Women heroes

BENCHWARMER

Ramon S. Dacawi 

                                                                             

(This is a revisit of a piece done five years back, a tribute to some women heroes whose sense of community I continue to draw strength from. – RD.)_

A strong personality with enduring political savvy remarked the team I work with just has too many advocacies. Hardly a compliment, the perspective is really a misnomer for we don’t have much of an advocacy. What we have is a feeble attempt to help kids plant and care for pine seedlings or explore the urban landscape they will inherit and manage, to link sick people with Samaritans out there, or to try to see inmates find expression in the printed word. .Whatever has been achieved belongs to them, for it’s their work, not ours as we’re messengers.  

Years back, a development consultant asked how many women volunteered in the Eco-walk children’s experiential environmental learning program. The issue never occurred to me and I admitted having never figured it out.   She asked how many of the kids were female. It’s over my head, I replied. She advised I start counting. I promised I would and never did.

Groping for a way out, I offered the gender count was hardly of the moment. The volunteers work with each other because they see the need and fit, not because they are women or men. I offered the perspective that the statistical oversight might as well be due to gender neutrality than lack of gender sensitivity. 

Some of my heroes happen to be women, not because of their gender but because their actions that inspire. Dr. Julie Camdas-Cabato, the gentle lady doctor is one of them. She’s one of the most respected and sought-after medical practitioners for her competence and sensitivity to the emotional and financial limitations of those she heals. For years, she’s been silently and doggedly into the environmental cause hands-on. She’s as self-effacing as Peter Fianza, Baguio’s out-going city administrator (perhaps the best the city ever had) who happens to be a man, and an Ibaloi like Dr. Julie.

Two other women I knew also gave substance to that line from novelist Richard Paul Evans: The greatest acts are done without plaque, audience or ceremony. .

Years back, I got a call from Lorie Ramos, a 43-year old widow with the civilian staff of the male-dominated Philippine Military Academy. She said she read of the plight of journalist Noney Padilla-Marzan, who was then battling cancer, and wanted to help. That led Conrad Marzan, Noney’s hubby, and me to Lorie’s  rented home at Scout Barrio.

“I understand the difficulty  Noney is in now,” she gently told Conrad after she handed her support. “I’m also into my second fight against cancer,” she added, perhaps to explain why she had her head wrapped with a handkerchief. Chemotherapy triggers hair loss. 

                She did lick breast cancer, or so she thought. She had placed the ordeal behind and had settled back into life’s daily routine when the pesky mutant cells reappeared, this time on the bone.

With cellular phones, the two women struck up a friendship to the end Lorrie later came to bid goodbye. In a voice reduced to a whisper by the spread of the disease, she said she had accepted the inevitable. She was going down to Quezon City to stay with her sister, who will continue raising her 10-year old son. .

Noney brushed aside her own need for fund support. She protested publication of her need for help to combat her affliction.  She insisted that proceeds from a folk concert  for her chemo treatment be channeled to kids in the cancer ward. She spent the last two years of her life attending to ailing toddlers and comforting parents of those who succumbed to the big C.

Two other women of substance, both christened Edna, never allowed their own pain from cancer to blind them to the suffering of other patients. One of them lives in Baguio, while the other is raising her daughter in Kentucky.

At the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center, Dr. AselaCasem and her staff initiated the upgrading of its psychiatric department. In the Third World, psychiatry is a vital but overlooked  area of the medical field where the trend remains concentrated on the more lucrative (and glamorous) areas such as surgery and internal medicine.

Hopefully with support from those who understand the importance of her work, Asela will soon undergo expensive kidney transplant – her second – to enable her to continue serving the only regional medical center North of Manila with an honest-go-goodness psychiatry department. Before the second renal failure, she had declined a high-paying job in her field of specializing in Australia, saying there’s much to do for psychiatric patients here.

For almost four decades now, Manang Cristy Dicang has been quietly doing the rounds in the city jail in a fulltime volunteer ministry. “There she would sit and chat with inmates; get to know their stories,” teacher Vicky Rico-Costina wrote. “She would indeed turn out to be a healing presence to inmates; someone they know would be there for them each passing day. Her idea of prison reform is not even large scale: “mapatino ko lang ang isa dito kontento na ako”

There’s Maria Paz “Datsu” Feria Infante, a Spanish mestiza and daughter of a sugar magnate in Bacolog. She fell in love with Mike Molintas, a pony boy at the Wright Park and a scion of the Ibaloi clan at Gibraltar Barangay. Datsu turned her back to a life of wealth and ease to follow her heart. When Mike succumbed to heart disease, she gathered their four sons after the burial to ask where they wanted to grow up in – Baguio or Bacolod. They chose Baguio and, almost single-handedly, she raised them, including frail Nino Joshua, the youngest who was born with a serious heart defect..

Nino’s heart was mended with support from Samaritans inspired by his parents’ unusual love story and a widow’s might. The family remains unbroken, with Nino trying to multiply a cow an aunt bought him. He said it will be for his brothers’ children. It’s in keeping with a pact the siblings made with their mother after they lost their father – to never give up on each other.  

The latest woman hero in my list is amazing Grace Groner, a centenarian who died recently. She lived below her means and left behind $7 million and her one-room cottage for a scholarship program for her alma mater, Lake Forest College in Illinois.   

These heroes just happen to be women. Still, there’s reason to push gender sensitivity and equality, women’s rights and welfare, be it Women’s Month or not.  In some cultures of the world, women continue to suffer from reduced social status and rights simply because of their gender. Women’s opportunities for growth are still being stifled even in some of the most advanced nations of the world.

It also pays to be culturally sensitive, whatever type of development we advocate..  This was my unsolicited advice to a lady friend when she was working on the gender issue in Ifugao.

Seen from the outside, I told her, Ifugao women appear to be at the receiving end of what seems to be a male-dominated culture. Women do the rice planting, maintaining and harvesting. Women work the camote patches, gather firewood, pound rice, cook and feed the pigs and chickens.

And the men?. Well, they follow the mumbaki (native priests) to the latest canao or feast where they splurge on meat and rice wine. They have no more boar and deer to hunt and  only a few rice terrace walls to fix because of the quality of their stonewalling workmanship.  When there’s no merry-making, they stay home sober to tend to the babies and munch beetle nuts while the women are out working the fields. At least in Hapao, Hungduan town, men remain the bread-winners as woodcarvers

There’s hardly anyone protesting this traditional arrangement passed on through the generations, I offered. I noted her push for gender sensitivity and awareness according to emerging development standards of the West might contribute to fraying the cultural fabric.

She saw the parallel in the effect of that empty Coca-Cola bottle thrown out of a plane in that classic of a film “The Gods Must Be Crazy”. If you never did, watch the film for the adroit humor with which it depicts culture clash, refreshingly more from the view of the one being judged according to Western values and standards. 

While at it, I wonder why N!xau, the lead actor in that well-done movie, who happens to be a bushman, never won an Oscar award for being the natural that he is, even by Hollywood standards. (e-mail:mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments).