The metaphors and vote of the poor (1)

The inscrutable poor masses out there have been publicized, lionized, satirized, analyzed and wooed to death. Election time has a way of smoking them out of the woodwork, the cracks and crevices where they dwell, as if candidates realize they exist for the first time. Suddenly the poor are on everyone’s mind and lips, suddenly they rule, they poll.

Do the poor produce a ``dumb masa’’ vote? What do the poor think of elections? How do they make their choices? How much influence do the media exert on them? What to them are the traits of a true leader?
The poor are smarter than you think.

The Ateneo University’s Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC) released a few days ago its findings on how the poor view elections and choose their candidates. What, how exactly do they think?

``The Vote of the Poor: The Values and Pragmatics of Elections’’ was the result of a research using focused group discussions (FGD) as a tool to get to the raw sentiments and perceptions of the subjects. Unlike surveys that use statistical methods, the FGD type elicits qualitative responses and scrutinizes the meaning and quality of these responses. In clinical psychology we call it the phenomenological way.

The FGDs were held in Metro Manila, Baguio, Cebu, Zamboanga, Camarines Sur, Iloilo and Davao del Sur. Six groups were all-male and five were all-female (aged 30 and above).Another five groups were composed of mostly young males and females under 30 years old.

IPC did a qualitative analyses of the statements that came from the FGDs but I’m sure readers would like to know what exactly were said. Nothing beats a good quote.

When groups were asked to supply metaphors about leaders, the responses suggested guidance, stability, service and perspective. A sampling:

Dalan na dapat matanos na lakawan kan pamilya. Ilaw na nagbibigay ng liwanag. Kapitan sa barko, madala sa mga tawo sa ilang destinasyon. Ama na gumagabay sa anak. Ama na dapat mamuno at aktibo sa lahat ng gawain. Magulang na nagtuturo ng mabuti. Sasakyan na kayang lusutan ang lubak. Leon na hari ng kagubatan.

Education is regarded as important but also with considerable distrust because the highly educated have been the most corrupt. The poor would rather vote for the one with the traits of a good leader, especially the one with vision, innate intelligence and a heart for the poor.

Some responses: Kapag mayroon kang tinapos igagalang ka ng tao. College graduate para alam ang batas. Uneducated leaders tend to get influenced by advisers who know more about governance. Kinahanglang aron dili matunto kung unsay dautan, dili matudluan, naay prinsipyo. May mga taong may pinggaralan pero hindi marunong magisip. Educational qualification is not that important, what is important is that he/she is intelligent. Mas maayo pa ang waay grado sa taas ug grado kay dili kabalo mangurakot.

Attributes of good leaders: Makadiyos/may takot sa Diyos, matulungin, matapat, responsable, matalino, masipag, tumutupad sa pangako, maprinsipyo, mapagkatiwalaan.

Bad leaders: Kurakot, sinungaling, sakim, iresponsable, makasarili, abusado, mabisyo, tamad.(May I butt in? Sana tamad mangurakot!)

Educational achievement, IPC found out, does not appear among the most-valued qualities. The rural-urban distinction provided a point of differentitation. Makadiyos (close to God), for instance, hardly matters among the rural poor participants. It is a trait mentioned by the urban poor participants, by both youth and non-youth groups. Matalino (intelligent) does not emerge as a valued trait among urban poor participants, but it is the most frequently mentioned trait among the rural poor.

Views on the elections: Panagpabanglo ken panangpadakes. Pera at bigas na binibigay ng mga kandidato. Masisira na naman and relasyon ng mga tao. Halimbawa, magkaaway ang magkapatid. Maraming nabubuhay na patay (flying voters). Ilegal na transaksyon. Magpapabango. Sinasamantala ang panahon, naglalabas ng mga pondo para sa mga projects. Takutan. Dayaan na naman.

Elections are widely viewed as a wooing game, a show, a gamble which involves risks, deception and trickery. Metaphors: Parang laro na may nananalo at natatalo. Pareha ug sugal adunay makadaug, aduna usay mapilde. Isang magulo at maruming laro. Katulad ng baraha, may patay at buhay. Isang chess game na malalaman lang kung sino ang panalo sa huling tira. Isang karera ng kabayo na may siguradong mananalo. Parang ligawan na may sinasagot at naba-basted. Sarong bulaklak na namumukadkad, kadakol bubuyog na nag-aalimbubyong.

Tulad ng isang basura na dapat linisin. Isang Orocan na plastic. Tulad ng radyo na maingay. A wedding with so much food and money. A beauty contest with candy showers. Isang fashion show na ang mga pulitiko ay nagpapaganda ng anyo. Paguwapuhan, pasiklaban. Pareha ng sinulog daghan kaayo ang mga tawo nga mudugok.

According to IPC, the poor approach elections with ambivalence. Still, they regard it as a legitimate means to effect change. Thus they say:

May kasabihan na ang hindi bumoto, walang karapatang magreklamo. Most will vote even if the people running for office do not merit (the people’s) approval. Dito nakasalalay and kinabukasan ng mga mamamayan. Para mapaunlaad ang bayan. Tsansa upang matanggal ang tiwaling lider. Para mailuklok ang mabuting kandidato. Para makakuha ng pera. Para manalo ang kandidato ko. Para kung sakaling naluklok siya at may problema ako, matutulungan niya ako. Because a voter’s affidavit allows one to go abroad. There are two kinds of voters, ang uto-uto at ang nagpapauto.

More next time.

'Let the healing begin'

Happy Earth Day!

What nationalist Filipino does not know that `Pearls R Us’?

But pearls could be a source of conflict. The Jewelmer Corporation, a Cojuangco-owned operator of a large pearl farm in Palawan has been the subject of complaints there. Recently, 500 members of indigenous groups, some clad in traditional costumes, sailed on their boats to fish in the waters off the islands off Bugsuk and Pandanan in Balabac, Palawan. These areas are currently off limits to fishermen.

Those who dared ``intrude’’ belonged to the Pal’wan and Molbog tribes and were members of the Samahang Tribo sa Dulo ng Timog Palawan (Sambilog). With the help of the Jesuit-influenced PhilDHRRA, they are claiming back their rights to the 57,000 hectares of ancestral land and waters occupied by Jewelmer.

Sambilog head Sanglima Rudy Calo said that Jewelmer ``has prohibited us from fishing in these waters for almost two decades. But these had been traditional fishing grounds for our ancestors. And now we learned that the operation of the pearl farm is illegal. It does not have an environmental compliance certificate from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources nor any clearance from the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development. They have not acquired any consent certificate from us either.’’

Those who have ogled at luscious pearls at Jewelmer stores and scanned their expensive coffeetable book would know why these South Sea pearls are very expensive. I was once tempted to buy a pair of champagne-colored dangling earrings there but the price said, go away. I settled for a look-alike, costing about one-tenth, sold by Muslim traders at a mall tiangge.

In some parts of the waters off the islands of Palawan I’ve seen hundreds of these unsightly floating boxes where pearl oysters grow. You could get shot at if you go near, I was warned.

Sambilog, I learned, had tried to dialogue with Jewelmer officials. The first dialogue was held in Malacanang last August. Jewelmer and Balabac Mayor Astani agreed to hold more talks but nothing has happened since.

Sambilog is invoking the indigenous peoples law and demanding a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title for the fishermen as well as a cease and desist order for Jewelmer. The fishermen said they were victims of a land swap between Eduardo Cojuangco and former Pres. Marcos in 1974, and now they want to recover what they had lost.

Who owns the sea?

Blue sea, blue planet. Two US-based groups, each one claiming to have started Earth Day celebrations in 1970, are at odds on the matter of the date of Earth Day. One wants to stick to the March date of the vernal equinox, the other to an April date which is what most people are familiar with now. It seems the April people have prevailed, judging from the expansion of the Earth Day Network.

`Let the healing begin.’ This is the theme of today’s celebrations sponsored by the Earth Day Network Philippines. Today is the launching of the nationwide Movement for Earth Rehab. Kick-off activities will be held at the commencement grounds at UP Diliman.

`Let the healing begin.’ The patient is Mother Earth Philippines and its 7,100 islands. The caregivers are you and me. Individuals and groups are enjoined to join in caregiving.

Last week I quoted Antoine de Saint-Exupery as saying that we often fail to see the cord that binds us to the wells and fountains, the umbilical cord by which we are tied to the womb of the world. This womb contains the waters that sustain life on the planet. Poison these and life dies.

Last year the United Nations declared 2003 as the International Year of Freshwater. The Earth Day Network supported this campaign by launching a two-year Water for Life Campaign till 2004.

We always think of food as a human right. Well, water is also a human right and this is something quite distinct because water, unlike food, is not grown, it is there for everyone, for the taking. Water knows no boundaries. The water in the rivers, seas and lakes goes as far as it can go, it does not stop on geographical boundaries. We dread the day when nations go to war over water supply or when terrorist warfare finds its way into the water supply of this world.

Earth Day Network’s Water for Life campaign hopes to bring global attention to the world’s water crisis. More than one billion people lack access to safe drinking water and more than two billion lack sanitation. According to the World Health Organization, millions of people, most of them children, die from water-related diseases every year.

It’s the government’s responsibility to provide enough water not just for drinking but for crops as well. The current trend toward privatization in water services could weaken public control and threaten ample supply. Private business interests could take precedence over people’s basic human right to access to water. But then, there are many opportunities and challenges too, to help private enterprises prove that sustainability could also mean good business.

Last February World Bank Philippines launched its 2003 Philippines Environment Monitor on Water Quality and highlighted poor water quality and sanitation services.

The government’s monitoring revealed that just over 36 percent of the country’s river systems are classified as sources of public water supply and that up to 58 percent of groundwater sampled is contaminated with coliform and needs treatment. Approximately 31 percent of illnesses monitored over a five-year period were caused by water-borne diseases and many areas are experiencing a shortage of water supply during the dry season.

It’s later than you think. Earth caregivers unite.

Wind, sand and stars and Saint-Ex

They found them, they found them at last.

The remains of the plane piloted by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of the beloved ``The Little Prince’’, have been found almost 60 years after his disappearance, French officials announced last week. The mystery has been solved, but more than that, there is now closure in the fascinating life of this remarkable Frenchman, this wartime pilot, aristocrat, romantic, adventurer, writer.

Saint-Ex’s life ended when he was only 44. Ah, but he lives on.

I pulled out from the shelf two of his books, ``The Little Prince’’ and ``Wind, Sand and Stars’’ (French title: Terre des Hommes). The former sure is a classic which millions of readers know by heart, but ``Wind, Sand and Stars’’ is my all-time favorite because it is Saint-Ex speaking directly, wondrously. (My yellowed copy has many pen markings on it, proof that I read and reread it a long time ago.)

``Wind, Sand and Stars’’ is a symphony, a meditation on life, spiced with true-to-life stories which are not the chicken-soup variety. Saint-Ex writes about his flights and travels to fascinating places in the sky and on land as well.

The sky is not simply a vast and empty space, it is a place where things happen to oneself and within oneself. The deserts and the fields aren’t simply there below to view from the air, they are, many times for Saint-Ex, there to crashland on, and there meet danger and beauty alone and know for the first time strange and wonderful people.

Of his crashlanding in Spanish Africa he wrote: ``But by the grace of the aeroplane I have known a more extraordinary experience than this, and have been made to ponder with even more bewilderment the fact that this earth that is our home is yet in truth a wandering star…I lingered there, startled by this silence that never had been broken. The first star began to shine, and I said to myself, that this pure surface had laid here thousands of years in sight only of the stars.’’

