Peryodistang Pinay

Bishop Gorordo's centenary

2009-07-10T00:18:00.004+08:00

AN exhibit opened in June in honor of Juan Bautista Garces Gorordo, marking the 100th year since he joined Sergio Osmeña Sr. as one of the most influential men of Cebu.

Gorordo had just turned 47 when he was appointed auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Cebu. Less than a year later, he assumed office as head of the diocese and its first Cebuano bishop.

“We wanted to honor him, to revisit who this individual was,” said Dr. Joy Gerra of the Casa Gorordo Museum. The museum hoped “to encourage Cebuanos to learn more about our own history.”

It took a week to celebrate Gorordo’s installation as auxiliary bishop in June 1909, wrote Dr. Resil Mojares in “Casa Gorordo: Urban Residence in a Philippine Province.”

“Houses were hung with adornments; games, serenatas and fireworks attracted droves of people to the public squares; parades and band music enlivened the city streets. . .There were receptions at the grand salon of the Seminario de San Carlos and at Plaza Hamabar, as well as a free meal for the poor in the parish houses.”

The book includes a photograph of Gorordo’s installation as bishop, surrounded by church officials and Osmeña, then speaker of the Philippine Assembly and three decades away from the presidency.

To prepare for this year’s exhibit, researchers reviewed historical accounts, scanned fragile photographs and chased leads from both church and secular sources.

Among their finds was a marker, surrounded by weeds, near the church in Barili town. The town erected the marker in 1962, 100 years after Gorordo’s birth there on April 20, 1862. (His father Juan Isidro Gorordo, according to Mojares’s book, had served briefly in Barili as the collector of wine taxes.)

Also in the exhibit is an 1899 photograph of the bishop at his mother Telesfora’s deathbed. That same bed remains today within Casa Gorordo, a portrait of the bishop by its side. Also on display are framed illustrations that show the plazas and city streets as they looked in the bishop’s day.

There are pews and a cross from the family altar, as well as a statue of San Cayetano. Louie Nacorda of the Cofradia de San Juan Bautista believes it was probably commissioned by the bishop himself, San Cayetano being “the patron saint of clerical administrators.”

Gorordo had entered the Seminario de San Carlos at age 12. At 19, while still a student, he began to teach Latin and Moral Theology. His students, Mojares wrote, included the future senator and publisher Filemon Sotto.

Poor health kept Gorordo, at age 28, from traveling to China as a missionary. Still, he managed to keep teaching in the seminary and serve as chaplain in the Cebu Cathedral and the Hospital de San Jose.

Born two months after her great grand-uncle’s death, Josefa Revilles grew up with stories of Bishop Gorordo’s eloquence, both in Bisaya and Spanish. She came home from the US this year to help arrange for a novena and a banquet on June 24. (It was on St. John the Baptist’s feast day in 1909 that the bishop formally assumed office.)

“We have to prepare, even if it’s just for a small celebration,” she told her relatives. “Just to honor him. Maayo na lang gani kay nakaabot ta ani (We’re fortunate to have lived long enough to see this celebration).”

She recalled many stories of the bishop’s generosity. After his death on Dec. 20, 1934, about 40 percent of the bishop’s estate, then worth P200,000, was donated to the church. He had also donated 54 hectares of land for the Eversley Childs Leprosarium.

His charity, said Gerra, indicated “that this was a man who, from his privileged position, saw the changes Cebu was going through, and also the anxieties brought about by these changes.”

More of the bishop’s accomplishments are featured in the exhibit, which will run at the Casa Gorordo on Lopez Jaena St., Cebu City until Aug. 15.

(First appeared here.)

Poll Mall

2008-11-06T22:32:00.002+08:00

BARACK Obama won a mock election in a Cebu City mall on Wednesday morning, but apart from the outcome, it was the speed of the results that impressed local observers.

“I wish we could have the same in the Philippines. It makes voting less costly. You don’t need watchers. You get the results very quickly,” said Rep. Nerissa Soon-Ruiz (Cebu Province, 6th district) after she “voted” using one of three machines flown in by the US Embassy in Manila.

Two of the machines use the same technology that a team of Filipino inspectors checked during a visit to the United States in 1993, according to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) website.

One is an optical mark reader that requires voters to shade the ovals beside the names of their chosen candidates. These ballots are then fed through a scanner that counts the votes.

Also on display was a direct recording machine—a terminal similar to an ATM, where voters simply touch the screen to pick their candidates. A paper receipt allows voters to check that their choices were accurately recorded, before they cast their ballots, again by touching the screen.

“We have the budget to purchase all the computers, but the problem, foremost, is that not all areas have electricity,” said Soon-Ruiz. “But we will, hopefully, have certain areas in 2010 where the elections can be automated.”

Asked what he thought of the voting machines at the “election watch party” the embassy hosted at the SM North Wing, businessman Sabino Dapat quipped: “Only one word: Envy.”

“How I wish we could have something like this in the Philippines, so we won’t have to go through several days of anxiety and there would be fewer opportunities for people to cheat,” said Dapat, a trustee of the church-based group C-Cimpel, which has monitored elections in Cebu since 1992.

While citizen involvement makes Cebu’s elections credible, Dapat said it’s high time the country used more advanced technology in its elections.

Cebu City Councilor Sylvan Jakosalem said he finds it “unbelievable” that voting and counting technologies already in use for decades have yet to be widely used in Philippine elections.

Using these would mean “quick results, less work for Comelec, and less tension among the voters and the politicians. That’s a big plus.”

Deputy Chief of Mission Paul Jones, who led the embassy’s 30-member team in Cebu, explained that each state, not the federal government, decides what machines to use for the elections.

But more important than the technology used, he said, was the reminder of “what both our countries share, which is our commitment to democracy.”

By noon local time (midnight in the US East Coast)—less than 18 hours after polling centers opened in the United States—both CNN and CNBC called the elections in favor of Obama, the first African-American to win the US presidency.

Half an hour later, the Cebu mock election’s results were announced: 211 votes for Obama, 95 for Republican candidate John McCain.

“We cannot say it’s the lack of budget (that’s keeping the Philippines from automating its elections). It’s the political will of the people running the country,” said Jakosalem. “Sad to say, but they prefer the old system.”

Related story here.

Target: 10% by 2010

2008-08-31T22:51:00.002+08:00

CEBU’S educators and entrepreneurs will have to work better as partners to help the local economy thrive in business process outsourcing, an industry projected to generate US$130 billion by 2010.

"The same key drivers of the industry are our own challenges: talent, business environment and new sites for expansion,” said Oscar Sañez, chief executive officer of the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), in the Sun.Star Economic Forum at Parklane International Hotel.

"Our inability to meet these challenges can seriously affect our competitiveness,” he said.

Outsourcing and off-shoring (O&O) in the Philippines drew US$5 billion into the economy in 2007, from only $1.5 billion in 2004. Industry players in the Philippines have set a target of $13 billion--about 10 percent of the projected global market--by 2010.

To do that, the BPAP set a target of 290,000 to 560,000 qualified graduates nationwide from 2007-2010. This, however, will require improvements in the general education system, which currently loses up to a quarter of its pupils between Grades 2 and 3 because families can’t afford to send the children to school.

Read the full story here.

Mining a city's memories

2008-08-31T22:49:00.002+08:00

A FEW weeks ago, the American historian Michael Cullinane came upon “a whole bundle” of records that, he hopes, will reveal new information and insights about why the principalia of San Nicolas joined the revolution of Tres de Abril. Cullinane already knows this subject better than most Cebuanos, but the process of uncovering history, he says, “never ends.”

In an interview at the Casa Gorordo Museum, Dr. Cullinane shares his fascination with the origins of the Cebuano political elite, as well as Cebuano history in general—a scholarly interest he has sustained since he first visited the Philippines as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1970s.

The local stories and personalities that get overlooked in the national histories: they’re what fascinate Dr. Cullinane.

“Almost all the national events took place in Cebu also, but they took place differently. For instance, how did the Philippine-American War operate in Cebu? The best book on that war, in my opinion, is the one by Resil Mojares. So why not use it? Teachers can give some introductory material about the Philippine-American War in general, and then, drawing from Resil’s work, say, ‘Here’s what happened here.’”

Cullinane serves as the associate director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is credited with helping set up the Cebuano Studies Center at the University of San Carlos. Most recently, he wrote “Ilustrado Politics: Filipino Elite Responses to American Rule, 1898-1908.”

“There’s a tremendous amount of material that I, in my lifetime, cannot even come close to exhausting, so I’ve defined things that I do want to exhaust,” he says. “I’ve read all the notarial records from 1818 to 1873, and 1888 to 1903. My job on this trip was to close the gap, but it’s too much. So I’ll keep coming back until I do.”

Read the full interview here.

All rice

2008-04-14T18:43:00.002+08:00

THAT Giada de Laurentiis: she made me think about the rice crisis.

There I sat, trying to read the latest sermons in the op-ed pages, when the sight of Miss de Laurentiis smacking her lips after a spoonful of sweet rice pudding dragged me off the couch.

Off to the kitchen, then, where a cup of rice grains promptly plopped into a pot, joined by three cups of milk, some sugar and the lip-puckering zest of a fragrant lemon. A little bowl of raisins sat on the countertop, for the pudding’s finishing touch.

Manang Giada, she made it look oh-so-simple. She didn’t even have to stir the pot.

So back I went to the living room, just in time to hear Vir Sanghvi praise a batch of thin rice crepes, filled with spiced potatoes and lined with butter, “a sure cholesterol catastrophe.” Not that he minded, this Mr. Sanghvi: the screen showed him tucking into one of the famous rice plates of southern India’s Udupi. There, he said, rice “sits at the center of religious belief.” On one such plate, spicy coconut cream and tomato sauces, hot vegetables and coriander-encrusted clams surrounded the real star, a mound of boiled rice, its heat steaming up the television screen. My belly growled.

To temper my rice craving, I turned to the news, but rice appeared everywhere. Television crews showed bare warehouses where NFA-stamped sacks, now empty, sprawled on the floor. Farmers’ cooperatives spoke in defense of their private financiers. (So who really benefits from subsidies?) Spooked by pests and bad weather, Vietnamese officials said they would limit rice exports to make sure their own people had enough. Meanwhile, more rice farmers in the Philippines and China decided it made more sense to leave the paddies to high-rise property developers.

By the time I remembered, it was too late.

In the pot that Giada inspired, a thick, yellowish-brown lump of sticky rice lay. I had forgotten the Goldilocks rule of cooking with milk: the temperature had to be just right. I tried two half-hearted teaspoons, but found the results too sad. I carried the failed pudding outside, and the dog looked at me askance. So into the garbage bin that pot of rice went. Since then, for reasons involving vanity and conscience, I have watched carefully the portions of rice I cook or order, and eat. With no influence over hoarders and no control over any rice field, all I can do, like most consumers, is prevent waste.

As if my Giada-induced guilt wasn’t enough, the April 21 issue of Time adds: “Even if Asia manages to keep its rice bowl full, high prices and shortages may still filter down to the world’s poorest countries… Tight world supplies create a zero-sum calculus. Vietnamese rice going to the Philippines is rice that is unavailable for Africa, or for the NGO’s that feed the world’s most vulnerable populations.” Oh, boy. I will never attempt to cook rice pudding again.

(Appears in today's issue of Sun.Star Cebu)

On trying to listen to Jun Lozada

2008-03-24T01:27:00.003+08:00

INFLEXIBLE errands kept me away from Rodolfo "Jun" Lozada Jr.'s much-publicized visit here, so I didn't get to hear first-hand his comments about the "Archdiocese of Malacañang" or see how the crowd reacted to him. I didn't know how much time he spent discussing the "spiritual harassment" he has suffered, and how much time went to the message he was flown here to deliver. I got the sense that he revealed no new evidence, but that he stayed consistent to the allegations he raised in recent weeks. But like I said, all that is second-hand information.

As necessary as compression is in our work as journalists, it also often leads to losses of nuance or errors in translation. Out of everything a speaker says in an hour, for instance, the journalist may end up highlighting a 10-minute bit of the speech that the speaker never intended to be his central message. "What new thing did he say?" is a common question that reporters will hear from persnickety editors. "What new revelations did he make?"

So the charge that some of Lozada's champions recently made is valid. Why, they asked, have Cebu's media zeroed in on Lozada's criticisms against local church leaders? Why have political leaders tried to "spin" the events as yet another sign of the (often-manipulated) divisions between the capital and local communities?

Here's an attempt at an answer. The reason Lozada's barbs have caused an uproar goes beyond the fact that Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal remains a well-loved and respected leader of the Cebuano community—no matter how opaque, how cryptic his political opinions have, at times, been. Calling him a "congressman in a cassock" isn't just flattery that some of our lawmakers haven't earned; it is also incredibly careless. It raises doubts about just how careful Lozada and his supporters have been in the accusations they've raised about the broadband deal.

Which is a pity, because it's only going to make it more difficult for a lot of people to pay attention to what Lozada has to reveal—and it's already demanding enough to try to listen and see past the posturing of certain senators. Yet one must keep trying.

All this reminded me of one of the most interesting discussions in a Media Ethics class I participated in last year, which centered on Edmund Arens' 1997 paper on "discourse ethics" and how media workers could use it to restore a sense of purpose in our work. For Arens, discourse ethics challenges media practitioners to see how well we have lived by three universal ethical principles: (1) orientation toward truth, (2) truthfulness, and (3) justice.

An orientation toward truth means, first, that anyone who wishes to communicate should make sure they have proof and explanations, and should limit themselves to pronouncements "of whose truth they are convinced." Arens also reminds us that there are stories that need telling—whether it's the silences that our more guarded public officials or community leaders keep, or the existence of those who, after getting the doors of schools and workplaces slammed in their faces, make a living off our garbage bins.

Communication informed by discourse ethics, according to Arens, is a "cooperative search for a mutual understanding of the disputed claims." It won't suffice to listen to and examine only the claims of the contending parties. Everyone who can should be allowed to take part, because "justice that assumes the task of advocacy means criticizing and denouncing those communicative and social relations in which human beings have no voice, in which there is no word from them, in which they are not heard."

(Appears in the Op-Ed pages of Sun.Star Cebu's 24 March 2008 issue.)

On the right to information

2008-03-12T02:37:00.002+08:00

The right to information in the Philippines first appeared in our Constitution 35 years ago, in the early days of Martial Law. Yet while such a right has been recognized in both the 1973 and 1987 Constitutions, the wave of reform that led many countries in the past decade to adopt freedom of information laws has yet to redefine Philippine shores.

Since 1998, various lawmakers' drafts of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have failed to emerge from the Philippine Congress as an enforceable law. In the past decade alone, at least five other countries in Asia have enacted FOIA legislation: Thailand (1997), South Korea (1998), Japan (1999), India (2002) and Pakistan (2002).

The lack of such a law has not kept Filipinos, for the most part, from gaining access to public information. Thanks to a Supreme Court that has interpreted the law in favor of free expression and informed debate, the contours of the right to information have slowly taken shape. It's because of the Court that information on all laws, the civil service eligibility of government workers, and the terms of any proposed settlement relating to the allegedly ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses—to cite a small part of a long list—are considered matters of public concern, where access to information is guaranteed.

In April 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch could not escape congressional requests for information without asserting its right to do so and its reasons. The Court declared void two sections of Executive Order 464, in which President Arroyo, invoking the separation of powers and the rule on executive privilege, had ordered public officials to gain her consent before appearing in a congressional inquiry.

Last week, President Arroyo revoked EO 464. But as concessions go, it is too little, too late. It strips her advisers and secretaries of an excuse to skip congressional investigations, but it doesn't guarantee they'll reveal anything anyway.

For this protected stonewalling, Congress shares part of the blame. You see, even as it failed to pass a law that would define the right to information more clearly, Congress has succeeded in enacting laws that spell out the right's limits.

Among these is Republic Act 6713, or the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees. Its implementing rules state that citizens can be denied access if: "the information, record or document must be kept secret in the interest of national defense or security or the conduct of foreign affairs; disclosure of the information will endanger the life and safety of an individual; and the information, record or document falls within the concepts of established privilege or recognized exceptions provided by law, settled by policy or jurisprudence." Four other conditions exist.

Why Congress has failed to enact FOIA legislation is worth examining. One possibility is the lack of incentive for government transparency. In a Congress dominated by the elite, reform-oriented provisions in the Constitution may not get legislated because these do not complement lawmakers' political or business interests. (Case in point: the constitutional prohibition on political dynasties.) In a sense, then, gaps in access to information may simply reflect larger disparities in the socioeconomic and political pecking order. In information, as with wealth and political influence, the gap between the haves and have-nots runs deep and wide.

(Appeared in the 10 March 2008 issue of Sun.Star Cebu)

Turning Japanese

2008-03-08T02:52:00.003+08:00

CORRUPTION charges have cast an unflattering light on official development assistance (ODA), but these programs remain vital for small and medium enterprises (SME) that want to capture foreign markets.

Two studies point out SME exporters in the Philippines need ODA grants to improve quality control and food testing, among others, and to plug gaps in credit so they can sell more to Japanese buyers.

What hobbles Filipino exporters? Tight credit facilities, high packaging and shipping costs, and the lack of government support to set up food testing centers appear in a list presented by Dr. Rosalina Palanca Tan of the Ateneo de Manila University.

She surveyed Japanese exporters as part of a project commissioned by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies and the Philippine Exporters Confederation to explore the effects of the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA).

"We compete with Ecuador and Taiwan to supply bananas to Japan, with Mexico for mangoes and with Hawaii for papayas," Tan told participants of a JPEPA forum last week at the University of San Carlos. "We also compete with China to supply Japan with vegetables and processed food, and with Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam for fresh, processed or canned seafood."

Exporters need to take advantage of a shift in Japanese consumers' preferences from expensive US or European brands to cheaper but high-quality products from Asia, she added. Among the items Filipino exporters can sell Japanese buyers more of are fermented beverages, children's toys, animal feeds, sugar, fish fillets, apparel and motor vehicle bodies.

ODA programs—although dragged into controversy recently by allegations of corruption in the national broadband deal with China's ZTE Corp.—can focus on helping SMEs improve their efficiency or make up for the lack of credit, Tan said.

One way to make the JPEPA more favorable to Filipino exporters, she added, is to compel Japan to develop "import promotion programs" and conduct more "buying missions" for Philippine products. Japan can also accredit more private testing centers in the Philippines, particularly for food products.

In separate study, Amelia Bello of the University of the Philippines Los Baños raised the need for technical assistance so that agricultural products can hurdle Japan's strict safety and phyto-sanitary standards. Assistance can also explore the use of Japanese seeds "to eliminate the risk of taste failure," she added.

The JPEPA will compel Japan to remove immediately the tariffs on shrimps, prawns, asparagus, dried bananas, mangoes and copra, among others. Tariffs will be gradually eliminated from fresh yellow-fin tuna, prepared or preserved tuna, fresh bananas, dried pineapples, and fruits containing added sugar.

Japan buys 23 percent of the Philippines' agricultural exports and is the second largest market, after the United States. Between 1991 and 2001, however, agriculture's share in total exports from the Philippines has dropped from 35 percent to single-digit levels, Bello said.

Although it's the top supplier of tropical fresh fruits, the Philippines appears only 16th in the list of top food sources for Japan. The JPEPA, which advocates say will ease Filipino producers' access into Japanese markets, awaits ratification by the Philippine Senate.

(First appeared in the 3 March 2008 issue of Sun.Star Cebu)

Happy talk

2008-02-27T02:45:00.002+08:00

GUESS who’s happier, in general, Filipinos or South Koreans? Filipinos, you say? Not quite.

A graph that compares countries’ subjective well-being (SWB) and gross national product (GNP) per capita shows that our northern neighbors score higher on both scales. They make more money, on average, and rate themselves as happier too. (That might help explain the flamboyant fashion sense.) Don’t be too quick, however, to ditch that quip about how money can’t buy you happiness.

The same graph, you see, also shows that Filipinos record a higher average SWB than residents elsewhere who make more money. These countries include Brazil, China, Peru, South Africa, Russia, Turkey and Argentina. (Who knew? Here I thought the birthplaces of samba and tango would be happier indeed.)

The graph appears in a paper presented in Thailand last year by Robert Cummins of Melbourne’s Deakin University, as part of the “Happiness and Public Policy” conference. In it, Cummins raises the need for countries to measure subjective indicators--and not just objective ones like money and health--when leaders study the quality of life.

Scoot over, poets and philosophers: that terrain called “the human condition” is no longer just yours to explore. “Gross national happiness” now makes the rounds of the international lecture circuits.

The oldest measure of subjective well-being (because social scientists don’t favor such fuzzy terms as “happiness”) consists of one question: “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole?” By tracking answers, community leaders can identify groups in the population, using variables like age, gender and income, that face a higher risk of depression, Cummins says. Or they can use the information to measure whether government resources are allocated in a manner that improves the people’s well-being.

Also worth noting is that even among countries with similar levels of GNP per capita, SWB scores can vary greatly. That is, people who make the same amounts of money may not consider themselves equally happy. “This indicates,” according to Cummins, “that a population’s subjective well-being can be heavily influenced by other factors such as civil disturbance, food shortages, disease and bad governance.” This would explain why Filipinos despair over the state of the nation, despite the Malacañang spin machine’s glowing reports about the economy.

“Are you happy living in Cebu City or in Metro Cebu?” Cebu City Planning and Development Officer Paul Villarete asked this in an urban planning forum last week, reported Sun.Star Cebu’s Nancy R. Cudis. The question bears asking because, Villarete pointed out, as “decision-makers in development,” the people need to vent not just about traffic or taxation, but also about their general well-being.

How the City or any other government unit plans to find out—or if it even intends to ask the question systematically—we still do not know. But it’s a good question for now, 22 years since the day we thought we had won a fresh start for this country. How satisfied are you with your life? How much has the government contributed to your well-being? The test starts now.

(Appeared in the Op-Ed pages in the 25 February 2006 issue of Sun.Star Cebu.)

Jun Lozada meets Walter Lippmann

2008-02-20T01:17:00.001+08:00

AT LEAST thrice last week, the witness Rodolfo "Jun" Lozada Jr. commented about his appearance—his thinning hair, particularly, and his simple clothes. It seemed to be an attempt to point out how ordinary a life he leads compared to the powerful men and women he now accuses of corruption in the aborted national broadband deal.

On Saturday night, resigned elections commission chairman Benjamin Abalos visibly bristled when Lozada apologized for appearing (in the ABS-CBN show "Harapan") in a plain white T-shirt, while Abalos and his lawyer were decked out in their Barong Tagalog. "Even at home, I am never seen in public in just my undershirt," Abalos huffed. Lozada's apology was pointed. He didn't mean to poke fun at Abalos, he said, but neither did he mean to cause offense by wearing such humble threads. "Matagal na po kasi akong hindi nakakauwi (I haven't been able to go home for a long time)," he said.

Like most of you, I have not met Lozada. What I know of him comes from the broadsheets, the blog entries for or against him, his appearances in the Senate. Yet even as I remind myself to suspend judgment until the facts are in, I cannot help but feel sympathy for the man. His family's life and livelihood upended by the controversy, Lozada faces a future more uncertain than that of the other protagonists in the NBN-ZTE deal.

What's at play here are what, eight decades ago, the journalist Walter Lippmann called "the pictures in our heads." These are composites of the words and images we obtain about our political leaders, colored by our experiences, stereotypes and opinions. My "mental picture" of Abalos, for instance, will always be marked by his disastrous turn at the Commission on Elections.

My "mental picture" of presidential spouse Jose Miguel Arroyo is hardly any better. It depends largely on what I remember of the transcripts of the "Hello, Garci" tapes, his tendency to sue journalists who dare question his role in public transactions and his apparent fondness for sharing the stage with boxing champions.

I know how limited these "mental pictures" are and remind myself to be open to revising them, in the light of new evidence. Our access to the facts, wrote Lippmann, is limited by many things, among them "the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives."

The Pulitzer Prize winner's proposed remedy was "an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible." (He didn't mean the press, either.) Accosted by a screaming rallyist, the former socioeconomic planning secretary Romulo Neri said, "There is more to the truth than what's being made to appear."

That's the obvious part. What's frustrating is the executive department's refusal to make public the facts and to take cover instead behind the same old bogeys of destabilization or assassination plots.

It used to be enough for the state to allow access to the information it held. Not anymore. A greater demand for transparency has redefined the right to information, so that it now includes a duty among governments to collect new information and to publish it. As long as that duty stays undelivered, public appearances and "the pictures in our heads" are the sand on which public opinions are built.

Why I want to give up fishing

2008-02-11T00:46:00.000+08:00

IN A country overpopulated with opinions, it’s bracing to listen to someone disciplined enough to dispense only the facts. The exchange doesn’t yield an easy headline or two, but it’s a fantastic reminder to keep asking ourselves the question that has challenged (and sustained) philosophers for ages: How do we really know what we know?

For the second time in a month, the University of San Carlos hosted last Friday a Nobel Laureate, for a lecture and discussion that the organizers hope will help promote “a culture of peace.” This time it was Dr. Finn E. Kydland, who in 2004 shared the Nobel Prize for Economics with Dr. Ed Prescott. Using data about the decisions made by households and businesses, the economists demonstrated that business cycles aren’t driven so much by changes in consumer demand, but by technological innovations and shocks, such as a rapid increase in oil prices.

In his talk, Dr. Kydland emphasized the need for governments to avoid policies that protect vested interests, prevent new technology in order to protect old-fashioned industries and enable corruption. For economic policy to be good, he said, it has to be credible, forward-looking and consistent. One student asked how he would characterize the economic policy that has made China one of the fastest-growing economies, and Dr. Kydland carefully responded that he wasn’t confident he had studied China enough to answer that question.

Given the chance to ask Dr. Kydland a few questions during the post-lecture cocktails, I began fishing—as journalists are conditioned to do—for pronouncements I could then use to anchor stories “relevant” to newspaper readers. Dr. Kydland, however, stayed admirably careful. Would adopting a legislated high-wage policy enable countries like the Philippines to lure its overseas workers back? “I’m not sure how it could work in the long run. That’s exactly why economic development is so important, because when it takes place, wages will automatically become higher, even without any interference from the government. That’s exactly what happened in Ireland.”

I asked a few more questions after that, about costly economic policy mistakes and the rising influence of sovereign wealth funds, and the answers were all very useful and interesting to me, but phrased in a manner so cautious that they couldn’t be corralled into a quick, provocative-headline-inducing news story that would fit in 15 newspaper column inches. At some point, I stopped “fishing” and just listened.

And then the day’s real lesson hit me: how hard-earned are the “truths” we allow to seep into public discourse? How often have we allowed spin to masquerade as substance? Few news sources are like Dr. Kydland, careful to comment only on the things he has learned first-hand. In a week crammed with public confessions, I thought it was an important reminder. How do we really know what we know? The rest is mere opinion.

(Appears, strangely enough, in the Op-Ed pages of today's Sun.Star Cebu.)

Truth and advertising

2008-02-04T01:58:00.000+08:00

...is what the bottom photo's called. It was snapped from the roofdeck of the building where I work during the Fiesta Señor procession last 19 January, using a fool-proof (the operative word here being "fool") digital camera. As for the first shot, I was really just watching the crowd brave the rain, when I saw these students' T-shirts. Now that's a thought (or so I thought).

‘Sachets’ and strides in banking for the poor

2008-02-04T01:48:00.000+08:00

You'll see them hanging in colorful strips in every convenience store, these small, inexpensive sachets of milk, laundry detergent, shampoo, instant coffee—even gin.

“These ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ commodities show there’s a profitable market for products that will meet the needs and wants of the poor,” said the economist Dr. Victorina Zosa, who heads the research office at the University of San Carlos.

The banks’ equivalent of the manufacturers’ sachets are microfinance services, especially microcredit. From only 121 banks in 2004, at least 225 banks already offered microfinance in 2007, Pia Bernadette Roman of the Microfinance Unit of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) told me via e-mail.

In a 2006 paper on microfinance for The Globalization Research Trust, Tom Clougherty defined microfinance as “the provision of financial services, whether loans, deposit accounts or insurance, to poor and low-income individuals and households. What primarily distinguishes microfinance from the traditional provision of financial services, aside from the small sums of money involved, is the absence of collateral as security for a loan. Instead, money is advanced on the basis of reputation.”

The number of borrowers who have obtained microcredit from rural, thrift or cooperative banks in the Philippines has grown 77 percent in the last three years, from 485,136 in 2004 to about 860,000 last year. The total loan portfolio rose from P2.95 billion (US$72 million) three years ago to P8.2 billion ($201 million) last year, the BSP reported.

One significant development, Roman said in a separate paper, was the General Banking Act of 2000, which ordered the BSP to revise the rules to encourage banks to offer microfinance services. “In the past, the banking sector had a general aversion to microfinance because of past failed experiences with directed credit programs, the perception that the poor are high-risk due to the lack of collateral, and the high transaction costs,” she added.

Banks that provide microfinance are exempted from a central bank moratorium on the creation of more branches. In 2001, the BSP opened a rediscounting window for microfinance providers. No ceilings are set for interest rates. Banks may, relying on their own assessment, decide to waive collateral from certain borrowers.

Roman emphasized that microfinance transactions “are business transactions and not dole-outs or charity.” While microfinance providers are allowed to do away with traditional documentary and collateral requirements, they are expected to recover the amounts they’ve lent; otherwise, they soon lose funding sources and fold up.

The United Nations Development Program estimated that in 2006, 400 to 500 million households worldwide were in need of microfinance. Only 30 million had access to it.

“Bottom-of-the-pyramid strategies, the idea that the poor represent an enormous, albeit diffuse, market worth trillions of dollars and that companies can profitably sell to this market so long as they meet the consumers’ needs, are growing in popularity among leading companies in a range of industries,” Clougherty said. “This can only be of benefit to the developing world.”

The Freedom market economy

2008-01-28T01:16:00.000+08:00

About this week's column: As with practically everything else, microlending has some sad stories. In a recent feature article, Business Week showed how banks, including those owned by the retail giant Wal-Mart, are trapping poor Mexicans in "a maze of debt" as these companies cash in on micro-credit. Given the depressing financial news over the past week, however, I thought it would be more helpful to focus on survivors' stories. I also remembered how Dr. Muhammad Yunus, in "Banker to the Poor", wrote that they set out to make sure half of Grameen Bank's borrowers would be women. Given my 3,000-character limit, this column doesn't capture the details of the lives of the three women I met in Carbon market last Saturday. But I hope it does convey how easy it really is to give someone else a fighting chance for an easier life--and how easily most of us can overlook this, if all we ever do is wallow in what we think of as our misfortunes.

