http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=772195&publicationSubCategoryId=86

Teresa, recently graduated from high school, is at a friend’s birthday party. She gets introduced to Pavlo, a Ukrainian and a guest of a friend, who’s in the country for a brief holiday. They exchange pleasantries, and they get to talking about the best tourist destinations in the country. And then Pavlo asks: Does the Philippines have a very long history? To which Teresa replies, “We were discovered in 1521 by your fellow European, Ferdinand Magellan. Soon after, the Spanish Period which lasted 300 years began. Followed by the American Period from 1898 until the beginning of the Japanese Period, which lasted until the end of World War II.”

Teresa is not a real person, but a representative of every Filipino student into whose head the above mentioned version of Philippine history had been drilled all throughout primary and secondary education. And that is precisely the attitude — thoughtless and cavalier – towards our history which Carmen Guerrero Nakpil in Heroes and Villains wants us to realize and — she insists — change.

For Nakpil, proper appreciation of our correct history is fundamental to our sense of national identity, which has often been beleaguered with crisis and confusion. And that is where the problem lies: what is the real story of the coming about of the Philippine nation? Not those told and written by colonialists and colonialist-influenced “historians,” Nakpil seems to say, which is to say, not the version found in our history books and taught to us in school. Those that had been branded “heroes” and “villains” by this biased and inaccurate version of history might not have been in the proper category, after all, after thorough research and study of old records and documents.

Was Legaspi a bearer of governance system, thus civilization (hero), to Maynila when he “won a battle over a creek, claimed conquest and Spanish sovereignty over the city of Maynila, the island of Luzon and the entire archipelago, naming them the New Castilla and bestowing a city charter with municipal councillors, a plan for a plaza , two grand houses and 150 smaller houses and a project for the distribution of land” on June 24, 1571 (Manila City’s Foundation Day)? Or was he a mere terrorist (villain) whose attacks disturbed the orderly life and governance and economic systems of those then living under the rule of three Muslim kinglets: Raja Matanda, Raha Sulayman, and Raha Lakandula?

Was America an ally (hero) in the young Philippine nation’s fight for independence from Spain, or an opportunistic and double-faced enemy (villain) that took Philippines from Spain (as if it was still hers to give) in a sham battle on August 13, 1898, thereby “strangling at birth the infant Philippine nation.”

Was Macario Sakay a mere bandit (villain) that terrorized the countryside, or a real patriot (hero) who, together with his 4,000 troops, continued the fight for independence from America until his death by hanging for the trumped-up crimes of robbery in band, murder, rape, summary executions, arson, kidnapping.

Reading Heroes and Villains is like watching a telenovela: each episode in the short essays tells of stories with all the hooking intrigues and engaging drama and action, all told in witty — if sometimes, sardonic — and concise prose. You get awed and sometimes pleasantly surprised by the revelations that unfold. And in the end, you understand yourself better because the story, after all, is about you and your identity as Filipino.

So who is the Filipino?

The Filipino inhabits the land called the Philippines — a name reported back to the Spanish court in mid-16th century by a Spanish government official — Ruy Lopez de Villalobos — who “tried to make up for his failures (he never landed in the islands for fear of suffering the same fate as Magellan) by currying favor with the offspring — Don Felipe or Philip II — of his principals.” Contrary to what is popularly taught in school, the land was not “discovered” — as if nobody had known of its existence until then — by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1521.

The Filipino is a descendant of Malayo-Polynesian people from the Asian mainland, who migrated to this land as early as 13,000 B.C. “The Malays were the ancestors of today’s Filipinos, who became Tagalog, Bisaya, Pampango, Bicolano, Ilocano, organized into fiefdoms under kinglets called datu.” Towards the end of the 15th century, another group of people from Sabah, Brunei, Johore, Malacca — ancestors of people in Southern and Central Mindanao — came. As early as the 6th century, our islands and their inhabitants were well-known to the large, rich world of Chinese emperors and scholars and Arab traders, and by 1000 AD., “our shores were regular ports of call in the trade with China, then the most powerful nation on earth.”

I will not romanticize the supposed uncorrupted pre-colonial qualities and morals of the Filipino, nor the idyllic pre-Hispanic past, which many of us are not even aware of (mainly because we weren’t taught that in school). The confusion and insecurity stem from the historic inability to forge a solid national identity before the onslaught of foreign influences. Unlike our Asian neighbors — China, India, Japan, Korea — which can lean against their sturdy wall of recognized collective legacy and identity forged centuries after centuries and generation after generation, the Filipino reeled from a battery of foreign onslaught, and found that there was no formed national identity to lean back on and that would have made him stand his ground.

The Filipino today is a product of centuries of colonization — Spanish, American — and, unfortunately, an even longer mental conditioning through propagandist scholarship and storytelling, that has left him ignorant of his true story, and worse, in perpetual awe of his former colonial masters.

If there is one thing that Heroes and Villains tells me, it is to know the real story of your people, and only then will you break away from ludicrous and counterproductive notions that you had been fed since you were little. Only then will you get bits and pieces about yourself that you didn’t even know existed. And maybe someday — the Spanish last name and American accent notwithstanding — you will know what to say — and with confidence and certainty — the next time you’re asked Who is the Filipino?

http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=732913&publicationSubCategoryId=86

Inspiration. It is what one feels is lacking when daily activities have become a grind, and life a routine, the motions of which one forces himself to trudge through.

Inspiration. It is what those in so-called crisis-riddled phases — quarter-life, midlife — cannot see through their depression-shrouded cocoons.

Inspiration. It is what is being sought — or rather re-discovered — by a development worker who has began to seriously question whether the articles that she writes or videos that she produces make a dent at all in the poverty incidence in the Philippines.

Inspiration. It is precisely what I found after reading the story of how Professor Muhammad Yunus, the “banker to the poor” who made microfinance a buzzword in the development world, and his team had endured countless rejections by big banks, and how, using personal resources, they started the micro-loan business with a few women in a rural village in Bangladesh as its first clients.

In Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, Prof. Yunus, by citing the experience of Grameen (village) Bank, makes a case for social business as the new agent of capitalism which, unlike its current profit-maximizing form, he is convinced will finally lift millions of people out of poverty. Designed and operated as a regular business enterprise (with products, services, customers, markets, expenses and revenues), a social business differs from the traditional business in that rather than seeking to amass the highest possible level of financial profit to be enjoyed by the investors, the social business seeks to achieve a social objective.

For me and many other aid workers who work in Mindanao, a top favorite development aid destination, several of Yunus’ points are bound to resonate.

In a speech delivered upon his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his and the Grameen’s Bank work, Yunus remarked that while terrorism, something that his country Bangladesh has had many experiences on, must be condemned in the strongest language, he believes that “terrorism cannot be defeated by military action.” He believes that for conflict to be stamped out once and for all, its root — poverty —must be addressed. Putting resources into lifting people out of poverty is a more effective strategy than spending on guns, he maintains, because poverty is inextricably linked to peace, and is in fact the biggest threat to peace.

As I read those lines I keep thinking of the gun-toting bags of bones dressed in loose shabby rags that I’d come across in my travels to the mountains of Central Mindanao, and who, I’d been told, were members of the MILF. Do they really understand what they’re supposedly fighting for? Or is the petty banditry occasionally witnessed in the waters of Sulu and Basilan an indication of what their fight has degenerated into — a battle for mere survival? Would they not gladly exchange that gun for productive work, three square meals a day, education for their children, and health benefits for their ailing mother? I bet they would.

Yunus calls into question the ability of our current systems and institutions to end global poverty. He brings our attention to concepts that are “too narrow — our concept of business which makes profit the only viable human motive, our concept of credit-worthiness which automatically eliminates the poor, our concept of entrepreneurship which ignores the creativity of the majority of people, and our concept of employment which relegates humans to passive receptacles rather than active creators — and institutions that are “half-complete at best” like our banking and economic systems which ignore half the world. Poverty exists, he says, because of these intellectual failures rather than because of any lack of capability on the part of people.

The first and foremost task of development, according to Yunus, is to turn on the engine of creativity inside each person. Any program that merely meets the physical needs of a poor person is not a true development program unless it leads to the unfolding of his or her creative energy.

I have seen a lot of people in Mindanao and elsewhere in the country who, with a little assistance, have managed to turn their lives around. And it is true. All they need is a little push to nudge them into finally stepping across the poverty line. And it is their business ideas that have always carried them over that dreaded line. A community-based association in a mountain village in Sultan Kudarat, having successfully operated and maintained a micro-hydro power system installed in their village by an NGO seven years ago, has transformed itself into a micro-loan provider to many of the village members, who in turn use the money for their own development. Up in the mountains, this time in Zamboanga del Sur, a village association is being groomed by a regional multipurpose cooperative to be the middle man, the cooperative’s business partner that will enable the cooperative’s agriculture and solar photovoltaic business to reach more villages in the hinterland.

The challenge is not only for development organizations to implement programs that will lead to the unveiling of creativity of the intended beneficiaries. Nor is it only for assistance beneficiaries to use their creative energies to lift themselves out of poverty. Nor is it only for the current economic and capitalist system to accommodate a kind of business different from its current profit-maximizing model.

The challenge is for everyone (although I feel that the challenge is thrown specifically at me), and it begins with a question: How do you want to make use of your creative talent? Yunus goes on, “Do you want to focus exclusively on making money? If you must, go ahead; but when you develop profit-maximizing businesses, be sure that they also produce positive impacts in people’s lives and steadfastly avoid negative impacts. On the other hand, you may prefer to use some or all of your talent to change the world by harnessing it to address human and social needs. If so, you can devote yourself exclusively or partially to social business. There is certainly no conflict between the responsible pursuit of profit and the service of social goals, and I hope you’ll consider the possibility of combining both in your career. The choice is yours.”

The choice is mine, indeed.

http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=697506&publicationSubCategoryId=86




THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Madelline Romero holds a degree in Broadcast Communication from the University of the Philippines. She works for a development organization that hopes to spread a little bit of happiness in rural areas around the country.

I fidget as I write this. It’s Sunday late afternoon, my room’s every nook and cranny cleaned, the laundry hung, the dishes kept. And I toss and turn on my fresh sheets-covered bed on an unusually rainy day trying to figure out what else to do apart from barrage my friends with text messages about the meaning of life or what the universe has in store for us — I always refer to the “universe” as that all-powerful entity that has the power to withhold or dispense — none of which was replied to, well, because I suppose, such subject matters are just a tad too heavy for a beautiful, lazy rainy afternoon, or they realized that I’m in one of my blue spells yet again, or they had better things to do or some place they were supposed to be.

Some place they were supposed to be. Don’t I have some place I’m supposed to be? Apart from the apartment that I have come home to for the past four years in the city, which I have lived in for the past 12 years, in a country that I have been a dutiful citizen of for all my 29 years, really, is there some place I’m supposed to be? Or, more appropriately, is there no other place I’m supposed to be?

This question — or, rather, the pursuit to the answer to this question — is what had made the people that Eric Weiner met in his travels to the happiest and unhappiest and those in-between places to be where they were when Weiner met them while doing research for his book. The assumption, of course, is you stay in — or move to — a place where you are happiest.

Based on data from the World Database of Happiness — what Weiner calls “the secularist’s answer to the Vatican and Mecca and Jerusalem and Lhasa all rolled into one,” where “with the click of a mouse one can access the secrets of happiness...based not on ephemeral visions in some ancient desert but on modern science” — Weiner travelled to various places, those that scored the highest, the lowest, and somewhere in between, on the World Happiness Index in search of the answer to the question that has engaged many a philosopher and has driven many a modern man to peaks of accomplishments and valleys of indolence alike, to lounging at seaside paradises, not to mention, to scaling mountains of debt: What does make a man happy?

Tucked under the Travels section of the bookstore, The Geography of Bliss offers the reader more than a sensory experience of each place that Weiner travelled to. It is a book on sociology, offering meaningful insights into a people’s soul, and on philosophy with its generous serving of beliefs on happiness — from dead and living, Western and Eastern, philosophers alike — interspersed throughout his journeys’ narration. The icing on the cake is a great deal of witticism and humor that have made devouring what he had to say all the more palatable and enjoyable.

