BENCHWARMER

Ramon S. Dacawi
Formula for a carless Sunday

(My son Johanne, a Ferrari fan without a car and father of two boys addicted to Ferrari models, writes this week’s column.)

Last year, when he was sitting on a seven-point lead in a Mclaren Mercedez, rookie Lewis Hamilton cracked under pressure at the final race of the season at Interlagos in Brazil. Kimi Raikkonen won by a point and Ferrari ended a dramatic, thrilling and scandalous year as winner of both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships.

I was reflecting on this when I was about to take a nap on a Sunday afternoon. I wanted to rest so I could gain enough energy to watch the final race on the calendar. This might sound overboard, but last year's race in Interlagos was enough to stop an old man's ticker.

So at about ten to six in the evening my wife tried to wake me up. After a while my elder son Lukie came to tell me it was about to start. I was already awake, praying in bed that Hamilton would crack up again. I was getting out of bed when my wife came in for the second time.

It was raining hard in Brazil. I held my little two-year old Dylan between my legs and hugged him tight. This was to contain my excitement, tokeep me from jumping up and down the living room. But when the red lights went off, I found myself hopping with Dylan in my arms.

He was competing at home and so Massa took control of the entire race. He needed to finish on top and Hamilton to place sixth on the standings to win the driver’s title. For Hamilton, he just needed to finish fifth or Massa to finish lower than first place to clinch the championship.

I thought this was the first time I saw Hamilton drive his MP4-23 like he was slightly pulling on the reins. I thought he was calm and his aggressiveness was not there. At the end of the race he said that his heart was in his mouth the whole time and that this was one of the most difficult races he ever did.

Of course it was! Because a seven point lead was nothing. He didn't only have to worry about the red cars. There were also two teams who were using Ferrari engines and they would definitely help their supplier in any way they can. There's also Fernando Alonso, who fell out badly with Hamilton when he was at Mclaren Mercedez, who said he would help Massa win.

My wife and Lukie wanted Hamilton to win. Dylan can not talk yet but I know he was for the Rosso car. It was painfully hard to accept that for six long years my own flesh and blood was a Ferrari fan like his Pa. But now Lukie sided with Hamilton and his Silver car. The reason for this, the kid told me one time, was because Hamilton won in the first race of the season.

And he predicted that he would then win the championship.

OK . . . . . Where did that come from? I tried to tell him that the passion and speed of the legendary "Prancing Horse" of Maranello is to die for. There was nothing I could do to persuade him, he was dead serious in his decision. In a last attempt, I told him I was his father! He calmly replied, "sei sempre il mio papa." (You are always my father)

My wife was rooting for Hamilton just to annoy her better half. Many times during the race, the camera man focused on the people on the box to have some sort of a break from the cars that go in circles around the circuit. There you see the team, some guest stars, the families of the drivers and their girlfriends or wives. You could tell how the race was going on from their faces.

What I liked to see were the facial gestures of the fathers of the drivers. Especially when their sons lose or make a serious mistake on the track. That look they have that says "It’s okay, my boy, it’s all fine and I'm still proud of you!" You can really see that special bond of father and son in Formula One. And in every race, win or lose, the fathers are just happy and thankful their sons crossed the finish line unharmed.

I saw something strange at the paddock of the Mclaren Mercedez team and told my wife about it. My wife didn't believe me at first but when they showed that Pussycat Doll again wearing a sexy red dress, it was like someone poured a bucket of cold water on her when she saw the Doll.

Quickly she said that she didn’t care about Hamilton any more - win or lose. It was like she was breaking up with someone and I was like, Uuhh okay. . . . . ? where did that come from! The girl in the red dress was Nicole Prescovia Elikolani Valiente Scherzinger, Hamilton’s girlfriend.

Back to the race. On the final laps the race stewards predicted it would rain again. Massa was beyond reach but it wasn't enough to lead him to the crown. He needed a miracle and the home crowd did the rain dance, Brazilian style. The heavens granted their wish.

On lap two all the cars went in for wet tires except for one, driver Timo Glock on a Toyota. Coming out of the pits the Brazilians cheered Massa on. As I knelt down in front of the TV with clasped hands pressed on my lips, my heart was beating so fast like I was ready to faint. When Massa passed by the final stretch to start his last lap, the cheering crowd sounded like a typhoon. Never in my sports watching life had I heard that kind of sound from the fans in any sport.

The volume of cheering doubled as Sebastian Vettel and Timo Glock made a pass on Hamilton, who was running fourth. Hamilton lost the title on that short moment that made the crowd wild as hell. But he held his nerve and drove on until he reached the final corners to see the Toyota struggling for grip on the wet tarmac. I got up and lost my temper. I cursed in front of the TV while my family was watching. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe myself after.

Driving on his parade lap, the Brazilian driver was addressed on the radio that he didn't make it. As he parked his car in the winners circle, still with his helmet on, he held his tears with his hands while his gloves were still on, too. I thought he was trying to stop his tears. A very emotional Felipe cried with the heavens as he beat his chest several times to dedicate the race to his fellow men. He won the race but lost the title.

My poor son Lukie didn't comprehend what went on during the final laps. He was in tears, too, as he thought Hamilton lost but wasn't sure. I comforted him and explained what happened. Lewis Hamilton made history.

When we were all preparing for bed that night. Lukie asked me to buy him a poster of the 2008 world champion like the poster we have on Ferrari and Kimi Raikkonen last season. Tucking him in bed I said we'll see. But deep down in me I promised to get him one.

As I kissed Dylan and then Lovelyn goodnight, brushing away the thoughts of her faded support on the new world champion, I was thinking about how Hamilton lost by a point the last time and in this race he won on that single point. It was a momentous win and nothing could have been better on how the race ended.

BENCHWARMER

Ramon S. Dacawi
Earthballing / Death of miners and a boy

In my years growing up in their midst, I never saw my old man and his fellow gardeners attempt to earth-ball and transplant pine trees beyond the size of a sapling or a pole. These manual laborers didn’t believe a tree much older and bigger than a Christmas tree would survive if disturbed, its roots jutting out of its ball cut, lifted out of its original moorings and then transplanted.

If the 497 trees standing on the way of a plan to expand the Loakan economic and industrial zone into Camp John Hay would be balled, it would be an experience these gardeners of yesteryears wouldn’t have the chance to witness. Most of them are now up there, coaxing petunias to bloom and seeds to sprout in the great garden and forest in the sky.

There’s reason to assume some of the trees planned to be lifted are mature, natural, first growth. If so, they’re old enough to be mute witnesses and survivors of events, like the bombing of the camp in 1941, and the changes in John Hay’s landscape after the former U.S. military recreation center was turned over to the Philippine government. They must be, for the area developer originally asked for a permit to cut, not to ball and transfer them.

John Hay is a monoculture forest dominated by pine. It’s valid, therefore, to presume that majority of those planned to be balled and transferred are of that pine specie, the scent of which we –residents and visitors alike – now and then miss and pine for.

Our once dominant Benguet pine (is it pinus kesiya or pinus insulares) is quite a sensitive breed. Some seedlings wither and die from the shock of being transported for planting. Even mature ones slowly choke to death when covered with one or two feet of soil from the base or root collar.

This had been the case in some insensitive bulldozing work, some intended, I suppose, to eventually give reason for the dead trees to be cut as they posed danger to life, limb and property. A successful balling project is that patch beside the Baguio Convention Center, done many years ago to provide a patch of peaceful green as added ambience to the Karpov-Korhnoi world chess championship battleground. The trees were poles and saplings when they were balled. Yet their growth is stunted as a result of the disturbance.
***
The tragic death of several pocket miners inside a doghole flooded during a cloudburst in Itogon, Benguet is reason enough for the province to consider a proposal for the establishment of a provincial mining engineer’s office. The proposal was made years ago by Edmund Bugnosen, a mining engineer who grew up in the mining camps of Itogon. It’s a practical suggestion, as mining, aside from vegetable farming, is Benguet’s economic backbone. Like other provinces, it has a provincial agriculture office to support its farmers. Unlike others, it still has pockets of gold thousands of its residents continue to depend on, even if the main lodes had been mined out by giant firms. A government policy, however, might block the creation of such office if additional budget for an office and staff would overshoot the allowed ceiling for administrative expenses.
***
The news is often found on the obituary or card-of-thanks pages – as those of our venerable Baguio Midland Courier. Here are two of them I got through my cell phone screen last week:
Myron Gawigawen, a Baguio boy from Besao, Mt. Province, ended five years of dialysis sessions the other Friday morning. Taking off from his student activism days at the University of Baguio, Myron went on to social and community development work under Horacio “Boy” Morales. I heard he also took on the cause for cooperatives for some time as executive of the Cooperative Development Authority. He raged on till the end against the dying the light, his wife Ellen told those who came to pay their respects at the Resurreccion Church. Myron, a friend and brother, was laid to rest Wednesday in Sagada.

Yip Kook Chong, the amiable, soft-spoken secretary-general of the Asia-Pacific Alliance of YMCAs based in Hongkong, will compare notes with Myron up there on how to bring this world of mortals closer to what it should be. Mr. Yip bent backwards, quite literally to endure pain and appear as normal as the rest when he came to give direction to the APAY forum this year in Manila.

Having met him only thrice and in fleeting moments, I hardly knew Mr. Yip. I learned more about him through his APAY secretary-general’s report last year. A sentence that somehow summed up his report may as well be the epitaph for one who lived a full life for others:
“In the thrust for transformation of society and building community, we continued to pursue the agenda for development with a human face.” (e-mail: rdacawi@yahool.com for comments).

BENCHWARMER

Ramon Dacawi
Host communities

With utmost efficiency in applying the techniques of Technology of Participation (ToP), facilitators saved the day in last Wednesday’s Cordillera Watershed Summit at the Hotel Supreme here. Driven by a sense of urgency due to time constraint as a result of a delayed start, the ToP experts were able to draw within an hour issues and recommendations from participants clustered into four workshop groups that initially looked unwieldy because of their big number.

(ToP, a group discussion method developed by the US-based Institute of Cultural Affairs, was used several years ago by the Associates in Rural Development in drawing the participation of partners in local government unit projects in the Philippines supported by the US Agency for International Development. ARD was then led by returning university professor. Alex Brillantes, the same Baguio boy who helped us out in the “Eco-Walk” children’s watershed program here.)

Some participants raised issues quite familiar, encountered in previous forums – low public awareness of policies and laws, conflicts between state laws and tribal practices, aside from the divisiveness among government agencies supposed to harmonize and implement watershed policies.

The breakthrough came from youthful Gov. Teddy Baguilat Jr. of Ifugao, the same leader who, during his first term, told visiting top national officials that his administration is corruption-free. Fittingly, his presentation focused on “the continuing struggle of upland watershed communities for just payments”.

Baguilat bewailed the lack of government policy incentives for the keepers of the watersheds they have sustained for generations through time-tested indigenous management practices. He also called for a better deal for these uplands in the renewed efforts of giant firms to extract gold and other remaining mineral deposits below the remaining watersheds.

The power of his presentation lies not on the issues he focused, as these have been aired over the years by his constituents and those in other provinces of the Cordillera. It lies on the passion with which a credible leader like him gave a voice to the tribal communities muted for long “in the name of national development”.

Whether it’s a bane or boon to the Igorots and their fellow indigenous peoples all over the world, most of the remaining natural wealth lies on tribal land. It has been more of a curse, as the Cordillera provinces remain among the country’s poorest despite gold mining and electric power generation.

Baguilat is kept busy by his steep fight for Ifugao’s benefits as watershed and host of the 360-megawatt Magat Dam. Because of the national wealth tax and other funds accruing to the “host community”, Isabela is also claiming Magat Dam lies within its turf.

With his grounded commitment to the push for rights of Cordillerans over their resources, the governor will be a crucial voice when the Cordillera Regional Development Council will begin talks with its counterpart in Region 1 this December.

The upcoming talks were triggered by the recent concern of Regions 1 and 2 over the dwindling flow of water from the Cordillera. Previously, Region 1 officials blamed the occasional silting and flooding of their communities on the mining and the hydro-power generation up here.

Their present concern has given us the leverage to tell them the obvious often ignored by those who established policies about sharing of resources – that watershed conservation is as much a concern of the lowlands as it is ours, for they are the life-blood of the industries and farmlands down there.

It should give them enough reason to support our stand that, for one, Benguet is as much a host as Pangasinan and Region 1 are to the 345-megawatt San Roque Dam built in San Manuel and San Nicolas towns. Finally, the lowlands can help push equitable sharing of benefits accruing from the harnessing of our water resources, through a redefinition of a “host community” entitled to these. For years now, the Cordillera has been alone in asking national planners to re-define the term that excludes us from a share of such benefits.

When he was up here in 2001 for a public hearing on the implementing rules and regulations of the controversial Electric Power Industry Reform Act, then Energy Secretary Vincent Perez was told of the inequity triggered by the myopic definition of a “host community”, which is limited to where the dam was built.
“That’s an insightful observation,” Perez told a press conference. He promised to consider a redefinition that would encompass the upland communities serving as watersheds of San Roque and Magat. When the IRR came out, however, it retained the infrastructure-based definition, lifted in-toto from that of the earlier Energy Crisis Act.

Early this year, now Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes was told in another press conference that, unless the river basin concept is adopted, Ifugao natives in Hungduan town would divert the flow of the Hapao River, the major feeder to Magat.

The revelation startled Secretary Reyes, who was told it was more a jest than a threat, to underscore the lack of incentive policy for the uplands. When push comes to shove, however (as Gov. Baguilat noted), the Ifugaos may take it seriously, as their ancestors did in carving whole mountainsides into rice terraces.

Before that happens, national development planners might as well take us seriously. After all, the effectiveness of the Technology of Participation is measured by the degree with which they listen to the keepers of the watersheds up here. (e-mail:rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).

BENCHWARMER

Ramon Dacawi
Culture clashes and crimes

As we mark “Indigenous Peoples’ Month”, I hope Native Americans would commemorate the rounding up 114 years ago next month of 19 men of the Hopi Nation..

Described as “murderous-looking” and misidentified as Apaches in a story by the San Francisco Call, the Hopi men were imprisoned for almost a year at Alcatraz, the island penitentiary that is now San Francisco’s top tourism come-on. .

Their crime: resistance to cultural imposition, subjugation and domination. They refused to send their children to boarding schools under a government program to “Americanize” them and wipe out their own culture.

In 1995, historian Wendy Holiday of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office wrote a story on the Hopi prisoners. She asked readers who had stories about them to contact her and help document this event in Hopi history – from the American Indian perspective.

That indigenous view surfaced in autumn of 1969, six years after the penitentiary was closed. Thousands of Indians and non-Indians landed on Alcatraz to reclaim it as Indian land. They invoked “discovery”, in the same token that European colonizers earlier invoked the self-serving principle of “terra nullius” in claiming Aboriginal and indigenous lands.

They occupied The Rock for almost a year and a half. The occupation proved a powerful rallying point to demand respect for indigenous peoples’ and their human rights. Ben Winton, writing for Native People’s Magazine in 1999, noted that “despite its chaos and factionalism, the event resulted in major benefits for American Indians.”

He quoted historian and law professor Vine Deloria Jr. of the University of Colorado: “Alcatraz was a big enough symbol that for the first time this century Indians were taken seriously.” And John Trudell, a Santee Sioux: “Alcatraz put me back into my community and helped me remember who I am. It was a rekindling of the spirit. Alcatraz made it easier for us to remember who we are.”

Tourists now line up daily at San Francisco’s Pier 39 for the boat to take them to The Rock. They are issued audio gadgets that serve as their guide to the now empty, silent cells of the more famous, or infamous convicts who did time there – Al Capone, Robert Stroud (Birdman of Alcatraz), George “Machine Gun” Kelly.

Conrad and Pilar Marzan and I took the queue and landed on The Rock last month, I punched the audio guide on , but my mind was off the names it featured.. What struck my eye were the sepia photos of the 19 Hopi prisoners. In deep autumn, they were taken away from their wives, children and families who had to survive winter without them. On the return boat, I struck some pesky flies from what appeared to be a swarm – six that didn’t escape Alcatraz, I said to fellow passengers also trying to ward off those landing on their faces.

At Alcatraz, I searched for the names of the 19 Hopi men. . I later found them in Holiday’s article posted on the Hopi website: Aqawsi, Heevi’yma, Kuywisa, Lomahongiwma, Lomayawma, Lomayestiwa, Masaatiwa, Nasingayniwa, Patupha, Piphongva, Polingyawma, Qosventiwa, Qotsyawma, Sikyaheptiwa, Talangayniwa, Talasyawma, Tawaletstiwa, Tuvehoyiwma, Yukiwma.

My mind turned to Australia’s Aborigines, about whom I learned from Bob Randall, Deborah Bird Rose and Rebecca Hossack, my teachers at Schumacher College in the Devon countryside of England.

Randall belonged to the “Lost Generations” of Aboriginal children who were taken away from their parents and brought to special schools – to be to educated in the ways of their European colonizers. Randall, a traditional co-owner of the giant Uluru Rock sacred to his people, never saw his mother again after he was plucked from her arms.

He spoke without bitterness - and with gentle, irrepressible humor. He called for a healing together. It’s the message of an award winning documentary film of which he is the narrator. Directed by Melanie Hogan, a white Australian, it’s entitled “Kanyini”, which means interconnectedness.

“The purpose of life is to be part of all that there is,” Bob said. “Our parents said we are connected to everything else, and the proof is being alive. You’re one with everything there is.”

Rose, a respected American-Australian anthropologist, noted how the European colonizers applied their self-serving concept of terra nullius in claiming lands Down Under. “The idea that the land was untransformed led directly to the idea that land was un-owned,” she noted. “Locke’s famous statement on property could have been written precisely to justify the dispossession of indigenous peoples in the European settlement of Australia.”

Contrary to the colonizers’ view that the Aborigines were simply hunter-gatherers or parasites who depended on food naturally produced by the land, Rose asserted they did have land management systems, using fire as a tool.. Hossack, an expert in Aboriginal art based in London, opened up on the problems of drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, gambling and feeling of aimlessness among Aborigines as a result of colonization that uprooted them from their cultural roots. She spoke of Albert Namatjira, perhaps the greatest and most famous Aboriginal painters whose quality of work made him the first among his people to be granted Australian citizenship.

Citizenship meant the right to acquire land and property – and to buy goods, including alcohol. True to his tribal culture of sharing, he shared what he had. In doing so, he was charged and found guilty of passing on alcohol to a fellow Aborigine. He was sentenced to six years imprisonment, but was released after two months, a despondent and broken man.

Namatjira’s fate reminds one of Cayat. He was an Igorot ( probably a Kalanguya,) during the American colonial period here. The Baguio court then convicted the guy for possession of a bottle of commercial gin. I remember his young Igorot lawyer, the late Sinai Hamada who went up to the Supreme Court to contest the constitutionality of the law that banned Igorots from acquiring intoxicants, except the “tapuy” they customarily produced. Two years after Cayat’s final conviction, the law, premised on the assumption that tribals couldn’t hold their drink, was rescinded. – (rdacawi@yahoo.com)

.

BENCHWARMER

Ramon Dacawi
A salmon run

I’ve just been to where visitors from the so-called Third World can’t readily distinguish the well-off from the regular, as housing and the other basic human needs are affordable and reachable by almost anybody who aspires for them.

It’s where three family cars and a garage for them are deemed a necessity, where front and back lawns are watered by sprinklers and trimmed by motorized mowers as common marks of decent, normal living.

It’s where double-insulating doors of commercial establishments automatically open for you – to the sight of wide aisles and rows and rows of well-stocked stands from where buyers pick their grocery needs without looking at the price tags. Or of families, friends and contented retirees sharing breakfast around warm restaurant tables and mapping out their next vacation routes. It’s where wide, pothole- and traffic jam-free interstate highways lead you to your choice of fishing and hunting grounds this autumn.

It’s where, despite the global economic crisis, you can eat all you can. Back home, I told my hosts, we eat all we have – which is often not enough. Back home, we had long consumed or abused what what we had. We hardly have lawns to mow, or water to grow grass, much less forests to preserve for the succeeding generations to see a deer or two.

Still, the common longing for home surfaces among Filipino expatriates the moment you pop up in their adopted neighborhoods. By yearning for news, you sense outright they would rather be here in this nation of want than be out there living out the American dream –if only they could.

So they do the next best thing to coming home – make you truly feel at home that gives you the certain feeling that they haven’t really left home after all these years. While they admit more Americans are now staying home because of the recent oil price hike and the impending global economic meltdown, expatriates aren’t bothered any as long as you’re around.

They’ll take days off from work to be with you, even if they remotely know you from Adam. As fellow Cordillerans, they’ll get you almost any gift of your fancy and drive you to anywhere you want to be – at your slightest hint.

So I tried to keep mum about my plans. Still, the closest of kin, not necessarily by blood but bound by years of friendship, immediately saw what I really wanted to do. That’s why Conrad Marzan, the diminutive folksinger with a heart bigger than his body, and his wife and nurse Pilar, met me on my arrival at the San Francisco Airport. Both wanted to prime me up for my date with my daughter Beng, whom I haven’t seen for a while.

When they knew my flight from here was set, Paul and Jenelyn Balanza called from their home in Midland, Michigan, to assure they’d drive me to Beng in Albany, New York. The young couple claimed their long-planned vacation would pass that way anyway, and that Albany is near. It took 14 hours, with several eatery, restroom and fuel station stops I lost count of.

I took advantage, going on a two-week salmon run the moment Pilar cooked pink salmon in their home in Santa Clara. It was all pure fillet, far from the head and belly Europe dumps into the SM malls here. Atlantic salmon is readily available in the highway exit diners of New York State and the in Queensboro neighborhood of Camilo Madadsec in New York City. Fr. Dario Palaci must have known it, so he provided respite with a “pinikpikan” offering at his wife Cathy’s birthday in the Big Apple.

I tried to make sense of American football – even if it’s more of a handball – after learning that Paulo, Paul and Jenelyn’s son, has been averaging three touchdowns a game for his junior high school varsity in Midland. Paulo's elder sister Sunshine had me back to salmon at the top-rated Zinc Cafe with her own earnings.

Salmon fishing provided father-and-son bonding, and it was no moment that Paul turned out empty-handed and had to clean Paulo's catch. Beng couldn’t thank them enough for the four-day father-daughter bonding we both needed most. My daughter asked for their addresses, hoping to send them cards this Christmas, plus a note to Angie Mayegayeg and her daughter Ruth for the fun of her walking their tiny dogs in New Jersey.

I couldn’t thank Joel and Emily Aliping enough. Or his brothers Bob and Bryan, Miggs Meru, Jorge Pawid and Harry Basing-at who drove from way down San Diego to be at the couple’s home for a reunion of Baguio and Cordillera boys and girls hosted by the BIBAK chapter in Northern California.

It was deep honor seeing again past chapter president Johnny Copero, incumbent president, Dr. Nap and Glo Batalao and incoming tribal chief Art Bulayo. And Richard and Jopats Arandia, Felix Tayatao, good-looking Dorothy Pucay and her mother. And retiree Lito Villanueva, who went fishing for our taste of striped bass.

Neither could the Baguio goodwill mission headed by Rep. Mauricio Domogan fully thank Dinah Villanueva and the Baguio Californians she heads for the months of spade work that paved the way for the rekindling of sister-city ties between Baguio and Vallejo. The Baguio mission is grateful to the Vallejo officials led by Mayor Osby Davis, the host families, the Filipino community and their guides, function and tour hosts.

I owe the immigration officer in San Francisco who expressed his welcome concern. “You don’t look or sound excited being here,” he noted as he was about to stamp my entry. I lied about my enthusiasm by telling the truth that my travel authority to cover the sisterhood renewal carried the specific provision that no government funds shall be spent for it. “Welcome to San Francisco, anyway,” he said with understanding.

But it’s always cheaper to have friends than to buy a round trip plane ticket. A friend and fellow Cordilleran here bankrolled half of my fare. (e-mail: rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).

BENCHWARMER

RAMON DACAWI
Suffering as catalyst

There’s this line from William Bloyd I often quote: “There are places in the heart which do not yet exist, into which suffering enters to give them existence.”

A parody is in order: “There are places in the heart of a Baguio boy or girl, or that of a Cordilleran, which have been there ever since, always triggered to action by suffering back home.”

Numerous patients saw that in Freddie de Guzman, the expatriate Baguio boy in Canada who, for three years now, has been reaching out to the sick here. Recently, he lost his job. While waiting for the labor case he filed to proceed, this suddenly unemployed architect sent P11,000 for four patients here and in Benguet.

“Ganoon pala si Freddie,” Philian Weygan, the Igorota traveler told me after she returned from the BIBAK Festival of Cordillera expatriates in Southern California. She’s not referring to his losing hair and gaining a forehead that extends to the back. She must have met Freddie there but only learned who he really is when she came back and brushed up on local news through back issues of the weeklies.

Patients who found hope because of Freddie saw that, too, in an Ibaloi woman raising her daughter in Kentucky. Simultaneously with Freddie, she began reconnecting through patients here three years back – while se was recuperating from the big C. They saw that in another woman who left a check for P50,000 last February, when she was about to have her check-up for cancer.

They saw it in a nurse based in Connecticut. Princess Lea, as she calls herself on the internet chat room, practically bankrolled a heart surgery two years ago, so Santy John Tuyan, now 12, could go back to school.

Ten-year old Mark Anthony Viray, would see it when he realizes that the guy who treated him to pizza and ordered a giant one for the kid to bring home, also footed the bill for his first chemotherapy the other week.

Mark Anthony is battling Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare form of cancer he’s too young to grapple with. The boy dreams of flying an airplane when he grows up. . It’s a dream his father Ernesto, an off-and-on taxi and family driver, must have to keep reminding the kid, to steel him up for five more chemo treatments sessions that would depend on other Samaritans.

Traditional karate master Julian Chees would have also picked the tab for the Mark Anthony’s second chemo - if only there were no other patients as seriously ill. Julian was swamped with medical prescriptions of patients in Maligcong, his native village, and the capital town of Bontoc, when he and his family arrived from Germany to visit his ailing mother.

As graceful, precise and decisive in his rendition of the shotokan (knife-hand) form of his martial art that earned him various international titles and a world championship in kata, Julian immediately saw why 27-year old Veronica Lee-Casuga needs to have a new lease on life.

Veronica, daughter of the late Sunshine Lunch waiter George Lee, married Joefrey Casuga, her high school classmate, last January 30. Last Christmas, the young couple learned Veronica’s implanted kidney, which her aunt donated in 2002, had failed.

Last week, Veronica was back at the St. Luke’s Medical Center in Quezon City where her first kidney transplant was done in 2002, thanks to the center’s board of trustees and then city Mayor Mauricio Domogan.

She and her brother Jimson, the would-be donor this time, were to start their work-up preparatory to the second implant. With them were their widowed mother Wella and Joefrey, who barely had a nap as he is on the night work shift at Moog Controls. Julian bankrolled their food, lodging and fuel costs. (In case others would like to take the cue from him, Veronica can be reached at cell phone number 09187073438.)

As I write, my buddy Peewee Agustin arrives, trying to cope with the fate of his 70-year old uncle Serino Andanan. The old man was wheeled into the Baguio General Hospital last Wednesday, comatose after a stroke. Peewee was told blood had clotted the brain.

I don’t know his uncle but I know Peewee. What he can’t whip out of his pocket, he makes up by transporting patients to and from Metro Manila. As he did for Veronica six years ago and last week. As he will when Veronica and Jimson return to St. Luke’s later this month.

Meanwhile, the shoe is on the other foot. It’s always easier to reach out to people you hardly know, Harder when the one in crisis is family who is aware you’ve been propping up strangers in need. In Peewee’s predicament, a stranger’s support came in handy. Early last week, banker Rolly de Guzman, the glorified teller of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., called. He said there’s again this anonymous donor unaffected by donor fatigue who had somebody drop at his desk P5,000 with the same advice – to whoever needed it most and no mention of where it came from.

From the anonymous Samaritan’s fund – his latest support to sick people he or she only reads about in the papers. – I handed Peewee P3,000. He wouldn’t have it but I insisted, to extricate myself from the predicament he was in.

Last Wednesday, another banker handed me P1,500. “It’s for the sick boy who wants to fly an airplane,” he said. Now, I’m California dreaming. From the Bay Area, Conrad Marzan and Joel Aliping called up to say they’ll belt out folk and country on Sept. 12, with proceeds from the concert for patients here. ( e-mail: http://us.mc333.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).

BENCHWARMER

Ramon Dacawi
Doing it

By the United Nations initial count, 38.8 million in 110 countries stood up against poverty. Most of those who stood – or tried to – were in the so-called Third World, the so-called South: Asia – 28 million; Africa – 7.5 million; Arab region – 2.5 million; Latin America – 734,000.

By the final count, the figure rose to 43.7 million. Understandably so. After all, it’s in the Third World where the extremes of deprivation are most common. It’s here where poverty is not a temporary condition but a constant, a given rather than an extreme, a rule rather than an
exception.

It’s here where poverty comes with birth – as if it were a birthright. It dictates the inequality of life that it shortens, and even the manner of death. Or even how one literally returns to dust, the indignity made less painful by the acceptance of one’s lot, or the lack of it in this Third World.

After all, it’s in some Third World countries where the poor don’t’ have a voice, except when told to speak up for dictators. After all, it’s the seventh year since leaders of 192 nations ushered in this millennium with a collective pledge to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. After all, we’re at the half-way mark to 2015, the target year the leaders set to finally eradicate the extreme.

After all, it’s time for nameless, ordinary millions to speak up to their leaders. Not only about poverty but seven other goals that world leaders vowed on paper to pursue under the United Nations Millennium Declaration they inked in September, 2000.

“What Stand Up did was to give them the opportunity to find voice on issues that matter to them,” noted Mandy Kibel, deputy director of communications for the UN Millennium Campaign. “They want to find their own voice, and they want to address not us at the UN, but their own governments and say we have expectations that you deliver on the promises you made.”

Three years before Stand Up, a world leader of form and substance gave voice to the millions gripped by poverty.

“Enough is enough,” former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev said in his keynote at the World Urban Forum in September, 2004 in Barcelona. Before him were the world’s leaders, urban executives, development planners, non-government organization heads and even so-called development tourists

Gorbachev was referring to numerous agreements and declarations that world leaders signed since 1992, when the term “sustainable development” emerged out of the World Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Gorbachev stood up against the disunity between theory and practice, the wide gap between the flourish of signature or speech and feeble ground work thereafter, between slogan and action.

Gorbachev knows of where he spoke. He served the Soviet Union and knew when it was time to step down, for its member-nations to chart their own development courses. Step down from political leadership he did. Towards making another difference he did not. Not forgetting Rio, he established Green Cross, now one of the world’s most respected environmental groups.

Enough is enough. It’s more than a slogan. So is the Stand Up pledge: “We cannot stay seated when a child born in a poor country today will die 30 years earlier than a child born in a wealthy one, when tens of thousands of people die unnecessarily every day.

“And we stand up because we are asking not for charity, but justice. We now that in our names, world leaders have made mighty promises to bring an end to extreme poverty by achieving the Millennium Development Goals. What is needed is the political will to achieve and exceed these goals. So we are on our feet to say:

“To the leaders of the wealthy countries: Be great. Fight to keep your promises – debt cancellation, more and better aid, and trade rules that help fight poverty. You know what needs to be done. Do it. “We also stand before the leaders of poorer countries to say: Be great. Make it your first responsibility to save the lives of your poorest citizens. We ask you to achieve real transparency and accountability in how money is spent, to tackle inequality, to root out
corruption. You know what needs to be done. Do it.”

On Stand Up Day next year, perhaps the pledge can incorporate a paragraph or two for the corporate and civil society, the non-government organizations, development workers and consultants outside of government.

After all, responsibility, transparency and accountability need to encompass all, not limited to the bureaucracy. In the same token that mediocrity and
corruption are not confined to formal governance.

Do it. It sounds familiar. A Baguio boy of substance and vision said that about a
decade ago, but with an h: “Let’s DOH it!” It worked in stamping out polio and other crippling illnesses of children of this Third World..It worked because Dr. Juan Flavier did not dictate it. It worked because he worked with thousands of volunteers, to whom he later paid tribute, to whom he attributed the success of “Oplan Alis Disease”.

Earlier, Baguio girl Natividad Relucio-Clavano, also did it. Against a world going heads-over-heels for milk substitutes, Dr. Clavano stood up, almost by her lonesome, to restore sanity in nutrition with a lifetime pitch for breast-feeding and mother-and-child
bonding the moment a baby was, is and will be born.

What these two Baguio doctors did are now world models that saved thousands and will continue to save millions of God’s greatest gift from the medical plagues of the Third World. Otherwise, they would not have been there standing up against poverty. Otherwise, the count would not have reached the 43 million mark.

As the late Baguio newsman Peppot Ilagan observed: “Children are a constant reminder from God that the world must go on” His is the most fitting definition of “sustainable development”. Like Stand Up, it’s more than a slogan. (e-mail:rdacawi@yahoo.com).

BENCHWARMER

Ramon Dacawi
Getting hooked to Billy Dean’s “If It Hadn’t Been You”

Baguio musicians were belting out folk, country, pop and rock last night, in Pacdal barangay’s covered but open multi-purpose court. The venue allowed anybody with ticket or not to come, watch and listen to what was billed as a concert for a cause. Hastily prepared with hardly a seed fund, the show, dubbed “Hands To Hold On”, had to go on. Organizers led by the Pacdal barangay council could only hope those who bought admission tickets wouldn’t mind.

After all, it was for Christina Lagasca, one of their neighbors now in deep emotional and financial distress. The 53-year old mother of three couldn’t make it to the performance for her benefit. A day before the show, she was wheeled into the hospital, for her chemotherapy, her fourth in a series of six expensive treatment sessions for breast cancer.

