'Tibak Rising'

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

Great title, great cover, great stories—ours.

The book launch last Saturday of “Tibak Rising: Activism in the Days of Martial Law” (Anvil Publishing) was a very well-attended reunion of sorts. What synchronicity, one might say, because while typhoon Ferdie was blowing and causing floods in some parts of Metro Manila, the book being launched, edited by Ferdinand “Ferdie” C. Llanes, has much to do with the 14-year martial rule (1972 to 1986) of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship that caused tens of thousands of deaths and disappearances and untold suffering among those who fought back.

While we all laughed at the convergence of the Ferdies, there was no stopping the flooding of memories about comradeship, struggle, pain, close encounters, death and even romance in the time of terror and in fields of battle.

“Tibak Rising” is a collection of 46 vignette-like stories by 39 writers. The stories are varied—serious, funny, personal, heart-rending. My piece is on page 128. One other piece I wrote (a funny one) had to be dropped because of space constraints but, who knows, there might be a second volume. This first volume—five years in the making—is just a foretaste of more stories to come.

Editor Llanes, a professor at the University of the Philippines and a commissioner of the National Historical Commission, and Joel Saracho, theater actor and president of T’bak Inc., collected the stories from far and near and put them together in a neat compilation enhanced by photos of yesteryears. If you were a tibak (short for aktibista or activist), the book is something you would hold close to your heart. The stories are familiar, if not similar to yours, the persons and places might be known to you, the events still burning in your memory.

Inquirer columnist and UP professor Michael L. Tan, himself a tibak in the health sector in those days, said in his foreword: “The Tibak stories remind us there’s more to transformation than slogans and the grim and determined politics of the streets (or the hills).

“We find friendships and camaraderies built even in detention, not just among prisoners but with the soldiers. History books tend to gloss over the details of everyday life; life histories capture the warmth and color of these encounters. On a sad note, the stories also highlight the irony of events that unfolded later, of former bosom friends becoming bitter enemies, of paranoia turning comrade against comrade.”

Wrote editor Llanes: “It was this generation that bridged the movement of the ‘flower generation’/First Quarter Storm and that of Edsa’s yellow forces … Indeed, in spite of its historic role and sacrifices, this generation seems virtually nameless in the pages of the national narrative or on the templates of the national consciousness, something like looking for Eman Lacaba’s ‘lost generation’ or Carlos Bulosan’s ‘subterranean subways of suffering.’ Collecting these stories … to bring out the big picture is an important though tedious task in writing a holistic, more just narrative of the nation.”

Llanes sadly added: “It was this generation that bore the brunt of killings, detention, torture and forced disappearances instigated by the State’s military and police forces. And then in a twist of deep irony, it was also this generation that had to (experience) death and suffering in the hands of its own leadership, an ideological mindset ossified in a schema of dogma and adventurism.”

The narratives in the book are grouped into varied aspects of tibak life—Transitions, Prison and Beyond, Friendships, Picket Lines, Icons and Symbols, Brave Moments, Turning Points, One’s Life for the People. Each chapter begins with a collage of photographs and an introduction. The story titles are so enticing, the stories cry out to be read. Here are some:

“The ‘Political Economy’ of Prison Pendants” by Ed de la Torre. “‘May Panahon’ as ‘Awit ng Petiburgis’” by Bong Romulo (with the lyrics of the song and guitar chords supplied). “2205 Cinco de Junio (o, nang muntikang maging ‘kandidatong kasapi’ si Nanay)” by Joel Saracho. “Gastambide” by Sibyl Jade Pena.

“Battle Queens” by Gilda Cordero-Fernando. “Lino Brocka and the 1985 Arrest” by Behn Cervantes. “Close(t) Encounters Inside the CCP” by Joey Flora. “Ka Popsing, ‘Toilet Brigade’ at Skateboard Supporter, at iba pang mga Tauhan sa Piketlayn ng Anson’s” by Leila Yap-Aboga. “Pregnant Mom on the Run” by Erlina Timbreza-Valerio. “A Bullet-Riddled Jacket and a Rosary” by Sanya Rusiana. And many more.

Edith Burgos, widow of press icon Joe Burgos and mother of missing activist Jonas, said it so well during the launch, that reading the book was like finding a community. Yes, because the stories and characters, though separate from one another in terms of time, distance and circumstances—and noms de guerre notwithstanding—are actually intertwined and have a point of convergence.

No wonder the book launch felt like a community/family come together. It was interesting to note that those at the gathering were mostly former activists, U.G. characters if you may, who are now in the mainstream, a number of them working in government institutions. I wondered if there were F.T.s present. Read the brief notes on the writers at the end of the book and see where they are now and how far they’ve gone.

Many more stories can be told, said Llanes. “The task therefore carries on—as continuing narrative and as celebration.”

So what are you waiting for? If you belong to the tibak generation and have a story to tell (1,000 to 2,000 words), e-mail it to me and I’ll pass it on to T’bak Inc. Contributors to “Tibak Rising” can claim their complimentary copies from Anvil (5709993, look for Jo Pantorillo). The books are now in bookstores (price: P495).

Killer of dreams

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

If this week you noticed the subject of suicide tackled quite often in the media, it’s because the World Health Organization (WHO)-Western Pacific Region based in Manila invited journalists (three of us from the Inquirer) for a mini-consultation and discussion on the prevention of this killer.

A topic not often openly discussed, suicide springs up in the media when a celebrity or a well-known person carries it out “successfully.” Or when someone unknown or unlikely (very young, for example) commits suicide in an unusual manner or place, or for very strange reasons.

Sometime during the discussions, I asked if suicide bombers (lots of them out there) were to be tackled, too. No. Maybe a separate consultation on these politically/religiously-motivated suicide acts meant to harm many? If suicide is the result of a mind process gone awry, then suicide bombing is also suicide like any other. Hmm, but I digress.

We discussed suicides by individuals—acting alone or, worse, in a copycat serial manner—who choose to end their lives because of personal reasons, unbearable depression among them. Depression is not the only cause of suicide, by the way.

I have written about suicide a number of times, one about a young, poor girl who was hastily presented by the media as a poster girl of rural poverty but who, it turned out later, had multiple issues weighing on her. And there was the high government official who ended it all with a bullet to the heart, the “honorable” way out for him. What about the lovelorn men who scale the billboards to call out to their lost inamoratas? It takes all kinds.

And there was the foiled suicide of a radio caller that aired live on “Dr. Love Radio Show” of Bro. Jun Banaag OP on dzMM Teleradyo. That was a gripping drama that ended positively because of how many big-hearted people (listeners, taxi drivers, government personnel, radio reporters) pooled efforts to help—without delay—a distraught mother of ailing children who was at the end of her rope. Brother Jun handled the crisis so well I was moved to write about it.

Media intrusion into the private pain of those left behind is always an issue. In shock, are the bereaved equipped to face media curiosity and state facts to end speculation? What is there for the public to learn? Are the media of any help in understanding and prevention? Yes, the media.

The WHO discussions were media-related and not for suicide prevention advocates and health groups who might be well-versed on the subject. My colleagues Rina David and Jocelyn Uy, who were present at the consultation, have already written about the suicide-related issues discussed. Let me stress other useful information.

Do you know that there is a Suicide Prevention Act of 2005? This requires school heads and counselors to collect, monitor and acknowledge all events and parties associated with suicide incidences. This bill has yet to be implemented.

During a group discussion, a journalist spoke about incidence of suicides in a school, but school authorities were tight-lipped. It was difficult to write the story, he said, because no one wanted to be a source of information. Hospital and police records, by the way, do not always state the true causes of deaths.

Suicide reporting is poor, said Dr. Dinah Nadera, a fellow of the Philippine Psychiatric Association. She meant reporting for recording purposes. But if she meant media reporting, she may not be wrong.

One may ask, why the effort to prevent suicides when there are people who want to call it quits? (We’re not talking about euthanasia here.) One could rationalize that a suicide victim would be in “a better place” or beyond pain and suffering. Well, what about the bereaved who will bear the loss, trauma, stigma, guilt and blame? (Thought guilt should never be owned and blame should never be assigned.) Death through suicide diminishes a family and a community in many ways.

On the part of the deceased, there is the death of dreams and unfulfilled possibilities. Same goes for those who truly loved them and hoped in them, they who must move on.

Experts say that among the “protective beliefs” that lower the suicide risk among college students are: spirituality, family support, peer support and positive expectancy.

Common components of national suicide prevention strategies are public awareness, media education, access to services, building community capacity, means restriction, training and research and evaluation.

An interesting highlight of the PowerPoint presentation at the consultation was the one on Don Richie, 84. For almost 50 years he lived across the street from Australia’s most notorious suicide spot, a rocky cliff at the entrance to the Sydney Harbor called The Gap. He has, so far, saved 160 people, according to an official tally, and was among the honored Citizens of the Year 2010.

For suicide prevention advocates and professionals, WHO has a publication “Towards Evidence-Based Suicide Prevention Programmes” that provides basic suicide prevention strategies. It gives details in formulating and evaluating prevention programs. But it stresses that there is no single solution in dealing with suicide in a heterogeneous environment, that is, one size does not fit all, and therefore the need for novel approaches.

For support groups, family members and school personnel, there is the “Suicide First Aid Guidelines for the Philippines” by the Foundation for Advancing Wellness, Instruction and Talents Inc.

