The author has worked as a journalist for more than 20 years in Manila, one year in Papua New Guinea and about seven years in Saudi Arabia. He started his career with the defunct Evening Post in Manila in 1976 and has moved to several newspapers since then, including a four-year stint with the British news agency Reuters in 1983-1987, the National newspaper in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea in December 1993-December 1994 and the Saudi Gazette in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 1999-2005 and 2007 up to the present.

Since his college days, he has been consumed by a passionate search for meaning in his mundane existence. In college, he found life to be meaningless and gravitated towards the Marxist cause during the time of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, but ended later as an existentialist.

Feeling empty deep within, he once wrote an epithet which he wanted placed on his tomb when he dies, “Here lays the body of a man who never knew who he was and why he lived.”

He lost God after taking a three-unit subject in anthropology which taught Darwin’s theory of evolution. After straying to atheism for nearly a decade, he returned to the Faith with a broader perspective in life, a Christian who believes in evolution as part of creation and sees science not as an enemy of religion but a window to take a peek at God’s infinite wisdom.

Except for the essays “When God closes doors,” which he wrote as part of his assignments in an online creative writing course with the Writers Bureau in London, and “Love in the age of neuroscience,” which was published by the Business Mirror in Manila in 2007, all the other essays in this blog had been published in the newspapers where he had worked and which he has compiled into a book, “The Gypsy Soul and Other Essays,” that he plans to self-publish.

The author was born in Bacolod City in the central Philippines but grew up in Romblon, a province up north, where his uncle took him, along with his eleder sister, to live with his famiy after their father’s death.

The essays are mostly about the political and social malaise in his country, the problems and the pains suffered by many Filipinos who are forced to look for greener pastures in foreign lands and some personal experiences which he hopes will find resonance in the hearts of other people.

The author hopes the visitors of this blog will enjoy reading the essays and probably draw some lessons from them.

Romblomanon visitors may find the essays, “Remembering Ginablan,” “The gypsy soul,” ”Written in the stars,” “Strangers in our own country” and “Our passion for writing,” in which he harks back to Romblon, both entertaining and inspiring.

The author:

C. P. Mayor Jr.

Sub-Editor

The Saudi Gazette

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

email: casianomayor@gmail.com

When God closes doors

I went home from work that night with a heavy heart. I had just lost my job as a subeditor with the Saudi Gazette in Jeddah where I had worked for the past six years. I was 62.

Losing my job at the twilight years of my life with an eight-year-old daughter and a wife to look after was surreal.

I didn’t expect the axe to fall too soon. The year before, I was named one of the company’s 12 outstanding employees and, despite the Saudi government’s program to gradually replace expatriates with Saudis, my job was not among the trades lined up for the chopping block.

It was one of the most trying times in my life. How do I fend for my family? We came to Saudi Arabia to escape a harsh life in Manila and the prospect of going home unprepared was a nightmare.

I got my termination notice without a warning in January 2005, two months before my renewable yearly work contract was to expire in March. I wanted to cry to high heavens that it was unjust. A few expatriates advised me to file a labor case but knowing the odds quite well, I deemed it prudent to keep still.

At that time, we were planning to migrate to New Zealand. My wife, a nurse 14 years younger than I, had barely started to scout for a job there. When I got my termination notice, I saw that dream collapsed. We had to use the money we saved for that purpose for more immediate needs.

Though shattered, I told my wife about the tragic news as calmly as I could. “Don’t be alarmed,” I opened up as she settled next to me on our sofa in the living room to watch TV, “I got fired from my job and we have to go home by the end of the month.”

I saw shock in her eyes. Instinctively, I assured her that I could still work as a subeditor in Manila and, with our modest savings, she could open a bigger store than what we used to have back home before I worked in Saudi Arabia.

My wife, who quit her job to take care of our daughter when the child was born in 1997, wasn’t convinced and pleaded with me to look for another job, any job, as a lifeline until we could move to New Zealand or any other Western country.

I understood her fears of going home. When I left Manila in 1999, I was a newspaper subeditor. We had a small store which we sat up in front of our home when she chose to stop working. When we got married in 1989, we never dreamt of working overseas until the spiraling prices of oil in the world market kept on pushing up Manila’s cost of living beyond our reach.

Figuring out our options when we went to bed that night, I decided to stay and look for another job. Filing a labor case was out of the question. That would hasten our going home. In Saudi Arabia, an expatriate can not simply hop from one job to another. He has to get the permission of his employer to move to another company. I asked my editor-in-chief to help me get a company clearance.

As I always do in my trying times, I prayed for divine guidance and was buoyed when the company gave me a six-month grace period to look for a new job. But it marked only the beginning of a new travail.

After failing to get a job with the Arab News, the only other English newspaper in Saudi Arabia, I discovered that I could hardly find even an ordinary office work. My wife, who also started scouting for work, did not fare any better either. My problem was my age; hers was an eight-year gap in her employment records.

Since my family joined me in Jeddah in 2000, we had been attending clandestine Bible studies and prayer meetings held by a Catholic charismatic group every Friday, the rest day in Saudi Arabia, and throughout our trial my wife would occasionally feel a muted anger against God for “abandoning” us.

As a former atheist, I told her it was futile to rebel against God. When I lost God during my college days after enrolling in an anthropology class that taught Darwin’s theory of evolution, I lost my peace of mind and had sank deeper into the quagmire of alcoholism until I turned back to Him on bended knees.

I told my wife that probably God was just testing our faith. We held on to faith. From my experiences, I had learned to practice the counsels in Proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; never lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will show you the right path”

In June, as I grew more desperate after my applications for published job vacancies got no responses and the referrals of friends turned out fruitless, I got an unexpected call from a Filipino, a friend of our next-door neighbor, working in a construction company; He advised me to see another Filipino in a sister company, Truba Arabia.

