Christmas letters from Muslims

Peace, Kapayapaan, Kalinaw, Kalinong, Salam, Shalom, to you this Christmas.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive letters from Muslims working in Saudi Arabia reacting positively to last week’s column piece, ``The Christmas Story in the Koran’’ (12/22/05).

First, I’d like to say that the Inquirer stylebook spells the name of the Muslims’ Holy Book as ``Koran’’ so the few times in the past that I wrote ``Qur’an’’ I always got a call from the proofreading department informing me that the spelling will changed. I again got a call regarding my title.

At first I was a bit hesitant to run the account on Mary’s pregnancy and the events that led to Jesus’ birth as narrated in the Koran. Was my copy of the Koran an accepted translation? I presumed that like the Bible that comes in different translations, the Koran also has many translations. My pocketsize copy is by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House and published in the US. Its title is ``The Koran’’ I got it from Powerbooks for only P125.75. The Bible isn’t as cheap.

Honestly, I was charmed by the account on Mary giving birth beside the trunk of a date palm. Famished and in pain, Mary heard a voice telling her to shake the tree, whereupon ripe dates fell on her. Dates are a good post-partum repast, I suppose. I thought, we have always associated Christmas with castanas (chestnuts). Why don’t we switch to dates?

I really prefer dates. Some of the best I’ve tasted were preserved ones that were still on the twig. They came from Tunisia. Dates, I was told, are a popular food item for Muslims at the end of Ramadan.

Now, if we go by the ripening of the dates and their falling on Mary, this would mean that Jesus was not born during a winter month but in the summer in that part of the world. Not that the exact date and time matters much now.

Anyway, here are some of the letters.

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The Christmas story in the Qur’an

The Christmas story is not only told in the bible of the Christians, it is also in the Qur’an of the Muslims. I went over the Qur’an which is not familiar terrain for me, I also browsed through an Islamic website where I found interesting stuff.

In the Qur’an one will find an account of Mary’s own birth, the Annunciation and later, the Nativity and Jesus’ public life. Mary is mentioned in the Qur’an 34 times. But before Jesus’ birth is the story about the miraculous conception and birth of John the Baptist, the precursor of the Messiah that was to come.

The Qur’an says that Mary was the daughter of the wife of Imran. When Imran’s wife was pregnant, she made a vow that she would offer her child to be raised and serve at the Temple. She thought she would give birth to a son, but when she delivered, the child turned out be a girl. The mother was disappointed.

She named the child Mary which meant servant. Mary’s father Imran had died before she was born, so her mother brought her to the temple to be reared by the priests. Zakariyya (John the Baptist’s father?) was one of them. Unable to decide who would have the privilege of having custody of Mary, the priests drew lots. Zakariyya’s name was drawn and he became Mary’s guardian.

When Mary reached the age of puberty, Zakariyya saw to it she was protected from the eyes of men. Mary worshipped Allah in a special partition where nobody could enter except Zakariyya. Whenever Zakariyya came in he always found her with food.

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The milkman of Talavera

Guyito, the Inquirer’s carabao mascot, would be happy to know that his fellow ruminants have transformed the town of Talavera in Nueva Ecija into a land flowing with milk and milk products. Thanks to the dream and the daring of entrepreneur Danilo V. Fausto, carabao’s milk is now making a healthy comeback and finding a niche in the market.

Another thing to moo about is fresh cow’s milk produced by small farmers’ cooperatives also finding its way into café society and boldly competing with imported milk that isn’t fresh at all.

Fausto’s ``Dare to Dream: A Filipino Entrepreneur’s Tale of Success in Dairy Farming’’ was launched last Monday at UP’s Balay Kalinaw with believers in the Philippine dairy industry in attendance. It was a small but happy affair. National Dairy Authority chief Salvacion Bulatao gave a national situationer while a nervous little farmer named Ka Henry whom Fausto brought along almost stole the thunder and received a standing ovation with his carabao success tale. But that is getting ahead of the story. People went home smiling and sporting white moustaches.

You might have seen in some malls the dainty DVF Dairy Farm’s ``Gatas ng Kalabaw’’ stalls that sell chilled fresh carabao’s milk in sealed bottles, plain or fruit- and pandan-flavored, as well as pastillas de leche and kesong puti. The promdi in you takes a second look and you wonder if this is for real. Carabao’s milk braving the mainstream?

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Oikocredit, small change, big impact

You must have seen a 20-peso bill with a circular doodle with three arrows coming out of it. You must have wondered whether that was someone’s way of venting his ire on the state of the Philippine currency. But when you looked closer, you must have read the words below that whorl--``UN Year of Microcredit 2005, Sustainable Microfinance Services for the Filipino Entrepreneurial Poor’’.

With a big bang, the 2005 UN Year of Microcredit ended last week with the so-called ``Filipino entrepreneurial poor’’, composed mostly of mothers, bannering the theme, ``Tinig ng Mga Nanay, Ating Ipatnubay'' (Let the mothers' voices be our guide). Microfinance beneficiaries, enterprising mothers mostly, from different parts of the country attended the gathering in Quezon City and showed off what has become of the ``small change’’ entrusted them. The delegation from Negros even brought in masscara dancers to provide color.

Oikocredit and the Microfinance Council of the Philippines organized the event that capped the International Year of Microcredit.

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The missing face of AIDS

Today is World AIDS Awareness Day.

Somewhere in today’s Inquirer I’ve written something on the Unicef campaign to help children affected by HIV-AIDS. ``Affected by’’ means these children have parents(persons) living with HIV-AIDS (PLH) or are themselves infected.

By the way, you don’t say PWA (persons with AIDS) anymore. You say PLH. So much for being politically correct.

Children, Unicef says, are the missing face of AIDS. According to the Lunduyan Foundation’s study on Filipino children affected by AIDS, silence, sad to say, best describes the children’s situation. Their parents’ hesitancy to be forthright about the disease is one of the reasons why their children’s plight is not being addressed.

After reading the results of the study I wanted to meet and interview a family affected by HIV-AIDS but I was told that there is a great deal of hesitancy on the part of the families. In fact, out 373 identified children, only 95 were allowed by their parents to participate in the study.

But these children are not totally faceless or voiceless. Some stories in the study gave a face and a voice to the otherwise silent world.

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Deadly playgrounds, cold numbers

I had looked into their eyes. I had watched some of them cock their rifles and aim at an imaginary enemy lurking behind the trees. I had aimed my camera at them and captured the resoluteness in their gait as they carried the heavy weight on their frail bodies.

I saw these so-called child soldiers for the first time in the 1980s in a rebel training camp in the mountain fastness of Samar. In Bicol I also saw a young girl, maybe all of 16, carrying a rifle.

My body ached after that journalistic foray in the jungle but I did come up with a long story. We used the photo of the young boy carrying a long firearm, marching with grizzly rebels in the Sunday Inquirer.

That was many years ago but the images still burn in my mind. What a heavy burden for these children, I thought. I had tried carrying some of the heavy metal that the rebels carried and wore a bandoleer of bullets across my chest for a photograph of myself bristling with bullets. But that was for the fun of it. I still have that photo. In the background, heavily armed rebels played dama.

Now the law says you can no longer use the photographs of minors in a publication, show their faces on TV or identify them if they have been involved in illegal activities or are victims of crimes.

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Rape a violent crime of conquest

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

Stereotypical rape scenes as depicted in movies and komiks do happen in real life. Ginahasa sa cogonan (raped amid tall grass) or ginahasa sa sagingan (raped in a banana grove) aren't imaginary scenes used to simply add color to lewd narratives, they actually and quite commonly take place in those proverbial places.

Tricycle drivers waylaying and then raping their young passengers has become stereotypical. Not that tricycle drivers are generally the raping kind. Maybe they just easily make it to the news because they have nowhere to run. They end up beaten up by the victims’ kin at the police stations and in front of the TV cameras, unlike the powerful types who could run away aboard their SUVs.

US servicemen raping ``the natives’’ should now be stereotypical too if we go by the statistics that Sen. Francis Pangilinan cited—3,000 rape cases against Americans have been dismissed in the Olongapo City court. I would presume that the cases were mostly against uniformed men.

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Women’s letter to rape victim

``We believe in you. We do not have to behold your face or know your name in order to say this.’’

Thus began the short but moving letter of 28 women’s groups and their allies to the 22-year-old victim of rape allegedly committed by five US servicemen last Nov. 1 in Subic.

The letter, expressed profoundly in Filipino, offered solace and solidarity with the woman from Mindanao who met her tragic fate while visiting Subic. Some members of the women’s groups that sent the letter are rape survivors themselves.

``We are with you while you weep, because your experience has been the experience of many of us. We are with you as you nurse the pain, because we also feel the pain when your dignity as a woman was trampled upon by US servicemen who had done the same to women in Angeles, Olongapo and other places. We are with you as you seek justice…We know that your healing will depend on many things, one of which is getting justice.’’

