Workers’ rights and garment labels

“Sr. Stella L.”, a 1984 multi-awarded Mike de Leon-Pete Lacaba film, was on cable TV a few nights ago. While watching it I recalled the hot afternoon we spent at a location where several strike scenes in that movie were shot. A bunch of us women journalists were there as extras shouting “Welga! Welga!” We did it for free. The shooting was in an old bodega-like place that was made to look like a cooking oil factory.

It was quite an outing, what with an award-winning bunch there—Vilma Santos playing Sr. Stella L., the late Tony Santos as Dencio, Laurice Guillen as the other Sr. Stella or the “tokayo”, Anita Linda and several “nuns” linking arms with the workers in the picket line. There was Sr. Stella L. emerging from her baptism of fire and delivering an impassioned plea on behalf of the strikers. And there we were, taking it all in under the scorching sun. It was like the real thing. We each had an orange drink after that.

What timing, I thought while I was watching it again after 22 years and waiting for the credits to roll so I could catch our names. For I had received an urgent call from the Workers Assistance Center (WAC) in Cavite. This was concerning the on-going strike at the Cavite Export Processing Zone (CEPZ). Unlike the “Sr. Stella L.” strike that was in a small local factory, the strikes at the CEPZ are in foreign-owned companies.

I went around CEPZ some years ago to do a labor-day series on the strikes there and to interview CEZ workers, particularly young women and how they lived. I visited some of them at their congested lodging houses where the lodgers took turns in using double-deck beds because, they reasoned, anyway they worked and slept in shifts. They didn’t have beds to call their own. One of the companies on strike was producing sacred images that were exported to Europe.

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Cheap drugs from India a boon

India has gotten giant drug manufacturers worried. It has challenged the patents on some of the world’s biggest money-making drugs. It has gone into manufacturing of low-cost drugs that would benefit the world’s poor. While India has stumped the big brand-name players, it has given poor nations such as those in Africa with huge numbers of AIDS cases a reason to be thankful.

Well, count the Philippines among the beneficiaries. But can’t the Philippines do the same?

I have been interested in India’s in-your-face kind of upstartness in putting the Goliaths of the drug industry on the defensive (or is it offensive?)

A story in yesterday’s Inquirer said that the government-run Philippine International Trading Corporation (PITC) will bring in up to P1 billion worth of low-cost medicine in 2007 to make essential drugs affordable to Filipinos. These will be sourced mainly from India and Pakistan. PITC has, in fact, been doing this but next year’s big batch is getting giant drug multinationals even more worried. PITC sells these cheap medicines through its network of Botika ng Bayan and Botika ng Barangay.

So Pfizer took legal action against PITC, saying that it has no assurance its patent rights would not be violated. With the support of international development agency Oxfam, medicine users picketed Pfizer to stress “patients’ rights over patent rights”. There.

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Tabang Mindanaw study on Sulu

“The security situation in Sulu is COMPLEX and has to be understood in all its facets if a lasting solution is to be found.”

This sums up the results of a recent survey that Tabang Mindanaw did on behalf of Pagtabangan BaSulTa. The Assisi Foundation was behind the endeavor.

The report entitled “Developing a Culture of Peace for Sulu” is a review of the peace and order situation in Sulu based on a survey conducted in 18 towns of the province. The respondents were composed of religious leaders, traditional leaders, women, the youth and the economic sector.

But what is this “culture of peace” that the report is invoking? The report uses the United Nations definition which is “a set of values, attitudes, modes of behavior and ways of life that reject violence and prevent conflicts by tackling their root causes to solve problems through dialogue and negotiations among individuals, groups and nations.”

The research team, headed by Victor M. Taylor and Abraham Idjirani, ran the survey that focused on the people’s views on their personal situation, the province, security, factors that contribute to the present situation and factors needed to improve the situation.

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Limbo un-rocked

Today, Nov. 2, is All Souls Day, the day for our dear departed. But feast-loving Filipinos always do the feasting and remembering in advance as if there might be no more tomorrow. And so Nov. 1, All Saints Day, is what Filipinos consider araw ng mga patay.

We Filipinos have a way of advancing the calendar to suit our festive mood. Well, All Souls Day is the harbinger of the Christmas season. Tomorrow the Christmas season “officially” begins in these islands. It will last for two months.

But hold on awhile to the 11th month. We all have our early memories of this November feast that sends Filipino families in droves to their old hometowns. Celebrations in the provinces are so much more folksy and Pinoy, unlike those in Metro Manila where the feast has taken on an American macabre flavor that I find corny and TH.