I got interviewed and was asked to report to work as soon as I could wind up with my job at Saudi Gazette. God has endowed me with genes that made me look ten years younger than my age and I got lucky that the personnel manager who interviewed me did not bother to look into my curriculum vitae.

I was offered a clerical job that would pay a third less than my previous salary. I decided not to report to work at once on the pretext that the Gazette had asked me to stay for a while. I was hoping to find another job with a better pay. I did not find any.

By August, a month after my grace-period to look for a new job elapsed, the Gazette cut my pay by half. It was time to go. I rang up Francis, my Filipino contact at Truba Arabia but he told me that his boss had accepted a new applicant who was expected to report to work in the first week of August. My heart sunk.

What happened next was a series of strange coincidences I will never forget ever. In mid-August, I got an intuitive urge to give Francis another call, hoping for an unforeseen turn of event. The improbable happened. Francis told me his boss had a change of mind and was reconsidering hiring me if I would accept a lower pay. I bit the bullet.

I was happy but the euphoria did not last long. The day before I was to report for work, I called up Francis for a reconfirmation before I went home from the Gazette at five in the afternoon. I was dumbstruck to hear that his boss did not want to sign my contract anymore – for no reason at all.

My wife cried uncontrollably when I told her about it as soon as I got home. It turned out that she also failed to get a job she had applied for on the same day. We prayed for divine succor. I prayed to Jesus to touch the heart of Francis’ boss, whom I knew was still at the office at that time.

Like many other companies in Saudi Arabia, Truba Arabia had a long noon break and reopened at five in the afternoon up to eight at night. About 30 minutes after we said our prayers, my cell phone rang. It was Francis, telling me his boss signed my work contract at last.

My wife and I wept. We embraced and shed tears of joy. The next day, my wife called up a hospital where she applied for a job the previous week. She was told to go there to sign her contract. We got our jobs a few days apart in August.

End of our travail? No.

Seven months after I started working at Truba Arabia, I almost lost my job in a new trial that would further strengthen my faith afterwards. That was in February 2006, shortly after we moved to a new office. I had a falling out with our boss, an Egyptian with fiery mood swings.

As early as two months into my job, I started telling my wife how unhappy I was in it and that I wanted to quit owing to my boss’ temper. She pleaded with me to hang on until I could find another job. Her pay was not enough for us to live by.  I took patience but it did not take long for my fuse to snap.

It happened one morning while he was ranting over what he perceived was a lapse in my work without giving me a chance to explain. “I can’t take this anymore and I don’t care if you fire me,” I told him and turned away without a by-leave. As I went back to my desk, he called out to Francis, who was our payroll officer, to close my account.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you this time. You shouldn’t have talked back,” Francis whispered when he went over to my desk. Another Filipino, Gilbert, our IT engineer, offered his sympathy. I put up a bold front. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “God will take care of me.”

Deep inside I was devastated. How will my wife take this? I prayed silently, “Lord, I don’t understand all of this, but I trust you. Please don’t leave us in the midst of this crisis.”

While I was packing my things, Francis told me our boss wanted me to stay. I learned later that our Filipino secretary, who was left at the old office to take telephone calls and monitor the fax messages while the communication lines at the new office were being set up, did not report to work that morning. I was to take his place in the meantime. He never showed up since then.

Francis made it clear to me that it was a holdover job that may last only for three months. I must start looking for a new job. When the telecommunication lines in the new office were put in place, I had to go. It was a week before March, the start of summer break for the Philippine schools in Saudi Arabia. I thanked God for the lifeline, hoping to get a teaching job in any Philippine school when classes opened in June, no matter if the pay would be smaller.

By May, Francis brought me good tidings. I was to be reassigned to the new office because the new secretary, an Indian, was not allowed by his previous employer to transfer. I moved to the new office within a week and worked as secretary to the newly hired executive manager, a Filipino who proved to be an epitome of civility.

I have been working with Truba Arabia for exactly two years last August 30. My wife has moved to one of Jeddah’s two biggest hospitals. Although we do not see any silver lining to our dream of moving to New Zealand, we try to keep still.

I have had my own share of answered prayers since I returned to the Faith after losing God when I was a journalism student in Manila and I have come to believe that when God closes doors He opens new ones. I believe in God’s mysterious ways.

                                                                                             September 2007

P.S.

I am back with the Saudi Gazette. Unexpectedly, I was rehired in October last year to help launch the Kabayan, the Tagalog section of the Gazette, with a financial package much bigger than when I was fired in 2004. With the new lifeline, we have revived our hope to move to New Zealand.

                                                                                              October 25, 2008

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The Gypsy Soul

(Today, 28 January 1997)

A letter to the editor published in the opinion page of this paper last week stabbed me in the heart. It told of the Filipino poet Federico Licsi Espino being confined at the mental hospital in Mandaluyong. The pathos of his fate lingered with me for quite a while and made me grapple on whether to write about it if only to let go of some strong, strange feelings that usually seize me when I am depressed. It is at times like this, when I get emotionally charged, that I itch to write. For I love to write not from the intellect but from the heart.

         The day I read the letter sent by Leopoldo Ortega, I called up the poet’s brother, Romeo Licsi Espino, whose name and telephone number were listed in the letter. I wanted to get his address so that I could send small amounts every now and then, when my budget permits, to help defray the expenses for Espino’s treatment. He wasn’t at home, but a lady who answered the phone, gave me the address.

        I don’t know the Espinos personally. I have never met the poet but I had picked up one of his books of poems – the one where he wrote about “cornflowers” – when I once rummage the bookstores when I was still in college. I have high regards for poets since I was in high school. Although I often did not understand their poetry, I was happy to appreciate a line or two.

        In the case of Espino, I have never forgotten his verse on the wind being a gypsy. Probably it is because it brings back sharp memories of Ginablan, a small farming village in Romblon, where the gypsy wind roamed freely on my aunt’s corn farm on a craggy hill of San Pedro.

