Letter from East Timor

It wasn’t so long ago (2002) when I wept while I watched on television East Timor’s declaration of independence after being under the Portuguese for 400 years and Indonesia for almost 30 years and Xanana Gusmao taking his oath as the first president.

I was in East Timor so very briefly in 1995 for the Ahi Naklakan Solidarity Tour (Ahi Naklakan is Tetum for light) with human rights activists. After several days we were found out and promptly rounded up by the Indonesian military and brought to the airport.

When independence was nigh in 1999 violence erupted and many were killed, among them religious missionary sisters. Foreign journalists left in haste but thanks to information technology and e-mail, the world knew what was happening there. Even while surrounded by bursts of gunfire, missionaries e-mailed letters some of which I used in this space (``Epistles via e-mail’’, 9/23/99).

East Timor is again in the throes of war. (It is now supposedly the other Christian country in Asia besides the Philippines but what does this mean really?) Here again is a letter from a missionary whom I know and who had worked in the Philippines. She was assigned to East Timor a few years ago. For reasons of security I have removed names from her letter.

``Yesterday 28 May, I decided to temporarily leave East Timor via one of the evacuation flights to Darwin, Australia…

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Breathless in Yogya

I was in Indonesia for nine days last week for a vacation with close relatives. We spent six days in Jakarta and three in Yogyakarta (Yogya or Jogja for short) which was among the areas in Central Java hit by the killer earthquake in the early morning of May 27.

Yogya, an ancient capital city, is the cultural center of Java. It isn’t anything like Bali but it has its own charm and cultural richness.

The quake that killed some 5,000 people missed us by 38 hours. I do not want to imagine what it would have been like for us had we chosen a later date for the cultural trip there. The quake left many stranded as the airport runways were damaged. (Yogya is 50 minutes by plane from Jakarta.)

Back in Jakarta I had goose bumps when I saw on TV and in the papers images of death and destruction. Some of the places we had visited around Yogya had suffered damage, among them the Hindu Prambanan temples, a Unesco World Heritage Site 18 km. east of Yogya which is continuously being restored to their original grandeur. With the killer quake’s destructive sweep, restoration work has suffered a setback. But the destruction is nothing compared to the thousands of lives that were lost.

Built in the 9th century during Sanjaya Dynasty, the temple complex has hundreds of temples spread out all over but a dozen or so comprise the major ones. The three biggest for the Hindu trinity—Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma—form the centerpiece.

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Culion: the nuns’ story (2)

This month and year, Culion Island in Palawan marks its 100th anniversary as a place where lepers of yore were shipped and confined for most of their lives. Culion, once the biggest leper colony in the world, is a leper colony no more. It is now a thriving island municipality. The new generation no longer bears the marks of the dreaded disease that medical science has finally licked. The scars are still there, but the place and its people have long begun the journey toward healing.

I was one of those who helped write the handsome coffeetable book ``Culion Island: A Leper Colony’s 100-Year Journey Toward Healing.’’ Here is the continuation of the excerpts from “The Nuns’ Story”, one of the pieces that I wrote.

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Culion: The nuns’ story (1)

This month and year, Culion Island in Palawan marks its 100th anniversary as a place where lepers of yore were shipped and confined for most of their lives. Culion, once the biggest leper colony in the world, is a leper colony no more. It is now a thriving island municipality. The new generation no longer bears the marks of the dreaded disease that medical science has finally licked. The scars are still there, no doubt, but the place and its people have long begun the journey toward healing.

I was one of those who helped write the handsome coffeetable book ``Culion Island: A Leper Colony’s 100-Year Journey Toward Healing.’’ The experience was rewarding indeed. Here are excerpts from “The Nuns’ Story”, one of the pieces that I wrote.

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Incredible mistake re Sally Bulatao

This is one case that tempts me to tell good persons planning to serve in government to please don’t. It has nothing to do with the monetary compensation. It is because despite the hard work you put in you might end up tarred and feathered, with your name irreparably tarnished.

Sure, one could be removed from an appointive position any time and for any number of reasons, loss of confidence among them, but to be given walking papers and accused of wrongdoing without due process is another matter.

Something terrible has been done to Salvacion Bulatao, head of the National Dairy Authority (NDA) for almost six years. I am hoping that things could be reversed, that those who moved with undue haste would be enlightened and realize that they had made a mistake.

Let me state here that I’ve known Sally for 25 years and I can vouch for her good character. I can also say that she has been a great mover in the local milk industry that involves thousands of farmers. Hey, you don’t easily find someone so passionate about milk, dairy farmers and the hungry poor. Sally has, in fact, passed on some of that interest in milk to me. An accounting graduate of the College of the Holy Spirit and with a master’s degree from Harvard University, Sally could have been somewhere more comfortable.

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Feedback on “Everest”

Here are some reactions on last week’s column piece “Surfing Everest” that was partly about the efforts to conquer the killer peak by a team and an individual supported respectively by TV network giants ABS-CBN and GMA7. (The rest was about one adventurer’s Himalayan spiritual adventure.) I had expressed my concern about the “race”, what with two competing networks doing a continuing coverage of their respective climbers. And I dread seeing one making it and the other not making it. Or worse…

From Maloli K. Espinosa, vice president of ABS-CBN’s Government, Corporate Affairs and Public Relations

“We are writing in response to your column `Surfing Everest’ published (April 27). Please be informed that ABS-CBN’s commitment to support the first Philippine Mt. Everest expedition was arranged nearly two years ago with The Mountaineering Federation of the Philippines, headed by Transportation Undersecretary Arturo Valdez. The network has pledged, among others, a media campaign drive that will promote this quest.

“The decision was made based on two considerations: that it was a legitimate news story and, second, it was in line with the network's commitment to the coverage of momentous sporting events involving Filipino athletes.

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Surfing Everest

The two giant Philippine television networks and their respective Mount Everest climbers are racing to get to the peak and hoping to plant a flag of conquest and beam to the world their triumph over height, cold, snow, ice, wind, fatigue. It is not easy for those involved to admit that it is a race to the top. And it is not a question of who gets there first but whether anyone among the hopeful Filipinos there right now could get to the peak at all and come back in one piece.

One hears the usual cliché about conquest of self, that is, the Himalayas within, before triumph over the elements. That is indeed what it is. But when competing media networks—ABS-CBN and GMA-7—do a running coverage of this first-time effort of Filipinos whom the networks are betting on separately, one cannot help but worry. Climbing Everest is not an ordinary sport. It is a life-threatening endeavor, a conquest of a lifetime, if one makes it.

One cannot but be concerned about the safety of the climbers involved (a team for ABS-CBN and a lone climber for GMA-7) and also about how viewers would perceive this whole thing.

Is this about ratings again? Couldn’t the two networks just have covered everyone—the so-called Philippine team (ABS-CBN’s) and lone climber Romi Garduce (GMA-7)? After all the climbers are all carrying the Philippine flag. I don’t mean they have to take the same route. What if one network makes it and the other doesn’t? I dread to see the outcome of such a situation.

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Elpidio de la Victoria, Earth Day martyr

Things were beginning to grind to a halt on Wednesday of Holy Week when the murderer struck. He chose the time when media coverage would be minimal, government offices would be closed and most people would be in their homes and in church or away somewhere.

In fact, news about the murder didn’t come out in the national print media until four days later on Easter Sunday. The Cebu media gave it major treatment though. The Inquirer had a brief account on page 20, part of which read:

``One of the city’s leading crusaders against illegal fishing died Thursday, a day after he was shot four times by an unidentified assailant while he was about to enter his house in Barangay Dauis, Talisay City.

``Elpidio de la Victoria, 46, program director of Cebu City’s Bantay Dagat Commission and the city’s market administrator, was shot in the back and arm and twice in the buttocks at around 3 p.m. on Wednesday. He died at the Chong Chua Hospital at 8:50 a.m. the next day.’’

Four shots in all. The killer wanted to be sure his prey died right there and then. (A suspect, a policeman, has been tagged.)

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Psalm 69 for our times

For this Holy Thursday, here is a variation on the theme of Psalm 69 that I had written for Holy Week in 1992. With a few changes here and there, it still applies 14 years later.

Save me, O God, for their diarrhea of words has come up to my chin. I am drowning in their slimy saliva and I slip everywhere I step. Into this depths I have been pushed and I am engulfed by the torrent of true lies and half-truths. I am weary from pleading that they shut up for a while and give my ears a rest. My throat is hoarse and dry.

More than the hair in their armpits and pubis are the dirt they have spread about one another. Oh, how they hate those who attack them. How they fight over the people’s loyalty. They strut about like angels and yet people know they have stolen, they have lied, they have killed, they have fornicated.

O God, you know I am not faultless but also know that I do not covet a government position.

Do not allow me to become too cynical and do not allow me to be dazzled either. Oh Lord, help me keep my conscience and my actions pure, equip me with the power to smell the rotten a kilometer away.

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From aviation to nursing

The previous column piece ``Mayday! Mayday! for the aviation industry’’ tried to bring to the fore the brain drain problem in the aviation industry which is becoming more acute because of foreign recruiters’ poaching expedition in the country. It is so easy for the foreign poachers to entice our highly trained aviation experts with high pay because the foreign aviation industry did not have to invest in long and expensive training.

That is what the locals are complaining about. It takes 10 years and more than P10 million in training investment to produce an airline captain. Aviation engineers aren’t simply plucked out of an aviation school, their skills are honed over the years. Now they are being snapped up faster than the local industry could produce their replacement.

I had spoken with very worried industry players who wanted to see some kind of moratorium on recruitment. But who can legislate against a person’s right to seek higher pay? Doctors-turned-nurses as well as educators might soon become a vanishing breed as they go away in droves. And now aviation experts who are sorely needed locally are flying away to seek bluer skies. Some are even shifting to nursing.

Here are some letters from those who know first-hand what’s ailing the aviation industry. They give us another view of what’s on the ground and in the sky.

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Mayday! Mayday! for the aviation industry

The local aviation industry could crash if the exodus of aviation experts does not slow down. The industry is composed of two sectors: the airlines and the service providers.

``Poaching at the highest level’’ was how a Filipino airline executive called the aggressive recruitment by foreign airlines. These ``poachers’’ have been reportedly coming to make choice pickings from the Philippines’ pool of highly trained experts. They could offer higher pay because they had not spent money and time to train their own.

More than 100 hundred Filipino pilots to go. This was what the Indian air industry was reportedly in search of during its recent recruitment foray in the Philippines. That’s too many considering that the Philippines’ has about only 700 commercial pilots to go around.

Singapore reportedly has an active order for 50 pilots pending at the Philippine Overseas and Employment Association.

From 2004 to 2005, more than 200 aircraft mechanics and aviation support staff have left the country according to Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) figures. Philippine Airlines (PAL) has lost 75 pilots in the last three years to different airlines in the Middle East and Asia.

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Rest for the Visayan Sea

While politicians are talking about restiveness, restlessness and unrest in the political front, those concerned about the environment are talking rest.

A group that calls itself the Visayan Sea Squadron is asking the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to give the Visayan Sea a rest, declare a closed season and determine areas available only for certain types of fishing.

Mayors have also petitioned the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources to declare the entire area closed to commercial fishing vessels (three tons and above). These local officials also asked the DENR to work for the declaration of the Visayan Sea as a Unesco World Heritage Site for marine biodiveristy.

According to the Visayan Sea Squadron, an outreach program of the Law of Nature Foundation, the Visayan Sea has an area of about one million hectares. It is ``at the apex of the fabled Visayan Marine Triangle which lies at the very heart of the Sulu-Sulawesi Eco-region.’’

The way this triangle is being described makes one imagine a fantastic water wonderland that exists only in tales of yore. But no, this region is still alive, even if now threatened by depletion and destruction.

The Sulu-Sulawesi Marine Triangle, which covers a wide swath from the Philippines to Indonesia, is supposed to be the richest marine eco-region in the world and is home to the largest variety of marine life—fishes, coral, sea grasses, etc., in the whole world.

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