Women heroes

BENCHWARMER
Ramon S. Dacawi

(It’s Women’s Month and I go back to this piece to mark the observance.)

Until gender sensitivity advocates told me to be conscious about it, I never bothered to count how many of my heroes are women.

Male or female, I still call them heroes. Unless, of course, I’m asked to call some heroines, in the same light that my former teachers, many of whom were women, insisted that women actors should be called actresses.

The gender issue, which is tied to project fund grants from the West, surfaced 12 years ago. A visiting Canadian, a woman worker in governance, asked how many women work with me in Eco-walk, Baguio ’s environmental program for, by and with children.

Admittedly, I didn’t know and honestly told her so. I stopped short of adding I never saw the need and wisdom to know until she asked. Quickly, I promised to count.

You should, she said. She then got me back on the spot by asking how many of the kids in the program were girls. Told her honestly I also never figured that out. It never occurred to me it would be of the moment to separately count the girls from the boys.

Most of the time, I’m gender neutral. I’ve worked on the children’s program with other volunteers irrespective of their gender. These volunteers include noted environmentalist and healer, Dr. Julie Camdas-Cabato. Together, we have been guiding kids, be they girls or boys, in their exploration of Baguio ’s forest and water source. Boys or girls, they will eventually inherit and manage this watershed.To this forest walk (Eco-Walk) has been added their exploration of the city landscape in a twin program called Children’s Urban Heritage Walk.

Despite this neutrality, it later dawned on me that it wasn’t by chance that many of my heroes, including Dr. Cabato, are women. Many women became icons because of the courage that only women can muster, perhaps to hurdle the inequality imposed on them by a male-dominated social structure. Sometimes, they don’t even want to be overly conscious or to harp on this social reality that gave rise to the gender equality issue.

Still, I don’t understand when the gender issue is pushed without cultural sensitivity into societies where the roles of men and women are clearly defined. Cultural disruption or conflict result, as in the introduction of an empty bottle of Coca-Cola into African tribal life in that wonder of a film “The God’s Must Be Crazy”. As in the tragic end for the foreigners who were marooned and nursed by a village of Eskimos in James Archibald Houston’s novel “The White Dawn”.

That’s why I cautioned a fellow journalist and non-government organization worker when she was assigned to push the gender issue in Ifugao. I told her that in my father’s Ifugao village, it’s a neat arrangement that women work the rice terraces and the camote patches, doing most of the manual labor. Men sometimes baby-sit or mend the rice terrace walls or follow the native priest (mumbaki) who presides over the ritual in traditional merry-making such as the “bakle”, when rice wine flows after the rice harvest.

Years back, folksinger Conrad Marzan and I joined a gathering of Minda’s Buddies. It’s that support group by, for and with cancer patients that Noney, Conrad’s late wife, had founded in memory of a fellow patient. “Sitsita met laeng, manongtilalakiditoy (We’re the only men here),” Conrad told me as we watched the women drawn together for mutual strength against a common affliction. With them was their doctor, lady oncologist, Dr. FelinaAdefuin, a dear friend of Noney.

We were told that unlike women, male patients find it difficult to admit and face their ailment. Instead of opening up, men would let the period of denial linger, opting to suffer alone and in silence. It’s part of irresponsible machismo which, in this case, can be fatal.

That was not the case with Lorie Ramos, then a 43-year old widow, mother of a 10-year old boy and a civilian worker at the Philippine Military Academy. When she read of Noney’s fight against breast cancer, Lorie called up, asking if we could drop by her rented home at Scout Barrio for a little donation.

Lorie had a handkerchief wrapped around her head when she let Conrad and I into her house. “I know how difficult it is for Noney,” she said after handing Conrad her support. “This is my second bout with cancer,” she confessed, almost matter-of-factly.

Her revelation, made with such nonchalance, blurred Conrad’s eyes. I thought he’d not find the door on our way out. Noney and Lorie immediately struck up a friendship that proved therapeutic also for Conrad and me.

The spreading cancer cells had already reduced her voice to a whisper when Lorie dropped by my workplace to say goodbye. Still, the message comes back clear when I think of her, to draw inspiration from this woman of substance: “I’ve accepted it and I’m ready; I’m bringing down my son to grow up in my sister’s home in Quezon City . Thank you.”

Lorie left me a box containing a piece of pink cloth for a barong tagalog.Noney later called, asking if I could call up Lorie, as she was asking about me.Unable to find the words, I never rang her number.

Two years before she herself passed on (on Mother’s Day), Noney dropped her own medical fight and focused on easing pain among occupants of the children’s cancer ward. That time folk musicians insisted on a concert for her cause, Noney asked that the proceeds instead go to the kids’ ward. Now and then, Conrad would find her comforting parents who had just lost a child to leukemia or any other form of the big C.

Noney left a will: No eulogies. Her casket sealed at the short wake. Cremation and for her ashes to be strewn on top of Mt. Pulag, the mountain she and Conrad ascended in a pilgrimage at the height of her battle against cancer. She asked Conrad to marry again, “to give direction to your life”.

One of my women heroes is AmparoCalaposLaza whom I want to write about in the present tense. She’s the widow of my kumpadre, police Capt. Perfecto Laza, and mother to nine children, including nephrologist, Dr. Josefina Luspian of the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center.

Dinky Casem could only regret to know of Mrs. Laza’s passing at 73 in the obituary page in February last year, after the wake and funeral. Dinky is a relative of the Calapos and Lazas of Bana-ao, Tadian and Mankayan.

Dinky and kids Bugoy (Mark Allan), Babeng (Marie Joy) and Budoy
(Christian Marlowe) mark this month the second anniversary of the passing on of his wife and their mother, Dr.Maria “Asela” Talco-Casem. Asela worked to make the psychiatry department she headed at the Baguio General Hospital a true refuge and place of healing for patients from as far as Regions 1, 2 and 3.

Asela had declined a well-paying supervisory position in psychiatry in Australia so she could continue her work in a vital yet locally misunderstood and ignored field in medicine. (e-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments).