Where have the piano makers gone?

Where have all the piano makers gone? Gone with globalization every one.

That’s my take on the vanished piano-making industry in the Philippines. Almost gone too are the craftsmen and artisans who built these great musical instruments that had brought music and liveliness to Philippine homes and concert halls.

But not entirely. Australia-based Filipino visual artist Alwin Reamillo, who comes from a family of piano makers, is back, trying to prove that the music from Philippine-made pianos need not die. Not if the few remaining piano builders could be brought back to old abandoned workshops, and with their hands (some gnarled because of tricycle driving), pick up the scattered pieces, strings, ivory keys, metal scraps and all, and put them together.

This is what Reamillo’s art exhibit “Mang Emo+Mag-himo Grand Piano Project” is doing. This exhibit is not Reamillo’s alone. Collaborating with him are piano craftsmen Jaime Pastorfide, Sabas Rabino Jr. and Tranquilino Tosio Jr., all from the Reamillo family’s closed-down piano factory that produced the Wittemberg pianos.

The exhibit’s catchy name comes from the nickname of Reamillo’s father Decimo, who was fondly called Mang Emo. “Mag-himo” is Visayan for “to make”. Mang Emo, Reamillo says, learned the rudiments of piano making by working for a piano company. Later, with his trained craftsmen, and with his brother and nephew as partners, he built a company that began with piano repair and restoration. They later went into fine pianos, some of which are in the Philamlife Auditorium, Miriam College and the Benedictine Sisters in Leyte.

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A teacher, a sheltering tree

It was hard keeping track of the body count or the exact number of casualties during the campaign period and the election day itself. The Inquirer put at 147 the death toll since the election campaign began on Jan. 14, the Philippine National Police total is 143.

I know the number stands for individual lives with faces and names, and with a network of families, friends and colleagues grieving for them. But sometimes the tally and the list of names just seem to numb feelings because they are just numbers to those of us who do not know the victims personally. This is not to say they do not matter.

One case suddenly stood out of the rest though. It was the death of a teacher. She died with a poll watcher, their bodies found in a toilet where they had taken refuge after gunmen wearing bonnets set the school house ablaze.

Why should a teacher die this way?

The name of the high school teacher is Nellie Banaag and the local poll watcher is Leticia Ramos. Their names happen to be familiar Filipino names. They are Everyteacher, Everypollwatcher. Banaag is a common family name in Batangas and there must be thousands of Leticia Ramoses in the Philippines, two former diplomats among them.

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Lola Masing, comfort woman

Tomasa Dioso Salinog of San Jose, Antique, one of the many World War II so-called comfort women in Asia who suffered sexual abuse under the Japanese Imperial Army, died of multiple organ failure last April 6. She was 78.

I met Lola Masing at the International Military War Crimes Tribunal held in Tokyo in 2000. Lola Masing led a dozen former comfort women from Philippines and joined dozens from several Asian countries (China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, East Timor, South Korea, among them) who bravely testified. A Dutch woman victim and a contrite former Japanese soldier also told their stories.

I remember that gathering to be a heart-rending occasion. Aging women went up the stage to testify, sometimes weeping, fainting, while old footage, photos and documents on the atrocities were being flashed to serve as backdrop. Some women from China who managed to attend were victims of the infamous “Rape of Nanking”, a well documented historical tragedy.

Lola Masing was only 13 in 1942 when Japanese soldiers broke into their house and took her away. The soldiers beheaded her father when he tried to save his only daughter.

“For two years,” Lola Masing narrated in her March 2007 letter to Japanese Prime Minister ABe, “I was kept as a slave to be raped and abused by Japanese soldiers. They took away the only member of my family. Alone, in abject poverty and with no one to take care of me, I could not go back to school and had to work in order to survive. The war and sexual slavery had destroyed my life and my future…

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Under siege on World Press Freedom Day

It’s World Press Freedom Day today and the son of one of the country’s media icons is missing. Abduction is the most likely reason for the disappearance of Jonas “Jay Jay” Burgos who was reportedly seen being taken away by unidentified men at a mall. Who were they? Where have they taken him? Why?

I hope this column becomes stupid reading because Jason was found alive while I am writing this (yesterday). But this is not the case right now while I am emailing this to the Inquirer close to deadline time.

I’ve never used the press releases of those running for office but re-electionist Sen. Ralph Recto sent something well said, he could very well have said it for us, the members of the media (this is not a plug and I have not yet decided whether I will vote for him):

“The country owes the Burgos family a great deal of gratitude for the freedom it enjoys today (and) it should repay their valor by finding a missing kin. We cannot let the son of a great man who helped give us back our democracy be a victim of undemocratic methods his father strongly raged against. During dangerous times his father did not disappear for teaching us about freedom so why should his son go missing for simply teaching some folks about farming in these supposedly normal times?”

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Quach and the power of music

Most everyone has an extreme fantasy. I have mine. By extreme I mean something that is beyond my present circumstances to fulfill or work at. It is not a dark frustration, but rather a thing to happily indulge in once in a while. Something magical brings it on. It is music.

My sweet indulgence is imagining myself conducting a symphony orchestra or playing as a concert pianist. I never imagine myself a car racer or ramp model. The concert or movie in my mind rolls when I hear great symphonic music swell and every inch of space around me is awash in it.

I raise my hand and do a Stokowski, pretend to stoke the music and make it come to life, make it rise and swell and ebb and flow. No, I don’t do this in public. Grand finales could make for good arm exercise and the sound of a lonely oboe rising above the whispers of violins could get me to the ceiling.

It is not the fame or the fortune attached to this occupation that makes my imagination and juices go wild. It is imagining the power, yes, the power, to have awesome music flowing from one’s hand or finger tips. Like, oh, my, God.

I can read and play music. And having been exposed to the classics during my Benedictine-German-style schooling at St. Scholastica’s College, I am not alien to Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. And I also know great music does not simply flow from the hand. It entails practice, practice, practice. And undeserved God-given musical talent.

A rich imagination is what I have. So what brought on my wild imaginings?

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“Whether through wounds, capture or shipwreck”

My feature story on the Philippine National Red Cross’ 60th year that came out last Monday did not have its accompanying sidebar because of space constraints. It was Manny Pacquiao day, you see, and with his new triumph, the boxing champ made good “blaze of glory” promise that would momentarily dazzle the nation.

Not that we are wanting in inspirational blazes and sparks nowadays. There are many out there, emanating from the lives of unknown, unsung and unseen heroes. Many of these are Red Cross volunteers who have put their lives on the line in order to help and save others.

I have many interesting reading materials on the Red Cross’ work in the Philippines and around the world but I have yet to see or read one that is exclusively on the human drama many Red Cross volunteers have been part of. I wish stories on this would be compiled and published to inspire the young. Something like the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s “Great Men and Women of Asia” books that feature the lives and times of special individuals who made an impact on communities. The light they had created had turned into a blaze that stunned the darkness.

I have the thick history of the Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC) as well as a beautiful coffee-table that tells the Red Cross story through vintage images and essays, from its beginnings before the American occupation up to the recent years. I also have the must-read “Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949” which every journalist who goes into a war zone should first read. I’ve had my old copy for many years. I got a new one recently.

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Fish be with you

Happy Easter!

Are they poor because they are fishers? Or are they fishers because they are poor? These questions of causality sum up the concerns of international fish experts—scientists, academics, government and NGO workers—who were in conference two days ago.

Easter week opened with fish and the poor on top of the agenda of the International Conference on Fisheries and Poverty. The discussions on the theme “Poverty Reduction Through Sustainable Fisheries” zeroed in on emerging policy and governance issues in Southeast Asia.

With the glow of Eastertide still washing over the land, I couldn’t help thinking that the first Pope was a fisherman. Fish—ichthys—was a sign used by the early Christians. May I digress by saying that I remember “Ichthys”, the weekly militant (okay, subversive) underground church publication that I was involved in during the martial law years. The Marcos military never found the catacomb where “Ichthys” was coming from.
Fish has been a staple since the dawn of time. Fish signs and symbols are very much a part of civilizations, and fishing a way of life for many people all over the world. So important is this human activity that it is even romanticized in literary works.

Today, the planet’s bodies of water cannot simply be left on their own to naturally grow all the fish we need the way they did in the days of yore. Feeding the planet and its present inhabitants means finding ways to increase food yield.

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Stunned by God’s fierce, passionate love

Philippine Daily Inquirer/FEATURE/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

MANILA, Philippines -- “GOD IS A FIERCE LOVER who will never let go,” says popular Catholic lay preacher Bo Sanchez of his experience.

“Being in love with God is capturing and being seized by God’s eros—God is in love with us,” says Fr. Percy Bacani of the Missionaries of Jesus.

During the seasons of Lent and Easter “God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son…” will be an oft-quoted line from the Bible. If the Holy Book has not driven this home strongly enough for today’s distracted, multi-tasking faithful, Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ” at least tried to do the job.

But faith and intimacy with God are not nurtured in the movies. God offers His love to individual persons in a more real way. Real not reel. Stronger than the human heart could feel or the mind could intuit. For, as the Bible reminds, God loved us first. And continues to do so in season and out of season.

This holy season, a special few, the called and the chosen, spoke to the Inquirer about God’s eros at work, “God loving with eros” or with a passion that consumes and makes the beloved “like the deer that panteth for flowing streams.”

Carmelite contemplative nun Sr. Teresa Joseph Patrick of Jesus and Mary (aka Josefina Constantino, writer and former professor) describes it thus: “It is an unquenchable thirst. Yet too, in the stillness, in the repose of the abyss where He dwells, finding rest in His embrace…” Sister Teresa, 87, has been a nun for 33 years. She joined Carmel in Gilmore, Quezon City, in 1974 when she was 54.

It is real, it is personal; it is felt in the body, in the soul. The touched, the called, the chosen—many are able to articulate the real-ness of God’s love and presence and, as in all relationships, even God’s sometimes seeming absence in the divine romance.

A love affair with God, falling in love with God and staying in love, seeking out the divine and being consumed by the longing is a love plot that has played itself out in the lives of special individuals in different contexts throughout history and in this present time.

Words fail in describing this divine love play and often gets stuck in human comparisons. A 10th-century Hindu mystic pleads to her Lord, “Make of my body the beam of a lute … Clutch me close and play your thirty-two songs, O lord of the meeting rivers.” The psalmist waxes, “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your torrents.”

For some, it was a slow but steady wooing, for others, it was a swift and sudden leap to God’s overpowering call and pull and then responding with a love so human, so clumsy. The experience could be initially draining as the uninitiated soul gets inexorably drawn toward an incomprehensible force.

Eros and agapé

Sister Marie (who wishes to remain anonymous) of Carmel in Lipa City gives a glimpse of her love affair with God: “Many a time, God made me experience His love in a very human way since I am a creature of flesh and blood. As Richard Hardy, a doctor of theology, said in a conference on St. John of the Cross, God loves us with an erotic love, with passion. In God, eros and agapé become one. How true! So I experience God’s love not only in the mind, not only in the spirit, but as passion.”

Sister Mary has had her “dark nights” when God seemed to be lost. “God hiding so that I might search for Him with greater longing, then God manifesting Himself as pure delight. No wonder the saints speak of marriage in the mystical life.”

As an Indian mystic had written, “You hide, lest I seek and find. Give me a clue, O lord, white as jasmine, to your hiding places.”

Grace upon grace

Sr. Victricia Pascasio, a Holy Spirit sister felt God’s generous love and faithfulness when she was in college. She was a student leader at that time. “That day was crystal clear to me. God had been so faithful, so generous. The whole of me for a lifetime was the only fitting gift I could offer.” Looking back Sister Victricia says that was God’s way and “initiative” to draw her to Himself. “Many years later,” she reflects, “I could only say, how foolish of me to feel so generous toward God when it had been God who was most generous and faithful. Since then, it has been grace upon grace upon grace.”

A religious missionary for 47 years now, Sister Victricia, is involved in her congregation’s socio-pastoral apostolates in the Philippines and is immersed in the issues affecting indigenous communities. She sees her work “as Christ’s, not mine.”

Into an inner clearing

“How can I really thank you?” Sr. Edith Olaguer, a Good Shepherd contemplative sister, recalls asking God in prayer. She was in college then. “Hundreds of images flit through my mind. They left in their wake a clearing so empty, so still, I was jerked clean of all thoughts. Then I do not know how to explain it because I heard no voice, saw nothing, was not thinking but I simply understood.” God was drawing, wooing her. She would be brought to that “inner clearing” again and again and there would say her “Yes.”

The 2004 Ramon Magsaysay awardee for emergent leadership, Ben Abadiano, was about to get married when the religious call made itself heard. He had reached a crossroad.

“How could I offer my life,” Ben asked God. He had, at that time, already worked among indigenous peoples (IP) for almost a decade. He wanted to give more. “While thinking of that I was shedding tears of joy. I felt as if grace was raining down on me.” It was a watershed moment.

He joined the Jesuit novitiate and stayed on for four years, did studies in philosophy at the Ateneo, even pronounced his vows as a Jesuit. Ordination to the priesthood was still far down the road.

But God beckoned yet again and lured him back to his first love—the IP. Ben left the Jesuits in 1997 for a new path. He had nothing with him except dreams and a song in his heart. And the memory of that watershed God experience long ago.

As a wise French nun once told an enamored young seeker: “You must hold on to the memory of that moment. Many, many years from now, no matter where you will be, you will need that to give you strength to go on, to convince yourself that God’s love call was real.”

Stunned, embraced, gripped

Bo Sanchez says: “I believe that the first step of the Christian life is not to work, to do, to strive or even to love—but to first be loved. I have to first be stunned, moved, embraced, gripped by God’s passionate love. And when my soul is overwhelmed, yes, overpowered by God’s generosity, I cannot help but love the Lover with my all. Many times I left God, but God kept waiting for my return. God is a fierce lover that will never let go.”

God chases, like Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven,” and the object of this fierce love flees. “I fled him, down the nights and down the days, I fled him … Down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind…”

Sister Marie remembers how she fled. “I just plugged my ears, hoping that God would call someone else. At about that time, I fell in love with a man of great simplicity and integrity, and I thought then that I was destined for married life. At a certain point though, I realized the immensity of God’s love for me, and it was so overwhelming that I felt that love could only be repaid by love. Only a total surrender of myself could match the greatness of that love. I heard a clear voice within me, a voice so clear there was no use denying it.” To Carmel she went.

There are peaks and valleys, moments of consolation as well as desolation, bright mornings and dark nights of the soul. Great saints had their share of triumphs and turbulence, agonies and ecstasies.

Their written works about their love affair with God leave ordinary mortals in awe. It could be so saccharine like Therese of Lisieux’s, or earthy and forest-green like Francis of Assisi’s. Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain” is a classic. Rabindranath Tagore’s “Gitanjali” (song offerings to God) endures, rivaling in passion and depth the Bible’s “Song of Songs” that drips divine eros.

Gratitude

“Passion for God is not fear-based and is not sacrifice-driven,” Father Percy speaks from experience. “It is being filled with the superabundance of God’s love and the only response is gratitude. I become mindful of the ordinariness and the giftedness of everything. This is my mid-life discovery in my God-quest. Being in love with God is capturing and being seized by God’s eros-God is in love with us. St. Augustine says it better: God is closer to our hearts than we to our own.”

God’s face in every star

Sr. Mary Edith has glimpsed that too. “I had been given a glimpse of how good God is. This hollowed in me a cavernous thirst that has never been quenched. And so I hold fast to the dream that one day, I will be allowed, even while on this earth, to see God’s face in every star, in every human face and in every quivering tear. I want to know in my heart that I belong to everyone and everything, and that everything and everyone is part of me. When others suffer, when one is disgraced, it is to my shame. I want to live out in everyday life the fact that all I want to be, I already am.”

The search, chase

The search, the chase, continues. There could be bewilderment. A modern-day seeker asks: “Are you the symphony, are you the silent river that runs through my thoughts, that floods the cave of my heart, that breaks open the soul to an unknown wilderness?”

Most likely, the answer is “Yes.”