Numbers to call in case of suicide threats: 0917-5724673, 0917-5584673, 0917-8524673, 0917-8425673, 2114550, 2111305 and 8937606.

Woman performing C-section on self

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

Here’s something to grossly entertain you before I go into other grosser details. A 1996 Inquirer news brief about a hacking incident could have landed in the Guinness Book of World Records except that…

I have kept the news clipping all these years and always wondered who should be (dis)credited, the writer or the copy editor. I credit them both for making me laugh every time I stumble upon the story in my files. It qualifies to be included in Inquirer Incredibles.

The news brief’s title is “Lover decapitated” and is datelined Bacolod City. It came out on July 12, 1996 (16 years ago today!) on page 21 of your fave newspaper: “An irate husband beheaded his wife’s lover after he caught them making love inside their house in Bago City. The husband said his mind went blank, took a bolo and cut off the man’s head. Headless, the man managed to run around the village and died an hour later. The woman fled and was nowhere to be seen. The husband is now detained at Bago City. Relatives of both the victim and suspect asked that their names be withheld.”

Something about that fourth to the last sentence, if gets mo. LOL?

That almost-Guinness record holder could have beaten this recent almost also-ran, which is no laughing matter. I thought the case of the Filipino woman who performed a Caesarian section on herself last week could qualify for the Guinness. Alas, I read that a Mexican woman had done it in 2000, and unlike the Filipino woman, was able to successfully deliver her baby boy alive and kicking. More on the Mexican and other incredible self-surgeries later.

The Filipino mother, Janice Calipe, 28, a midwife by the way, who attempted a C-section on herself is now recuperating in a hospital. According to news reports, Janice might be charged for performing an abortion, which is a criminal act. Her mental state is now being evaluated by psychiatrists.

Inquirer’s Jeannette I. Andrade wrote: “Using an ordinary kitchen knife and with no anesthetic, the woman slashed open her belly and uterus to remove a baby from her womb Wednesday afternoon and then sewed herself up with a regular needle and thread. Her baby who apparently had reached full term, died as a result of the operation…

“The bizarre incident was discovered at around 1 p.m. Wednesday, inside the woman’s house on Nagtahan Street in Sta. Mesa when the woman’s 39-year-old aunt arrived at their home and found her niece sitting on a blood-covered bed with her abdomen slit and the skin over it apparently sewn together. The lifeless fetus and a kitchen knife she used lay near the woman.”

Dr. Mario Lato of Sta. Ana District Hospital in Manila said that Janice still had to go under the knife to undo the harm she had done on herself. “She was only able to stitch together her skin and did not reach the uterus, which is the reason for the surgery. We removed 250 cc (cubic centimeters) of blood in her abdominal lining.”

What possessed Janice to do such a thing when there are public hospitals nearby? If she was in labor couldn’t she have just waited for the baby to come out? Was it her painful way of getting rid of her full-term baby? But why when there are countless potential adoptive parents out there? Was she really trying to kill her full-term baby? Or was she just trying to bring her baby into this world? If Janice intended to kill herself why did she bother to sew up her gaping abdomen? Did she know about the Mexican woman who had done it?

Janice’s next of kin who had her dead baby hurriedly buried in some corner are in trouble, too. The baby’s remains were exhumed by the police a few days ago. As evidence of an alleged crime committed? What was the crime? Infanticide? Abortion? Putting a baby’s life and one’s own in jeopardy? Women’s rights advocates should have a say on the case.

Janice’s case is different from that of Inez Ramirez Perez of Mexico, who lived with her husband and six children high up in the mountains. Afraid that she might again deliver a dead baby and because her labor took too long, Inez took a gulp of rubbing alcohol and sliced her abdomen open with her husband’s knife. She wanted both herself and her child to live. Passing out several times during the process, Inez was still able to stitch herself up before outside help came.

It’s an incredible story, confirmed by doctors and later featured in the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics. You can read about it on the Internet, see her picture with her growing son and the knife she used.

Four of the “10 Incredible Self-Surgeries” featured in Science & Nature were done by women. Jerri Nielsen, an ER doctor, was stationed in Antarctica when she discovered a lump in her breast. There was no way for her to get out of there in the winter so she performed a biopsy on the lump. She communicated with specialists via e-mail and teleconferencing. Equipment and medical supplies were air-dropped for her use. Scanned specimen was sent to the United States for biopsy which confirmed malignancy. Nielsen had chemotherapy out there in the icy wilderness.

Incredible was British artist and scientific director Amanda Feilding’s procedure called trepanning, which no surgeon wanted to do on her. Feilding used a dental drill on her skull to allow blood to circulate more freely in her head. A write-up says “she lost almost a liter of blood but she was pleased with her surgery. Over the next four hours she noticed herself rising up with a feeling of elation and relaxation. Feilding says, ’I went out and had steak for supper, and then I went to a party’.”

A man (not a Filipino) recently made the news after he sliced off his manly parts and cooked them for the delectation of his friends. That’s self-butchery.

Mentoring the Mentors and K to 12

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

I don’t tire of writing follow-up stories on the Mentoring for Mentors Program (MMP) which is quietly fomenting an education revolution in the city and the countryside. MMP is something I really believe in, not because I witnessed its birth (with Inquirer founding chair Eggie Apostol and Marie Eugenie Institute’s Chinit Rufino pushing and heaving) and I was able to snare in my close friends in the academe who would become among MMP’s pillars today, but because it was a great idea made flesh that quickly took off and took on a life of its own. Yes, to the delight of teachers hungry to feast on something out of the box.

Two weeks ago I was privileged to have lunch with the forces behind MMP—executive director Rufino, national coordinator Evelyn Mejillano (retired University of the Philippines education professor), trainors Celia Adriano and Soledad Francisco (both from UP), Lirio Ongpin Mapa (of the Franklin Covey System) and Elnora Montemayor (who has decades of experience in preschool education at an international school abroad). Mejillano, Adriano and Montemayor have been my close friends for decades.

Also present at the lunch were new trainor-recruits who have been honing their mentoring skills in recent MMP seminars.

The Department of Education’s great leap forward with the K to 12 education program (compulsory kindergarten, seven years in grade school and five in high school) has thrown many schools and teachers off balance and left them groping in the dark. How do they begin?

Let me advertise by saying that MMP can help you back on track. Already, a good number of schools have signed up for an MMP seminar, not only for their K to 12 woes but for something more, which is how best to be a teacher. As I wrote last year, MMP is taking the city and countryside by storm, but quietly. By storm, because it has unleashed much energy and fire from both the catalysts and the catalyzed, the mentors and the “mentees.” Quietly, because those involved do their work without fanfare.

MMP is a program meant to further develop teachers’ skills in mentoring their students, opening their hearts and broadening their perspectives. Its main targets are the public school system and teacher education institutes (TEIs). It mentors teachers on the “new” teaching methodologies so that both teachers and students become not only learned individuals but also agents of change.

Education for social transformation is the ultimate goal of mentoring, so at the center of MMP’s work is to help people learn more effectively and “become the person they want to be.”

MMP is a mobile program designed to meet the participants in their own localities. Sessions are limited to 50 to 65 persons to ensure quality and personalized mentoring.

The topics in the mentoring program: Kambio sa pananaw from akin to atin (paradigm shift); principles and practices in mentoring; character formation; leadership for service; building win-win relationships and the art of loving; active teaching-learning strategies; and designing effective instruction/understanding by design.

Today, eight years later, the MMP veterans look back on their trailblazing efforts: More than 7,000 principals and teachers mentored all over the Philippines. They bask in the profuse expressions of gratitude, the clamor for follow-ups and seeing change in teaching and learning.

An MMP seminar begins with a lot of heart-opening, soul-searching, and hand-holding (the art of loving, leadership, character formation, win-win relationships), then segues into the innovative and effective ways of teaching, many of which were not taught in TEIs. Active teaching and learning are not merely lectured about, they are experienced.

Seasoned teacher’s teachers Mejillano and Adriano will tell you that scientific studies have shown how effective learning takes place and that some old methods must go. Adriano has rendered the old, wordy lesson plans obsolete and shows teachers how to make more focused, workable ones. Creativity is key and teachers must use new ways to make learning enjoyable and unforgettable.

A number of teachers from the public and private schools have written about their MMP experience. They are the best endorsers of the program.

Seven-time Palanca awardee Ametta Suarez Taguchi, a teacher in Corpus Christi School in Cagayan de Oro City, wrote: “[W]hat stood out in the seminar was the simplification of the lesson plan. Until the visit of the Cel-Sol Tandem, planning the lesson plan was an ordeal that got tougher and, excuse me, sillier as new lesson plan styles kept cropping up and we’d follow them to be up to date. Cel and Sol showed us a way to make the lesson plan helpful rather than ornamental.”

A teacher from Angeles City wrote: “Understanding well that people learn more by doing, our mentors did not blitz us with a stream of information; rather, they squeezed out our creative juices and made us think out of the box. On Day 1 they said, ‘We will not tell you, but we will show you.’ They fulfilled that promise.

“Much to our delight, the training also turned out to be therapeutic. It has brought to light our strengths and healthy habits and opened the door to healing. It has awakened the healer in us and made us realize that if only we are willing to give up our akin mentality, we would have healthier relationships and be happier with our work.”

Might your school need an MMP seminar? Superintendents have a budget for teacher training while mayors have a budget from their local school boards. MMP could also find sponsors for the financially challenged. Contact MMP at 8693292, 8938588 and mentoringthementors@gmail.com.