        Espino, as the letter said, was a six-time Palanca awardee for literature, including two first prizes for poetry, aside from being first prize winner in Spain’s Ramon de Basterra Memorial Awards in Spanish poetry in 1997 and the Enrique Zobel de Ayala award. But with what befell him what good will all his awards be, for him and his family? The high cost of his treatment, it was said, has left the family impoverished.

        Espino’s tragic fate reminds me of life’s uncertainties, its emptiness, its mysteries and of our own insignificance, no matter how we bloat our egos beyond what we really are. It raises a big question on life’s meaning which probably many of us have tried to grapple with when we look beyond our daily grind. After we have achieved what we had hoped to do when we were young, what do we gain when death – if not insanity – overtakes us?

       Shakespeare answered that question with his famous line about life being a “stage full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible says that all our achievements are meaningless, just like “chasing the wind.” Jesus Christ answered the issue with another query: “What does it profit man to gain the whole world and loses his own soul?”

        My own search for meaning in life introduced me to atheism when I was in college. It made me appreciate the dilemma confronted by Albert Camus’s Sisyphus. It lured me into the world of Marx and I almost did follow him but for my reservation about his theory to create a “classless society,” which I thought was a utopia.

         I was more at home with the existentialists and, in the later part of my college days, had even prepared an epithet for my tomb, “Here lays the body of a man who never knew who he was and why he lived.”

         But if life’s emptiness and uncertainties made me stray to atheism, they also drove me back to my old religion, Christianity. In my wanderings since I left Romblon, I have come to realize that man has a soul longing for a home. His soul made Espino a gypsy like the wind wandering in his poetry. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, although an atheist, was no exception. He was a gypsy soul.

         Our soul has kept on driving us in search for meaning, whether we live in a craggy hill in some remote villages or in the jungles of modern sky crappers in some mega cities, probably to remind us that this world is not our home.

The tragedy that befalls us

(The Saudi Gazette, 15 October 2002)

Reading the papers last Wednesday, I was struck by an article which carried an interview with movie director Jose Javier Reyes who talked about his plans to migrate to other countries, possibly Canada, because of his disappointments with what’s going on in our homeland.

            I presume that many Filipinos in the Kingdom have read the article on the entertainment page of Saudi Gazette’s Variety section, but for those who have missed it the interview was mostly on Javier’s opinion about the opposition’s plan to draft movie actor Fernando Poe Jr. as its standard bearer in the 2004 elections.

            Reyes was civil enough not to say outright that Poe, or FPJ as he is popularly known, is not a good presidential timber but you can read between the lines that he was against the idea. He said, “I think the fact that he is not into politics is a drawback and I am worried for him because of the viciousness of Philippine politics.”

            Reyes struck me as a man from the movie industry who talks more sense – and with more compassion and decency – than most of our politicians whose drive for wealth and power has made them act like gaudy entertainers – and gangsters, if I may say – in the movie industry than as statesmen they are supposed to be.

            Reyes was right to worry about Poe “because of the viciousness of Philippine politics” for, indeed, politics in our country has strayed from its classic definition as the art of governing to the art of sowing mayhem. The opposition’s plan to persuade Poe to throw his hat into the political arena is a vicious political maneuver that serves no purpose at all than to take Malacanang, the seat of power, at call cost.

            If Poe accepts the draft and wins in the 2004 elections – and his chances of winning is undeniably high – it would be difficult to imagine how he would handle even the president’s simplest duty as meeting the leaders of other countries. Unlike his buddy Joseph Estrada, who has displayed raw guts – and brawn – since he became town mayor of San Juan in Marcos’s time, Poe is as meek as a lamb with a political awareness that did not go beyond tinsel town politics.

            It was reported that when President Gloria Arroyo tried to strike a conversation with Poe during a movie festival at Malacanang last month, the king of Philippine movies was at a loss on what to say. Given that as a background, I can imagine how Poe would grope for words to keep a conversation with, say, US President George W. Bush or Malaysian strongman Mohammad Mahathir if he becomes president.

            But the purpose of this column is not to judge or disparage Poe. We can speculate but we can never tell how Poe or his handlers would go about any given situation until the situation arises. To borrow a cliché, there are many ways to skin a cat. Probably, his handlers can let someone else do the president’s job for Poe and make him a ceremonial leader. The range of speculation is wide and endless.

            When I used the hypothetical case it was to stress a point that our politicians have ceases to include other people’s welfare – neither that of Poe nor ours, in this case – when they make political decisions. I still have to hear an opposition politician say that they are drafting Poe because he would be a good president. All I hear is that he can beat Arroyo hands down.

            But then our politicians, like race horses, are not trained to pause and sniff the scent of flowers, so to speak, but to win. They are a breed of people who think that other people are nothing but tools – either as voters or supporters – to be manipulated in their mindless quest for power.

            I understand Reyes’s concern if Poe is pressured into joining politics, which is not his natural habitat. Forcing the shy Poe to join the political fray in 2004 is like putting a dear in the company of wolves or an angel in the company of thieves.

            The apathy of our politicians toward the people is a reality that we have been forced to bear, with unheeded grumbling, for a long time. It is a political reality that drove the masses to the arms of Estrada, a prize-winning actor who was as good at creating an illusion of genuine concern for them.

            That brings us to the other part of the article on Reyes – his plan to move to Canada or any other country, a plan he has momentarily put on hold, he said, for the sake of his sick mother but was considering to pursue if the situation in our country does not change for the better.

            The part of the interview struck me with a sense of depression because I shared his feelings, his dilemma. And I know many Filipinos do. Like Reyes, my wife and I often think of migrating to Canada, New Zealand or elsewhere in Europe because we have trepidation in our hearts that our five-year-old child has no future in our country.

            I think that is a feeling shared by the Filipino workers in Iraq who refuse to heed our government’s advice to leave in the face of an imminent US attack and in the Ivory Coast where there is a civil strife. Their defiance strikes a surreal realization that many of us would prepare to risk death than go back to the Philippines.

            It is sad that our economy is in bad shape but I think it’s not the primary reason that gives us a sense of hopelessness. It is our politicians’ endless and senseless bickering because we know that they are not clawing each other for our sake.

            It is pathetic that those who fell from power, along with Estrada, are now exposing every graft in government but had conspired to block the presentation of evidence against him during his impeachment trial at the Senate.

            We are supposed to thank them for their vigilance, but as the popular expression puts it, thanks but no thanks because we know that they are doing all those not to clean up the government but to score political points for the next balloting.

            The tragedy that befalls our country is that our politicians, who are supposed to lead us in solving our problems, have become our biggest problem.

Strangers in our own country

( The Saudi Gazette, 25 January 2003)

Two items which appeared on this page last week prompted me to ponder about our wanderings as migrant workers. One was a photograph showing Filipino women in an employment agency seeking job placement overseas. The other was the news report about how Filipino families back home are slashing their spending on food to stretch the family budget for other basic necessities like fuel, electricity and water.

            The two items underscored how difficult life has become in our country. The queue of overseas jobseekers had given flesh to the government statistics that more than 2,000 Filipinos leave the country everyday for greener pastures in some foreign lands. Those who have seen the photograph, which appeared on this page Tuesday last week, could have felt a sense of empathy with the jobseekers.

            We have had our own shares of experiences similar to theirs before we came to our new jobsites in the Kingdom. Many of us had queued outside job placement agencies in Manila or other key cities in the archipelago, braving the scorching sun and eating banana cue for lunch with high hopes that life would turn for the better when we find our dream jobs overseas.

            My own family did feel the pinch of hard times before I came to Jeddah in1999. Although we had made it a point not to miss paying our electricity bills because we knew that Meralco would have cut our power line with neither pity nor compunction a few days after the bill is due, we did miss on several occasions paying our telephone bills and our monthly amortization for our housing loan from the Social Security System.

            There had been times when I felt sorry for my wife while we watched our one-year-old child enjoy her “chicken joy” at Jollibee while neither of us took anything because we could not afford to order meals for ourselves after buying our weekly groceries at SM supermarket. I felt self-pity when I had to rummage the shoe racks at Shoe Mart in 1998 hoping to find a pair of shoes for P200 or a little more – at a time when a decent pair of kids’ shoes cost at least P500 – to replace a worn out pair I was wearing.

            I had known hard times after my father died when I was 13. I call myself a self-made man with a sense of pride, having made my way through college on my own, first as a construction laborer and then as a security guard, after I left my uncle’s household in Romblon to follow my stars elsewhere. But it is different when one faces trying times alone than when he wrestles with them to fend for a family.

            Alone I had slept on piles of plywood at construction jobsites with nary a care on whether I would breathe my last that night. I was living for myself with no family to worry about. But we all know that it would be different when we have families to look after. We have to feather the nest and see to it that our households have decent meals on the dinning table. Alone, we can be reckless gladiators taunting death; with our families depending on us, we become cautious knights taking the risks only when necessary.

            That brings me to a dinner I had with Jun Anabo, a college classmate in Manila whom I met by chance a few months ago in a hospital where my wife and I took our child for treatment of her coughing. We talked about life in general – life in college, our hopes when we were young and how difficult times had become back home after our economy had collapsed since the time of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

            It was time to hark back to the days of yore when we were young journalism students who had set up our own campus newsletter because we felt that the official school publication was not serving the interest of the students but those of the school administration and Marcos’s.

            We belonged to a group of students who took seriously our share of social burden to help change our corrupt social and political system. It was at a time when migration to other countries, mainly to the United States, was the domain of doctors and nurses. It was a time when I felt that our doctors and nurses who migrated to the US had no sense of patriotism.

            Over dinner at Shawly restaurant in Balad, we laughed at how we had lost the conviction to fight for a better country. Like most idealist students in our time, we have been gobbled by the same system we had wanted to change. The traditional politicians, whom we had despised like plagues, won and have continued to dominate the political landscape back home.

            Also over dinner, Jun and I talked about migrating to other countries before Saudization catches up with us. That night we were not the young gladiators we used to be. We were cautious old knights plotting a retreat to some foreign lands, forlorn that we had to leave our own homeland after it has been plundered by our politicians whose dreams could not go beyond basking in the glory of wealth and power.

            That Tuesday night was a bitter-sweet reminder that I have long shed off any illusion that I still have a burning fervor of a patriot in me, no matter if the government keeps on telling us, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), that we are heroes because our remittances have helped prop up our ailing economy. I am an OFW but I am not a hero. I did not come here out of my sense of patriotism but as a husband and a father who wanted to see a new dawn for my family, no matter if that dawn unfolds in some other countries.

            I have come to terms with reality. Like millions of our compatriots who had left our homeland for greener pastures in other parts of the world, I have hitched my family’s wagon to a caravan of Filipino migrant workers who have become strangers in our own country.

                                                                        The Saudi Gazette, 25 January 2003

Pilgrims to the life beyond

(The Saudi Gazette, 5 July 2003

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My apologies for skipping to write this column last Tuesday. My computer hanged for a few days after we had moved to a new home near the International Philippine School in Jeddah (IPSJ) where our six-year-old daughter is enrolled. I am a caveman when it comes to computers. So when my computer bogged down last week, I was helpless until a friend, Jun Moran, who doesn’t really know much about computers but has an aptitude in tinkering with electronic machines, tried his hand on my machine. The cursor moved by accident when he switched the computer off and on.

            We had decided to move to a new home out of necessity, as it is often – if not always – the reason why people keep on moving from one place to another. Over the past three years we had been living in a neighborhood at the back of the new Danube supermarket on Arbaeen Street which is quite far from the school. Because I don’t have a car, we wanted to cut on transportation costs and spend more time at home so that my wife could prepare lunch early and do other household chores in between while I loaf, read, write or surf the internet before going to work after lunch.

            Moving to a new home is not easy. It is not only the physical act of moving appliances and wardrobes that makes it an ordeal. We had hired people to move all these things for us. But there’s the emotional drag that makes leaving an old familiar place daunting. A few days before we left I suffered from tension diarrhea. Probably it was because I was afraid of what lies ahead of us in the new place, in the same way that we fear death when, like a couch potato, we are living comfortable lives.

            Our moving to a new home reminds me of the days when I had to make a big decision after I was offered my job at the Saudi Gazette. There was that same emotional drag that made me procrastinate for quite a time. Although I did not have any doubt that I needed the job to keep life comfortable for my family, it took me three months to make up my mind. I did not want to leave my family behind even for a year as well as my job as a subeditor for the newspaper Today because I had like the paper’s working ambience.

            But life is a story of how man adapts to his environment. As we have learned to suit our ways to our new life in the Kingdom, my family has learned to adjust to some difficult situations in our new home. Unlike in the old place where water was aplenty, we have to stock up on it now because in many areas around IPSJ water is a problem, particularly in summer. In such a situation I try to get philosophical that life is full of compromises. As my philosophy professor would love to say, “You cannot eat your cake and have it.”

            In a larger sense, moving to a new home reminds me of life itself, of our pilgrimage to the live beyond. We have been gypsies all our lives, moving from one place to another out of necessity. How many times had we moved to some new places in our own homeland before we came to the Kingdom? When I was a child my family moved from Bacolod City to Cebu City where my father, a government employee, was reassigned. When he died in Bacolod City after he retired, my sister and I had to move to Romblon to join my uncle’s household.

            We are gypsies not only in flesh but also in our soul. We keep on moving from one place to another not only in the physical world but also in astral space. Unlike the ordinary animals that have no cares but to graze from place to place, we know how to dream, to hitch our wagon to a star, if I may borrow a line from the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. We can think of the cosmos and beyond, we were given the instinct to think of the infinite possibilities of life.

            We are restless souls who are not contented with what we are and what we have. We always look up to other people who we think are better than us and – consciously or subconsciously – wish that we were in their shoes. We want to have what our neighbors have, even if we do not need the things they own. We have an empty space in our hearts that we always want to fill, a void that keeps on driving us to crave for wealth, power and fame. Is this empty space part of the human mechanism to remind us that life is meaningless without Him?

            It is this sense of emptiness that drives our politicians back home to hang on to power for as long as they can, even if that means committing crimes to get ahead in life and even if they know that they have become irrelevant to the lives of people they profess to serve but exploit hideously. It is this sense of emptiness that prompted Charles Carlson, the special counsel of former US president Richard Nixon, to leave politics when he started to see its bareness and took up his ministry for Christ.

            Whether we are religious or not, there is an empty spot in our being that we may never understand, much less manage, if we don’t pause for a while and take a closer look at life until we realize that we have been pursuing not life itself but its palavers, until we realize that we are not lost gypsies but homing pilgrims whose dreams ought to be lofty enough to rise beyond our graves.  

                                                                                      The Saudi Gazette, 5 July 2003

Home is where the purse is

In January last year, the young couple Dennis and Mylene del Rosario took their six-year-old son Daryl Mikko with them to Jeddah after a month-long vacation in the Philippines.

It was two years after Mylene followed her husband to Saudi Arabia. The couple took Daryl to Jeddah to find out if the child – whom they had left to the care of Dennis’s parents when Mylene left the Philippines in 1999 – could adjust to life in the Kingdom.

“If Daryl could adjust to life here, he had to keep him here, If he wanted to go back we were prepared to send him back,” says Mylene, a 27-year-old nurse working at the King Faisal Hospital.

“It could have been tragic if he had chosen to go back. It could have been very painful for us to bring him back to the Philippines and return to Jeddah without him.

“To our astonishment – and our relief – he liked it here. Like the Saudis, he liked to be awake at night and sleep on daytime. He even liked Arabian food; in fact his favorite until now is the yellow rice.”

As an added bonus, the decision to stay came from the six-year-old himself the couple remembers how the child almost pleaded with them to let him stay before the opening of Philippine schools last June.

“Sana dito na lang ako para magkasama tayo (I wish I could stay here so we could be together),” Dennis quoted Daryl as saying when they asked him if he wanted to study in the Philippines.

Daryl is currently a kindergarten-two pupil at the International Philippine School in Jeddah (IPSJ) where the Gazette interviewed the couple.

The del Rosarios are among the thousands of Filipino migrant workers who have decided to bring their families with them to the countries where they have found better-paying jobs.

The migration of OFWs, or overseas Filipino workers, is replete with stories of untold sacrifices by each worker who spends sleepless nights staring blankly at the ceiling of his room or of mothers leaving their kids to the care of the father or relatives while working as nannies for children not their own.

In the worst case scenario, overseas employment is a tapestry of tragic stories about families about families breaking up while one spouse or both spouses are working abroad. Since the migration of Filipino workers started in the late 1970s, it has become commonplace to hear about a husband or wife looking for comfort in other’s arms or about kids going wayward for lack of parental supervision.

While overseas employment brings financial rewards to the families of many workers, it has its own downside. It is against this backdrop that many workers bring their families to the countries where they work.

The del Rosarios decided to take Daryl with them to Jeddah when they started to feel that their long absence had weakened their child’s bonding with them.

“When we talked to Daryl on the phone when he was still in the Philippines, we feel that we were becoming strangers to him, nawawala yung bonding. Para bang ibang tao na kami sa kanya. (the bonding was thinning out, it’s like we were no longer his parents),” says Mylene.

The gap became pronounced during Daryl’s first month of stay in Jeddah. The couple remembers how Daryl would use references like “sa amin” (at home or back home) when he talked of his days in Cabanatuan City where they del Rosario came from and referred to Dennis’s parents as his daddy and mommy.

1. “He would say ‘sa amin’ daddy and mommy would often take me out at night,” Mylene recalls. “Or paglaki ko gusto kong maging tulad ni daddy (When I grow up I want to be like daddy), in reference to Dennis’s father who is a lawyer, a city prosecutor.”

“It was like we were not part of him, like we were not his parents. There was something in the way he said ‘sa amin’ which made us feel we were becoming like strangers to him.”

For Jun and Marissa Bunao, the decision to take the family to Jeddah came in 1998, a year after Jun, an electronics engineer, moved here to work with the German company Siemens.

“He got me and (one-year-old daughter) Maxine on a trial basis,” Marissa says. Because she was working as an administrative staff at the Philippine Heart Center in Quezon City, she has to file an indefinite leave of absence from her job.

It took a long time for Marissa to decide whether to bring the whole family to Jeddah and had extended her leave three times until the Heart Center, a hospital specializing in heart cases, asked her to make a definite decision. “I was reluctant to leave my job, my career,” she muses.

In April last year, fate made the decision for the family – their rented house on J. Marzan Street near Espana in Manila’s Sampaloc district was in a block of houses which went up in smoke in an afternoon blaze that started in the neighborhood.

“Nawalan ng choices (We lost our choices). All our belongings – furniture, appliances, jewelry and even clothes – were gone with the house,” Marissa recalls.

The couple were forced to take their two other children – Joseph Raphael, then 11, and Earle Randolph, 6, who were left in the care of Marissa’s mother in Manila. Along with Maxine, the two other children are currently enrolled at the IPSJ.

Like many other Filipino parents who have decided to raise their children in the Kingdom, the Bunaos and the del Rosarios have to make so many adjustments in their home away from home.

For Marissa and Mylene, who came from middle-class families in the Philippines and were used to having maids to do the household chores, the adjustment period was a trying experience.

“Back in the Philippines you don’t have to worry about cleaning the house or washing the clothes because the maids do the chores for you. And, also because my mother was with us, I didn’t have to worry about what food to cook. She planned the menus for us,” says Marissa.

“In Manila, when I arrived home from work I would go straight to the bedroom for a rest, then check the children’s homework and asked them about their activities in school.”

Like the del Rosarios, the Bunaos pay much attention to the education of their children, who are on the top ten of their classes. “That puts more pressure on us,” says

Marissa who has decided not to work anymore to take care of the children full time. “Parenting is like a high-wire balancing between housekeeping and looking after the children.”

Mylene finds her role as a working mother more daunting. When Dennis left in 1997, she and Daryl stayed with his family in Cabanatuan City. Since the family has maids, she only had Daryl to look after.

“Mabait ang mga in-laws ko (My in-laws are good to me) and I did not have to worry about the household chores. Dennis’s daddy and mommy treated me like I was their own daughter. That’s why I had to make so many adjustments when I came here – and even now,” says Mylene.

“Sa Pilipinas senorita ka, dito hindi pwede (In the Philippine, you live like a princess. Not here). Dennis and I have to do things we did not have to do back home – cleaning the house, washing the clothes and cooking food,” she laughs.

The household chores are just half the difficulties. Since both spouses are working nurses, parenting and looking after Daryl’s studies take the other half. Whoever is at home in the morning takes Daryl to school for his 8 am to 11 am classes and do the household chores in between.

“Usually, we sleep only about four to five hours a day,” muses Dennis who works at the King Khalid National Guard Hospital. “After work we have to budget our time between doing the household chores and helping Daryl with his studies. It’s difficult, but it’s the price we have to pay.”

Mylene says she often doses off while helping out Daryl with his school lessons and that she and Dennis make up for the lost sleep only during their days off and on weekends when Daryl has no classes.

Despite the difficulties, the del Rosarios have never thought of bringing back Daryl, who is on the top-five of his class, to live with Dennis’s parents in the Philippines.

“It’s out of the question. Our being together is worth the sacrifices,” says Dennis. Bats in Mylene: “You worry more when your child is not with you, so it is better that he stays with us.”

Over the past few months, Pepito and She Rodriquez have been working to get the visa of their two children – Princess, 6, and Coleen, 2 – so they could bring the kids to Jeddah when they take their vacation in summer.

She, a teacher at the IPSJ, and her husband have decided to get their children so they would stop worrying on how the kids are growing up in their absence. Both of them came to Jeddah in 2000 – he in July and she in October.

“Ang napapansin ko kapag kausap mo sila sa phone, parang nagiging iba na ang ugali ng mga bata, lalo na ‘yung panganay. Parang na-spoiled (I have noticed that when we talk to them on the phone, their attitude seems to have changed, specially the older child. It’s like they are getting spoiled,” says She.

“So ang naging tanong namin: hindi kaya mahirap na lumalaki ang bata na malayo sa atin? (The question that keeps on nagging us, isn’t it a problem that our children are growing up without us?).”

The question puts to sharp focus one mundane reality which many migrants have known pretty well – that home is not a matter of geography, it isn’t any particular place at all. Home is in the heart – and where the purse is.

Saudi Gazette, 31 January 2002

The Sarah Balabagan story

Down south where golden pineapples bask in the sun and where minarets of mosques point gallantly towards the sky is the land of promise Mindanao.

And on this island, in Sultan Kudarat in Maguindanao, a girl named Sarah Balabagan nursed a modest dream common to Filipinos seeking greener pastures in foreign lands – to help an impoverished family make both ends meet.

With youthful abandon and faked papers, she pursued her dream in 1994 and headed for the United Arab Emirates, one of the oil-rich countries in the Middle East.

Three years later, she came back home, with 100 lashes on her back and 10 months in prison behind her and a sordid memory of an elderly man she had stabbed 32 times when he tried to rape her.

The demure but determined Iranon girl lost her childhood – and nearly missed her puberty – when she left the village of Simuay to escape the pangs of poverty.

She came home a celebrity and “richer” by P1.2 million, a fortune she could have never dreamed of when she was a child. But the fortune did not come in the way she could have wished in her heart to happen.

“Maliit pa lang ako inisip ko na ang magtrabaho sa ibang bansa (In thought of working abroad since I was a child),” she said in an interview when she dropped by Today two days before she went home to Simuay on Monday.

“Nakita ko ang kahirapan ng pamilya namin, lalo na ng nanay ko. Gusto kong makatulong sa kanila at saka makapag-ipon para makapagnegsoyo (I saw the ordeal my family had suffered, especially my mother. I wanted to help my family and save for a small business).”

It did not occur to her that she was leaving for a Middle East country where rapes are a newspaper fodder. “Wala akong takot (I knew no fear),” she declared.

Prodded to explain why she was not afraid, she added: “Kung may mangyari sa iyo, mangayri ‘yun kahit saan ka pupunta (If something is going to happen to you, it will happen wherever you go).”

She visited Today on Saturday last week in a black T-shirt over a pair blue jeans she wore when she came back to Manila from Dubai a week before.

Prettier in person than on the television screen and her photographs in the newspapers, Sarah carries herself with a demeanor that gives no hint that she was a housemaid.

Unlike the typical poor country lass, Sarah doesn’t grovel in the presence of anyone. Never displaying an air of haughtiness either, she looks like a wholesome next-door teenager in a middle-class neighborhood.

When she dropped by Today, her rotten front teeth had been fixed by her dentist and she had abandoned her trademark habit of capping her mouth with her palm when she smiles.

With her one-liner answer to every question, mostly yes or no, she was an ordeal – if not a nightmare – for a journalist to interview. It takes extra prodding to make her answer go beyond a sentence.

In Simuay, which gave her a heroine’s welcome when she came home on Monday, Sarah – the fourth to the eldest and one of two girls among seven siblings – is “Papao,” her nickname in the Iranon tongue, which means beloved.

Her childhood was a story of poverty. When she was three years old, she left the Balabagan’s one-bedroom home to stay with her maternal aunt, Saimona Sumagayan, who owned a small sari-sari store.

“Nagbabantahy ako ng tindahan at tumutulong sa gawaing bahay (I tended my aunt’s store and helped in the household chores,” she recalls.

At times she helped make hallow blocks for pocket money. She lived with her Aunt Saimona until she left for Dubai at age 14.

Life was harsh in Simuay where – as the village folk would put it – gravel is bread and sand is butter, in reference to gathering sand and gravel from the Simuay River as a cottage industry.

The Simuay River, which is near her aunt’s house, has a special place in Sarah’s heart. She recalled how she and her friends would cut classes to take a dip in its cool waters.

When the crew of the television news program, Saksi, went to Simuay to make a special report on her, Sarah wanted to take them to the river after telling them proudly that she and her friends used to take a bath there.

Like may school children in remote barrios, Sarah have had her share of playing hokey with her classmates. She probably enjoyed being carefree so much so that she dropped out of school when she was in fifth grade at the Simuay Junction Elementary School. But she was good in class, she said, and her teachers thought that she could have made it to the honor roll if she were serious in her studies.

After her bad experience in Dubai, she wants to go back to school and take up law. “Nakikita ko na iba talaga ang may pinag-aralan (I see the advantage of being an educated person),” she said.

When she came back to Simuay on Monday, her former teachers led in preparing the welcome program at the Simuay Junction Elementary School where relatives and friends showered her with hugs and kisses.

At the rites, her classmate Farida Landukan made a remarkable comment about her. “Ang laki ng pinagbago ni Sarah. Dati mahiyain siya (at) hindi marunong humarap sa tao ((Sarah has changed a lot. She used to be very shy and did not know how to mix with people).”

Journalist who followed her when she returned to Simuay noted that in the way she dressed up and mixed with her people, Sarah did not seem to belong there anymore.

Maybe Sarah herself did not feel she still belongs to Simuay. She wants to continue her studies in Manila and will be back in the city in a few weeks to “iron out things” in preparation for her studies next year.

Like many indigenous Muslims who had left Mindanao, Sarah could have felt that the future in the land of promise down south does not belong to the plain folk like her but to the warlords carving fiefdoms with the barrels of their guns, the politicians, the shrewd entrepreneurs and the multinationals bleeding the region’s resources dry.

At least now, Sarah had a fairly substantial trust fund. While she was in jail, a non-government organization in France launched a fund-raising campaign and raised P1.2 million for her while its government and the whole world lobbied for her release on the ground that she stabbed dead her employer in defense of her honor.

When she came back to Manila from Dubai, business tycoon William Gatchalian promised to raise another P1 million for her, besides his promise to foot her education bills. Senate President Neptali Gonzales also promised to shoulder her expenses until she takes up law.

At least three Manila movie companies and a German filmmaker want to film her life story. One of the Filipino movie outfits was reported to have offered P5 million for the right to her story.

Hers was a fairy tale story with a cliffhanger plot that took her to the threshold of death and melted the hearts of people across the world. It is a story that also opened a small widow to a greater truism that the future is not fixed by any man but is written in the stars by an invisible hand.

Today, 14 August 1996

Nostalgia for simple living

(The Saudi Gazette, 15 July 2003)

Reading the June 30-July 7 issue of Newsweek makes me nostalgic about a small village in Romblon where I spent my adolescent years. The issue featured scientific advances in the field of medicine and some major technological inventions such as, hold your breath, “a coat that will make you – and many other things – look invisible.”

Let me start with the coat which was the subject of an article titled “Disappearing Act.” The article opened with a question: “Who hasn’t wanted to spy on others without being seen himself?” Answering his own query, writer Kay Itoi, continued: “Nobody, which is why Susumu Tachi’s new invention – an invisible cloak – makes waves” when he “he had one of his students put on the cloak and turn semitransparent …”

Tachi, a professor of information physics and computing at the University of Tokyo, was not trying to invent a gadget that would make the world’s spies invisible and become more effective in the cloak-and-dagger game but was working on a technology called “optical camouflage” to hide unsightly things, make people see through walls or “project outside landscape on the walls of a windowless room.”