The late Sr. Christine Tan, RGS, told the Inquirer seven years ago, “Encountering God is a passionate experience. Violent but also tender. In prayer, when you go deep into the silence, you could actually feel God. You and God are merged as one. In that utter stillness you could feel the light, and the fire and the tight embrace, and the tenderness enfolding you. Then you become strong like a bull. You go straight like an arrow.”

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Interactive Via Dolorosa

Here’s wishing you a passionate Holy Week.

The Internet has revolutionized ways for people to prayerfully contemplate the world. (Contemplation could be defined as taking a long, loving look at reality.) If one cannot be physically present in places where the Via Dolorosa is being played out daily in people’s lives, one can at least participate virtually through the web and then live out Jesus’ Passion, Death and Resurrection in the context of one’s own life.

Visit the interactive Way of the Cross in the Internet of the Operation Rice Bowl (ORB) of the Catholic Relief Services (CRS). ORB’s 14 Stations of the Cross give the googler a virtual experience of a modern-day Via Dolorosa contextualized in ORB’s project sites in different parts of the world.

I can’t show you the images and maps but here are edited reflections on several Stations. You could also check them out in the Internet.

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Nuns, bishop in the casino

What were they doing there? How did they get there? Who brought them there? Why were they there? What did they think their presence there would mean? Are they a new breed?

These were some of the questions asked by those who saw, on television, nuns trying out what looked like slot machines in the casino at the “Las Vegas”-to-be strip along Manila Bay.

Also present was Novaliches Bishop Antonio Tobias who gave the occasion an ecclesiastical feel.

Even the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) didn’t quite know how to react, but did react anyway by saying, through its spokesman Msgr. Pedro Quitorio, that the CBCP was not going to do anything, by way of censure perhaps, in relation to the presence of one its members in a gambling setting. Quitorio however did say that it was something the CBCP did not approve of.

Individual bishops are heads of their own ecclesiastical territories and are independent of the CBCP. They are accountable only to the Pope and their own constituencies. The most a bishop might get from his fellow bishops would be fraternal reminders. Individual bishops do not take orders from the CBCP, except perhaps when, as members, they must take heed and act as a collegial body.

And what about the nuns? Although most, if not all, heads of religious congregations in the country are members of the Association of Major Religious Superiors of the Philippines (for women and men), these congregations are independent of the AMRSP and don’t need the AMRSP’s yes or no.

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Heart in two places

MANILA, Philippines -- “When we were asked to stand up, raise our right hand, and pledge to ‘renounce’ our loyalties to our old country, I felt a giant lump in my throat and I had to struggle not to cry. By the time they sang the national anthem, they had already lost me.”

That paragraph, though emotionally charged, sounds prosaic when compared with the rest of the essays in Gemma Nemenzo’s gem of a book, “Heart in Two Places: An Immigrant’s Journey” (Anvil). The moment she describes is a watershed moment for most Filipinos who have left their homeland to strike it out in the U.S. of A. But its impact and significance for a variety of Filipinos could be as varied as the Filipinos themselves and their reasons for living there.

Gemma writes about that pledging experience in her first essay aptly titled “Citizen Cain” (double entendre there), one of the 53 essays in her book.

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MDGs, FTAs

Alphabet soup, anyone? The letters are swimming in my head like letters in a bowl of alphabet soup heaving with dollops of jargon. One moment I know what a bunch of letters means, the next moment I find myself asking what SIA is. I bet, you also do not know. SIA stands for sustainability impact assessment. Do FTA and EPA mean the same? Are we ever an MFN? What happened to the WTO?

And then there are the kilometric words. Trade liberalization, globalization, neo-liberalism, multilateral, bilateral, developmental, etc. Journalists hate long words. Why say less-fortunate when you simply mean the poor? But I will concede to the economists’ “below poverty line” although I can only picture a line, not the face of destitution, hunger or penury.

These thoughts were swirling in my head while attending two recent two seminars meant to help journalists understand what is going on in this world, this country in particular.

The first one was on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which was exclusively for journalists and sponsored by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). For this one, the only way to get journalists to stay put was to fly them to some island. And so we were happily marooned in the island of Panglao in Bohol with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) and SocialWatch (an activist NGO), to help with the A to Z of the MDGs. How to critically analyze the progress reports? How/where to find MDG-related stories?

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