A Christmas song for Raymond

If I’d make a wish for Christmas
Each day would be like Christmas night
When we put aside our fighting
Find the warmth that comes from giving
When the rushing world slows down for once
To share a song of joy


Then the noise will fade
Weary hearts will find themselves at ease
Throughout the world, all men will learn
To live in Christmas peace


If I’d make a wish for Christmas
Each man would be more like a child
Hearts that marvel at the small things
Love and laughter everlasting
And a worldwide wonder as we raise our eyes
To a million shining stars


Only then will we see the Baby Jesus in our hearts
What a miracle, the Heavenly King born in our hearts… If I’d make a wish for Christmas…



A boy with autism, a young volunteer, students and professionals with music in their hearts, a group that spreads the good news--all with hopes for quiet and peace in the land. Something beautiful was at work among them.

And so a Christmas song was born.

Some years ago, Marchan Padla, a young volunteer at Ang Arko ng Pilipinas, a l’Arche community that cares for mentally handicapped persons, wrote lyrics and a melody for a song. It was a song he dedicated to Raymond, an autistic boy who has become an inspiration to many who have come his way.

This song found its way to Hangad, a group of students and young professionals bound by their desire to know God and who, through their music, help others know God. Hangad’s music is recorded and distributed by the Jesuit Communications Foundations (JCF).

Marchan told Hangad that he wrote the song at the height of anti-Muslim violence during the Estrada administration. He titled the song “Raymond’s Lullaby”. This was to honor the boy with autism. Raymond could not stand the Christmas holiday noise in the city he had to be brought somewhere else every time the noise was too much for him. Autistic persons are generally very sensitive to sound and cannot stand noise at high levels. But Raymond is more than the sum total of his autistic self. Proof of this is the song that came to life.

“Raymond’s Lullaby” is the lead track of Hangad’s Christmas album “A Wish for Christmas”. Hangad (www.hangad.com) and JCF hope to raise funds for Arko and make people aware of Arko (www.angarkongpilipinas.com) and its mission to serve those with intellectual disabilities.

A booklet titled “I Walk with Raymond” written by Catholic priest Roderick Milne (of the Marist congregation) of New Zealand several years ago tells the story about Raymond and the people of l’Arche Punla (or Ang Arko ng Pilipinas) which is the Philippine branch of l’Arche. Fr. Milne ministered to Raymond during his stay in the Philippines.

Ang Arko-Punla is in Bayanihan Village in Cainta, Rizal. L’Arche, an international community, was founded by Jean Vanier. Well-known author Henri Nouwen’s “The Road to Daybreak” tells about Vanier’s work.

Raymond was about eight years old in 1988 when he was abandoned by his family. Ang Arko-Punla, then in Nagtahan, took him in. Raymond has since been with Ang Arko. Raymond does not speak but communicates by making noises and bodily movements. He needs to be assisted but otherwise he is physically healthy and is a brisk walker.

There are many special persons like Raymond who live in l’Arche communities. And there are many good individuals like Marchan Padla and Fr. Milne who have found their way to these communities to serve. Maybe you will, too. The music might lead you there.

It’s amazing how a little song and a person who cannot speak and who hates noise have connected a number of people who did not know one another in the beginning. Paolo Kalaw Tirol of Hangad was so inspired he worked with Marchan to give the song its musical form and arrangement. Julius Guevarra did the instrumental arrangement.

The other songs in “A Wish for Christmas” are “Child Emmanuel”, “Paskong Pinoy Medley” (from five Filipino Christmas staples) and “Silent Night”. I was told it is selling well at P120. The album and other JCF products—music, books, video, etc.—are available at Tanging Yaman Outlets at the Loyola House of Studies in Ateneo de Manila University. From there, you might want to visit Ang Arko in nearby Cainta.

Another music group that needs support for its brave and off-the-beaten track repertoire is the Andres Bonifacio Concert Choir that brought music to our Inquirer Christmas celebration last week. They came in simple Filipino costumes and regaled us with patriotic, indigenous and popular Filipino songs. Founder, composer and conductor Jerry Dadap also coaches the Inquirer choir. He wrote the musical “Andres Bonifacio: Ang Dakilang Anak Pawis.”

The Andres Bonifacio Concert Choir and the Andres Bonifacio Rondalla are under the Andres Bonifacio Music Foundation (ABMFI) which was founded in 1986. If you want to add nationalistic musical fire to your affairs, call the ABMFI at 9314882.

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We all know now that: If it had been Three Wise Women (instead of men), they would have asked for directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the Baby Jesus, cleaned the stable, cooked dinner and brought practical gifts.

My addition: And they would have stayed on much, much longer to accompany the Holy Family during their flight into Egypt.

Today, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, let us remember and do something for the children and the infants who suffer because of neglect, widespread violence and disasters.
To those who sent Christmas text messages and did not get a reply from me, I wsh u a gr8 +mas @ a hp nu yr. In other words, I WISH YOU A GOOD AND MEANINGFUL CHRISTMAS AND A GREAT YEAR AHEAD. Remember how simply it all began.

Reclaiming public water

A water rate hike in Metro Manila is upon us and Ek Sonn Chan is on my mind.

There is something that water managers, providers, consumers, conservationists, activists and worriers, etc. might need to read. It is “Reclaiming Public Water: Achievements, Struggles and Visions from Around the World.” It is about wide-ranging approaches in reforming urban public water systems that are being practiced in developing countries. It’s about vision and against-all-odds innovation. I don’t have the book but I have the abstract and lengthy discussion paper on it.

It was published in 2005 by the Netherlands-based prestigious Transnational Institute and Corporate Europe Observatory and has been going the rounds of international water forums. I picked up the abstract and several papers on water privatization at the recent Asia Europe People’s Forum in Helsinki. Water services privatization in debt-ridden developing countries was among the life-and-death topics discussed there. At first I thought, what’s water doing in debates on globalization and neo-liberalism? As I listened in I realized that water, or access to it, is no longer just a basic human right, it has also become a commodity, a merchandise, what with water services being privatized and taken over by giant multinationals out to make big profits.

The announcement on the water rate hike the other day was like a douse of cold water on consumers’ pre-Christmas warm-up. On New Year’s Day you’ll be paying more. That is also when the cold and dry season begins to be felt. Later, it segues into hot and dry, and humid too, and people will need to take a bath more often, wash clothes more often, water their plants more often. It is indeed ironic, for we have just experienced disasters of the watery kind that wiped out villages.

So are we wet or are we dry?



We’re getting a double whammy. For didn’t they announce earlier that there will be a water shortage in the national capital region (NCR) in the coming months? The water level in the reservoirs will dip while the rates will soar. Is this about the law of supply and demand?

When water services were privatized 10 years ago, consumers thought their water woes would end. I remember doing a front-page three-part series on big-time water thieves disguised as water suppliers of parched Paranaque. Privatization, the residents had hoped then, would ease their woes, and it did, but not entirely for the majority of Metro Manilans.

At the 2003 World Water Forum in Kyoto, private think tanks pushed and promoted private sector involvement. International financing institution and Northern governments backed them. Well, studies like the one by the London-based Public Services International Research Unit, have shown that “there is no systematic intrinsic advantage to private sector operation in terms of efficiency.” In fact, water multinationals, among them Suez, have had to withdraw from concessions in cities in Bolivia, Argentina and Tanzania. (Suez partnered with Benpres in the failed Maynilad.)

There is a new and growing awareness that public water operations deserve support as they are crucial in achieving the so-called Millennium Development Goals. And the good news, according to experts, is that good public water delivery is possible. There are new innovative models that are rooted in citizens’ involvement. “Reclaiming Public Water” documents these and cites ways of overcoming bureaucracy and other causes of public service failure.

A successful model is the “public-public partnerships” or PUPs where high-performing public utilities are matched up with those that are not performing so well for the purpose of sharing expertise.

At the March 2006 Water Forum in Mexico City, the PUP gained growing support. This was a significant shift from the earlier water forums (Hague 2000 and Kyoto 2003) where public water was hardly mentioned.

The Jubilee South-Asia Pacific Movement for Debt and Development’s study “Water Privatization in the Asia Pacific Region” presents privatization as “a deadly enterprise”. It cites the partnership between global giant Suez and the Lopez-owned Benpres (Maynilad Water Services) and the partnership between transnational United Utilities and Ayala Corporation (Manila Water Company). The World Bank had hailed these partnerships as the first large-scale water supply privatization in Asia.

The study also presents cases in the Asia-Pacific region. Privatization projects, the study says, are either explicitly included as part of loan criteria and conditionalities for borrowing countries or are prescribed for meeting fiscal targets required by international financial institutions.

Has privatization resulted in better services and affordable and safe water for many? Have other and better models been considered? There are now many studies on successful schemes in developing countries that the Philippines could learn from. Metro Manila’s failures need not be the lot of other areas that still need to have a good water system in place.