The desert crash site is in fact the setting of the meeting of an aviator and the Little Prince, the intrastellar boy who reveals much about himself and the planet where he came from. Well, their conversation in the Sahara has become one of Planet Earth’s bestsellers. Published in 1943, ``The Little Prince’’ has been translated into more than 100 languages (including Filipino).

The Agence France Press news story said pieces of the famous writer and aviator’s Lockheed Lightning P38 aircraft, which vanished July 31, 1944 during a wartime mission, were found off the coast of Marseille. The discovery, the news item said, was a galvanizing moment for France which had long speculated about the fate of Saint-Ex whose life and books have made him a French icon.

Born in 1900, Saint-Ex joined the French Air Force in 1921. He flew in Morocco and France, and after a brief demobilization, returned to North Africa as a member of the Air Mail Service. He later acted as a director of the Argentine Air Mail Service until he returned to Paris in 1931 and published ``Vol Nuit’’, (Night Flight) the book that established his literary fame.

Saint-Ex tried to break the record from Paris to Saigon but crashed in the African desert and nearly succumbed to thirst. This is one of his stories in ``Wind, Sand and Stars’’.

``I should never have believed that man was truly the prisoner of the springs and the freshets. We take it for granted that a man is able to stride straight out into the world. We believe that man is free. We never see the cord that binds him to wells and fountains, that umbilical cord by which he is tied to the womb of the world.’’

Saint-Ex continued to fly during World War II and when France fell, he fled to the US where he wrote three books, among them, ``The Little Prince.’’ He flew again in 1943, as a reconnaissance pilot for the US forces. On one of his flights, Saint-Ex vanished, probably shot down by the Germans. The weather was good and he had just flown out of the French island of Corsica to photograph parts of southern France in preparation of the Allied landings.

Despite his posthumous fame, Saint-Ex’s fate remained unknown for a long time, until 2000 when a professional French diver found the remains of a P38 plane off Marseille. Two years earlier a fisherman found in that area a bracelet with the words ``Saint-Ex’’ inscribed on it.

Saint-Ex’s stories in ``Wind, Sand and Stars’’ are mostly about the challenge of the elements. He had battled a tornado in the Andes and crashed in the Libyan desert. He had flown mail across the Sahara and played Scarlet Pimpernel during the Spanish Civil War. He found ecstasy in danger, in breaking bread with peasants, Arab shepherds and bedouins, in gazing at the sky with only sand for a pillow.

Through flying Saint-Ex discovered himself and this planet. ``Even the simple shepherd modestly watching his sheep under the stars would discover, once he understood the part he was playing, that he was something more than a servant, was a sentinel. And each sentinel among men is responsible for the whole of the empire.’’

Bookstores offer many new inspirational books, but nothing has captured my heart more than this old little book. Life is an adventure, a challenge, a giving of oneself for a purpose. Saint-Ex’s written works were the fruits of his zeal and zest.

We are all stardust, Saint-Ex seems to say. And he ends his awesome book with ``Only the Spirit, if it breathe upon the clay, can create Man.’’

With sweet longing ``The Little Prince’’ ends: ``Send me word that he has come back.’’

It’s Eastertide. Find time to read and feed your soul.

From `the abyss of sorrow’

A contemplative nun (pen name: Sr. Hyacinth Carmeli) sent her journal on the suicide of her brother Eugene (his real name) after she read something we wrote that resonated with her pain. With the permission of Sr. Hyacinth and other persons concerned, we are sharing excerpts from the journal. This, she said, is her way of reaching out. She can be contacted through this column.

This Holy Week, it behooves us to enter into the pain of others so that we may know and understand.

``Today I bow my head before my brother as almost nine years ago, he put the thick yellow nylon cord around his neck and took hold of the beam. I believe God had tears too as He waited for Eugene because He knew more than anybody else how he had suffered in this life. He cried with Eugene, He cried with me. I believe God is a God who walks with us and never abandons us in all the deepest sorrows of our heart. He feels our pain acutely more than we can ever feel it. But in the beginning these thoughts never entered my heart and if they did, I did not believe a single word of it. I was not ready to listen then.

