From Payatas to St. Scho, magna cum laude

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo Payatas in Quezon City is often pictured as a landscape most foul, a garbage dump, the receptacle of the city’s refuse. I’ve been there thrice: to do stories on a woman who turned scraps into exquisite underwear, on a thriving Church microlending cooperative for the poor, and, in 2000, on the collapse of the garbage dump, burying hundreds of waste pickers (mangangalahig). Today I’m writing...

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Partial compensation from the Marcos loot

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo Thousands of victims-survivors and relatives of those who perished and vanished during the dark night of martial rule have each been handed their compensation checks for the second time. I received mine last Monday. A photo of that came out on page 2 of the Inquirer last Tuesday. I was wearing my “Martial Law Survivor” overshirt and holding the EastWest Bank check. Also in the photo was our...

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Empowered women farmers

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo Filipinos have a way of using superlatives when they see a how-good-can-it-get situation. So let me say: Women farmers na, empowered pa. That is said with the supposition that being a woman farmer is not (or should no longer be) a burden but a blessing, not a diminishment of status and gender but an empowered state of being. Of course, the ideal is still far from what is happening on the...

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'Let it go,' sisters

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo Let’s have a roaring Women’s Month! “Let it go, let it go/And I’ll rise like the break of dawn/Let it go, let it go/ That perfect girl is gone/Here I stand, in the light of day/Let the storm rage on!” That’s from the Oscar-winning song in the movie “Frozen.” In her groundbreaking book “Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye,” Madonna Kolbenschlag writes: “All fairy tales are about transformation,...

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