Ek Sonn Chan of Cambodia, 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Government Service, has shown that things could be turned around if there is a will. Ek, an engineer and manager, was honored for his exemplary rehabilitation of a ruined public utility and bringing safe drinking water to a million people in Phnom Penh. Ek lost his entire family to the killing fields of the communist Khmer Rouge but he moved on to help in his country’s rehabilitation.

With world support Ek and his team embarked on a major overhaul of the water system and showed that it could be done. It was a heroic feat for a government bureaucrat.

Mabuting Pasko.

Climate change, the bigger enemy

While the Philippines was reeling from its yearly dose of typhoons, the worst of which struck recently, something related was happening elsewhere. The Twelfth Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Second Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol was taking place at the UN office in Nairobi, Kenya from Nov. 6 to 17.

Kenya’s vice president Moody Awori told the delegates: “We are gathered this morning on behalf of humankind because we acknowledge that climate change is rapidly emerging as one of the most serious threats humanity will ever face.”

On a local scale for us, first, it was typhoon Milenyo, then came Reming, then Seniang—all within a span of a month or two, and the last two typhoons within a week of each other. It was as if these superhowlers were trying to be in synch with the political storm that has been buffeting this be-stormed and benighted country these past months.

After the skies had cleared and the body count had begun there was the usual blame-throwing. To Phivolcs: Were the warnings loud enough and the mudslide-prone areas warned? To the local governments: Were the warnings relayed to communities concerned? To the residents: Why didn’t you heed the warnings? To despoilers and destroyers of forest covers: You must pay for the destruction you have wrought. And so forth and so on.



In the din of cries of grief and despair, amid the cacophony of fault-finding and blame-throwing and in the happy hum of the steady stream of aid that was pouring in, there was a little voice, inaudible almost, that rose. I don’t remember now who said it but I certainly heard it. The bigger enemy, someone said (I think it was a scientist who said it) is climate change. And it is bigger than the short-term solutions being presented on the ground.

Like, yes, we have natural weather occurrences that shouldn’t have resulted in such huge disasters if only… But these occurrences and their consequences are just raindrops when compared with the bigger global enemy that is climate change. Bigger in the sense that it affects the whole planet Earth and all its inhabitants—young and old, rich and very rich, poor and very poor, powerful and powerless…

It is bigger than politics and national boundaries, bigger than ideological, religious and ethnic strife, though, I might say, that all these human concerns also have something to contribute, directly or indirectly, to the meteorological problems of this planet. For the deadly wastes we send up to the atmosphere come down in a deadly way upon or heads and homes, on towns and cities, on hills and valleys. And it is mostly the poorest that are worst hit.

Father Sean McDonagh, author of many books on the environment and former resident of the Philippines, has come up with another book, his nth, “Climate Change: The Challenge to Us All.” Two years ago he wrote “The Death of Life: The Horror of Extinction”.

I have yet to get a copy of McDonagh’s recent opus but I learned that it got good reviews. I also received a copy of his essay “Climate Change: The Urgent Challenge to All”. I think “urgent” is the key word here.

Climate change has been in the international agenda since Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, McDonagh reminds. What has happened since then? Politicians have merely been paying lip service and have not confronted the problem because their advisers have thought the it would take probably 100 years before the effects of climate change would be felt, that these wouldn’t happened during their watch.

Well, many politicians and world leaders who were alive in 1992 are still around and they are seeing for themselves the drastic changes in the past few years.
In 2004, Sir David King, the chief scentific adviser to the British government said that “the problems arising from global warming are the biggest challenges facing governments.” McDonagh says scientists and scientific bodies around the word have since issued dire warnings about the effects of climate change on weather patterns, ocean habitats and flooding, biodiversity and access to potable water. Speaking of water, Metro Manila has been experiencing what waterless means, with a weather official hoping Seniang would blow into Central Luzon so the waters of Angat would be replenished.

It’s like choosing between a rock and a hard place, between death by drowning or death by thirst.

McDonagh says that Sir Nicholas Stern’s review of the “Economics of Climate Change” (published in Oct. 2006) constitutes the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle in terms of making a cast iron case for aggressively addressing global warming. With a combination of political leadership, the proper mix of carrot and stick in carbon tax to reflect the true cost of energy and support for new technologies, we could avoided the worst in climate change, he says.

A low carbon economy, McDonagh suggests, will offer new possibilities for business that could run to billions of dollars per year. It can no longer be “business as usual” while we are experiencing drastic extreme weather conditions, melting ice caps, rising ocean levels and massive extinction of the species.

While the Bush administration has not signed the Kyoto protocol, a number of US states and cities are willing to sign a Kyoto-like protocol beyond 2012, and everyone wishes growing economies like China, India and Brazil would also sign up to limiting greenhouse gas emissions after 2012.