For a people’s quality that contributes much to their happiness, Weiner finds that in the Netherlands it is tolerance for seemingly everything “including intolerance”; in Switzerland it is — words failing Weiner to describe the Swiss brand of happiness — “conjoyment,” something “more than mere contentment but less than full-on joy”; in Bhutan where Gross National Happiness is used to measure the tiny country’s development in lieu of the more traditional Gross National Product, it is the uncaring attitude the Bhutanese have towards material possessions so cherished in affluent countries and the pace of life (slow) that Bhutan’s geography has imposed on its people; in Iceland it is the Icelanders’ sunny — strange as it sounds in a country constantly enveloped in a “hard and unforgiving” darkness — disposition who, faced with a brutal climate and utter isolation, could have easily chosen despair and drunkenness (the Russian option), but instead, “peered into the unyielding blackness of the noon sky and chose another option: happiness and drunkenness”; in Thailand it is the Thais’ mai pen lai way, the way of “dropping” difficult or sticky matters and getting on with life.

In Qatar — a nouveau riche desert oil country composed of 80-percent foreign worker population — Weiner finds that all that “excessive, obscene amounts of craven luxury” not only has not made Qataris any happier, but also made them ride the “hedonic treadmill,” the infinite cycle of pleasure and adaptation, so that they no longer took pleasure in extraordinary comforts that they enjoyed, and in fact wanted and demanded more. In India — a land of contradictions where wealth and poverty, mundaneness and spirituality comfortably exist side-by-side — “poverty doesn’t guarantee happiness nor does it deny it.” In Moldova, the Eastern European nation that is the least happy country, according to the World Happiness Database, a lack of solid ethnic, national and linguistic identity, and the Moldovans’ reaction to their economic problems explain a lot about their unhappiness.

All this reading about happiness makes me reflect on my own state of happiness, or unhappiness. I am a 29-year-old single female professional working at a service-oriented organization, who holds a BA degree and lives in a middle-income, tropical country; who is not a member of any religious congregation though believes in the “universe,” and has a solid circle of family and friends, and whose commute from home to work lasts a short15 minutes. That is not a profile for a dating site. I am merely stating that considering the opposites or extremes of all factors cited, by all counts — except for the “single” part as research suggests that married people are happier than single ones — I am on the happy side of the equation.

Happiness has been described to be many things and in many ways. But my favorites are the ones proffered by Benjamin Franklin: Happiness is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day (A lottery winner’s happiness, which can easily slide into a “hedonic treadmill,” is nothing compared to the happiness I feel when an empty cab miraculously appears in front of me amid an apartment building-wide competition). Another by a Swiss blogger: Happiness is not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.

And by those definitions, I have had so much happiness, and yes, I am happy.

Not unlike the sensation of falling just right before one is jolted awake, M is snapped – or more appropriately, bumped – into consciousness by the ancient rocks of one of the famous reliefs of Angkor Wat. It was late afternoon. The newly-drenched smell of the ground caused by a persistent drizzle combined with a glass too many margaritas the previous night was enough to lull M to an afternoon nap.

M had been dreaming of a really wonderful time with C. In the dream, they took a trip together – a hastily arranged first ever personal trip for C who always went out of the country on business and never on personal trips as such trips were a luxury he could ill afford given his financial responsibilities at home. In the dream they stayed at a nice hotel, in a nice room with a huge king-size bed. They toured and discovered the small city’s secrets and pleasures during the day, went back to the comfort of their huge king-size bed in a nice room at the nice hotel for a late afternoon nap, and went back out to discover more of and taste the city’s hidden pleasures at night.

But M’s greatest discovery had been a profound affection for C. In true informal settler fashion, C had slowly and insidiously set up home in M’s mind and life, so that M now had difficulty recalling what pre-C Saturdays looked like. M liked the way C’s mouth would break into a big smile and the way his eyes would crinkle in the corners when amused. M found C’s wide-eyed, child-like enthusiasm endearing – if infectious – in its purity and genuineness. M admired that C was a very good son, a responsible brother and a generous uncle.

And in the dream M remembers feeling proud of C’s ability to easily strike up a conversation and gyrate his body passionately to the dance music with beautiful women tourists.

The dream turned hazy after that. How-dare-you’s hurled through tears and spit met with apologies spat through slurred speech mixed with tears and spit. C on his knees in the middle of a deserted city road kissing M’s dusty shoes. And then, a challenge thrown through half-closed eyes and through the mists of tequila-inspired bravado: LET’S MAKE LOVE. A challenge refused by the remaining rational, alcohol-free section of the consciousness, and a question thrown in response: WHAT ARE WE? A question C could not answer in the dark of night, and would not even dare look at in the light of day.

For while M had been discovering a love so profound for C, C had been discovering things about himself which not only confused but tormented. For the past few months he had been trying out a lot of things, going to a lot of new places. He had been happy. Yes, he had been absolutely happy. WITH MARLON. That is a self-discovery he wished he did not have to make.
And just like that, the beautiful dream turned into a nightmare. A nightmare Marlon prayed he did not have to wake up from, but did.

Marlon shakes off cobwebs of sleep and amidst the light drizzle of the late afternoon rain starts to walk towards the ancient Hindu temple’s main entrance. A friend had told him once that love is really a selfish enterprise, that all that one does in the name of ‘love,’ when one comes to think of it, is more often than not for ONESELF (to feel good) and rarely really for the OTHER. Ex-boyfriends had accused him of always getting his way. Not now, he thinks..

For even a selfish man like him, he has recently realized, is capable of true love – the kind that can make him gladly exchange his happiness for the other’s. And so here, cast in the pale orange light of the setting sun, set against the shadow of the majestic temple, he would meet his NIGHTMARE and DREAM, embrace him ever so tightly and then let go slowly and quietly. For now.

