Be a Cyber Volunteer!

How to be a cybervolunteer:

1. post status updates about where volunteers should go
my friends Cybele and Camille noted that there is a surplus of volunteers in some areas, while the rest are in need to extra help
2. post/text weather updates and tips
3. call relief centers to confirm their hours of operation
4. inform friends here and abroad about what happened and how they can help
5. monitor the news and web and post shoutouts to your friends

with thanks to Karen Borbon-Seno

Taking care of ourselves

My father’s house was completely devastated by the floods. He rebuilt his life, at 59 years old and settled in Provident Village. None of us ever thought he would have to escape to his attic as he watched the flood waters rise to the second floor of his home and damage everything he worked for for the past ten years. As he was throwing out mementos he painstakingly collected for decades – photos, cards, letters – he acknowledged that this was the most painful thing he had to do. And at 59 years old, with his good years behind him, how will the government help him regain his second wind?

I don’t think they have any idea how. Not for my father, not for the families of the over 200 people who perished, not for the nearly half a million citizens displaced by the typhoon. They don’t have a clue.

And so I officially give up. What little hope I had left for the government had been washed away by the flood waters, and have mingled with the unidentifiable mess of mud, garbage and my countrymen’s broken dreams. It was only a matter of time before this happened, but instead of taking precaution, they took time. They also took the money and all the other resources that were supposed to help the people. In short, they took away our lives.

Typhoon Ondoy and the subsequent flooding of Manila was a catastrophe waiting to happen. I am appalled that the government did wait for it to happen, and then begin scrambling at the last minute “to do the right thing.” The right thing should’ve been to repair the drainage systems, educate people on climate change, implement laws and policies on caring for the environment, and enact concrete measures for waste management.

But that’s all in the past now isn’t it? We know we’ve always been let down – why expect anything else? We’ve learned to live with hardship (20 typhoons a year, regular flooding in low-lying areas, evacuation centers that kill more survivors than the calamities they’ve escaped from) and in spite of it. In fact it’s in our DNA to laugh at adversity and make a joke or two, to lighten the load or comfort a friend.

But how much longer can we manage to shrug off the government’s negligence? How much more BS can we take from corrupt politicians and breakdowns in our system? How much longer are we going to live with pitiable health care, pathetic disaster management programs, and deplorable conditions in many parts of our city – all hazards just waiting to become disasters?

If the government can’t take care of us, then we just have to take care of ourselves. As Atty. Frances Pesayco-Aquino (my aunt) so eloquently put it: we just get down and do what we have to do – with government, without it, in spite of it. In fact, news reports have been trumpeting the efforts of volunteers: on the ground, in the water, overseas and online. The Filipinos are coming together, of their own accord, to take care of one another. And we don’t need any grandstanding trapos to lead us. We don’t need empty promises from government officials and agencies. All we need is each other and our bayanihan spirit, our innate kindness and concern to see our neighbors better off than how they previously were.

We’ve taken the first step to rebuilding our country and ourselves, by reaching in, literally and figuratively and pulling one another out of the murky flood waters of indifference.

These are the real Filipinos – the men, women and children who suffer yet are still able to lend a helping hand and a smile. We just need to stick together. And if there’s any joke we will crack it will be that the government is the biggest joke of all. You can never put the Pinoy down; we’ll be laughing in your face as you try!

We can get through this. Kapit-bisig, mga kababayan! And when all the hard work is done, give each other a pat on the back: we did it, all of it, together!

-with thanks from Ian Roxas, Enteng Balasbas, Atty. Frances Aquino

Un printemps en Adelaide

There's something really about spring weather that makes everyone more...cheerful. Could be the sunshine, warmer days and evenings, the pollen, the grass and flowers growing again, the crisp air. Maybe the deep chemical and biologial links we humans have with our natural surroundings are triggered, telling us that this is the time for new beginnings. This is a time to grow. And so everyone steps into the sunshine and soaks up all that warm goodness.

Growth comes in many forms: as lovehandles you notice one morning while dressing up for work; a once-lean bank account now slowly fattening up; efforts to eat better, more healthy meals; new friends; new adventures; new places to visit. I should also mention opportunities -- opportunities to work and make contributions, positively, to the community and to one's self esteem. It's been a blessing for me to be able to work, really work, in an office and experience Australian culture first hand. This was something I've always wanted to do. Not to say volunteering doesn't offer that. Volunteering gives a different kind of satisfaction, one money really cannot match. But to be able to work and prove one's capabilities, and get paid for it, is quite another. It kind of, seals your ability and provides proof of your expertise -- that you can hold your own in other places and cultures. It's like another passport to more opportunities. And I am really stoked about that.

While the word "growth" may denote "gaining" something, there is also something to be said about growth by "losing." When you lose something, or someone, you realize important things that were always there, but not always highlighted. It was only by losing that you see the layer beneath the "comfortably consistent" and when it's lost that's when the lessons start to flood. Depending on your personality type, there are many ways to handle this: I did it by throwing a tantrum, pouting, kicking myself mentally, scolding myself for days on end, trying to replay in my mind the events of the day and how I could have avoided the mistakes. It's exhausting, it's punishing. But for Type 1s like me, I acknowledge that it is part of my coping process. I will get over it soon, but I am still in that space. Hopefully this stage of growth does indeed teach me, if not to take better care of situations, to be gentler on myself.

The growing season is not limited to this couple in Adelaide, though. My siblings have been experiencing their share of growth: proudly, two of my siblings are achieving things for themselves. Thea is in Singapore, with a contract to teach in a music school -- her dream. And Denise is presenting at Pecha Kucha in Boracay, only one of the biggest and most popular modern art exhibits and presentations that has toured the world. In fact it was in Melbourne last month! Andrei's team is back in the UAAP's Final Four (hoping they win it this year!) and Monique is flourishing in her events business. There's a lot to be proud of, ey? I am looking forward to all the stories come Christmastime.

I wish I could take a snapshot of this time and hang it on my wall, a reminder of how wonderful it is to really feel like you're growing, and getting so much out of this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Of course it will serve as a looking-back so that one can move forward. Dwelling on the past is not always healthy. But revelling in the reminder that, this whole experience is possible for anyone who wants it, and wants it bad enough to go out there and get it, only makes the task worth retelling and remembering. The lessons that will come out of this time will be priceless, and I can't wait to see what all of those would be. Most of all, I can't wait to see who I will be.

Salamat po Tita Cory.

Paalam.










*all photos link back to the source from which they were grabbed.

Cory and the color of Hope

I remember how excitedly my parents roused me and my brother from sleep in the wee hours of the morning, made us wear our cleanest yellow shirts, our jackets and our slippers. They did not bother with our pajamas: we had to be on the streets NOW!

It was only when we were seated inside my uncle's passenger jeepney that I learned what was going on: Ferdinand Marcos had fled the country, and Cory Aquino was the new president of the Philippines. At this news my brother and I immediately waved our yellow-and-green pennants at every passerby. "Cory! Cory!" we chanted. Pedestrians waved back, cars tooted their horns in tune, the color yellow was everywhere. Hope had come to the Philippines.

As I look back on the years when she was in office, and observe the fervor that once propelled the People Power Revolution disintegrate into scathing criticisms of her failure as the country's leader, I realize I haven't enough years or experience living in Martial Law-Philippines to compare with Cory's presidency. All I know is, change came to the Philippines.

People say Cory's rule allowed many things to return: the freedom of the press not the least of them. She revised the Constitution, it was also during her reign that the US Bases were closed. I still remember watching her speech at the US Congress on TV. All the US Senators and Congresspeople stood and applauded her entry. Once on the podium, dressed in her trademark yellow suit, radiant, she flashed her winning "laban" sign. I felt that gesture was a solid acknowledgment, a shout out to the millions of Filipinos watching her. It was the symbol of the people's triumph. It was a great moment to be Pinoy.