Those excerpts are for English speakers who do not understand Filipino. But there is nothing like reading the whole letter in the national language. It stabs deep into the heart. I hope the rape victim, whoever she is, wherever she is, would be able to read this and be convinced, really convinced, that she is not alone. Her kabaro are reaching out to her.

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VCO as bird flu remedy?

News flash.

If coconut oil proved effective for HIV-AIDS cases, it might also be good as a H5N1 (bird flu) remedy. Studies must now be made on the oil’s efficacy against this new disease that threatens to become a worldwide epidemic.

This urgent proposal came from Dr. Conrado S. Dayrit who helped make virgin coconut oil (VCO) a popular dietary supplement and medicine here and abroad and helped remove it from the ``bad oil’’ list.

Dayrit, hale and active at 86, is a known pharmacologist, cardiologist, internist, science researcher author and University of the Philippines professor emeritus. He was former president of the National Academy of Science of Technology, the highest scientific body in the country.

The team Dayrit directed in the early 1990s proved that HIV-AIDS cases responded to coconut oil. The highly promising results are now the bases for continued trials meant to alleviate the suffering of millions HIV-AIDS patients countries especially those in Africa.

Dayrit outlined his proposal and rationale in his Oct. 24 letter personally delivered to the office of health secretary Francisco Duque III.

Dayrit’s proposal was for ``Southeast Asian countries affected by H5N1 (bird flu) to conduct clinical, animal and viral studies on the effectiveness of coconut oil (either RBD copra oil or virgin coconut oil) which the Philippines can supply.’’

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Enriching the earth with our bodies

``You are nothing but an infinitesimal combination of earth's rocks, water and air; these are two billion years of evolutionary explorations, new trials, new combinations, new forms of life.... beauty comes in knowing what you are and where you came and why you be, earth child.'' – Walt Whitman

During the long weekend ahead when we honor our dear departed, it behooves us to ponder on our mortality and immortality.

In the film ``The Lion King’’, King Mufasa gives Simba, the future Lion King of Pride Rock, a lecture on life and death. ``When we die,'' he tells his only begotten son, ``our bodies become the grass. And the antelope eat grass. Then we become part of the great circle of life.''

Human beings are the most notorious when it comes to the disruption of ``the circle.'' By opting not to go back to the earth, humans have cut themselves off from the great circle. Burial practices have deprived our living planet of the enrichment it deserves.

Die-hard ecologists tell us that the best way to bury the dead is to dig a hole in the ground, gently lay the dead in there and cover it with soft, warm earth. There the dead breaks down into different elements and participates in the earth's life-giving process. Why consign a corpse to an airless, concrete tomb where it cannot enrich various life forms?

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`Shameful episode’ in Australia

A visiting friend from Melbourne brought with her an October copy of the Australian newspaper The Age that has the Vivian Alvarez Solon case as banner story. The ombudsman’s report on the bungled immigration case has been released and the axe was expected to fall.

The banner article, Vivian’s huge photo, blurbs and cartoon occupy three-fourths of page one of the daily (which, in this age of shrinking broadsheets, maintains a size that is two columns wider than the Inquirer).

Inside are three more articles, Vivian’s photo as a missing person, and other related items.
The Age doesn’t have a one-liner for a headline like the Inquirer does.

The banner headline is long: ``It is a `shameful episode’ (in red) in the history of immigration in Australia. The management of Solon was `catastrophic’ (in red). The unlawful removal of one of our citizens is `almost unthinkable’ (in red).

The small kicker above it says: ``The Alvarez Solon verdict: A damning judgement against the Immigration Department.’’

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Remembering poverty

October is the month when the world is supposed to pause, remember and confront the issue of poverty and hunger. Oct. 16 is World Food Day while Oct. 17 is the Day for Overcoming Extreme Poverty--the latter by virtue of a UN Resolution and a presidential proclamation.

October is Indigenous People’s (IP) Month in the Philippines, and the IPs being among the poorest and hungriest in the country, the whole of October should belong to them.
In Southern Palawan, IPs and long-time settlers are undertaking a ``Solidarity March for Land and Life’’ that will cover the distance from Rio Tuba to Puerto Princesa City. It started yesterday, Oct. 12, and will last till Oct. 17.

The march will highlight the IPs’ call to the local, provincial and national government to look their way. The issues being raised are the slow processing of ancestral domain claim applications, government neglect and unfair local and national laws that threaten the culture and livelihood of indigenous communities. Among the marchers are members of the Palaw’an and Molbog tribes and fishermen from the towns of Bataraza and Balabac.

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