A choice between living and suffering | The Philippine Star Lifestyle Features Sunday Life

I remember the scene very vividly: my mother was wearing her old floral-printed housedress, and was sitting drooped over dozens of freshly baked cheese bread loaves that she was packing. She looked like she hadn’t had decent sleep in days, the rings around her eyes so deep and dark.

My father — emaciated from his lung disease — was resting on a bed just a few paces away, his struggle to breathe painfully apparent even in sleep. Hot air from the oven in the bakery at the back of our house where the kitchen used to be combined with the humid July air and permeated our entire house, making moving let alone breathing a pain. My mother was a ticking time bomb; touch her and she would explode. The “touch” came when my younger brother asked for school money, and there was nothing to give. My mother stopped packing, covered her face with her hands and let loose all her bottled-up emotions — the agony of anticipating death and the overwhelming responsibility of holding our family together — albeit soundlessly, lest my father awakened.

This, I thought, was suffering.

I got a hold of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning five years later as a reading requirement in an application to a human rights youth organization, and it gave me an entirely different perspective on what I’d say had been a difficult life. I thought I had stumbled upon another book on western philosophy that talks about ideas in technical terms using abstruse language. Man’s Search for Meaning, using plain yet poignant language, talks about a familiar universal phenomenon — suffering. It is this familiarity of a universal phenomenon that makes the account comprehensible to a reader whose generation is twice removed from that of Frankl’s, and whose impersonal knowledge of wartime’s concentration camps is devoid of strong emotions, the vicarious knowledge having been derived from history books.

I was prepared to find yet another self-help book whose armchair psychologizing categorizes people into Types A through Z, and in the end puts forward (simplistic) solutions to the human mind’s malaise in bullet points. Instead, I found a personal account of a war prisoner who, against discouraging circumstances, forced himself to still wear his psychiatrist’s hat in an attempt to make sense of his and his fellow prisoners’ experiences. The account is endearing in the author’s humility, and finds its effectiveness — ironically — in the non-imposing way Frankl presents his ideas.

The idea that man, despite external fetters in any form, ultimately “decides what shall become of him” had a self-empowering effect that effectively struck a chord previously desensitized by feelings of vulnerability and helplessness. Suddenly I (re)discovered the power of the mind to ignore all abominable external physical conditions and pursue what my essence is based on the dictates of my spirit. It is, after all, this “spiritual freedom (as opposed to physical freedom) — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”

Every day I encounter people whom I would love to ask whether they find meaning in what by any standards appear to be a difficult existence. In my everyday walk from home to work I get approached by children in rags asking for coins so that they may buy food. At “luckier” times I get waylaid by families asking for fare money so that they may go home (I later found out that this was a ploy to get people to give them money). At almost every train station I am greeted by homeless — some of them obviously sick — people with arms outstretched, palms up to anyone who’d look their way. I am accosted by images of human suffering every day and I ask, “Do they see meaning in their suffering?”

I am a firm believer in Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I am inclined to believe that the most basic of the human needs takes precedence over what feeds the mind or the spirit. For how can one even contemplate feeding the intellect when the stomach is growling? I have seen attempts to defy this seemingly perfect logic falter — students who can’t concentrate in school because of hunger pangs, and those that simply can’t continue going to school as the family needs the money for food. This is not to undervalue efforts — and laudable, indeed, these efforts are — to transcend the physical for the mental or spiritual; this is merely to recognize the limitations that our human existence imposes on us. And break free from these physical limitations, Frankl seems to tell us, even while recognizing the concomitant difficulty when he concedes that “only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards.” A difficult situation, he says, affords a man the opportunity to attain moral values. Whether he makes use of or foregoes the opportunity such situation affords is the litmus test of whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

Those who opt not to traverse the road less traveled unconsciously make their deprivation the license for their depravation, as if preying on a faceless individual is their way of getting back at a society who has caused their insufferable existence. They — we — forget that what becomes of us is the result of an inner decision, that everything can be taken away from us but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — the freedom to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose our own way. I have seen family members stop talking to each other as if each one is preoccupied with their own survival. I have seen laughter drain out of homes, this even when humor is regarded as the only element in the human makeup that has the ability to rise above any situation. We blame it on our fragile existence; I say now that we chose to be that way.

Freedom is often defined as the lack of either the literal or figurative shackles that restrain one’s movements. Here, Frankl offers a more active actor-centered definition when he says that freedom is one’s conscious decision to adopt an attitude towards life. I could choose to be sour or bitter or cynical about what I feel life has dealt unfairly to me. Or I could choose to be serene and positive and engaging with what life throws my way, looking for new opportunities instead of pining over lost ones, and finding meaning even in suffering. Suffering, after all, is an inescapable part of life. One can make the decision to live rather than to suffer. And I choose to live.

Seeing God in a different light | The Philippine Star Lifestyle Features Sunday Life

Seeing God in a different light
By Madelline Romero (The Philippine Star) Updated August 15, 2010 12:00 AM

As is typical of a Filipino born to a Catholic family, I was introduced to “God” by an army of Mass-attending, sin-confessing devotees led by my late rosary-bearing grandmother. That plus 12 years of formative education at an exclusive nun-ran Catholic school for girls had pretty much made sure that I knew my sacraments, “understood” the mystery of the Trinity, “accepted” as truth the notion of Incarnation, and had a good relationship with the historical figure, Jesus, the “Son of God” — of the Catholic God, the conceptual evolution of which was never really taught to us in school.

Karen Armstrong’s A History of God brilliantly summarizes the intellectual history of the three dominant monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — and traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God from the time of Abraham to the present. And to the disappointment of many a religious person who has taken the concept of “God” for granted and as a matter of fact, it is shown that the conception of God, at many points in history, was shaped and altered to suit the social and political needs of the religious followers.

From among all the pagan gods in the ancient Middle East, Yahweh Sabaoth — “the God of Armies,” who opened the sea for the Israelites and closed it for the oppressive Egyptians — with help from confessions of priests and prophets who “personally experienced Him” was elevated to the status of one true God in the minds and hearts of Israelites shortly after the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587, which had dislocated and displaced the Jews. The cult of Yahweh, of which Moses was able to convince the Israelites to be the same God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and which proved to be the beginning of monotheistic religious traditions — enabled people to find hope in impossible circumstances, and spoke profoundly to their conditions. From the Spanish Jews who were expelled from Europe in yet another wave of Anti-Semitism in the 15th century came a new form of Kabbalah — one whose mythology and disciplines discovered a profound significance in their homelessness, which became the Jewish movement to be almost universally accepted and which wrought a profound change in the religious consciousness of world Jewry.

In the midst of political upheaval in the Muslim world (disintegration of the Baghdad caliphate, devastation wrought by Monghol hordes in Muslim cities) during the 12th and 13th centuries, Sufism, an ascetical form of Islam that first developed during the 8th and 9th centuries, ceased to be a minority movement and became the dominant Islamic mood in many parts of the Islamic empire because the people wanted a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote and legalistic God of the rational ulema, the religious “authority.”

By the end of the 16th century, a new brand of Christianity said to have effected the second wave of the Reformation (Calvinism) had been established as an international religion, inspiring the Puritan revolution in England in 1645 and the colonization of New England in the New World in the 1620s. Its attractiveness was to the bourgeoisie in the newly developing cities of Europe whose inhabitants wanted to shake off the shackles of a repressive religious hierarchy.

Concepts about God and religion — far from being “divine revelations” dropped like manna from heaven — naturally required movers and shakers, the legacy of whom are evident to this day in the religious institutions that evolved and in the conflicts created, some of which still characterize our present world.

In the battle of ideas in the early Christian world, Athenasius, assistant to the bishop of Alexandria, managed to have his theology on the inherently divine nature of Christ (Nicaean Creed of 325) win over that of others’ in a debate that characterized many a point on which the Great Schism would eventually draw its lines, dividing the Christian Church into two warring camps: the Latin Western Church and the Greek Orthodox Church. Western Christianity would later become a “much more talkative religion and would concentrate on kerygma, the public teaching of the Church based on scriptures,” while the Greek Orthodox Church would emphasize dogma, which “represented the deeper meaning of biblical truth,” and would hold that “all good theology would be silent.” From Augustine, considered the founder of the Western spirit, came the doctrine of Original Sin, and traditions of “neurotic misogyny” and contempt for sexuality: “Woman’s only function was the childbearing which passed the contagion of Original Sin to the next generation, like a venereal disease.” The hostility between Muslim Sunnis and Shiis had its beginning in the 16th century when a new type of Twelver Shiism was championed — and forced on Shiah subjects with a ruthlessness never before seen, by Shah Ismail, founder of the Safavid dynasty, and eventually became the state religion in Iran.

Reading about the history of God brought my attention to a recurring pattern throughout the development of concepts about God and religion: that there had always been a yearning to return to the earliest form of man’s relationship with his God, a very personal connection unconfined by any formal “correct” theology nor unencumbered by obligatory obedience to sanctioned hierarchy, when institutions with all their frills and trappings, ironically, became insufficient to satisfy man’s natural predisposition towards the spiritual.

That God — at least as I had known Him — was a concept came to me, not surprisingly, in the university setting and in the face of a multitude of ideas, which until then had remained inaccessible within the confines of dogmatic sectarian education.

The realization brought me to a reassessment of my feelings for and knowledge of my God — and just like the early Jews, Christians and Muslims who had found a theology-based God too elaborate yet profoundly inadequate — and I began to slowly shed encumbering doctrines, notions and preconceptions.

To my delight, I felt nothing but freedom, the liberating freedom to experience God — that innate, deeply embedded longing within me to connect to the endless wonder and mystery of this world — whichever way: in a wild cathartic creative explosion of forms and movements or in deep silent meditative prayer, no matter where: in the temple, church or mosque. As mystics across all religions universally claim, “there are as many roads to God as people.”

“Pardon my voice, I had been singing,” Bai Sandra Basar’s tongue-in-cheek apology snaps me out of my reverie of children with the incredibly hot man in front of me whose profile I had been staring at all throughout dinner. Forcefully, I tear my gaze away from the beautiful thing in front of me, and turn sideways to see Bai Sandra, dark veil framing her smiling face, and looking down pat comfortable alongside the men in ties and barong in that panel of successful entrepreneurs gathered to talk about the business climate in Cotabato City. Through hoarse, patchy voice I hear her story loud and clear: how she, a young Muslim woman, defied all conventions and expectations, and sought to crack the many media-propagated stereotypes on Cotabato City, and challenged the Chinese-dominated business status quo to establish one of the biggest and most successful hardware chains in southern Philippines.

Cotabato market, anyone?

“Cotabato” first entered my consciousness when as a young impressionable girl who listened to her favourite old uncle’s music, I had thought Asin’s “Ang Bayan Kong Sinilangan” the “in” song. At a school audition, with all the emotions (nil) that an eight-year old could muster about a song that she really didn’t understand the background of, I sang the first lines, “Ako’y isinilang sa isang bayan ng Cotabato/Kasing gulo ng tao, kasing gulo ng mundo,” to strange looks from my fellow eight-year olds.

Two decades after my first encounter with “Cotabato,” I see the city in broad daylight astride a motorcycle bike on my way to see Bai Sandra. The city displays a curious mix of sleepy, small old town, with a busy undercurrent of energy, feel to it. Located at the delta between the two rivers – Tamontaka and Rio Grande de Mindanao – that have always been historically a major commercial artery in the heartland of Mindanao, Cotabato City is a commercial and transport hub for all sorts of products that include basic commodities, industrial raw materials, agriculture and marine products, in the Central Mindanao region. The seat of two administrative regions – Region XII and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao – until the transfer of Region XII regional center to Koronadal in March 2004, the city’s population swell by 100 percent to over half a million during the day when residents of the surrounding areas travel to the city to transact their commercial or political business.