ROSITA, Lolita and Maria Teresa are all traders in Freedom Park, part of Carbon market, where the city’s vehicular, commercial and pedestrian traffic meet.

Rosita’s family sells ladies’ bags, baskets, hammocks and little trinkets often used as party giveaways. Lolita’s smaller display of woven bags and baskets shares space with her husband Marcelo’s watch repair stand. Maria Teresa’s family used to sell textiles and clothes, but in recent years she has decided to shift to wooden furniture instead.

Across the three women’s stalls, at least three pawnshops wait, quick sources of cash for those times when their fellow traders need money for tuition or suppliers’ payments. The three, however, belong to at least one cooperative each—and that, they say, is what has made all the difference in their lives.

Rosita says the coop allows her to borrow as much as double her share capital. If she has P2,000 (about US$49) in the coop, for example, she can borrow up to P4,000 ($98), with three months to pay, at one percent interest. Her daily payments would be less than P50 ($1.25). Sometimes, she doesn’t have enough, such as when her stall’s weekly rent of P241 falls due. But the daily payments are small enough that she can usually make up the difference with the next day’s sales.

Lolita has depended on Freedom Park for a living far longer than Rosita has. “We were here long before Martial Law,” her husband Marcelo tells me, which means they’ve seen the public market’s crowds wax and wane for more than 36 years. Like Rosita, Lolita has also tried borrowing money from a coop and from a bank. Both women say the coop’s arrangements were more convenient. The money they needed to borrow was, they felt, too small for the paperwork a bank required. Besides, the coop gave them regular dividends.

Of the three, it is Maria Teresa who knows the most about the coop’s activities. She serves in its audit committee. She knows that in late October, as All Souls’ Day approaches, it’s the flower vendors among their 200 or so coop members who will borrow extra capital. In December, it’s the dry goods merchants’ turn. Every day, she says, the coop earns a little extra money by charging fees (P3 to P5) for the use of four clean toilets—a service the market didn’t have until the coop’s members thought of it.

When Maria Teresa’s sources fall into hard times, she sends them money, usually borrowed from the coop, so they can keep building the wooden cabinets, beds, cribs and tables that fill Maria Teresa’s stall. This way, she also sustains several other households apart from her own brood of six.

The coop gives Rosita, Lolita and Maria Teresa’s families the social insurance they cannot get elsewhere: it has helped them send children to school, weather an illness, or give a loved one a decent burial. It has helped them stay in business, in an economy where the upper limits of microenterprise—capitalization of P3 million ($73,529)—are, for now, beyond their reach.

I spent part of Saturday afternoon in Freedom Park looking for examples of how micro-lending had bettered the lives of those who would otherwise fall through the cracks of the formal banking system. And thanks to three women, I walked away inspired and optimistic.

$27 that changed millions of lives

2008-01-21T01:56:00.000+08:00

Muhammad Yunus tells the story of how, over 30 years ago, he would visit villages in rural Bangladesh to persuade “hidden women” to get loans from the then-fledgling Grameen Bank. The women were literally hidden. Purdah—the traditional rules that are meant to preserve feminine modesty—kept them from being seen by any men who weren’t their husbands or close relatives.

To communicate, Yunus recalled, he would sit in a clearing, while the women would gather in one house, and one of his female students would allow them to exchange questions and answers by serving as the go-between. This went on for hours. One rainy day, the women told him to take shelter in an empty house next to the one where they had gathered, and they began conversing without the go-between’s help, shouting their questions from behind a bamboo wall.

As they listened, the women—about 25 in all—would press their ears against the bamboo partition. Pretty soon, part of the flimsy wall gave under pressure, and “before they knew what had happened, the women were sitting in the room listening and talking directly to me,” Yunus narrates in his memoir, “Banker to the Poor” (Public Affairs, 2003).

By the time Yunus and Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2006, 97 percent of the nearly seven million people who had availed themselves of micro-credit loans were women, scattered in small groups across 73,000 villages. “We focused on women because we found giving loans to women always brought more benefits to the family,” Yunus said.

As a matter of policy, Grameen does not require skills training before handing out its small loans. “The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability. They do not need us to teach them how to survive; they already know how to do this,” Yunus said. By November 2002, an estimated 26.8 million of the families helped by micro-credit (pegged at 54 million families total) were scraping a living from less than US$1 a day. As of 2006, Grameen’s repayment rate stood at 99 percent.

Long-time borrowers who run their own micro-businesses also have the option to acquire shares in Grameen companies or mutual funds, through Grameen Securities Management, because Yunus says they “did not want our members to become dependent on their children, the government, Grameen, or businesses they were no longer able to run. After years of hard work in their micro-businesses, we wanted them to live their final years in dignified retirement.”

To do all this, Yunus started by dipping into his pocket to give 42 stool-makers of Jobra village a loan. The total amount involved? US$27. Granted, Yunus was also armed with an advanced degree in economics from Vanderbilt University, but still: think of all the millions of families whose lives have become better, because he reached out to them, listened to them and gave them not just a loan, but even more valuable gifts to help them break down poverty’s walls: belief in their capacity to gain financial know-how and faith in their abilities.

(Appears in the Op-Ed pages of today's Sun.Star Cebu.)

A gift with strings

2008-01-14T01:25:00.000+08:00

THINK of knowledge as a small region in an immense sea of ignorance, and the challenge of those who find it is to push its limits outward. "The most important product of knowledge is informed, intelligent ignorance," said Dr. David Jonathan Gross, Nobel Laureate for physics in 2004.

I can honestly admit I brought a lot of ignorance during Dr. Gross' presentation last Friday at the University of San Carlos. So it was a relief when Dr. Gross deviated from "The coming revolutions in fundamental physics" and talked instead about the lessons of science, among them openness, the need for internationalism, and the willingness and ability to keep asking questions.

The work that won Dr. Gross his Nobel Prize (shared with Franck Wilczek and H. David Politzer) proved that the force between quarks varies with distance: when the quarks are close together, the force that holds them together is weak, but "pull them apart and the force gets so strong that you can't pull them out of a proton." He adds: "That's pretty weird!"

(Blog-only aside: It's this almost palpable sense of wonder that makes Dr. Gross a compelling speaker. Check out this interview he did with PBS. And it's a sure sign of how unsophisticated my mind is that his brief summation of asymptotic freedom also sounds to me like relationship advice.)

Because Dr. Gross is one of the rock stars of string theory, I was planning to ask what implications it would have, if scientists prove that the universe isn't made up of sub-atomic particles, like quarks and leptons, but instead of tiny strings, vibrating endlessly. Where would that knowledge lead us? What good would it do? Would I have to alter my retirement plans? (As I was pitching this assignment the night before the talk, one newsroom colleague joked, "And how does this affect the foreign exchange rate?")

Indeed, the gap between research and application is the first thing most of us are likely to see. Knowledge is deemed more valuable if it has immediate uses, especially if these uses prop up some corporations' bottom line. That's not entirely bad news. It helps explain, for example, why the most generous contributors of scientific research funding in the Philippines, after the government, are the electronics and semiconductors industries.

Apart from the lack of funding, there are the challenges of training more scientists and improving the quality of basic science education. Filipino physicists have pointed out that in the Philippines, there are so few practicing physicists that we literally have a one-in-a-million chance of meeting one.

We are unlikely to grasp the wonders of the universe with the results from our schoolrooms. In 2006-2007, the average score in science achievement tests among sixth-graders was 51.58 percent. (It was 60.29 percent in math.) Among sophomore high school students in the same school year, the average science achievement score was 41.99 percent.

But as I listened to Dr. Gross list the questions he has been contemplating for nearly 40 years, I got gooseflesh. "How do the forces of nature unify? How did time start? How did the universe begin? Is it cyclic, or something even wilder? What is the nature of space and time?"

It must be a tremendous gift, to spend one's time and energy grappling with such large questions. How can we make this gift available to more Filipino students?

(Appears in the Op-Ed pages of today's Sun.Star Cebu.)

The good life and the afterlife

2008-01-10T01:58:00.000+08:00

A comment from cvj on the previous post had me checking the files for a related column I wrote in 2003. And here it is:

TWO literary greats of the 20th Century once tangled on the subject of money. “The rich,” said one, “are different from you and me.” “Yes,” the other retorted, “They have more money.”

Hemingway’s glib answer to Fitzgerald aside, one does wonder what it is that makes the rich what they are, apart from inheritance and intermarriage.

A recent American study suggests religion may yield some clues: that people who regularly attend religious services amass more wealth than those who don’t. And that certain sects or denominations encourage habits that make their followers richer than those of other faiths.

Of course, any study that suggests Jews are conditioned to be wealthier than Catholics or conservative Protestants (e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, among others) is bound to get its share of critics. This study by sociology professor Lisa Keister of the Ohio State University was no exception.

Keister believes that the religion a family chooses to practice can influence a lot of factors that determine whether their children grow up wealthy or not: the schools they attend, the professions they choose, their views on money and property, and their social connections.

Going by Keister’s theory, next time you wonder why you’re poor, don’t just look at your grasp of technology or technical skill. Check your theology too.

Does your faith say it’s okay to live the good life without jeopardizing your chances in the afterlife? Is it wrong to want to be rich? A New Testament quotation is frequently mangled by those who want to blame money for all of humankind’s woes. But the correct quotation bears reading: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Timothy 6:10) “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” according to the Beatitudes. Note that it doesn’t say, “Blessed are the poor,” period.

By some stroke of luck (or, perhaps more appropriately, divine intervention?), I got invited over a week ago to a forum on “Religion, Culture and Economic Performance” hosted by the Eduardo Aboitiz Development Studies Center.

The visiting scholar, Marcus Noland of the Institute for International Economics, pointed out that while the literature is rich in theories of how religion influences a country’s economic performance, there is no “robust” evidence that shows this relationship at work. For one thing, Noland pointed out, it’s difficult to isolate the effects of religion on the economy, from the effects of culture. And there is a host of other factors—geography, history, the quality of institutions—to consider when one tries to find out why some nations are richer than others.

The afternoon yielded no tabloid-worthy headlines (“Economist urges mass conversion to save RP economy”) but plenty of food for thought. It may not show up on econometric models, but religion’s influence on policy and prosperity is apparent, from “sin taxes” to birth control—just as religion’s failures are reflected by various signals, from tax evasion to corruption.

What we believe determines how prosperous we can be, as individuals and communities, in at least three ways: (1) our views on wealth and poverty; (2) our habits, among them thrift, charity, self-discipline and responsibility; and (3) the extent to which we allow our religion to affect our transactions. (Is Sunday piety reflected in workaday practice?)

Prosperous Jain merchants on the northern coast of India were said to have benefited from a belief system that saw wealth creation as morally neutral, neither evil nor good in itself, for as long as “one labors that many may enjoy what he earns.” (Halfway around the world and several centuries removed, the economist Fritz Schumacher echoed the thought: “Management is not an economic question, but a moral one.”)

This exercise, as you can see, can lead to all sorts of interesting ideas, including the good old chicken-and-egg combo: Am I poor because of what I believe? Or do I believe what I believe because I am poor?

(First published 13 October 2003 in the Op-Ed pages of Sun.Star Cebu)

Are you financially literate?

2008-01-07T00:06:00.000+08:00

LIFE did not change radically on the day I learned the Rule of 72. But it certainly made a little more sense.

The Rule of 72 is a neat mathematical shortcut for figuring out how many years it will take for an amount to double, given a fixed annual rate of interest. All you have to do is divide 72 by the rate of return or interest. So if your time deposit earns six percent, for example, this means you'll have to wait 12 years to get double your original amount.

Let's say you managed to keep your hands off your yearend bonuses in 2007, and you estimate that you'll need double that amount in eight years—when your eldest starts college, or when you want to have enough for a down payment on a house. Divide 72 by eight, and the rule suggests that you'll have to find a way for that money to grow at nine percent interest each year.

Those of you who studied business or learned about investing while still in the pits of puberty are probably appalled that something so basic could have escaped a grown woman for so long. You'd be surprised. I did a quick informal poll of 10 of the smartest people I know—all of them well into their thirties, which is why they shall go unnamed here—and only one knew the Rule of 72. One! (Granted, most of the lovely people I know are humanities types.)

Of course, we all need a lot more than the Rule of 72 to make better decisions concerning our savings, spending, budgeting and retirement plans. One doesn't learn overnight the value of patience, or the need to avoid making financial decisions based on fear, or why dividend reinvestment will make you feel better, in the long run, than the fleeting pleasures of retail therapy.

But realizing how little one knows about the basics of financial literacy helps, for starters. We know that about 84 percent of all Filipinos were found functionally literate (meaning they weren't "innumerate") as of 2003. No one measures financial literacy, but one indicator could be our savings—and here the figures are dismal indeed.

Throughout the 1990's, Indonesia had a lower per capita income than the Philippines. But in the entire decade, we reported a higher gross domestic savings (GDS) rate—savings as a percentage of GDP—only once, in 1999, compared to Indonesia. In that year, our GDS stood at 19.8 percent, compared to Indonesia's 13.2 percent. In contrast, Thailand reported a GDS of 35.4 percent; Malaysia, 37.7 percent; and Singapore, 51.2 percent. For all the other nine years, Indonesians saved more than we did—even if their pay packets, on average, were thinner than ours.

"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons," Woody Allen has said. We may have limited or no influence over some strategies that can raise a country's ability to save, such as land redistribution and rationalizing population growth. But we can certainly begin with ourselves and our households, and the start of a year is a great time for setting or reviewing financial goals.

(Appears in the Op-Ed pages of today's Sun.Star Cebu.)

For New Year's Eve, a little humble pie

2007-12-31T15:32:00.000+08:00

If we believed all the sis-boom-bah generated by government officials, some business leaders and journalists, it wouldn't be surprising for Cebuanos to assume that our economy—and by extension, the regional economy—is the most dynamic outside of Luzon.

So when a Cebu-based economist corrected my assumption, it was quite a surprise. "Western Visayas has been overtaking us in the last three to four years," Dr. Victorina Zosa of the University of San Carlos' research office said in a recent interview.

Whatever it is they're doing in the plains of Panay and the beaches of Boracay, the economy of Western Visayas has been the largest outside of Luzon since 2003. As of last year, it was the fourth largest contributor to the gross domestic product (GDP), outstripped only by the powerhouses of the National Capital Region, Calabarzon and Central Luzon.

In 2005 and 2006, the "race" was rather close: Western Visayas accounted for 7.2 percent of national GDP in both years, compared to 7.1 percent from Central Visayas. But consider too, that our northwestern neighbors slowed down in these two years—unlike 2001 to 2004, when its regional GDP consistently outpaced that of Central Visayas.

Between October 2000 and October 2007, Western Visayas reduced its unemployment rate by 4.4 percentage points. Central Visayas' gains were more modest, at 1.9 percentage points. (As of October 2007, unemployment stood at 6 percent in Western Visayas and 5.9 percent in Central Visayas, although their underemployment rate, at 22 percent, was almost double ours.)

It helps us to know that despite growth in construction, tourism and information technology, in 2006—for the first time since 2000—the Central Visayan economy grew slower than the national average. From third fastest in 2000, we dropped last year to sixth, in terms of GDP growth rate—growing slower, in fact, than the economies of Northern Mindanao, Central Mindanao and Ilocos. (Our exporters' troubles with a rising peso are probably part of the reason.)

The point of this exercise isn't to appeal to regional pride but, in this season of resolutions and self-assessment, to remind ourselves of the need for a more objective appraisal of how well we're contributing to the national economy.

Social historians tell us that in the early 20th century, Iloilo City's economic decline stemmed mostly from labor unrest and an inaccurate reading of its economic performance and prospects.

"Its popular culture, newspapers and theater fostered a working-class consciousness that was far in advance of Iloilo's role in the global hierarchy of cities," Alfred McCoy writes. "While its stevedores demonstrated the militancy and solidarity of an industrial proletariat, the city itself was an expendable entrepot at the bottom rung of the transport chain, not an indispensable industrial center."

What new ideas or products are behind the reemergence of the original "queen city of the south"? What connections can we forge with it and the rest of Western Visayas? There is much to gain from working well with one's neighbors—and in learning to not always believe one's own PR.

(Appears in the Op-Ed pages of today's Sun.Star Cebu. Because an overcrowded academic and professional workload has failed--miserably--to make a pessimist out of me, I'm writing a weekly column again. Wish me luck!)

A rising tide doesn't lift all boats

2007-12-26T23:11:00.000+08:00

FILIPINO exporters are starting to look outside the United States, traditionally their largest market for electronics, furniture and other exports, to cope with a peso that’s been rising for nearly three years.

Since November 2005, the peso has gained P11.35 against the US dollar. That’s 20.8 percent off the value of the dollars that exporters and overseas Filipino workers have been bringing in. A strong peso cushions the blow from rising oil prices and helps keep inflation down, but it also erodes the earnings of overseas workers and exporters.

“In peso terms, total exports plummeted to negative 4.9 percent from 9.2 percent last year, the effect of the appreciation of the peso against the dollar,” the National Statistical Coordinating Board said in its third-quarter report for 2007.

Of the top 10 merchandise exports, only two items—crude coconut oil (70 percent) and ignition wiring sets (3.6 percent)—grew in the third quarter from last year’s figures. For everything else, there was no growth to speak of. Garment exports dropped by -22.6 percent; semiconductors and electronic microcircuits, -10.7 percent; and other manufactured products, such as furniture, -34.3 percent.

More than 50,000 jobs lost

Furniture exporter Jay Yuvallos, president of the 13-year-old company Interior Basics in Mactan, knows these grim figures only too well.

“In general, the future of small and medium enterprise (SME) exporters is really a big question mark,” Yuvallos said. “We really can’t survive the competition in the international market if the cost of raw materials, supplies and labor continues to rise. Power cost in our country is very high; in fact it’s the second most expensive in Asia, next only to Japan, and our labor productivity remains low.”

Yuvallos is also president of the Confederation of Philippine Exporters (Philexport) in Cebu, which warned in a position paper last May that “more than 50,000 breadwinners” have lost their jobs in SME companies alone since early 2006.

While government agencies contributed to the P280-million Export Development Fund, Yuvallos said that exporters wish that more aggressive efforts can be taken in such areas as subsidies on market intelligence, research and development, international trade fair participation, promotional materials and activities geared toward finding new market opportunities, particularly the European Union.

“And of course a more favorable currency exchange rate,” Yuvallos added.

The lack of collaboration with other industries, such as machine shops, also hobbles exporters, said Dr. Victorina Zosa, an economist who heads the Research Office at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City.

“We never really expanded our market and are still heavily dependent on the US economy,” Dr. Zosa said. “The Japanese have already supplanted the US in terms of foreign direct investment and official development assistance, but we have not really explored the potential of other markets outside the US.”

No longer the ‘Milan of Asia’

The problem is more serious than exporters’ shrinking profit margins. In a paper she wrote in 2004 for the Philippine Institute of Development Studies, Dr. Zosa pointed out: “Cebu’s export-led growth reduced poverty by approximately 8 percent from 1988 to 2000.” From 1990 to 2002, the Cebu exports’ share in the gross regional domestic product (GRDP) of Central Visayas grew from 6.37 to 32.06 percent.

Last year, for the first time since 2000, the Central Visayas’ GRDP grew slower than the national average.

“We have to recreate ourselves and shift our markets. If in 2003, our furniture industry made us the ‘Milan of Asia’, today that is no longer the case,” Zosa said. The loss of designers and mechanical engineers to jobs abroad, as well as the poor quality of basic education in the Philippines, are among the challenges exporters face.

Cebu’s exporters, however, have dealt with tough times before, said Zosa. In the 1970’s, the combined effects of a ban on the use of local rattan, Indonesia’s refusal to export its rattan poles, and rising oil prices forced about 70 percent of all export firms to close shop. The rest recovered, she recalled, by integrating their supply chain with production and by working together to promote the sector.

Instead of wringing their hands at the prospect of weak US demand in 2008, Filipino exporters can attempt to understand instead the different preferences of European consumers, said Klaas de Boer of the Dutch Government’s Center for the Promotion of Imports from Developing Countries.

“You cannot stand on one leg. At this moment, if you look at the international economy of the Philippines, you’re only standing on one leg,” he added.

So far, the government has revised its projection for export growth in 2007 from 11 percent to only eight percent. “We made a regional export development plan, and the scenario was not that positive. I don’t know what the basis for the eight percent is. But looking at the current scenario, I don’t know. We definitely cannot expect growth coming from SME exporters,” Yuvallos said.

Gazing down at his quiet factory floor in Mactan, the exporter said it dismays him that the extent of the problem seems to have been downplayed. “Can you imagine a company retrenching some 100 employees?” he said, shaking his head. “They’ll walk into your office on their last day, their last paycheck in hand. You know their families. Majority of them have tears in their eyes. How do you manage that?”

(A longer version of this story appears in the 24 December 2007 issue of Sun.Star Cebu.)

Cebu exporters eye EU market

2007-12-14T23:17:00.000+08:00

A 42-MEMBER delegation, most of them exporters from Cebu, is leaving for The Netherlands in February 2008 as part of efforts to understand and attract European buyers, amid weak demand from traditional trade partners Japan and the United States.

While in Rotterdam, these local experts-in-training will present their marketing plans for six export sectors—furniture, fashion accessories, home décor, garments, food, and health and wellness—before proceeding to Frankfurt am Main, Germany to observe a trade show.

“You cannot stand on one leg. That is what’s happening with the global economic potential of the Philippines for now,” said Klaas de Boer, a consultant of the Dutch government’s CBI or the Center for the Promotion of Imports from Developing Countries. For a long time, he added, a lack of commitment to the European market has been one of the challenges of Filipino exporters, “who are too US-focused.”

The Rotterdam sessions will wrap up the first module on export marketing and management, for which the CBI invested 250,000 Euros (about P15.2 million). Talks are ongoing with the Confederation of Philippine Exporters Foundation (Philexport) Cebu for the rollout of the second module, this time on export diversification. Two other modules focus on market information and the strengthening of institutions, such as industry associations.

“The quality of the participants is very, very high,” de Boer said yesterday, during a break in the training course. “We are working with colleagues here, not students, and our focus now is to move from the strategic level of thinking that we have worked on for the past three weeks, to the operational level,” he added. He cited the need to make sure that Philippine exporters can create and guarantee a reliable supply of goods demanded by European buyers.

A peso that has been rising for about two years has compounded other problems faced by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the export industry, said Philexport Cebu president Jay Yuvallos in a separate interview.

“In general, the future of SME exporters in this country is really a big question mark,” he said. “We can’t survive the competition in the international market if the cost of raw materials keeps on rising, the labor cost keeps rising, the price of oil keeps rising, the electricity cost is the second most expensive in Asia next to Japan, and our labor productivity remains low.”

The peso has gained P5.7 or about 11.6 percent against the US dollar from January to November this year, and averaged P43.21 last month. It averaged P48.91 to the dollar in November 2006.

Apart from the exporters and the Philexport Cebu staff, the delegation will include Talisay City Vice Mayor Lani Abarquez, Dr. Inoray Osop of the Mindanao State University in General Santos and some human resource training consultants. The rest of the training will address the lack of market information for Philippine exporters, as well as strategies to meet the European market’s rigorous standards.

(This story also appears in Sun.Star Cebu.)

Kodaker extraordinaire

2007-12-03T03:13:00.000+08:00

Ok, so maybe not extraordinaire. But my photos don't land in some high-traffic website every day, so I thought I'd celebrate the fact that this one got selected for the Schmap Cologne guide. (Go to the Top Attractions, pick the Cologne cathedral, then click on those arrows flanking the pictures in the top right column. See? Pa-Kodak ka? Ma-da ra ko'g hangyo.) But before you ask for a balato to celebrate my good fortune, let me state for the record that bragging rights are all I'm getting.

Well, that and a pleasant sprint through memory lane: it was a late April afternoon last year, and my friend Clare and I were walking around the Roncalliplatz in search of strong coffee and unconventional souvenirs, when we saw hundreds of these figures built from computer parts, soda cans and bits of plastic. This photo doesn't show you the scale of the exhibit, row upon row neatly lined up on the cathedral square like an elaborate chessboard. And it's definitely not the view that other tourists will see--it was just coincidence that we were brought to Cologne on one of the exhibit's last days. You will probably see scaffolding, because the restoration and cleaning of the cathedral don't seem to end. If the grime on the cathedral's face puts you off, remember that it took nearly seven centuries to build and, since its completion, has survived for over 120 years. Given everything it's been a mute witness to, it's none the worse for wear. (Which is more than I can say for certain republics, but I digress.)

Speaking up against government secrecy

2007-09-26T22:15:00.000+08:00

Pete Weitzel’s “The Steady March of Government Secrecy” (Nieman Reports, Fall 2004) proved helpful during a recent class in mass media law, so I thought it would be a great idea to e-mail him and ask what he and the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government have done to press for changes in the United States’ Freedom of Information Act.

Here are his answers:

1) What do you suggest that journalists do in order to protect access to government information?

Push back in every way possible. First by regularly reporting about the issue and about occasions in which meetings are closed or records refused. If information is refused, that should be part of the story, and the official refusing to provide the record, or the group meeting in private, should be identified. And let readers, listeners know when you pull important information from records because it will help them develop an appreciation for keeping records open.

Second, do everything you can not to take no for an answer. Try to get the information some other way. And then in reporting it, again let the reader/listener know one or more officials refused to make the information public (but you found out anyway).

Third, get your news organization to use its editorial voice in support.

Fourth, get your news organization to push back in court.

Fifth, urge your news organization to get involved in media and public advocacy alliances supporting open government proposals in your legislature/congress and fighting public records/meetings exemptions.

2) You spoke of an “orgy of national security legislation” post-9/11 that has led to more documents getting classified in the United States. Has that trend abated since you wrote your article in 2004, or is secrecy still on the rise?

There have been fewer new bills in our Congress closing access to information and we are close to getting a very positive reform of the Freedom of Information Act, but there have been continuing problems of executive branch agencies seeking to close access.

Far more documents were classified last year than every before; the government has claimed a “state secrets privilege” in seeking to have several lawsuits seeing information thrown out of court. And the president has claimed executive privilege in refusing to respond to a number of inquiries from Congress.

3) Have journalists in the US discussed any proposed amendments to the FOIA or the enactment of new laws to preserve access to information?

My organization and a number of other journalism organizations have supported (and contributed suggestions to) the OPEN Government Act, which has not passed both houses of Congress, although in slightly different form.

The Conscience of a Liberal

2007-09-20T23:43:00.000+08:00

Now free, thanks to the end of TimesSelect: a new blog by the always thought-provoking Paul Krugman, author of "The Return of Depression Economics."

Earlier today at a Cebu Press Freedom Week forum, two of the questions during the Q&A focused on convergence (maybe the fact that UP in Cebu was inaugurating a multimedia newsroom had something to do with that). I'm still learning about the big "C" word and how I can prepare for it, to be honest, but Mr. Krugman's experiment will certainly bear watching.

If information wants to be free...

2007-09-07T23:51:00.000+08:00

Why doesn’t the Philippines have a Freedom of Information Act?

As of last count, at least 17 bills on this have been filed since 1998, yet all have remained stuck in Congress. Seventy other countries already have such a law.

Perhaps we’re being complacent. After all, the country arguably offers the greatest access to public information, at least in this region. Also, the right to information is recognized in both the 1973 and 1987 Constitutions, and the Supreme Court has held this right to be self-executory: we don’t need a law in order to exercise it.

But absent a law that outlines what the right to information means, citizens have had to rely on the courts to define the right to information’s scope and limits. This also means government agencies where a culture of openness has yet to take root may arbitrarily deny access, particularly if one doesn’t wield a press card.

The right to information used to be narrowly defined only as the right to gain access to information held by public organizations. Of late, however, that definition has been expanded to include an obligation on such organizations to publish information and an equal obligation to collect new information (such as what truth commissions do).

The absence of a Freedom of Information Act in the Philippines casts doubt on efforts to portray the country as one at par with international standards, able to compete and cooperate on the global stage.

In December 2005, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Convention Against Corruption, whose provision on “public reporting” asks states to:

a) Adopt procedures or regulations allowing members of the general public to obtain, where appropriate, information on the organization, functioning and decision-making processes of its public administration and, with due regard for the protection of privacy and personal data, on decisions and legal acts that concern members of the public;
(b) Simplify administrative procedures, where appropriate, in order to facilitate public access to the competent decision-making authorities; and
(c) Publish information, which may include periodic reports on the risks of corruption in its public administration.

In an article that I’ll work on next week, I hope to explore why efforts to enact an FOIA have failed, and what we can do about it. If you have any suggestions, questions, possible sources I can interview by phone or e-mail, I’d appreciate feedback (or should that be feedforward?) via this blog’s comment box, or e-mail (isolde.amante(at)gmail.com). Thank you!

Target: 1M foreign tourists in Cebu by 2012

2007-08-27T06:06:00.000+08:00

Cebu should work to attract at least one million foreign tourists by 2012, Tourism Secretary Joseph “Ace” Durano said last week as he unveiled a proposed framework for developing tourism in the island.

To do that, Cebu needs to bring in 13.25 percent more foreign tourists each year in the next five years, which Durano described as “a doable target, not too much of a stretch.” In the last three years, the annual growth rate has ranged from 10 to 13 percent.

Next year’s target: 71,152 more foreign tourists. That’s close to 6,000 additional tourists each month, on average.

Durano admitted the plan carries with it a long errand list that includes expanding the Mactan-Cebu International Airport, which already exceeded last year its capacity of 2.5 million passengers.

“If we are to hit the target of one million foreign tourists, plus domestic travelers, the terminal must have a capacity of 4.5 million in five years, almost double the present capacity,” Durano said. “Given a gestation period of 18 months to two years for government infrastructure projects, it is imperative that we start expanding Mactan airport today.”

Working against constraints

The former congressman discussed his proposed framework at the Sun.Star Economic Forum held last week at the Marco Polo Plaza Hotel. Responding to a participant’s comment about the congestion and poor facilities at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA), Durano admitted that in the past three years, the Department of Tourism has been “searching for ways to circumvent constraints.”

“One effort has been to open more international flights outside Manila,” he said, adding that NAIA’s share of foreign tourist arrivals has dropped “dramatically” in the last two years. Efforts are ongoing to open the airport in Kalibo to foreign flights, make Clark the main international gateway in Luzon and, among others, build an international airport in Panglao, Bohol.

For Cebu, the challenges are attracting more tourists from emerging markets, promoting the island as a venue for international meetings and pitching Cebu as an ideal location for second homes.

“China is still a very small part of the present market mix,” Durano pointed out. “It’s time for Cebu to target the high-growth emerging markets like China, Russia and India. I am confident that just by broadening our market base, we can hit our targets… (but) we also have to broaden the product base of Cebu. With the new business hotels, the Cebu International Convention Center, it’s about time Cebu promoted itself as a destination for international meetings.”

Room to grow

About 579,000 worked last year in Cebu’s tourism industry, and 77,000 more jobs are projected in 2007, said Durano. Nationwide, 3.49 million worked in travel and tourism last year.

Cebu’s projected tourist arrivals for 2007 represent about 18 percent of the national target. The tourism department expects foreign tourists to spend some US$968 million in Cebu this year alone.

But there’s a lot of room for improvement, starting with the availability of rooms that can be marketed to foreign tourists.

“Not all of the existing rooms can be marketed abroad; only about half of them. Our effective capacity is only three million ‘room nights’ a year. We have to target close to 9 million ‘room nights’ in the next five years," Durano said. (Capital investments in Cebu’s tourism industry hit P3.84 billion in 2006.)

Both the surroundings and service need some work. According to a survey commissioned by the DOT last year, 55 percent of those who visited Cebu cited the “warm hospitality and kindness” as the thing they liked best about their visit, followed by “beautiful scenery and nice beaches” (44 percent). Around 15 percent reported some “dislikes”, among them bad weather, poor roads, a dirty environment and heavy traffic. Hotel workers were rated “good to excellent.” Of all service groups, cab drivers and immigration officers scored lowest, with an “average” rating. No details were supplied on the number of survey respondents, when the survey was conducted or the margin of error and confidence level.

(Want to download the presentations? Visit the official blog here.)

For Mayette, with many thanks

2007-08-20T07:02:00.000+08:00

(One of the women I admire most, Mayette Tabada, has responded to my tag with a column on a subject dear to us both: writing. Last night, while reading something that had nothing at all to do with school or work---my own, secular attempt at a lectio divina, my daily hour of contemplation---I was struck by two impulses, equally demanding. One led to playtime with a short story that keeps bringing me its surprises, and the other, this short entry.)

It seems that activity, not idleness, is what gets me writing. Now that I have four papers due in two weeks, I feel the urge to work on “Punta Engaño” again, a story that has refused, after seven years, to let me forget it. My writing remains wanting to me, slack and often pedestrian. But for now, this is the writing I’m capable of, and in order to keep going, I have to believe that one day, the words will fit together better, find meaning and music in the way I’ve ordered them on the page.

No, perhaps not ordered---a more fitting word escapes me for now, a way to capture what it’s like to wait, straining to hear amidst the silence, until the word that sounds true presents itself, appears tentatively at first in my mind’s fog. If it feels right, it brings inevitability with it---yes, this word, and nothing else will do. (Announces itself like Whitman: “I stand on this spot with my soul.”)

I remember scribbling late one night in my old apartment, stopping often while the words dawdled, then suddenly there it was: persiflage. It finished a funny poem for me, hopping into place before I could remember where I had first heard it, or confirmed what it meant. And yet, for that poem, it was exactly what I’d been waiting for.

The news is relatively easier to write. I can map it out in my head like a row of boxes waiting for the facts and quotes to fill them up. Or else I can fill little cards with The Points I Wish to Make, and shuffle them until a coherent sequence becomes plain, and I can write. I plan the first line and last; often the problem is keeping the non-essentials out, no matter how long it took to get them, or how delightful they sound.

The fiction’s a different story altogether. It is maddeningly slow work, and if I don’t pay attention or write down every new possibility (a line, a character quirk, a scene or a detail to reward the perceptive reader with), I’ll find that it has fled while I tried to wade through the day’s demands. I’ve learned since to keep a notebook handy, to accept each revelation as it comes, and to try to live, as the editor Russell Lynes once put it, on “the fine edge of awareness.”

I don’t always succeed. There are stories, or parts of stories, that are lost to me for good. Yet now that real life has piled on so many other things to do---papers to write, errands to account for, those little griefs and joys to ponder with each irretrievable day---I find that the stories have remained, were there all along waiting for me to stop apologizing for how inadequate I’ve become, and to just write. And so I do. So I try.

In the war against dengue, half of all casualties are children

2007-08-04T04:30:00.000+08:00

More than half of all dengue fever patients in Central Visayas this year are children 10 years old or younger. Those who live in homes close to stagnant pools of water, where mosquitoes breed, are at greatest risk.

By Isolde D. Amante

MANDAUE City, Philippines---Neighbors Marian Opora and Jebbie dela Victoria didn’t want to take chances when a fever hit their children in late June. Marian brought her daughter Carla, 3, to a government clinic less than five minutes by tricycle from their house. Jebbie coaxed her son Ritchie, 5, into a private clinic by promising she’d buy him fried chicken and spaghetti after his check-up.

Different doctors offered the young mothers the same advice: give the children some paracetamol, keep them indoors for a few days, and if that didn’t work, visit the clinic again. Marian, 19, and Jebbie, 23, were relieved the doctors didn’t see anything alarming in the children’s blood test results.

But, just three days after his check-up, Jebbie’s son Ritchie complained that his limbs ached so much, it hurt when his mother hugged him. “When Ritchie suddenly began shivering, my husband and I decided to bring him to a private hospital in Cebu City,” Jebbie said. They had P2,000 cash, but the hospital staff said they needed P4,000 up front to admit anyone, so the Dela Victorias took their son to the government-run Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC) instead.

That’s where their son spent his last two days. Five days later, his playmate Carla died in the same hospital. She was severely dehydrated and shaking from what doctors called “dengue shock.”

“We had no warning,” Marian said. “A doctor (at the VSMMC emergency room) told us that if we had only brought her just a few days earlier, she might have had a chance.” That’s what the hospital’s emergency room doctors told Jebbie too.

Children 10 years old and younger make up 53 percent of the 1,145 dengue fever cases reported in Central Visayas from Jan. 1 to July 7 this year. This cluster of four island-provinces is one of the top five regions, out of 16, with the highest number of dengue fever cases reported this year in the Philippines.

Health officials have declared Mandaue City in Cebu, where the Opora and Dela Victoria families live, as a hotspot. Dengue fever could hit 34 out of every 100,000 persons here, if the first semester’s trend continues.

“We are bracing for worse,” said Mandaue City Health Officer Dr. Oscar Quirante. August and September are the peak months for dengue fever. But Dr. Quirante in Mandaue and Dr. Enrique Tayag at the National Epidemiology Center in Manila are hoping that fewer people will die of dengue fever this year, because overall numbers are lower this year than last.

“It’s really too early to tell, though,” Dr. Tayag said in a phone interview. “One problem with dengue fever is that it’s very easy to send mixed signals. When doctors tell patients to go home, the patients and their families think everything is all right, when there’s a chance it isn’t.”

50 million worldwide

As early as 1999, health experts identified early detection and initial care at home as critical strategies in the global campaign against dengue fever. Delegates at a discussion hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva also emphasized that government should train public doctors and nurses to spot dengue fever faster.

Worldwide, 50 million suffer from dengue fever every year, the WHO estimated.

In 28 years as a government health worker, 18 of them in Mandaue, Dr. Quirante can’t recall any year when dengue fever wasn’t a problem in the Philippines.

Every day in recent weeks, a team from the Mandaue City Health Office hits the road and visits different villages to make sure the ditches aren’t blocked and water keeps flowing, because the mosquitoes that spread dengue fever breed in stagnant water. The team also tells homeowners to keep the barrels where they store rainwater for bathing and laundry covered.

Poor water storage is one of the main causes the WHO has identified behind the dengue fever outbreak in the Asia-Pacific Region. In Central Visayas, about 46 percent of all households have no piped-in water and have to depend on artesian wells or shared faucets, the National Statistics Office reported. The other causes behind dengue fever include “unplanned and unregulated urban development and unsatisfactory sanitary conditions,” said the WHO.

Other problems plague public health offices and local governments in the fight against dengue fever.

“In recent years, we’ve been losing 10-12 of our nurses and midwives every year,” Dr. Quirante said. Better-paying jobs in the Middle East, the United Kingdom and the United States lured them away. “And it’s always the better-trained and experienced workers, like our program coordinators who have 8-10 years’ experience, who leave.”

Most of the people in Dr. Quirante’s dengue prevention team are borrowed from the City Engineer’s Office, because there aren’t enough people to visit the barangays. The nurse who heads the unit that records all dengue fever cases in the city has been on the job for only six months. The unit is so understaffed that the same nurse is also in charge of the animal bites unit.

Mandaue City Hall can afford to offer higher salaries, Dr. Quirante explained, but government audit rules won’t let it. No more than 45 percent of the city’s annual budget can be spent on salaries and employee benefits. This prevents the health department from offering higher salaries to hold on to experienced staff or to hire more doctors and nurses for local, instead of overseas, jobs.

Taxpayers’ bill

When Congress passed the Local Government Code in 1991, the National Government transferred the responsibility of managing and paying for district hospitals and most public health care workers to the local governments.

“Decentralization and health sector reform in some countries have been identified as problems when local governments do not receive adequate guidance and support from the national Department of Health,” was one of the observations at the WHO dengue campaign review. “This was seen not so much as an issue of financing and publicity, but rather one of clarity and direction.”

But Dr. Tayag at the NEC, the agency that monitors and investigates all outbreaks in the Philippines, said that strict guidelines and a public awareness campaign have not trickled down to the local governments.

“The most common mistake of local governments is acting too late, when there are already dengue fever cases and deaths,” he said. “The dengue fever campaign should be conducted all year, not just during the rainy season.”

Another common mistake, Dr. Tayag added, is “indiscriminate” fogging. “Having equipment and insecticide isn’t enough. Fogging works during outbreaks, but should be sustained.” And because fogging kills only adult mosquitoes, but not their larvae, just two weeks after a fogging operation, a new generation of mosquitoes matures, already resistant to the chemicals used. That’s why, Dr. Tayag said, fogging must be reinforced by “search-and-destroy” missions, where teams get rid of water in flower vases, old tires, roof gutters, discarded cans in garbage piles---all breeding places for the mosquito that spreads dengue fever.

Dr. Tayag also cautioned people against relying only on a popular dengue fever remedy, a broth made from boiling mangagaw (Euphorbia hirta) leaves. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that the herb boosts one’s platelet count, but Dr. Tayag warned that patients with serious dengue fever cases need fluid replacements and in severe cases, blood transfusions.

A common misconception is that anyone who has suffered dengue once will be safe from it for life. Dr. Tayag pointed out that dengue has at least four strains. One illness doesn’t make the patient immune to the other types of the dengue fever virus.

As of June 23, hospitals have admitted 8,285 patients with dengue fever nationwide. Seventy-eight, nearly all of them children, are dead. In eight of the country’s 16 administrative regions, more than one percent of dengue fever patients have died. (The WHO’s target is to keep case fatalities under one percent.)

The Philippine Government spends at least P5,000 for patients who are diagnosed early. Dr. Tayag estimated those who require transfusions, however, will need at least P20,000 worth of medicines and tests.

Using his estimates, the dengue fever bill that Filipino taxpayers will pay ranges from P41 million to P165.7 million---and it’s not even the peak season yet.

Late lessons

But Mandaue City’s Dr. Quirante also pointed out that, as long as the cases are diagnosed early, dengue fever can be easily managed, even if no vaccine has been developed yet. Fever medicine and intravenous fluids will do just fine, “and the disease runs its course in about seven days,” the doctor said.

That’s seven days the Opora and Dela Victoria families in Mandaue City didn’t get.

Since Carla and Ritchie’s deaths, the Sitio Mantuyong neighborhood has been getting daily visits from a team organized by City Hall and barangay (village) officials.

“City Hall just started offering free blood tests,” said team leader Emma Saga, “because some of the parents here can’t afford the P230 fee. But I think we need to look at other areas also, like better garbage collection and a drainage system that won’t clog up.”

Saga now knows the community so well that she can find any of the more than 1,300 families who live there without having to ask for directions. It’s hard to tell how she does this, when the houses look almost the same: single-room, low-ceilinged affairs with no more than 20 square meters of floor space. Candidates’ posters from the May 14 elections, fading fast now that the rains have started, provide a few spots of color on the bare plywood walls.

Only two houses apart, the Opora and Dela Victoria homes stood out for a few days because they had USAID tents and a string of light bulbs stretched across their small front yards, where Carla and Richie’s coffins were displayed.

“He only got to attend day care for a week,” Ritchie’s mother Jebbie said, keeping an eye on her younger boy, just one year old.

At least five other children in the neighborhood have shown some symptoms of dengue fever in the last two weeks---high fever, headache, joint pains, nausea and a rash---but all of them have been treated and released from hospital.

The Mandaue City District Hospital has also set up a “dengue express lane” where anyone with dengue symptoms can be attended to, without going through the admissions paperwork or being asked for a cash deposit.

Early diagnosis, said Dr. Quirante of City Health, isn’t a problem. “To the trained clinical eye, dengue fever is obvious,” he said. And the most critical part of treatment, preventing dehydration, isn’t expensive. But no investigation is being conducted to review how accurately doctors are diagnosing dengue fever cases.

For two mothers in Mandaue, that offers no comfort. Marian Opora thought it was only a simple fever that her three-year-old Carla would soon shake off. “I wish we’d been told how bad it was,” Ritchie dela Victoria’s mother Jebbie said at his wake. “I wish someone had warned us.”

Guten Tag!

2007-08-03T23:41:00.000+08:00

I've been tagged by cvj. Here are the rules for “8 facts”:

• In the 8 facts about [name], you share 8 things that your readers don’t know about you. At the end, you tag 8 other bloggers to keep the fun going. Each blogger must post these rules first.
• Each blogger starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• At the end of the post, a blogger needs to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So. Here we go:

Fact 1: On the few occasions that my friends and officemates went, I liked karaoke. (I know, it’s such a sad, sad thing to admit to, but there it is. I can do a few songs without provoking homicide, though, if that helps any.) I haven’t gone out singing since January, so the only caterwauling I’ve managed lately was on the drive to and from work, singing along to Corinne Bailey Rae on my mp3 player. (Said player also contains such oldies as “Turning Japanese”, “My Sharona”, “Bette Davis Eyes” and “You Sexy Thing.” Which helps explain why I’ve inadvertently drawn some strange looks at stop lights.)

Fact 2: All false modesty aside, I’m a good bowler. My office teammates can confirm this. In our league, competing against other media companies, we were champions for five straight years. Ahem.

Fact 3: People who pun make my day. Here’s a good one I heard recently in class. Professor: “Laws are pregnant with morals.” Classmate mutters: “Too bad they never deliver.”

Fact 4: I wish I could break journalistic stereotypes, but the fact is, I’m poor at math. Geometry and statistics (for communications research) were manageable, but everything else might as well have been cuneiform for all the sense I managed to make of them.

Fact 5: My favorite writing quote is, “My pencils outlast their erasers.” Nabokov.

Fact 6: When people say “`coz” instead of “because” I get irritated. It’s my shallowest pet peeve. “Because” is a powerful word, evoking reason and judgment and will. “`Coz” seems lazy and inelegant, by comparison.

Fact 7: I wish I were at least five inches taller. I also wish I'd be more mature and less solipsistic (blogging hasn't helped in that department).

Fact 8: I’m often impatient. I want to learn patience right now.

I’m tagging these 8 bloggers:

Mata-Mata
The Coach’s Wife
ForzaMillan
Max
Myke O
Kilometre Zero
Catch a Falling Star
Orbis

Town hall meeting a la BBC

2007-07-16T00:30:00.000+08:00

Coming up for air from the heaps and piles (and volumes, nay, entire galaxies! :) of reading assignments that surrounded me like sandbags, I switched on the TV early Sunday, hoping for a quick fix of Iron Chef or a Corinne Bailey Rae video, anything to fill the silence that held me in its cocoon.

But it seemed there was no escaping journalism. Because as soon as the screen lit up with the image of a bunch of people arguing in front of a white board, while a facilitator scribbled notes, it no longer mattered whose cuisine would reign supreme, or whether "Put Your Records On" would make my day. What was this NGO doing on the BBC? And why wasn't this footage edited?

This week, "The World Debate" took place in Jordan, a (from all appearances) lively brainstorming session that brought together business, academic and political leaders from all over the Middle East. The small-group discussions were aired in long stretches---a BBC crew filmed the participants as they huddled and tossed around the tricky questions of peace, transparency, teaching and politics. Nik Gowing of the BBC went around, making a few brief comments on the sidelines to help the viewer understand what each group was working on. But other than that, the discussion was as close to "unmediated" as possible. Instead of quick, catchy soundbites, viewers got the participants' raw, extended comments, as well as the occasional raised voices. It was exciting stuff.

Each group then got the chance to go around and eavesdrop on what the others were discussing, to find out what they agreed on, if any, or where they differed. Of course no resolutions were reached by the time the "town hall" meeting on "A New Middle East" ended. No quick news leads summed up the breadth and depth of what was said. But as Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salik put it, "It's so encouraging to see the BBC cover this positive news."

It reminded me of something the communications scholar Jay Rosen wrote, when he cautioned the press against assuming a public that was consistently "alert and engaged":

But suppose the public leads a more broken existence. At times it may be alert and engaged, but just as often it struggles against other presures---including itself---that can win out in the end. Inattention to public matters is perhaps the simplest of these, atomization of society one of the more intricate. Money speaks louder than the public, problems overwhelm it, fatigue sets in, attention falters, cynicism swells. A public that leads this more fragile kind of existence suggests a different task for the press: not just to inform a public that may or may not emerge, but to improve the chances that it will emerge.

24 hours in Camotes

2007-06-13T00:19:00.000+08:00

As refreshing as our weekly visits to the community pool were, they didn’t seem enough to end our summer with. So when Malacanang pushed forward the Independence Day holiday, my mother, still raving about a recent visit to Camotes with her church friends, organized an overnight family trip.

One of the joys of living in Cebu is this ease with which we can get away from the noise and heat of the city: just drive three hours south to Santander’s pebble beaches, or hop on a swift ferry to Bohol, Negros or Siquijor.

Because it was our first trip to Camotes, we arranged for a tour of the highlights. The boat ride proved smooth and quick, just under two hours, if a little too cold. My brother, sister-in-law and her sister ducked under their blankets and dozed. Mama and I played with the baby, who very quickly found his sea legs and insisted on staying in the aisle, playing with the armrests.

At 20 months, my nephew still gazes wide-eyed at the world: tugging at the armrests proved fascinating for about 5 minutes, until he saw the paperback I’d set aside for the ferry ride. He grabbed it, scanned a few pages (of Freakonomics, if you please), then trotted down the aisle again, his grandmother on his heels.

When we reached Poro port at midday, the colors were startling, after the city’s smog. The sky was painfully blue, the water bluer still, and the hills that abutted the pier were lush and green. Our driver arrived, and within 10 minutes we found ourselves at the mouth of Bukilat Cave in Tudela. (You should consider renting a van if visiting Camotes in groups. You could of course rent motorcycles and tour the island wearing Jackie O. sunglasses and a scarf, but past a certain age, that may seem a tad outlandish.)

Bukilat is a popular swimming hole. About 20 stone steps lead to the first of several chambers where, at high tide, one can swim in waist-deep saltwater. We were scanning the strange formations overhead and on the walls, half-hoping for a sign of bats, when we saw graffiti. Korn, one said, scrawled in black. We snapped a few pictures and went back up, to find overcast skies.

Our next stop was Boho Rock Resort, a long flight of stairs (40 or so) that led down to a veranda, a diving platform and two slides, all arranged on a cluster of large boulders. They charged us PhP1 per person to visit the place. I didn’t think PhP1 could still get you anywhere these days. There were a few kids showing off at the platform, doing swan dives and running jumps. The water waited about 8 meters below, opaque and intimidating.

By now we were hungry, so when the driver said we were heading for Lake Danao park next, I imagined a picnic lunch at the water’s edge and perhaps a bit of fishing afterwards. There were two places in Camotes that I’d seen marvelous pictures of, and Lake Danao was one of them. The first glimpse proved it was far larger than I’d imagined. I wanted to rent the first boat on sight and paddle away just to see how vast the place really was, but in this case hunger wasn’t good discipline (as Hemingway so famously said). It was just plain torture.

Fortunately, the driver said our lunch stop was a mere 5-minute drive away. We had to forgo the lakeside picnic as a fine rain started pouring, which was a good thing, because it meant I caught my first glimpse of Santiago Bay on an empty stomach, my senses sharpened. By now the rain was falling in slanted sheets, and the wind was up. The resort where we were to have lunch sat on the edge of a cliff overlooking the bay. Imagine a stark, white beach about the size of six football fields. A lone man walked past a stranded banca, a long way from the water’s edge. Beautiful as they were, none of the pictures I’d seen did Santiago justice. It’s one of those vistas you just have to see to believe.

In under three hours we had covered most of the island’s obvious tourist attractions. Which is not to say we had seen all we wanted of the place but, given a tight schedule and a baby who was raring to hop into his swimming trunks and into the water, we decided to head for Mangodlong, get settled in, and wait for the sunset. After Santiago’s jaw-dropping bay, the beach at Mangodlong was much smaller, but no less beautiful.

This was the view from our room. Brother and baby lost no time hitting the water. Mama walked over to the rocky outcrop across the beach where a few cottages sat, and talked to other resort guests, newly arrived from the mainland after getting drenched in a squall. Early the next morning, she would sit in one of the cottages, reading, and as I walked by in search of interesting spots to photograph, she directed me to the fallen "mermaid" hidden among the rocks. For the moment, however, I dragged a deck chair to the water’s edge and read (forgive my lack of imagination) Rachel Carson.

“Bearing on its surface only the wave-carved ripple marks, the fine traceries of sand grains dropped at last by the spent waves, and the scattered shells of long dead mollusks, the beach has a lifeless look, as though not only uninhabited but indeed uninhabitable,” Carson wrote. “In the sands almost all is hidden.”

At dusk, the horizon’s edge flared briefly orange, then indigo. As the earliest stars appeared, my nephew tugged at all of us in turn, pointing upwards. “Wow!” he said, each time a star sparkled. It occurred to us that he had never seen a real star before.

Hours later he would fuss a little, missing the familiar smells and contours of his bed at home, but at that moment, caught up in the first glimpse of something beautiful and new, he seemed to be having the time of his life. As, indeed, were we.

Gulong ng palad, an epic

2007-05-24T02:27:00.000+08:00

I keep a book in my tote bag at all times, in case the traffic jams or a small window opens itself in the workaday grind. This week, for reasons I can no longer remember, the book in question is Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, read years ago upon a friend's urging. This passage from Heaney's introductory essay struck a chord today:

All conceive of themselves as hooped within the great wheel of necessity, in thrall to a code of loyalty and bravery, bound to seek glory in the eye of the warrior world. The little nations are grouped around their lord, the greater nations spoil for war and menace the little ones, a lord dies, defencelessness ensues, the enemies strike, vengeance for the dead becomes an ethic for the living, bloodshed begets further bloodshed, the wheel turns, the generations tread and tread and tread.

Perhaps I should have picked something more cheerful for post-election reading, no?

7-4-1 in Cebu Province; 6-5-1 in Cebu City

2007-05-22T03:45:00.000+08:00

Joker Arroyo, Francis Pangilinan and Edgardo Angara are expected to take the top three spots in Cebu’s Senate tallies, going by trends in the parallel count by citizens’ arm C-Cimpel.

With 91.29 percent of the precincts counted when they ended operations at noon last Sunday, C-Cimpel reported these figures:

1. Arroyo, Joker (707,416)
2. Pangilinan, Francis (703,529)
3. Angara, Edgardo (674,848)
4. Pichay, Prospero Jr. (666,697)
5. Defensor, Michael (651,993)
6. Zubiri, Juan Miguel (600,987)
7. Recto, Ralph (597,207)
8. Villar, Manuel Jr. (596,623)
9. Legarda, Loren (578,084)
10. Escudero, Francis Joseph (542,658)
11. Aquino, Benigno III (542,417)
12. Montano, Cesar (460,367)

I’m still trying to find out if C-Cimpel has separate tallies for the Senate results in each congressional district---if only to see where Defensor and Pichay won enough votes to dislodge (if one may be provincial about it) candidates with a more pronounced Cebu connection, like, say, Panfilo Lacson. He had an efficient and popular stint as the PNP’s last Metro Cebu District Command chief in the early 1990s.

In 2004, the opposition had complained about alleged discrepancies in the election returns from some towns in Cebu’s fifth congressional district, bailiwick of the Durano clan. These objections were merely “noted” and the returns from Cebu, never scrutinized.

If indeed Cebu is “the last bastion of Garcification,” it would help the bright boys of future campaigns---not to mention the voter embarrassed by Cebu’s getting tagged as GMA country---to find out which districts need to be watched more closely.

One thing to consider in Cebu’s Senate results this year is the Genuine Opposition’s absence in all but one of the eight congressional districts in Cebu City and Province. Serge Osmena may be GO's campaign manager, but his younger brother Tomas, newly reelected as mayor of Cebu City, has said he would support all but one of the TU ticket---Recto, whose place in the local sample ballots went to Legarda. Two candidates for governor and vice governor were so hell-bent on running with the TU that, for the first time in their political careers, they presented themselves as allies of the Partido Demokratikong Sosyalista ng Pilipinas. (One friend quipped: Sosyal na democrat!)

In that lone district where the GO had some semblance of a local operation---the south district of Cebu City, currently represented by the reelected Antonio Cuenco---all of the GO’s local candidates lost. And yet five GO candidates landed in Cebu City’s top 12 choices for the Senate. (Next time, maybe the opposition shouldn't be so quick to write Cebu off.) Here are the official results in Cebu City:

1. Pangilinan (199,861)
2. Arroyo (193,261)
3. Angara (185,956)
4. Villar (182,317)
5. Legarda (179,179)
6. Defensor (177,581)
7. Escudero (165,659)
8. Zubiri (165,127)
9. Aquino (160,573)
10. Pichay (160,010)
11. Recto (142,599)
12. Lacson (135,437)

Note that: two GO candidates landed in the city’s first five (Villar and Legarda), in contrast to the province-wide list, where, except for Pangilinan, the first five spots went to the TU. Lacson, not Montano, took the 12th spot. Pichay is a far 10th in the city, compared to fourth (seriously?!?) in the province.

Giunsa pag-ugbok si Pichay sa Sugbo? Inquiring minds want to know.

Oh, fergodsakes

2007-05-21T03:35:00.000+08:00

AT LEAST 187,000 residents voted for either Arturo Radaza or Norma Patalinghug to serve as mayor of Lapu-Lapu City until 2010, the Patalinghug camp points out in a petition sent to the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

Why is that a problem?

There are only 148,870 registered voters in the city, the petitioners pointed out.

In a supplemental pre-proclamation petition filed last Saturday, Patalinghug asked the Comelec to order a new canvass of the votes cast in Lapu-Lapu City, by a new board of canvassers.

She also asked that Election Officer Ann Janette Hu Lamban be replaced as chairperson of the canvassers’ board, and that the Comelec defer the proclamation of winners until the new canvass is completed.

“And if such is no longer possible and if the true will of the electorate cannot be determined anymore through this process,” Comelec should declare a failure of elections in Lapu-Lapu City, the acting mayor also said.

A week after the elections, the results from all 47 towns and six cities in Cebu have been announced and the winners proclaimed, except for three positions: mayor of Bogo town, congressman of the fourth district of Cebu Province and mayor of Lapu-Lapu City.

When the canvassing ended last Friday afternoon, Radaza was ahead. But the Patalinghug camp has contested the returns from at least 157 precincts.

Read the rest of this story here.

Headline

2007-04-11T01:22:00.000+08:00

In my defense, all I'll say is that the story practically begged for it. It seemed like a good idea at that time. Easter Sunday was a slow night in the newsroom, so when an address in a crime story popped out of the text, it was the perfect detail to peg the story's headline on. Two gunshot wounds, one in his right cheek and the other in his left armpit, killed a 23-year-old man at 7:30 p.m. in Barangay Buhisan, Cebu City. Given the date of his death, it was the name of the sitio where he lived that caught my attention.

And here's the headline I couldn't resist writing:

Nazareth resident shot,
killed on Black Saturday

I'm just waiting for a news story with any of these actual names---Sitio Vampire, Sitio Kawatan ("kawatan" is Cebuano for thief, and it's too bad there aren't any allegedly overpriced street lamps there), Alcohol St., Paradise Island (a clutch of shanties at the foot of the old Mandaue-Mactan bridge)---to land on one of my page assignments. Perhaps I'll never write a classic like "Headless body in topless bar" but at least I can avoid "Suicide now punishable by lethal injection."

Tale of 2 cities

2007-04-01T02:28:00.000+08:00

TWO Metro Cebu mayors decided Friday to fight an ombudsman order preventively suspending them, without pay, for six months while they answer charges provoked by the purchase of expensive street lamps.

But while it was almost business as usual in Lapu-Lapu City, an irate crowd effectively blocked the way to the mayor's office in Mandaue, displaying placards that attacked the "vigilante justice" dispensed by the anti-graft office.

Lapu-Lapu's Mayor Arturo Radaza received the suspension order and temporarily handed over control of City Hall---with a kiss on the cheek for good measure---to Vice Mayor Norma Patalinjug, his challenger in the May 14 elections. They even posed for pictures.

Mandaue City Mayor Thadeo Ouano made no public appearance, even as his supporters blocked the stairs to his second-floor office, and the driveway was barred by a government-owned dump truck and a backhoe.

Before noon, Ouano's lawyers filed a petition for injunction and asked for a temporary restraining order (TRO) on his suspension. But because no one was present to receive the suspension order earlier in the day, one City Hall official had to go to the ombudsman to get a copy, which they needed to attach to their petition.

Radaza, in a separate interview, said he also asked his legal advisers to file a similar petition, but in the meantime, "Magsugod na ta'g kampanya. Kampanya na man ta karon di ba? (I might as well start campaigning)."