On the solemn side of memory lane, some melodies refuse to die. I can still sing the first and last lines of the Latin Gregorian chant that the Benedictine sisters chanted during the Mass for the Dead in the beautiful neo-Romanesque chapel in school. “Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla…” Translated as, “Nigher still, and still more nigh, Draws the day of prophecy…”

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The scent of coconuts

One should indulge in life’s little pleasures even while the world goes berserk and the ugly side of politics is constantly spoiling the landscape of our lives. Food is comfort and we look to so-called comfort food, the food that brings back pleasant memories and feelings, when things go awry.

It was good to savor the flavors and scents of the food of Bicolandia last Monday at the EDSA Shangri-la where the two-week (Oct. 23 to Nov. 3) Gayon Food Feast is now going on. This is being co-promoted by the Department of Tourism’s Bicol Regional Division under Maria O. Ravanilla.

Gayon is short for magayon (Bicol for beautiful) and where the name of the awesome Mayon Volcano of Albay is supposed to have come from. Extend the suffix and you have magayunon or very beautiful; magayunonon means very, very beautiful. You could extend the suffix some more to push the meaning to the extreme.

My verdict? The food was not just masiram (delicious), it was masiramon (really delicious). I say this not because my cousin Didette N. Peralta (who co-owns and runs Legazpi City’s Small Talk Café) was one of the guest cooks but because the flavors did Daragang Magayon (the maiden in Bicol legend) proud. And I judged the spread as it was—somewhat fusion cuisine--not as the home cooked, slow-food fare that purists might pine for. There was pasta pinangat, for example, and Bicol express served on tomato halves. Quite neo-, those. But the real pinangat was there in its coconut-y glory.

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Yunus: ‘Poor women are good credit risk’

The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF) is on Cloud 9 because 1984 Awardee for Community Leadership, Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, is this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner. The RMAF was 22 years ahead of the Nobel in recognizing Yunus’ work among the poor.

The Dalai Lama received his RM Award (Asia’s Nobel, so-called) in 1959, 30 years before his Nobel in 1989. Mother Teresa got her RM Award in 1962, 17 years earlier than her Nobel.

This means that Asia, the RMAF of the Philippines in particular, is not behind, it is in fact way ahead, in recognizing its own home-grown heroes and, yes, long before these persons have become familiar names in the world.

Yunus was only 44 when he received the RM Award in 1984, one of the youngest in RMAF’s roster of laureates. Now there is an RM award for Emergent Leadership for those below or on the threshold of 40. Yunus was quite surprised that he was chosen at that time because Grameen banking (microfinance) for the poor was not yet a byword. This is what Yunus said in 1984:

“I still cannot make out how the trustees of this prestigious foundation could notice a small effort such as ours, which has reached only some 100,000 in a population of more than 90 million. (As of July 2006, the population is 147.3 million - Inquirer Research Dept.) I can only admire the foundation for taking a big risk in choosing me…”

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Sikat

The Catholic Church in the Philippines sets aside the second Sunday of October as Indigenous People’s Sunday and October might as well IP month.

An NGO that has been working for almost 10 years for the education of IPs is Sikat or Schools of Indigenous Knowledge and Tradition or Silungan ng Katututbong Kaalaman at Tradisyon. The Filipino word sikat means shine and when the accent is placed on the second syllable, it means celebrity, a person of note and achievement. Sikat is a non-church, non-profit, non-stock movement that aims to make the IPs find their rightful place, their place of pride, under the sun through education. Not just any education but an education that is attuned to the IP’s way of life—their culture, language, livelihood, habitat, and everything that defines them. This means developing a “culturally responsive education for indigenous peoples”.

Behind Sikat and supporting it every step of the way is the Asian Council for People’s Culture (ACPC).

In December 1997, a group of people from various regions and faiths gathered for the first National Trainers’ Training in order to share and build visions for a national network of cultural workers and community educators. That meeting gave birth to Sikat and the network of schools.

Al Santos, Sikat executive director and founding member says: “In establishing community-owned culturally responsive schools, we create linking pathways for the promotion of indigenous education among various tribes across the country.”

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Billboards from hell(2)

There’s a (2) up there because I used the same title last year when the Anti-Billboard Coalition (ABC) whipped up a storm. Many storms have come and gone since that time and billboards have continued to collapse on highways, vehicles, transport systems, structures and human beings except on those who put them up.

Someone suggested I use the title “Death by billboard”.

The man who instantly died after he was hit by a falling billboard was probably still being embalmed when this outdoor advertising executive said on national TV something like this: Milenyo was a strong typhoon and things standing were expected to fall, among them trees, electric posts and billboards. If we ban billboards, he said, we might as well ban trees and electric posts.

Ano raw? Trees aren’t marijuana. You don’t have to be a true-blue greenie to know the basics about trees. And electric posts? Many have contributed to the ugliness of the metropolis because of the entangled wires they weave around them but they stand there for a purpose. And we expect our power providers to someday do away with unsightly wiring.

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Where to take your electronic junk

The good news is that we (from Metro Manila and other major cities) no longer have to search far for an “electronic junkyard” where our unwanted stuff could be consigned to, sorted properly for reuse or recycled. There is a way to prevent the rise of Payatas-like wastelands made up of toxic and harmful non-biodegradables such as computers, cellphones, microwaves ovens, electronic toys and gadgets, batteries and the like. Wall-size TVs, and tiny MP3 players and digital cameras will soon join the march to these junkyards.

Walk through the Jurassic Park that is your house or office and identify the electronic dinosaurs that have been sitting in dusty corners for years. At some point they reached obsolescence or were beyond repair. Where do you take them if there are no takers? They shouldn’t be consigned to the garbage dumps or coral reefs. They could be toxic and hazardous to living things. So where do these hardware go and wait to be reincarnated or recycled?

Some years ago I brought a car trunk-ful of these stuff to a vocational school of electronics that had use for them. I was so thankful they took them all—from cordless phone to dot matrix printer to radio/tape recorder that’s been silent for 20 years plus so many more. But I forgot to bring the 1993 laptop whose manufacturer is now extinct. It’s still waiting to be properly laid to rest.

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The Pope’s language

A marine scientist, upon seeing the damage of the recent oil spill on Guimaras, is likely to say to his fellow scientists, “The biota exhibited a 100 percent mortality response.”

We journalists would write, “All the fish died.” It thunders in its simplicity and you couldn’t get more dramatic than that.

Author Kurt Vonnegut says that his favorite line among James Joyce’s stories is from the short story “Eveline”. The sentence: “She was tired.” At that point, Vonnegut says, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

“Simplicity of language,” he says, “is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively 14-year-old: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’”

The subject of simplicity in language—and its sacredness—was going through my mind while I was going over the lecture that Pope Benedict XVI delivered at the University of Regensburg in Germany last week. It was not a papal “to the city and to the world” (Urbi et Orbi) speech, by the way, only a lecture for a select group of intellectuals in an academic compound.

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Surging like ‘The Oceanides’

Helsinki--After days of Nordic food, bottomless coffee, workshops, talk shops, civil society networking and so-called “open space” discussions (throw in a few films), the 450 participants of Asia-Europe People’s Forum 6 (AEPF 6) held in Helsinki called it a day.

There was no evidence of rice and spice deprivation withdrawal among the Asians as they were very vocal, as victims and potential victims of neo-liberalism should be. Asians and Europeans of the G&D (grim and determined) grassroots variety have, once again, found their collective voice. On the fourth day, they let it all hang out at a city square through songs, dance, mime and a “people’s soup kitchen” courtesy of the Finns.

Here in the land of a thousand lakes, the land of the revered composer Sibelius, (for cellphonephiles, the land of Nokia), Asian and European voices swirled and rose, like the ocean’s roiling surge in Sibelius’ symphonic poem “The Oceanides”. (Finland is just a wee bit larger in area than the Philippines but has a population of only five million. Compare that to our 80 million plus, or just Metro Manila’s 10 million.)

As AEPF ended, the object of its trajectory, the Asia Europe Meeting (Asem) was about to begin, with government leaders in attendance, GMA among them. These Asian and European leaders forge political and economic links that could spell the race to the top for some or the race to the bottom of the ocean (the Pacific, particularly) for many. Together, the Asem member states have influence over half the world’s GDP.

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Asian-European sounds in Helsinki

HELSINKI—Here in the land of revered Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) Asian and European peoples’ voices are being aired loudly. Here is a symphony of sounds, so to speak, rising, blowing with the cold Baltic wind that is getting colder by the day.

The event is the Asia-Europe Peoples’ Forum 6 (AEPF 6) for NGOs and civil society organizations (CVO) that are non-state and non-corporate. The theme is “People’s Vision: Building Solidarity Across Asia and Europe”.

What better way to start than with a short ferry boat ride and an informal dinner-gathering of kindred spirits at Suomenlinna Island, a historic tourist site just off the city. After that it was back to the city and the tasks ahead. Time for long words and CVO-speak.

AEPF aims to bring all these voices from the ground to the official Asia Europe Summit (ASEM) and create alternatives to ASEM’s “neoliberalist agenda”.

ASEM would be to Asia and Europe as APEC is to Asia-Pacific and the US. Well, more or less. Heads of state, Pres. Macapagal-Arroyo, among them, are attending ASEM. ASEM consists of the member countries of the European Union (EU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and East Asian countries China, South Korea and Japan.

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