This is the market that Bai Sandra’s hardware business – with its six branches spread all over the city and one in South Cotabato – serves, and this is the profile of Cotabato City that she has been trying to promote to investors through the Cotabato Muslim Chamber of Commerce and Industry that she organized in 2002. By holding promotional and marketing events, the Chamber hopes to change people’s perception of Cotabato and its people, which she says, had been unfairly colored by the much media-hyped occasional incidents of conflict and bombings. “There is more money circulating in Cotabato than elsewhere in surrounding areas,” she says of the spending capacity of Cotabato consumers.

A slice of the hardware market
I finally arrive at her store along Sinsuat Avenue. FMS Enterprises, just like her other hardware stores, is two-storey with the store on the ground floor and her residence on the top floor. It’s a practice that she had copied from the Chinese. And that’s not all she got from her Chinese neighbors: the idea of a hardware business – a diversion from her father’s copra business – which came to her while idly waiting for the Medical Technology board exam results, finally materialized after years of hoarding receipts from the local Chinese hardware store in her efforts to learn proper pricing. Having gone to a Chinese school, she had learned enough Mandarin that clinched for her her first credit line with a supplier.

The Chinese have always dominated the business sphere in Cotabato beginning in the 1920s when they first made their way to the then developing town. The hardware business had been especially a Chinese turf, until Bai Sandra established business connections with and learned from the Chinese, and from there went on to establish her own hardware chain, which in turn eventually assisted other budding Muslim entrepreneurs when they put up their own stores. From three Muslim-owned stores, Cotabato City now has 10 to 15 hardware stores owned and operated by Muslims. That was a development Bai Sandra is most proud of.

Voice to the voiceless
“Socio-economic exclusion is the root cause of war. It breeds resentment, breeds ideology, breeds conflict,” opines Bai Sandra when asked of the principle behind her work to encourage entrepreneurship among Muslims and promote Muslim businesses. Conversely, an enterprising mindset among the people instills discipline, and promotes and supports peace. Conflict is anathema to business, as she and other businessmen had painfully learned firsthand when profits got severely affected during the war in Maguindanao in 2000.

In 2002 she organized the Cotabato Muslim Chamber of Commerce and Industry when, reeling from a massive loss from her first attempt at business, which was exacerbated by the 1997 financial crisis, she realized that it’s time Muslim entrepreneurs in Cotabato got together to encourage Muslim entrepreneurship. The first order of the day for the Chamber was to inspire confidence in Muslim businesses. She herself had had experiences when government and commercial banks had been hesitant to grant her loans either because the property that she was offering as collateral was in a conflict area, or simply because she was Muslim and the bandits terrorizing the south were presumed to be members of her clan. The challenge was how to break through stereotypes and prejudices that prohibited cooperation and complete integration.

By putting into practice the work ethic that she learned from her father who had her working in the family business for little rewards as a small girl, and by keeping her promises to creditors even when times got really bad, she was able to expand her business and earn her first million nine years ago, at age 32. More importantly, she was able to earn the trust and respect of the business community. This ethic of hard work and trustworthiness is what she passes on to fledgling Muslim businesses through example and mentorship.

From an initial 30 members, the Chamber’s membership has grown to over 80 micro-enterprises that include businesses in the transportation, real estate, motor parts and ICT sectors.

For her work in promoting entrepreneurship among her fellow Muslims Bai Sandra was chosen to be one of two Philippine representatives to President Barrack Obama’s Summit on Entrepreneurship on 26-27 April 2010 in Washington DC, joining about 250 entrepreneurs from more than 50 countries, and the ranks of women leaders like Jordan’s Queen Rania al Abdullah II, Madeline Albright, and Hilary Clinton.

My conversation with Bai Sandra goes on for an hour and a half. I feel guilty for letting her talk even while she was nursing a sore throat. Through hoarse, patchy voice I hear her story loud and clear, as it was one whose echoes will reverberate through generations of Muslims in Cotabato City who have found a voice – even if a tiny one – in business.

We, the society | The Philippine Star Lifestyle Features Sunday Life

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I will never forget the image on television of bare-chested men atop wooden planks floating on the rampaging floodwaters, the people on the bridge scampering to throw anything that the ill-fated could hold on to, and the tragic — albeit expected — end: sodden wooden planks breaking up on the other side of the bridge, making its passengers an addition to the total death toll of the worst flooding in the recent history of Metro Manila.

Environment groups seized upon the disaster as an opportunity to turn the spotlight on the issue of the earth’s warming. Others were as quick to point an accusing finger at climate change, as if saying that the flooding that submerged most of Metro Manila and surrounding provinces was the most natural and inevitable eventuality, with the objective of exonerating themselves from responsibility.

But as the floods receded and Metro Manila was found lying in its own filth — all 1,500 tons of garbage that end up in our water systems every day and have accumulated in the past years — climate change proved to be a not-so-convenient, let alone sufficient, scapegoat for the typhoon Ondoy tragedy that wreaked a painful (337 deaths) and costly (P10 billion in infrastructure and properties) devastation.

That a society brings upon itself its own devastation is the main thesis of Collapse (How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed), a study of both failed and successful past and present societies. What is interesting about this work is where others have identified military warfare or invasion by another group as the most common cause of a society’s extinction, Prof. Jared Diamond goes deeper and identifies environmental destruction as the underlying and ultimate cause of a society’s devastation, and in some cases, demise. The warfare and the political, economic and social chaos that one may be quick to pinpoint as the cause of a society’s failure, may be, when one dug and looked deeper, just the natural offshoot of a population’s mad scramble for what’s left of their resources in a depleted and overexploited environment.

The perplexing question had been and still is: why would a society ruin the environment on which their very survival depended? Why did the Easter Islanders (a small Pacific island) denude the forests of their already fragile environment to largely support the construction of huge stone statues (15 to 20 feet tall, weighing from 10 to 270 tons) erected on massive stone platforms (13 feet high, 500 feet wide, weighing from 300 to 9,000 tons), the construction of which overstretched the island’s resources? Why did the Mayan kings fail to recognize that the population was outstripping available resources, and instead focused their attention on wars (which had to be waged as more and more people fought over fewer resources), erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support their activities?