As the years wore on I noticed how many who once fought for her were steadily disillusioned with her. My dad, who once spent days and nights printing her campaign posters, joining rallies and marching at EDSA, was suddenly criticizing her. She was now regarded as a weakling, without a mind of her own, installing her own cronies and building a family dynasty. The coup d'etas were to be her presidency's bane, and I figure she was just too happy to hand over the reins to Fidel Ramos when her term ended.

I've always been rather apathetic to the circus that is Philippine politics. But I will always remember Tita Cory as one person who made me change my mind about the possibilities in the Philippine government. She was, after all, the first woman president -- something not even the United States could afford to do. But first and foremost, she was a Filipina. She stood for the virtues that we value: an unwavering faith, unconditional love and the tenacity to finish whatever one has started. People who knew her say she wasn't the least bit corrupt, was always pleasant, and had the most untarnished reputation among all the Philippine presidents, past and present.

For these credentials alone, I think she should be remembered the way Ninoy was. In life, as in death, they paved the way for one another to keep the dream of a great Philippines alive. They kept to their motto: the Filipino is worth dying for.

There will be no frantic horn-tooting and pennant-waving today. But Pinoys everywhere will be in yellow to commemorate the life of a woman who put the country on the map again. Future generations of kids in pajamas will only read about the life she lived and will acquire an experience of her more diluted than mine. But the important thing to know is, Cory lived. Cory brought change. Cory brought hope.

Let that yellow ribbon always remind us of this.

The Characters of Adelaide International House

It occurred to me I haven’t introduced our housemates to everyone! Adelaide International House, the hostel where we live, is a temporary home to mostly Asians. A majority are Chinese, there are some Indians, a Japanese woman, a couple of Africans, and a lone Australian.

The people I know best are those who live on our floor, aside from Rachelle, our house manager, who lives on the floor above us. The Chinese on our floor are mostly from Beijing: professionals in the accounting and law professions. There’s Hally, who’s from KPMG. She’s looking for a job in Adelaide, after studying accounting here 2 years ago. The same goes for Rebecca, who used to work for a sister company of HP in Beijing. She works in a mall down south. Zhang Bei is also an accountant, who is on a training course in the city. She worked for a company called SK (South Korea) Energy in Beijing, but quit that job because she didn’t like the management there. Then there’s Lisa, a lawyer-turned-accountant, who’s taking units at the University of South Australia. She left her husband and son in Beijing to study here.

Then there are the Pinoys: Anne and Alma, Benc’s classmates at Uni. Anne is a 27-year old Ateneo graduate who's spending all her hard-earned money for this MSIT project. She has no background in programming at all, but is at the top of her class. Alma is a mom from Baguio who won the scholarship too. Her family's arriving next month. Then there's Rommel Pangaruy: a Pinoy who migrated to New Zealand, and then to Queensland. He’s in Adelaide on a consultancy contract for 5 months.

On our floor also (Mine and Benc’s neighbors actually) are 2/4 of the Indian scholars: Wevic and Gotam, undergrads studying engineering at the UniSA as well. They’re here with their classmates Lohit and Naranjan (who live upstairs) on a 6-month exchange program, all expenses paid. It’s Lohit and Naranjan’s shower that was leaking into our room. But it’s all right now. The landlord fixed it.

Of course, there’s Rachelle, my favorite person in the whole hostel. She’s only 23 but came on her own to Adelaide to study English and community work. She was totally on her own, and learned how to cook here. She learned how to get around, make a little money (by being the hostel cleaner twice a week) and cook her own meals, which she never used to do in China. She’s a straight talker, honest and disciplined. She’ll tell you straightaway if she doesn’t agree with your opinions, but will laugh loudly at any anecdote she finds funny (even if you don’t). She idolizes Benc, loves my cologne, teases Anne about her hair in the morning and is a fan of sinigang and adobo.

Michael meanwhile is the manager, our landlord's right-hand man. He's here everyday and he seems more like a resident than the care-taker. We go out to movies, drives to Mt. Lofty (a small mountain resort 20 minutes' drive from the city) and lunches with us when he can. He's Malaysian. He came to Australia to study in Queensland, and then he moved to Adelaide to work. He's engaged to his Chinese girlfriend and they're getting married next year here in Adelaide.

We bump into each other everyday: in the common room, along the hallways, in between cooking shifts in the kitchen. At first we exchange pleasantries, talking about the weather maybe. Then eventually we exchange cooking tips. We offer one another a taste of our latest concoctions and then eventually we get to talking about why we’re all in Adelaide in the first place. Most are here to study--the Oz government gives out scholarships to increase the country’s reputation as an education-destination, its main competitor being New Zealand. South Australia is one of the main destinations, in part because the state would like to increase its population to one million people, and they decided they need help from immigrants to achieve this in three years. The Philippines and South Australia actually have an MOU to bring over 300,000 Filipino skilled workers over the course of ten years!

Others are here to find work so that they can eventually apply for permanent residency in two years. Unfortunately, even casual work is hard to come by these days. Hally, who wishes to bring her parents over from China, has been steadily losing steam and I advised her to volunteer: at least it’s something to do, and counts as “local experience”-- that bugger of a requirement when applying for jobs in big companies.

I’ve always been fascinated by the dynamic that goes on when people from different cultures interact and try to find common ground. I love the negotiation of language, how we try to find familiar words to define a single concept. I love the way we sort through concepts that are so tightly bound to our own cultures and learn how to find something similar in another culture. Most of all, I love how we discover that, there is so much we don’t know about cultures that are supposed to be close to ours, and how deeply we’ve perpetuated stereotypes. Everyday interactions with our housemates reveals something new, whether it be a key ingredient to a dish or the most revered work of literature in their country. These are definitely things that one can’t just get from books.

From our Chinese friends I learned that most of them find the one-child policy “crazy” and “stupid.” They too are appalled by the pollution in Beijing. And, surprise: none of them believe in Feng Shui. “This is for the old people, the grand parents,” Lisa says, and she was surprised when I said lots of Filipinos believe that Chinese believe in this fervently. She denies this vehemently. “It’s crazy! No one can sustain this belief,” she exclaims in disbelief.

We can communicate in English, but there are times when they need help from Rachelle to find the words they need. Rachelle is probably the best English speaker among the Chinese at our hostel. She can speak basic English quite well, with occasional missing articles, the wrong conjugation of a verb, or a mispronunciation. Her jaw dropped when we told her we got an overall band of 8 on the IELTS, when she struggled to even just get a 6. She says she gets annoyed with the Australian accent (especially the rising tone at the end, as if everything was a question) but she doesn’t realize she actually has the same mannerism already. I “forced” her to read Harry Potter. She said she has seen all the movies but was afraid the book might be too complicated for her to understand. When I assured her it was a children’s book and was easy and fun to read, she dove right in...and got so engrossed, she fell behind in some of her assignments! hehehe.

One thing I can say about the Chinese: they are uber hardworking. They will take on absolutely anything, be it a cleaners’ job or a drastic career change, and make it work. I guess this is one reason why they are everywhere, and I don’t mean just bumping into them on the street or sitting beside them in a bus. They are in every job you can imagine and seem to occupy every imaginable task. There are Chinese busboys and girls, Chinese store owners, Chinese accountants, bankers, waiters and cooks, drivers and gym sales consultants. It’s as if they created a market for themselves, and industries that need them, which force Australian businesses in turn to cater to them: food products and special language services are available for the Chinese nationals, reading materials and whatnot, even specific job needs: Jurlique, a leading cosmetic company here was actually looking for sales and make-up consultants who could speak Mandarin or Cantonese! It’s almost unbelievable, how they were able to do this, but when you look closer, they simply just decided to do something and did it, which was: survive, and create opportunities for themselves and others.

There’s a lot to learn from them, not least of which are their cooking methods. I’ve been taught a great deal by Lisa, Zhang Bei and Rachelle, and I have some tricks up my sleeve, which I will not divulge here. :) Let’s just say it has a lot to do with chili, high heat and lots of sauces. Yummy!

Newcomers to the hostel are the Indian students from Tamil Nadu, in the southern part of India. Lisa refers to them as the Indian Force: tall Indian guys with loud voices and interesting personalities. We were all impressed with their respectfulness and attitude. They’re always greeting us when they bump into us, and are always ready for a chat. What I like about them is that they read. They READ! I was discussing some Indian writers with them and I was so pleased to find that they themselves have read these works, and in fact recommended other works for me to explore. When their meal times coincide with ours, they love to discuss movies and tv shows. They are all interested in sci-fi, but surprisingly in Harry Potter too! They had a lot of opinions about HP 6, which I thought was amusing: 4 engineering students discussing a fantasy children’s book. Then again, this was the most significant piece of literature during their growing years, written by an individual who was from the same country that colonized them.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), they haven’t begun cooking any Indian meals. They aren’t familiar with the English names of the spices used in their dishes, and have to acquaint themselves with these first. They did hip up a chicken tikka masala one night, using a prepared sauce which, they say, was nearly as good as the original. I’m going to try that next week, and see what happens. They made us try a very unique dessert called rasmalai. I can’t describe the process; all I know is that it’s extracted from cooking buffalo milk and then soaking them in syrup. The ones they made us try were soaked in rose syrup.

Because we all use the kitchen, we’ve developed a kind of unspoken schedule and etiquette. I usually cook early, around 10 am when I'm preparing lunch. Then Lisa comes in with Zhang Bei and we usually hog the facilities (there are two 4-burner stoves) while we have a chat. Sometimes Hally and Rebecca pop in for the odd microwaveable or quick-cook dish. By the time the Indian Force arrives, we’re plating up, while they chop and bang pans around and try to figure out what to do first. We Pinoys and Chinese would be finishing up our meals when the guys come out with their food. And we all have about ten minutes of chitchat before we clean up and attend to the day’s business. It’s pretty much the same procedure at night, except that Rachelle, who lives on the third floor joins the party downstairs. For some reason, our kitchen draws people in. We don’t know what it is, but people like cooking in our kitchen.

In the evenings, when it’s too cold to go out, or it’s that time of the month to cut back on eating in restaurants, we sit around longer and tell stories over the ambient sound of the television set. This is when we learn more about each other, about one another’s cultures, how unique some customs are and yet how similar other practices are to our own. We’re all very family-oriented; we’re all very friendly and polite; we like to share (anything from stories to food to kitchen implements) and we value companionship. Some very striking differences though: our Indian friends are quite assertive when it comes to their opinions, while we Pinoys and Chinese tend to speak with “softer” words and manners. The Chinese, like the Pinoys, are very aware of their individual personal spaces, but we Pinoys will always make room in case we see others who need it. To me the Filipinos are still some of the most compassionate and kindest people on the planet. That unique characteristic of “pakikisama,” "malasakit" and “pakikipag-palagayang loob” is invaluable when it comes to getting along, networking and gaining peoples’ trust. This also comes in handy, I’ve found, when you need the landlord to fix something NOW.

I think foreigners are charmed by our gentle ways, our good humor, politeness and kindness, that they don’t mind doing things for us. It helps a lot too that we can speak really good English. Unlike our Chinese friends who have to relearn the concept of Western speech versus their own, and our Indian friends whose heavy and rich accents, and quick speech sometimes causes a bit of misunderstanding, Pinoys’ grasp of English is second nature. In that, I feel we will always have an advantage, and it helps us cope -- it helps us get what we need and gives us access to information that helps us live more efficiently. Most of all, it helps us get in good with our hosts--our Australian hosts, that is. Because of our grasp of the language, we get to have more conversations, allow us to understand each other, even joke with one another and even develop friendships.

So English is the official language at Adelaide International House. We revert to the vernacular of course when we’re talking amongst ourselves, or when we have a comment and don’t want others to hear. I’m sure they do the same thing. This “speaking in tongues” is definitely common across all cultures. I believe nothing matches the color and emotion of speech when expressed in your own language.