Climate change is not just a scientific and economic issue. It is a moral one.

Puta man o santa man

Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times. From the prehistoric times to the present, rape has played a critical function. It is a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.
-Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will

I used the above quote last year shortly after the rape of “Nicole” landed in the news and created a furor. I use it again now that a conviction has been made.

Puta man o santa man…. Whore or saint—neither one deserves to be raped. This has been playing in my head for days, before and after the decision on the Subic rape case and until now. At first I thought saying it in Filipino would sound too vulgar but I changed my mind when I read yesterday’s front-page news in the Inquirer.

No less than a bishop—Bishop Oscar Cruz—was lecturing women on how not to get raped, as if there was a way to get raped. As if rape could partly be women’s fault, as if they would have it coming and could bring it upon themselves because of their way of dressing or behaving. Because it is but natural for men to respond by raping? Come on. Hello? I could feel blood rising to my face.



I’m glad the Inquirer gave the quote prominence because it showed how many men, a bishop among them, still regard women, that is, as temptresses. “Womanhood is precious and noble, so it is not right for them to be flaunting it around.” That’s what the bishop said. Flaunt? Otherwise they could be raped? Should women be always fearful that the way they carry their womanhood could result in violence against their person?

Not that I approve of everything that women do with their bodies and of their distracting way of dressing in certain occasions. But I don’t wish that the celebrities who have three-fourths of their quivering mammary blobs exposed would be raped, mashed or groped. Sure, certain behaviors could have negative consequences. Like if you sit on a ledge of a building you could fall but this does not mean someone should push you to your death.

Rape is no longer a ``private crime.’’ The Anti-Rape Law of 1997 classifies rape as ``a crime against persons’’. For a long time rape was considered merely as ``a crime against chastity’’. This seemed to suggest that persons who were unchaste were fair game.

Defense lawyers who dredge up the sexual reputation of rape victims and cast aspersions on their morality to bolster their defense of the accused should know this strategy could boomerang on them.

Last year, when the Inquirer carried the banner headline that Nicole was not, repeat, not, a sex worker, women’s groups reacted strongly because the headline seemed to suggest that if Nicole was in fact one she was fair game. (The headline was a response to those who wondered what she was.)

The crime of rape should have nothing to do with the chastity of the victim. Rape is not merely a sexual offense or a crime against chastity but a crime against persons and against the State. As one feminist lawyer had said, ``Rape is not a crime against the hymen. It is a crime against the whole person.’’ It is a crime of the strong against the weak, a crime of conquest. Speaking of conquest, the Subic rape case took on a political color because the accused were citizens of a former colonizing nation who still throws its weight around.

Did you see that burly American who was throwing his weight around to shelter Lance Corporal Daniel Smith after his conviction? But our policemen were there to do their job. He even tried to stop the media from following in a car. I wish someone had yelled at him, “You, (@#&!*>) American, you are on Philippine soil!” I wish our police had pinned him down but they seemed intimidated. Dinaan sa laki.

Smith did not deny he had sex with Nicole, but it was consensual, he insisted. Well, that’s what rapists always say—that their victims wanted it and so why are they crying rape? That’s what 91-year-old American Jesuit Fr. James Reuter, a revered figure in these islands, is stressing again and again. That it was consensual sex as Smith alleged. This makes Nicole a liar. Had he talked to Nicole?

I find Reuter’s interventions so pathetic. The most he could have done was simply to listen to what Smith had to confess (whether or not Smith is a Catholic) and give it the seal of confession. In contrast, the Filipino Protestant pastor who had been regularly ministering to Smith and the other accused simply stuck to the spiritual and left the legal to the lawyers and the judge.

The other night there was this news on TV about a big box that was dumped beside the road. When a poor man opened it he found a whole human body inside it. That’s what the US servicemen did to Nicole. They dumped her on the pavement, with her pants worn the wrong way and with a used condom hanging somewhere. Is that how consensual sex is supposed to end? And then they zoomed off to their waiting ship like felons fleeing the scene of a crime.

What woman in her proper mind (Nicole was drunk) would consent to be carried out of a club on the back of a man and into a van, and in the presence of five or six other men, have sex with one of them while the vehicle was moving? And when it was over, be dumped on the side of the road, looking disheveled and dazed?

Last year Sen. Francis Pangilinan said that 3,000 rape cases against Americans have been dismissed in the Olongapo City court. Smith’s conviction in Makati is a first.
Congratulations to Nicole’s lawyers.