Why would we construct high-end subdivisions on the hills and mountaintops of San Mateo, Rodriguez, Angono, Cainta and Marikina when we know that doing so would further denude the Sierra Madre mountain ranges, making them unable to catch most of the rainwater that would eventually flow down to Metro Manila? Why would we continue to quarry the Sierra Madre for gravel and sand when we know that this would make the Marikina River silted and, thus, very shallow, so that it easily overflows when abnormally heavy rainfall (like Ondoy) comes? Why would our government allow any of this to happen?

When the environment that once supported a population and made institutions flourish finds itself no longer capable of propping up a society’s way of life, the first to collapse is the leadership institution. The royal palace in the ancient city of Copán in Mayan civilization was burned down soon after a confluence of environmental damage, population growth and climate change began to fail to deliver the rains and prosperity that the Copán king had promised his people in return for the power and luxuries that he claimed. The government of modern Rwanda simply broke down and lost total control in a civil war that not only pitted traditional tribal opponents (Hutu vs. Tutsi) against each other, but also people from the same tribe against one another, in what was unconventionally observed to be “a unique opportunity to settle scores, or to reshuffle land properties,” a war “that is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.”

And as always happens when tragedies occur, the spotlight was embarrassingly turned to the Philippine government’s lack of foresight and preparation: why Metro Manila’s (overpopulated at 12 million) waterways are blocked by garbage and slum dwellers or else have been appropriated by commercial developments; how real estate developers are able to circumvent the Revised Forestry Code (PD 705) that prohibits the building of houses and residential development on slopes of more than 10 degrees; why more than 70,000 urban poor families have not until now been offered alternative housing sites.

Diamond admits to the possibility of oversimplification should a society’s collapse be attributed solely to environmental destruction. He proffers a five-point framework of contributing factors to societal collapse: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and the society’s responses to its environmental problems. While the first four of these factors may or may not prove significant in every society surveyed, the fifth — the society’s response — always was the weight that tipped the scale over to either survival or annihilation, success or failure.

And society has a government and the governed. While our government indeed hasn’t made it very difficult for us to lash out at it every time disasters of huge proportions occur, we also only have to look around us, while the flood waters recede and the mountains’ eroded topsoil is washed off houses and properties, to see an imprint of our own reckless, irresponsible behavior. It is our own garbage that clogged waterways, our own greed and inappropriate values that made us build beautiful architecture with breathtaking views on mountaintops, our own folly and lack of vision that have made us exploit our environment more than it can sustain us.

But all is not lost. So even while with arms raised to the heavens we pray for truly visionary leaders, our feet are planted firmly on the ground, which — as recent tragedy has painfully taught us — could shake and break and swallow us whole if we don’t amend our excessive ways. It is after all, we, members of society, that choose whether to fail or succeed.

It was 1986. I vaguely remember (or perhaps this was reconstructed memory from stories about the day my parents later on relayed to me) my father fidgeting beside my bed at a hospital some 125 kilometers south of Manila, untangling the IV cord injected to my 4-year old veins, while a man’s voice blared from our old transistor radio. My father was talking to my mother in a manner I would later on always see whenever he opined about matters of importance – with an air of finality and utter conviction. Given what I now know – mostly from history books – about what transpired on that day, I imagine my parents’ conversation to have been littered with words such as Marcos,dictator,EDSA,Cory…Democracy.

I don’t recall when I first learned about democracy, because to every Filipino born after 1945 (end of Japanese interregnum in Southeast Asia), democracy has become as natural as the – first immaculate, then later on, putrid – air we breathed from the time the Americans handed it back to us, pretty much as they had done in 1898 when they picked up where the Spaniards left off. Comparing our experience with those of countries in the communist Soviet bloc, or of military regime-led countries in Latin America, or of neighboring China, we were taught to extol the values of democracy, and to be always grateful for the freedoms, the liberties, the rule of law, and most especially, the opportunities that our democratic society has afforded us.

And I absolutely agree. Except that events in very recent memory have made me ask whether democracy was truly working for the Filipino people, or if the distinct characteristics of Philippine societies (the plural form is deliberate because one tends to find quite a multitude of societies within the larger Philippine society) have created a democracy that – while keeping up the most superficial of appearances – fails to measure up to textbook definitions and expectations.

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We had just gone back to the university after a two-week Christmas break, and the air was crackling with more than the remnants of the 2001 New Year celebrations fireworks. The environment at the University of the Philippines was rife with excitement and frenzy as only an unfolding historical event could stir. We so wanted to be part of history that when student leaders and activists barged in on our Journalism 101 class they only had to raise their placard bearing the sign “PATALSIKIN SI ERAP!” (Oust ERAP) before we went running out of the classroom and into the streets leading to Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) – Metro Manila’s main thoroughfare – for a repeat of the historical People Power Revolution which toppled a 14-year dictator 15 years before.

Donning comfortable sneakers and the strap of our bags strewn diagonally across our chests, we began the 22km hike from the university campus to EDSA, intermittently chanting the revolution’s catchphrase, and trooped down to the EDSA Shrine, before the image of Mary, to join the thousands already camped out there who had gathered by what observers would eventually call a “Text Revolution.”

I was on a high. This was history in the making that I and my contemporaries were taking an active part in. Perhaps more than to others, this revolution was personal to our generation, a generation accused of displaying more apathy than the activism and vigilance for which generations before us had been known. Our fathers battled with a martial law regime that saw half of their peers killed summarily and the other half missing until now. Their fathers fought fiercely at first, and then learned to live in dismal conditions, under a harsh Japanese occupation. When our time came, through the exercise of the very thing that we were trying to protect, we responded to defend what our fathers and their fathers fought hard to regain – our freedoms, our liberties, democracy.

This was democracy in action. The knowledge that the administration called itself a democratic government and had still been inclined to keep up appearances – perhaps for the sake of the international community – despite an embarrassing human rights records, was enough for us to exercise our freedom of speech and bring our protests to the streets without too much worries about harassment from government forces. This, I thought, was what citizens in non-democratic societies could not do without fearing for their lives.

Joseph Ejercito “ERAP” Estrada catapulted to Malacañang (Presidential Palace) riding atop a base of mass support – who saw in him a champion of the poor, a role he constantly played in his long movie career – and left three years later (and three years sooner than the Presidential terms mandated), awashed by the wave of middle class and civil society disgruntlement over evidences of graft and corruption. After six years of trial – and for the Philippines, six years of an administration equally, if more so, beleaguered by issues of corruption and legitimacy – the Philippine graft court convicted Erap of plunder in September 2007, sentencing him to 40 years imprisonment and ordering the forfeiture of almost Php1 billion (roughly US$20 million) bank deposits and assets. Six weeks later, in an act which critics say smacked of political maneuvering, the current administration granted Estrada presidential pardon, exonerating him of any accountability and allowing him to escape forfeiture of his bank accounts and assets. And now, eight months into next year’s presidential election, Joseph Ejercito Estrada, the deposed, convicted and pardoned 13th Philippine president, confidence buoyed by recent Social Weather Station surveys which showed him having a still strong following, vows to run for the highest office to become the country’s most powerful person once again beginning in 2010.

And I would not be surprised to see him get elected once again. The conditions that got him elected in a landslide victory in 1998, specifically, poverty among a large section of the population, are well-entrenched in Philippine society. The wind beneath Estrada’s wings that allowed him to fly high to the presidency was the faith and hope that the masses placed upon him to deliver them from poverty as he had done when he fist- and gun-fought his way towards saving the downtrodden and oppressed from the powerful and repressive antagonists in his old movies . These are the same masses whose votes could sway to the direction of the highest bidder. They are hungry and live in rickety shacks along railroads and under bridges, and their hunger, more than their lack of education, forbids them from seeing far into the future and makes them misread the “signs.”

I have always believed that genuine, functioning democracy is founded on a condition of well-fed, well-clothed, well-educated citizenry. Otherwise, what results is a mockery of the democratic process, participated in by the masses with only the most myopic of objectives in sight, and which perpetuates a bankrupt political system that is dominated by economic elites and traditional politicians.

My question is, how do you make democracy work for a society so plagued by poverty that they would sell their future for food on the table?

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It was May 2007 and we received a directive from our foreign government funding agency to stop all travels to Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) – the Muslim-dominated island group in southern Philippines – pending resolution of election-related conflicts. We expected that. I had then only been working as communications specialist for the rural electrification project for three months, and already I had heard stories of private militias, clan wars (rido), and generally, just how it was in Mindanao during elections.

The Philippine Commission on Elections ordered a re-canvassing of election returns in Maguindanao, a province in the ARMM, and some other towns and cities, following allegations of massive cheating and fraud. At least five teachers, who served as election inspectors, supported the claim that no balloting actually took place, and victory was handed over on a silver platter to “select” senators in what observers say was a political arrangement between officials of the central and regional governments.

Muslim Mindanao has always perplexed government administrators beginning in the 1970s when a movement began that wanted to secede the Muslim-dominated part of Mindanao from the rest of predominantly Catholic Philippines. Now, adding to the problem of widespread poverty (ARMM is one of the poorest regions in the country), has been the issue of Jemaah Islamiyah-related terrorist network marauding the mountains of Mindanao. Equally perplexing is the conundrum of development: why ARMM remains underdeveloped despite millions of aid poured into it.

A huge part of the answer to the Mindanao riddle, in my opinion, lies in their traditional power and authority structure which characterizes relationships at all levels of society. Theirs is a society with extremely strong ties among family, who must be protected and avenged through declaration of clan war if need be, and strict (sometimes even blind) obedience to revered authority whose strength is demonstrated by the strength and number of troops in his private militia.

It is a self-perpetuating process: the people, out of necessity, associate themselves with a leader (politician), and this propagates the Mafia-style divisions in society, which very so often erupt into conflict and bloodbath, not the least of which during the exercise of the ultimate, signature gesture of democracy: elections.

My question is, how does democracy secure the guarantee of freedoms and liberties and deliver its promise of opportunities in a society whose citizens are at the mercy of their leaders, quite literally, for their lives, in what appears to be a feudal structure?

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The 1986 People Power Revolution of my reconstructed memories soon became a template for the people’s bloodless assertion of their rights all over the world, and we saw Solidarity in Poland (1989), the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia (1989), the Rose Revolution in Georgia (2003), the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004), to name a few. People Power went on to install Cory as the 11th President of the Philippines. The wife of a martyred opposition senator killed on his return to the Philippines from exile, she became the people’s rallying figure in their clamor for the return to the land of the rule of law, of democracy. Cory passed away in August 1, 2009. But not before showing the Filipino people what they are capable of.

While I – and perhaps my generation – do not have answers to the contradictions we observe in our democracy, we will remember People Power and our capacity to unite as a people in defense of our freedoms, our liberties, our democracy.

I have a fascination for descriptions.

I meet a person for the first time, and ten minutes into the conversation he begins to disintegrate to fall neatly into any one or two categories: the unaccepting loser who pretends otherwise, the unhappy overachiever whose life had been mapped out by someone else, the natural star-hugging limelight, the plain wallflower who hasn’t – will never – get a chance.

A whole lifetime captured neatly and folded and slipped into a box. Covered and sealed up.

He defied categories.

As elusive as a ball of feather-light wildflower that floats in the morning air, he is blown by the ever unpredictable wind of his whim, always, always missing the flat of my palm. He was as giddy and wide-eyed as a little boy during the day, and a wild, fierce lover at night. He worried about the little, critical details, and spent half the time on the phone. He was an obedient son, and that was why he told half truths.

The half truths came as naturally as it was certain that the waves in the sea would crash against the rocks as they broke on the shore. The ease with which the half truths escaped his soft, beautiful lips tells of a lifetime of necessity to take back a little of what has been seized from him – the chance to live a life, his life. Spinning a whole slew of half truths was a way of countering a reality that brings him pain to look at. In the half truths he took refuge for it is only where he had absolute control.

He asked me to join him in his half truth-world. I had not the heart nor the volition to refuse.

I love you, do you love me? I love you. Will you marry me? Yes, I will.