``I talk to my brother again today in the midst of tears. I have somehow anticipated this sadness as his birthday approaches. It was on his sixth memorial day that I finally told him that it was okay for him to have left....

``There is now a glimmer of acceptance in me. Was he right or wrong? There is no answer. It was too dark for my brother to see, he was in too deep a pit to reach out to all those who wanted to clasp his trembling hands. I believe my brother struggled deeply but his gentle fragile little spirit was already shattered to pieces and never had the chance to get healed in this world. He fought hard and hurt us immensely in the process because he needed us to have a glimpse of his pains and the horrendous howling within.

``Broken glasses, broken hearts. We were afraid of him, of his violence. He, on his part, was intensely afraid of life that kept wounding him. Maybe Eugene battled with an undiagnosed mental illness, maybe he had a bipolar problem aggravated by his chemical dependence, maybe he was destroyed by our painful family life beginning with the fatal shooting of our policeman father when he was only 11. Maybe life was just plain cruel to him.

``I, the sister next to him, saw the brother with a fragile heart, the little boy who went to battle alone, the child who wore a heavy armor and never returned. I saw a little boy who turned into an old tired man. He grappled with life’s complexities alone as he alienated himself more and more. Eugene took refuge in alcohol and drugs to maybe numb himself and pretend that nothing was wrong. But instead of silencing the noise, it trapped him in a long filthy tunnel where no light could reach him. It was the beginning of his many deaths within and the darkest times of our life as a family.

``I remember when I would visit him in the rehabilitation center. He looked happy and filled with hope. I was there every week, forcing myself not to cry as I saw him going out of the building with his shaved head and exhausted look. But he gained weight and was smiling. I thought that was the beginning of a new life. Sadly, people failed to support him when he tried his best to start anew.

``In my heart he remained the brother I knew before the darkness in his mind took over. I held on to the belief that the problem was not his chemical dependency but the very huge hole in his heart.

``A series of major losses including the sudden death of his infant first-born son on a bus while they were on their way home from the province, his separation from his wife, his difficulty in finishing his studies, my entering the convent, and finally the news that his wife was already living with another man took a heavy toll on what was left of his desire to survive life. The horrendous howling within him was too much for him to bear. He went to see a shrink and had to take medicines but it was too late. It was time to take off the heavy armor as the warrior chose to quit and walked away filled with deep sorrow for the battles he knew he could not win.

``On July 25, 1999, the tired old man of 28 closed the window…No letter, no goodbye, nothing. I believe that Eugene was ill, that he was emotionally crippled to choose life. No one `freely’ chooses suicide. My brother was free to choose life but he did not, maybe because he was already dead long before he killed himself. We lost him way back before he decided to end his pain.

``I now accept his death. I stand before him holding the nylon cord and bow my head in utter acceptance and surrender...In honoring his life, I honor the battles he fought all by himself and the endless tears he shed that he tried so hard to hide. I bow my head in gratitude to God for giving him to me as my brother. Eugene will always be a part of my life.

``The myth that it could have been prevented had we done more and been there at the right time tormented me immensely. The need to understand and have all the answers had to go gradually before the little piece of light allowed me to hope and firmly believe that there is still life after the death of a loved one through suicide.

``A great part of my brother’s short life allowed me to penetrate the abyss of sorrow a human heart can experience. It made me dwell in a land of darkness where I never dared imagine I could enter. ``It’s really a mystery--why he was not graced with the same Light that I encountered and continue to encounter, but I know this is just my own thinking. God deals with each of us differently. God’s seeming absence in his life does not necessarily imply that he was not there.

``Eugene’s life and death invited me to a deeper understanding of my own pilgrimage in life. I started to question deeply what life really means for me and where I am going. I don’t believe in suicide but Eugene does not need my opinion on this, he just wants me to continue loving him and being his sister all my life.

``Suicide wounds never heal but the pain changes. There is a distinct difference now but I cannot claim that I am completely out of it. But in my heart I know the sun is beginning to shine again. God is with us today and always.’’