The key to optical camouflage, the article said, is “retro-reflected material which sends light rays directly back toward their source.” The way I understand it, it is the same technology used to make the paints on the vests of our traffic cops luminous at night. The difference is that, in the case of the traffic vest, the technology is applied in reverse to make paints visible rather than transparent.

Another article was about an experiment to knock out cells of rodents to determine which genes were linked to some particular diseases or disorders so that medical scientists could develop drugs for their prevention or cure. That experiment in genetics engineering gives rise to their hopes to develop anti-aging drugs. One article was on brain imaging which researches believe may later reveal the “qualities that make us human.”

There were other interesting articles on designer babies, temperate-region plants being bred to adapt to tropical climate and textile being developed to wire it to some electronic gadgets so that one can do household chores like a servant while the master relaxes on a sofa or bed – an excellent formula to encourage laziness for the hurried modern man? I haven’t read many of them for lack of time, which brings me to the subject that I wanted to voice out as I read some of the articles.

The articles gave me the itch to write about our dormant realization that the world has become too complicated and too compartmentalized that we could no longer see the importance of what other people are doing or thinking. Our conversations nowadays are more focused on our own jobs, our cars and the latest appliances or electronic gadgets we have bought but seldom – if not never – about literature, arts and humanities.

Technological advances have come up with so many consumer products and services that force us to focus our attention on making more money to buy the latest gadgets or services that pop up in the market. The inventions are supposed to make things – and life – easier for us. Ironically, the more we try to make life easy for us, the more we complicate our lives.

The textile being developed to be wired to household gadgets and appliances so that one can do other things while he relaxes on the sofa when he arrives home from work proves this point. Industrialization has made our lives hurried that we have to hire other people to keep our homes clean, our lawns trimmed and invent gadgets to make us relax. We have brought the news to our living room as soon as they happen, but what monumental difference does it make to our lives?

I am not trying to disprove that man’s inventions are useless. Many of them are very useful, although there are some which I think are junks, particularly those in the realm of fashion. It would be difficult to stand the heat, particularly here in Saudi Arabia, if we have not invented the air-conditioner. The airplane has made travel faster. The internet has made it easy for us to communicate with kith and kin on the other parts of the world.

These inventions have become a necessity as we make our lives more complex.

This subject, of course, is not new. Many writers have talked about the rat race in the cities. At the home front, Filipino poet Virgilio Almario has written about this in his Tagalog poems or tula. But, alas, how many of us have read Almario? I myself haven’t read in full a single Almario poem, although I have read some reviews about his poetry. It is because I, too, have become a hurried man.

That brings me back to the rustic life in the farming village of Ginablan. In my youth, I hated farm work during the planting and harvest season and the idle months in between which I spent tending a herd of carabaos on hilly grasslands. I took for granted the beautiful sights of the turquoise sea or the colorful sunsets I saw almost every day.

I dreamt of the good life in the city and the lure of its neon lights, not knowing that I would be trapped in a vicious cycle that revolves around nowhere but in making money to feed our insatiable wants.

The Saudi Gazette, 15 July 2003

Snapshots of life

(The Saudi Gazette, 17 December 2002)

One news item which appeared in this page last Wednesday pricked the sentimental side of me. It’s about babies dying at the state-run Philippine General Hospital everyday because their parents could not afford to buy medicines to save their lives.

On the top of the story was a news item about Imelda Marcos standing trial for dollar salting during the 20-year-role of her late husband Ferdinand Marcos. It had an accompanying photograph showing her being cordoned by a retinue of bodyguards as she waded through a sea of adoring supporters.

The news item about Imelda suggested that she could be jailed for 12 to 20 years if convicted but I felt no compassion for her. I know that her prospect of going to jail is slim, if not nil. She is facing more than a dozen other cases in court for over two decades now but none of them has prospered.

Imelda’s story tells of how the rich and the mighty in our country can go about town taunting the law as much as the flaunt their wealth while the poor, whose number is fast expanding at the base of our social pyramid, are losing the fight even for their right to survive.

Unlike the poor who are easily incarcerated for slight wrongdoings, the rich and the mighty seldom go to jail. There are some who did but they are more of an exception than the rule. They include former congressman Romeo Jalosjos, former town mayor Antonio Sanchez and businessman Rolito Go. Their cases are a matter of bad luck, or hubris. I think hubris is the more appropriate term.

The most recent case to illustrate how the rich and the mighty in our country can go around our laws is that of the power firm Meralco. Found guilty of overcharging the public, the Supreme Court ordered it only to refund the estimated P28 billion it has cheated from the power consumers. It was not penalized, and neither were its owners nor corporate officials charged with theft.

Adding insult to injury, the government appears to be rewarding the firm for its wrongdoing. The last report we heard about the case was that the Energy Regulatory Board was inclined to allow the firm to raise its power rates while it is refunding the “stolen” amount, which will not be returned in cash but deducted from the monthly bills of the power consumers.

The situation would have been different if an ordinary Juan dela Cruz is caught to have installed a jumper to his electric meter. He can be charged with qualified theft for stealing electricity. Needless to say, his chance of going to jail is great because, most likely, he is poor and could not afford to hire even a mediocre lawyer.

In the poor man’s case neither our laws nor our government would have compassion for him even if he is the sole breadwinner in the family because his household is not a corporate entity, whose closure is always presumed to have forebodings for the economy.

I think that explains why I waxed sentimental when I read about the helpless babies dying at the Philippine General Hospital. Not born with silver spoons in their mouth, so to speak, they have lost even their right to survive.

There was no picture to accompany the story but the description about doctors and nurses fighting “emotional battles each day while watching a baby dies” was as graphic as a photograph.

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