Soon, local musicians may have to do another one, for another woman who is almost half Christina’s age. Like Kristina, 27-year old Veronica Lee-Casuga just hopes she, too, could be hospital-confined soon -- for her second kidney transplant.

Folksingers the likes of lawyers Bubut Olarte and Rolly Vergara took on Veronica’s fight last March, going country at the Amarillo Folkden, just when she could no longer cope with the costs for her twice-a-week blood-cleansing dialysis

Veronica’s kidneys failed nine years ago, while she was taking up pharmacy at the St. Louis University. The eldest child of George Lee, a waiter at the Sunshine Lunch beside the Malcolm Square, she had her first kidney transplant in January, 2002, as a charity patient at the St. Luke’s Medical Center. George, whose diminutive, smiling figure was a come-on for Sunshine, died of illness before his daughter could recover. The organ donation from her maternal aunt, however, augured well. She went on to finish her course, at the sacrifice of her brothers Jimson and .Michael, who quit their classes so their mother Wella could concentrate on sustaining Veronica’s continuous medication to prevent rejection of the donated kidney.

The orphaned family’s sacrifice allowed Veronica to fall in love – with Joefrey Casuga, her second year classmate at the Baguio City National High School. It eventually led to her employment last November, as pharmacist at the Pines City Doctor’s Hospital.

A sudden bout of amoebiasis last Christmas, however, darkened hopes for the young couple to raise a family. The illness affected her donated kidney, which doctors found to have shrunk. They diagnosed it as chronic kidney disease, stage 5, secondary to glumerulonephritis.

Over at Pacdal, Christina doesn’t know how her husband Danny, who raised his family working as a caddy at the Baguio Country Club, raised the money for her fourth chemo session last Friday. Her ailment had drained her family’s resources. For months now, Danny has been sidelined from the greens due to heart ailment.

But Olga, their youngest child who quit school to attend to her mother’s needs, found hope in Samaritans. A man who declined to give his name delivered P5,000 at the Pacdal barangay hall. Earlier, a mother and son sent P1,000, to which a nurse in the United States, who goes by the chat room name Leah, added P3,000 for Christina’s daily radiation therapy.

Olga sent a text message last saying another anonymous soul gave P5,000, aside from P3,000 from Jane Rose Teodoro and P1,000 from Florendo Dulay. Before last New Year’s Day, Veronica was back to her twice-a-week dialysis sessions at the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center. Last Jan, 30, a day before the sixth anniversary of her first kidney transplant, Veronica and Joefrey tied the knot.

She feels luckier than other patients whose relatives are reluctant to donate a kidney. Her brother Jimson, would have donated his own if only he were not too young in 2002. He’s now 25 and a tissue matching earlier this year showed high compatibility and that he’s fit to donate. Hope for another transplant brightened up the other week. Rep. Mauricio Domogan said St. Luke’s approved to again take in Veronica for another work out with his brother and eventual organ implant.

Peewee Agustin, who drove Veronica to and from St. Luke’s that first time, is again on standby to deliver her and Jimson to the medical facility.

Meanwhile, Veronica has to be on dialysis, even while her doctors strongly suggested the transplant be done as soon as possible. Samaritans may visit Veronica at their rented house at 8 Dizon Subdivision. They may ring her cellphone number 09187073438.

Others may send their support to Christina by calling her daughter Olga at 09184524903 or course it through the Pacdal barangay office infront of the St. Joseph Church. For them gentle souls, folk and country music hosts Cesar Marzan and Nick Calinao will surely spin Billy Dean’s “If It Hand’t Been You” on their radio slots over DZWR-FM. (E-mail: rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).

BENCHWARMER

Ramon S. Dacawi
It takes a plane …

If it takes a village to raise a child, it sometimes takes more than a village to heal a child. Sometimes it takes a series of connecting plane rides for free, as that taken by toddlers Carl and Clarence Aguirre in 2003. Or Karen May Bongat, then a teen-ager from Siquijor in 2005.
Born with their heads conjoined in 2002, Carl and Clarence were flown from Silay City to Manila and then to New York. There, they were separated through a series of surgery at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore. Karen was flown from Cebu to Manila and then to South Carolina in the United States. There, she underwent reconstructive surgery for burns suffered when she was three.

It took more than a village that gave them a chance to live and grow up as normally as possible, like normal kids. It took the gecko-like tenacity of their parents and relatives, the kindness and expertise of the doctors and the hospitals, the initiatives of grounded civic clubs (Rotary in the case of Karen) and the embrace of foster parents in the U.S. who opened their homes.

It took Philippine Airlines to have their healing process get off the ground. The Philippines’ flag carrier, for years, has been flying indigent patients for free, through its Medical Travel Grant, according to Maria Carmen Sarmiento, executive director of PAL Foundation.

Yet Ms. Sarmiento herself has a wish and appeal relayed during a recent phone call. She would like more Filipino-American families to reconnect back to the villages here by serving as foster parents of ailing