Read the rest of the story here.

19 suspended over lamps deal

2007-03-30T01:31:00.000+08:00

The Office of the Ombudsman has ordered the preventive suspension of 19 Cebu-based officials, including the mayors of Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu cities, while they undergo an investigation on the purchase of street lamps for last January's Southeast Asian summit. You'll find the anti-graft office's press release here.

The press release cites figures from the program of works and estimates that Mandaue City officials prepared for the lamps purchase. Excluded from the figures cited (but spelled out in the final evaluation report that graft investigators in the Visayas submitted) is the cost of lighting control panels for the single, double and triple-arm lampposts installed in Mandaue City: P202,959.78. That's the cost per unit.

Allow me to quote further from the investigators' final evaluation report:

Another glaring irregularity duly established, which was noted upon careful evaluation of the documents, is the fact that the description and unit rate of the materials used in the installation of the single, double and triple-arm street lighting assembly as reflected in the approved program of works prepared by the City Engineer's Office of Mandaue is also the same description and unit rate of the bid proposal/detailed estimates submitted by the contractor Fabmik Construction and Equipment Co.

A hat tip here and many thanks to Sun.Star Cebu journalist Karlon N. Rama, who obtained a copy of the final evaluation report and who filed this story on the preventive suspension order.

Where's a watchdog when you need one?

2007-03-22T17:44:00.000+08:00

Citizens can do more than just complain about overpricing in government purchases. With time and some training, they may learn to vet these purchases before taxpayers’ funds are wasted.

The inclusion of civil society oversight is one of the innovations introduced by the Government Procurement Reform Act (Republic Act 9184), enacted in 2003.

But “while this process has been legislated, it is not yet functioning as intended in practice, with insufficient members of the public putting themselves forward to observe tendering decisions,” said Nigel Thornton of the sustainable development consultancy firm Agulhas, in a paper on procurement reform in the Philippines.

Thornton’s paper was prepared for the 2006 Asian Regional Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held in Manila last October.

According to guidelines prepared by the Government Procurement Policy Board (GPPB), each government agency’s bids and awards committee (BAC) is required to invite to its proceedings three observers. One should come from the Commission on Audit (COA), one from a private sector group “whose discipline is relevant to the procurement at hand” and one from a non-government organization.

“The attendance of observers ensures the transparency of the procurement process. They represent the public, the taxpayers who are interested in seeing to it that procurement laws are observed and irregularities are averted,” the GPPB guidelines state.

Observers are tasked with preparing a procurement reform observation report, where they can point out whether the BAC has complied with legal requirements and identify areas where the bidding process can be improved.

Their report becomes part of the official record of bidding and the audit trail. They may also submit a copy of that report to the ombudsman or the COA, in case the BAC has failed to follow bidding procedures.

Observers are supposed to have access to all stages of the procurement process, including the pre-bid conference, opening of bids and special meetings of the BAC. They are also entitled to copies of procurement documents, such as the minutes of the BAC meetings and the post-qualification summary report.

However, selected observers must also have no financial interest, whether direct or indirect, in the contract to be bid out, the GPPB guidelines state.

Civil society’s role in procurement reform is illustrated by the creation of Procurement Watch, an NGO that helped draft and push for the procurement reform law. It is supposed to be monitoring how well that law has been enforced.

But while Procurement Watch plays an oversight function, “it has taken the view that NGOs at the local level can better perform oversight of their particular transactions,” Thornton said in his paper.

He pointed out that changes in procurement, as in any other reform process, unfold in three stages: first, putting the laws, procedures and regulations in place; second, implementing the new system; and third, the public’s identification of the change.

“For the Philippines, the new framework is in the process of rolling out across government. The current challenge is ensuring it is implemented effectively, particularly in the local government units,” Thornton added.

(Appears as part of this story in the 19 March 2007 issue of the paper I work for, Sun.Star Cebu.)

Illumination, please

2007-03-22T17:36:00.000+08:00

At a recent forum on the government infrastructure program, a member of the Arroyo Cabinet belittled a survey that placed the Philippines as the most corrupt country in Asia, at least according to the business sector’s perceptions. “Where does that perception come from?” the official asked. Whatever punchline he’d planned, someone from the audience won the crowd with this quip: “Lampposts?”

The Office of the Ombudsman-Visayas completed this week its fact-finding inquiry on the purchase of 1,860 decorative park lamps and 450 street lamps. It will then decide whether or not to push for a full investigation on allegations of overpricing---with the possible preventive suspension of government officials responsible for the purchase.

Here’s one of the deco lamps in question, installed along the roads of Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu cities where delegates of last January’s Asean summit passed. Each one of these babies costs P85,000---roughly the cost of four years’ tuition at a top government university. And these lamps are apparently the cheapest of the lot.

Another model is shown here with some of the tents of over 1,000 families that lost their homes in a fire in Mandaue City earlier this month. The ombudsman’s office has learned that each of these lamps costs P224,600. (In contrast, a low-cost, socialized housing unit costs P180,000 by government’s estimates.)

To illustrate the alleged overpricing, businessman Crisologo Saavedra has offered to sell similar decorative park lamps to Cebu City for only P31,000 each, inclusive of installation costs. News reports have also quoted architect Manuel Guanzon as saying the lamps on the grounds of the Cebu International Convention Center cost only P25,000 each, again inclusive of installation.

Whose brilliant idea was it to pay P85,000 to P224,600 for a decorative lamp? Apparently, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), although its regional officials have also said that local government officials prepared the program of work and estimates (POWE) for the project.

Officials of Mandaue City, where most of the lamps are installed, have confirmed preparing the POWE, but refused to let reporters examine the entire document in a recent press conference.

Stop reading here if the reported cost of the decorative park lamps has made you decide to stop paying taxes. It gets worse.

As part of preparations for the summit, the DPWH also procured 450 street lamps, most of which were installed in Mandaue City. Each costs over P300,000. They look like this:

Single-arm lamppost: P314,698

Double-arm lamppost: P325,916

Triple-arm lamppost: P350,091

In recent interviews over radio station DYLA in Cebu and the Balita newscast on ABS-CBN Manila, suppliers’ representatives have said the lamps were not overpriced and that all the attention has placed them, not the government, at a disadvantage. The suppliers are Gampik Construction and Development Inc. (for the decorative lamps) and Fabmik Construction and Equipment Co. (for the street lamps).

(By the way, when will it be possible to obtain---swiftly, online and for a reasonable charge---articles of incorporation and financial statements from the Securities and Exchange Commission? We have never had problems with their local branch, but records of companies registered in Manila are available only from their office there.)

Even if it turns out the lamps were not overpriced, the transaction still seems reckless. Why pay P224,000 for a decorative lamp, when less gaudy fixtures can be had for a tenth of the price?

Consider too that the lampposts purchase---a project that cost P365,870,000 in taxpayers' funds---accounted for only a fraction of the Asean preparation expenses. Every time I drive past one of those P300,000 street lamps, I wonder whose pockets got lined while summit organizers urged everyone to postpone questions about summit expenditures.

It's high time we got a full accounting of the Asean summit preparation expenses. Because given how much this illumination cost, it’s tragic how the responsible government agencies and officials seem bent on keeping us in the dark.

Dear Ex: Get out of my neocortex

2007-02-13T22:58:00.000+08:00

This story was so lovely, it reminded me of one of my favorite writers, Natalie Angier of The New York Times. Turns out it's actually by Neely Tucker of The Washington Post (what certain Conservatives call The Washington Compost). Enjoy!

An Affair Of the Head
They Say Love Is All About Brain Chemistry. Will You Be Dopamine?

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 13, 2007

It's all about dopamine, baby, this One Great True Love, this passionate thing we'd burn down the house and blow up the car and drive from Houston to Orlando just to taste on the tip of the tongue.

You crave it because your brain tells you to. Because if a wet kiss on the suprasternal notch -- while, say, your lover has you pinned against a wall in the corner of a dance club -- doesn't fire up the ventral tegmentum in the Motel 6 of your mind, well, he's not going to send you roses tomorrow.

Dopamine.

God's little neurotransmitter. Better known by its street name, romantic love.

Also, norepinephrine. Street name, infatuation.

These chemicals are natural stimulants. You fall in love, a growing amount of research shows, and these chemicals and their cousins start pole-dancing around the neurons of your brain, hopping around the limbic system, setting off craving, obsessive thoughts, focused attention, the desire to commit possibly immoral acts with your beloved while at a stoplight in the 2100 block of K Street during lunch hour, and so on.

"Love is a drug," says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love." "The ventral tegmental area is a clump of cells that make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and sends it out to many brain regions" when one is in love. "It's the same region affected when you feel the rush of cocaine."

Passion! Sex! Narcotics!

Why do we suspect this isn't going to end well?

Read the rest of the article here. And for more on the suprasternal notch, watch "The English Patient"---but remember, I saw Ralph Fiennes first.

"There is grandeur in this view of life"

2007-02-08T01:37:00.000+08:00

Later today, I expect to receive a FedEx package containing two books, one of them Edelman's "Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness." So it was a neat surprise to find, just hours ago, a series of articles in Time Asia's 12 February edition (the ink-on-dead-trees one; it turns out the articles were available online nearly a month ago) that explore exactly the subject I have been meaning to read up on---consciousness.

Because it is so comforting, the soul is a difficult concept to let go of. At the same time, however, it is tremendously empowering, this idea that everything noble the human mind is capable of stems mostly from physiological activity. That the ideals one aspires for---humor and intensity, humanity and depth---are anchored not in some supernatural order, but in "mere wet stuff," as one novelist once said of the brain.

Obviously, I still have to read Edelman (and Dennett and McGinn and more of Pinker) before certain personal conclusions can be reviewed or reached. But for now, Steven Pinker's concluding paragraphs in this very helpful article are worth mulling over:

My own view is that the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings---the core of morality.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise, but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous....The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth....Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that "life is short." It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Do we hafta look at NAFTA?

2007-02-08T00:38:00.000+08:00

Southeast Asia’s leaders waxed optimistic about economic integration when they met in Cebu last month, but trade figures from recent years tell a different story.

From 1996 to 2003, trade among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) “was still a fraction" of what Asean members did with non-Asean countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported.

Dr. Charles Rarick cited that IMF report in a lecture Monday at the Eduardo Aboitiz Development Studies Center in Cebu City, where he discussed the challenges faced by regional blocs like the Asean, the European Union (EU) and North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). Rarick is the director of international business at the Andreas School of Business in Barry University, Florida and was the 2005 Fulbright senior specialist to Myanmar.

Seven years after they formed NAFTA in 1994, trade among member-countries Canada, Mexico and the United States had increased by 17 percent, Rarick pointed out. In contrast, seven years after the Asean was formed in 1967, trade among member-states had dropped by 19 percent.

Selective protection

Despite a 27-year head start, Asean has not eliminated as many barriers to trade as NAFTA has.

Tariff has been removed on 99 percent of all products traded within NAFTA, Rarick said. Restrictions to foreign direct investments have also been eliminated, except in some sectors: Mexican oil, the Canadian film and television industries, and the United States’ airline and broadcasting industries.

“Asean has the intrinsic qualities to be competitive on a global scale,” Rarick said, citing a 2003 report by McKinsey and Co. that pointed out the region’s market size, market growth, skilled and educated labor force, and natural resources.

But to integrate its economies more swiftly, Asean members need to remove non-tariff trade barriers like customs and licensing requirements.

Members of the 10-nation Asean also need to relax cross-border investment restrictions and to collaborate more, such as by exchanging technical assistance. A common currency, which remains on the drawing boards for now, would cut transaction costs, remove exchange rate uncertainties and prevent “beggar thy neighbor” currency manipulation.

Compared to the 27-member EU, Asean has granted more exemptions in its attempt to liberalize trade. At the same time, it has demonstrated less financial integration (for instance, accounting and corporate governance standards remain different across the region), less coordination in macroeconomic policy and---its most urgent challenge---less political will, Rarick observed.

Looking East, again

Europe’s gains from economic integration have been substantial: greater political standing, more efficient movement of production factors, greater choices for consumers, increased in-region trade and greater prospects for peace.

If it acts swiftly, Asean could take advantage of the fact that India and China “are shifting the center of economic activity in your region’s favor,” Rarick said.

To create a more “economically liberated and globally connected" Asean, the organization and its members must show effective leadership, reduce corruption and allow greater economic freedom, he added.

While there is no guarantee that “a rising tide will lift all boats," Rarick emphasized it will “not be enough to sit around and lament what we’ve lost.”

“The economy of the past is gone for all of us," he told an audience composed of educators, students, government executives and civil society workers.

At the Cebu Summit last month, leaders of the Southeast Asian nations agreed to establish a free trade zone by 2015, five years earlier than originally scheduled, with the six richer nations starting the process in 2010.

Deeper integration and faster industrial upgrading are among the most urgent challenges if Asean wants to become more globally competitive, Dr. Ponciano Intal had told delegates at the Asean Business and Investment Summit last December in Cebu. Intal is chief of party of the advocacy lobby Universal Access for Competitiveness and Trade.

Asean’s leaders have identified 11 priority sectors where barriers to the movement of workers, capital and production factors must be demolished by 2010.
These sectors include electronics, health care, automotives, wood products, rubber products, textile and garments, agriculture products, fisheries, air travel and tourism.

(A slightly shorter version of this article appears in Sun.Star Cebu's issue for Wednesday, 7 February 2007.)

Ominous instrumental music

2007-02-06T21:19:00.000+08:00

Next time you’re frazzled at work, be thankful you’re not Jack Bauer.

You may feel like a lab mouse pumped full of oncogenes, but at least you don’t have to (1) dodge assassins, (2) rescue an airport terminal from heavily armed European terrorists, (3) avoid being framed and arrested for the murder of an ex-president, (4) destroy 20 canisters of nerve gas (by blowing up a gas distribution plant), (5) torture a White House adviser you suspect of consorting with the bad guys, (6) kill an assortment of aforementioned bad guys, (7) rescue a Russian submarine (and keep 12 missiles from being fired into Los Angeles), (8) force a confession from the president of the United States, (9) kiss the Department of Defense hottie who, in the past 18 months, was led to believe you were dead, and (10) before the reunion goes any further, get kidnapped up by a bunch of Chinese thugs.

All in 24 hours, of course.

In itself, Season 5 of “24” is interesting enough. And then I accidentally switched on the subtitles. Right from the opening credits, (subtitle: “Ominous instrumental music”) I was hooked. Somewhere in a disc-filled basement in China or New York City, language gets deconstructed more than in some postmodern semiotics class. Here, “armory” becomes a “weapons database”, “good” becomes “good of” and “it’s over” merits an equivalent “The end.”

If I’ve failed to sum up Season 5 accurately in this entry’s opening paragraphs, it’s because I watched most of it with subtitles. Subtitles exist to remind us why not much gets done at international summits that require interpreters. Consider these excerpts from Season 5’s final episode:

“Admiral Kirkland.” (Gram full general)

“Miss Raines, I understand you’re reporting some type of emergency at the port of Los Angeles?” (I know you at make collective report the harbor occurrence of Los Angeles?)

“Terrorists have seized control of a submarine.” (The terrorist has already controlled the submarine.)

“What? We haven’t received any distress signal from the crew!” (What? We have not yet received the submarine to beg to teach the signal!)

“Because they’re dead, Sir, all of them.” (Because they all died, Superior.) “We believe they’ve flooded the sub’s ventilation system with Sentox nerve gas.” (The terrorist is in well-ventilated system of submarine.)

“My God!” (Good heavens!) “You’re asking me to sink the submarine?” (Do you want that I fry to sink the submarine?)

“Sir, those terrorists are in control of 12 multiple-warhead missiles which they will use against civilian targets…” (Superior, the terrorist controlled 12 many warhead-guided missiles…)

“…unless we stop them first.” (…unless we can obstruct them in advance.)

“How long will it take for you to scramble some F-18 fighters?” (Arrange the urgent take-off of battleplane want to be many long time?)

“I’m sending you the estimated approach vectors and ETA of the F-18s. I can have my fighter jets there within 22 to 25 minutes.” (I route of the battleplane and anticipate the arrival time to you. The battleplane can arrive the target within 2225 minutes.)

“We have a problem, Sir.” (Had a little bother, Superior.)

“According to our simulation, Bierko (a terrorist played by Julian Sands, arguably the best-looking creepy character in the plasma TV universe, but I digress) will have his missiles in the air in less than 20 minutes.” (Arrange the battleplane take-off immediately.)

“Jack, Bill’s right. We don’t have the manpower or the resources to get on that sub!” (Right, bower, Bill can say that again. Our hand is not enough, equip also not enough. Have no way to rob the submarine!)

“We might. Somebody just launched a signal tube off the starboard side.” (Can go perhaps. Just now someone put from the starboard a begs the buoyancy stick.)

“What’s a signal tube?” (Is that what things?)

“Did anyone else from the crew survive the attack?” (Do you still have on the hoof other seamanses?)

“You should be able to move around freely.” (You can at liberty activity. Etc.)

“I’ll contact you when I get there.” (Arrive hereafter, I contact again you.) “You don’t have a choice, son.” (You did not choose, child.)

“I did it for the good of the country, as I saw it at that time.” (I is a national benefits, is a benefits at that time.)

By this time, the whole point of using subtitles---to avoid waking up the neighbors---was pretty much moot. I was laughing so hard I got accused of watching “Little Britain” or the “House” boxed set (“Complete Secondly Season!”) yet again. Of course I want to watch Season 6 to find out how Jack escapes from the clutches of some Chinese thugs. Mostly, though, I can’t wait to check out those subtitles. In other words, I anticipate the arrival time to you. Arrive hereafter, I contact again. You did not choose, child.

The write stuff

2007-01-24T00:24:00.000+08:00

I loved "The Hours." I loved it so much it took a while to get around to the novel, because if the movie moved me to tears, I was afraid the book would require an entire forest's worth of tissue paper and enough chocolate to sustain a small army. Now that I'm finally reading Michael Cunningham's novel, though, I regret putting it off for so long. Here's one important passage---not the strongest, because Cunningham has more tricks up his sleeve, but for the benefit of fellow aspiring writers, the most useful:

This is one of the more singular experiences, waking up on what feels like a good day, preparing to work but not yet actually embarked. At this moment there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead. Her mind hums. This morning she may penetrate the obfuscation, the clogged pipes, to reach the gold. She can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance, and when she is very fortunate she is able to write directly through that faculty. Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction she knows, but her access to it comes and goes without warning. She may pick up her pen and follow it with her hand as it moves across the paper; she may pick up her pen and find that she's merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a pen, afraid and uncertain, only mildly competent, with no idea about where to begin or what to write.

She picks up her pen.

Oh, and the next time someone nags you about reading, toss him/her a bit of Harold Bloom: "We think because we learn to remember our reading the best that can be read." So there.

No rain on this parade

2007-01-22T00:21:00.000+08:00

To enjoy the Sinulog street dancing parade next year, leave those suede shoes at home, put on as much sunblock as you can tolerate, and no matter how hot it gets, smile. Yes, smile. It's amazing how easily you can work your way through the crowds if you just smile at the cadets and barangay tanods that surround each contingent like bouncers at a seedy bar. Some of the dancers (on the streets, not the bar) might even smile back.

If you'd rather have a clear view of the performances, get a grandstand ticket (they usually go for PhP100 to PhP500 each).

Grandstand, long shot Hosted on Zooomr

But if sitting for 8-10 hours doesn't strike you as fun, hit the streets instead, and spare a kind thought or two for the dancers who are going to have blisters for the next two weeks, because they worked so hard for your amusement.

You'll still see the performances, especially if you pick a spot where some of the roving judges are assigned.

Besides, it's entertaining to observe the crowd interact with the performers. ("But Mama, why is Lapu-Lapu green?" It takes a moment before Mama answers, "Because he's Incredible Lapu-Lapu!" A quick glance at the contingents' list confirms that, indeed, he is---"Incredible Lapu-Lapu," that is---and he wins second place too. I feel like e-mailing a picture to a couple of history teachers, just to hear them rant, but the festive air is making me all nice and more woolly-headed than usual.)

There's more sequins than solemnity during the parade, but of course the religious imagery is inescapable. When the famous Sandiego dancers breezed past, and the crowd realized that choreographer and lead dancer Val Sandiego was holding a real, pink-cheeked baby, and not a doll, some of the people near me broke into applause, then whipped out their camera phones. (A tourist, overheard: "That's a real baby? Jesus!" Yes, Virginia, correct on both counts.)

One of the most entertaining contingents (for me, at least) was that of Southwestern University (SWU), whose costumes were so colorful they were almost blinding. Their props included huge peacock feathers---I had so much fun watching, I forgot to take more pictures---but on the streets, the usual reaction was, "Hala, manok!"

It would have been great for them to win a prize, this being their comeback attempt after years of missing the contest they've dominated for so long. One thing I liked about them was that they were as energetic on the streets as they were onstage---the crowd didn't have to prompt them, "Sayaw sad mo, oi!" even if they'd been out on the streets for at least 10 hours.

SWU Hosted on Zooomr

For more Sinulog stories and much better photos than these, go to the official site and the Sun.Star Network Exchange's blog. And please check out our news team's stories on the organizers' overall assessment, the winning dance contingents and the politicians who tried to work the crowds. Perhaps somebody should 've handed them those peacock feathers?

The moving image

2007-01-21T01:46:00.000+08:00

An estimated 700,000 people---roughly a third of the province's total population---turned up in downtown Cebu City Saturday afternoon for the annual procession that demonstrates the religious underpinnings of Cebu's Sinulog festival.

Years of covering the Sinulog, and later going over the stories that colleagues brought in, have eroded some of the street-dancing's attractions for me. The spectacle remains enjoyable, and the streets are so full they cannot help but yield a snippet or two to amuse "human interest" scribblers---but the older I get, the quicker sensory overload seems to set in. It doesn't take long before the contingents all begin to look alike, move alike, their repeated gestures broken only by occasional chants I have to struggle to understand.

There is, however, an aspect of the fiesta that has always moved me. Which is strange, because I stopped being religious a long time ago. It's the sight of thousands out in the streets for the procession on the eve of the fiesta, rosary beads or Sto. Niño statuettes in hand. Many of the participants are old, shuffling along so tentatively they look ready to fall with every other step. And yet they do this---walk three to four hours straight under an unforgiving sun, because there are things they want to ask for, or things they want to give thanks for.

Sometimes I think I envy their certainty. And sometimes it just makes me a little sad.

So, to summit all up

2007-01-17T00:50:00.000+08:00

After all the work done and the attention paid to a summit on creating “one caring and sharing community,” did residents of the host cities share the enthusiasm or even care at all? Here’s a roundup of recent reports and commentary:

Traffic wasn’t as bad as most people feared. I did get stuck once, my usual 30-minute drive to the city stretched to nearly four hours. A book, a good reading light and bottled water made it bearable. But for hundreds of other workers, especially in Mactan, the summit’s most immediate tangible effect was extra exercise.

Local business leaders, however, said the summit gave them a chance to make new contacts in the region, which could create opportunities for entrepreneurs to make inroads into new markets.

Us locals aren’t the only ones relieved by the summit’s outcome. In an editorial, The Bangkok Post says, “For the first time in recent memory, an Asean summit has produced meaningful debate.”

The Cebu conferences will be remembered first of all for taking international terrorism seriously. The five years of Asean debate over how to deal with this mortal threat have been disappointing and stultified. All 10 countries now have agreed to a legally binding agreement to hunt, prosecute and extradite terrorists. Another pact mandates sharing of information on health problems such as bird flu.

And by 2015, free trade will be pretty much the rule throughout Asean. Expect this agreement to spark heavy opposition from anti-trade advocates and activists in virtually every Asean nation, not to mention China, Korea and Japan. The leaders who agreed to advance both Asean and East Asian free trade within eight years will have to fight for it. They should accept no delays or setbacks at home.

Just as meaningful, if less dramatic, was the agreement to work towards political unity. The Cebu summit took the correct stand to work towards becoming a political entity. The first constitution is to be completed this year. Call it Asean’s version of the European Union.

Martin Walker of the World Peace Herald was even more effusive, describing the agreements reached in the Cebu summits as “visionary” (so maybe let’s cut him some slack for reducing all of Cebu into one “resort”).

“WASHINGTON -- The most important place in diplomacy over the weekend was not with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the Middle East, nor with the “21st century Socialism" rhetoric of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on his Latin American tour. It was in the pleasant resort of Cebu in the Philippines that the real shape of the future was to be discerned.”

Nearly all the headlines generated by the 12th Asean Summit last Jan. 13 focused on the signing of a landmark counter-terrorism agreement and the Asean leaders’ commitment to discuss a charter that would change the group from an organization based on consensus, to one anchored on rules---including the power to sanction or expel members who flout those rules.

For us community journalists---or provincial journalists, as some of our big-city counterparts still insist on calling us---one challenge was to present the Asean’s effects in concrete terms relevant to our readers. That’s why some of our stories have focused on specific aspects, like the mutual recognition agreement on nursing services.

The spokesperson of the Health Alliance for Democracy, however, was unimpressed, saying better pay would do the country’s nurses more good than such an agreement.

On the sidelines, youth leaders also approved a resolution asking for a greater say in the annual Asean leaders’ summit. They asked the senior Asean leaders to focus on employment, tempting certain editors into attempting some word play (“Work on jobs, youth leaders ask”).

And at the end of it all, President Arroyo said the summit created “people-centered initiatives” that the region’s so-called ordinary citizens will feel.

Before we break out the champagne (or Tiger beer), however, here’s an interesting paper from Razeen Sally of the London School of Economics, who warns that the European Union model “of close political cooperation and dense institutional integration is inapplicable to the (East Asian) region.” One of Sally’s points seems to be that in pursuing narrower (e.g. bilateral) free trade agreements, East Asian countries are demonstrating “a myopic neglect of the WTO.”

Asean member-governments now have a vision to create an Asean economic community by 2015, with a single market for goods, services, capital and the movement of skilled labor. This includes a proposal to fast-track 11 priority sectors that account for over half of intra-Asean trade. Although this proposal is ambitious in general statements of principle and rhetoric, it is ambiguous on practical goals, methods and deadlines en route to 2015, like other Asean visions.

So far, Asean vision statements and other blueprints have largely failed to remove the barriers to commerce in Southeast Asia. They seem rather distant from the commercial ground realities. Hence, it is not surprising that Asean matters are dominated by politicians and officials, with an attendant circus of academics and think tanks, but interest and engagement on the part of business remains absent as usual.

The paper---written last year, so it’s possible the author may revise the prognosis after last week’s summits, just as it’s possible for me to drown in all this alphabet soup---warns Asean and the larger East Asia alliance against descending into “shallow conferencitis and summitry.”

We return now to our regular programming.

Interview: Architect Manuel Guanzon

2007-01-16T13:08:00.000+08:00

Last year, when architect Manuel Guanzon said there was no reason the Cebu International Convention Center (CICC) would not be completed, “because we cannot postpone the Asean,” he had no way of knowing the weather would prove him wrong. And then the CICC leaked, giving hundreds of journalists what seemed like the perfect detail---a kind of objective correlative, really---to show the disappointment felt by organizers and volunteers raring to get on with the show.

Last Monday, the CICC’s ground-floor summit hall served as the venue for the East Asia Summit, attended by 10 heads of state and government in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and their six dialogue partners. When the day ended with no major incidents to mar it---no leaks, no ceilings falling on the heads of hapless government officials---Guanzon had more reason than most people to feel relieved. He paced the main lobby of the P515-million CICC, occasionally stopping to snap pictures of ballroom dancers putting on a show for journalists and government support staff. He also granted this brief interview.

In all, how much time have you spent on the CICC, from the conceptualization up to now?
That’s a total of about nine months.

Do you have any misgivings, considering the amount of publicity this project has generated?
Ah, no, no, no, no. (Pauses) No. That’s part of it. If you’re working on a government project, you will always encounter that (publicity) because you’re working with public funds, no? It’s always like that. Some government projects wala kaayo’y problema (there aren’t too many problems). I just did the bus terminal for Danao City, for example, and it was also inaugurated by the President. Dili kaayo to grabe og samok (We had fewer distractions there). Maybe because of the absence of media.

Now, in this case, Cebu City gud, ngilngig man gud ang media nato, very active. We really don’t mind. Sometimes, it’s very irritating and frustrating, but we just have to live with it. The media in Cebu is very sensitive to any big government projects.

Of the questions raised about the CICC, which did you find most irritating or most unproductive?
Well, since Day 1, they have been asking me whether I can do this. Mao na’y irritating kaayo (That’s the most irritating part). When I said, ‘We can do it’ and even the governor said we can deliver, people didn’t seem to believe us. Or maybe they refused to believe. Ok ra man na, pero irritating ba. Irritating kaayo.

During these nine months that you’ve been taking care of the CICC, what happened to your other projects? Did anything get put off?
Everything was put on hold. It’s a good thing many of my clients are recall clients, who understood and didn’t mind. They told me to go ahead and finish it (the CICC), and we’ll talk later. Since last week, they’ve been coming back, now that there’s less pressure. We are moving on to our next project. We have three major projects this year on our drafting board, and I have one ongoing in Davao, so I can go there now to supervise also.

I understand you’ve received inquiries also from some summit participants?
Yeah. (Grins) Some have asked whether I’d be interested to do something like this in their place.

Which countries are these?
Di lang sa ko mosulti ana. (Let’s not discuss that just now.)

How much space will be available for exhibits in the CICC?
A lot! This one (gestures to one wing on the ground floor) is about 2,000 square meters. There’s another exhibition hall upstairs that’s about 2,000 square meters, and still another one (pointing to the main briefing room on the second floor) that’s at least 3,000 square meters.

Will you have a role to play in the management of the CICC?
No. Just the people from Mandaue City and the Provincial Government. We just have a few changes to make, like changing the Summit Hall to an exhibition space. Every now and then duna’y ma-stuck up (something gets jammed), so we fix it. That’s how it is when a new building becomes operational, all the people involved in the construction should stay put for any contingencies.

(A few minutes after the interview, the architect politely turned down a request to take a picture of him taking a picture of the performers. He strolled around the lobby, then down the hall leading to the exhibition rooms---knowing, better than anyone present, whether everything had fallen into place.)

Small-sketch scribbling

2007-01-15T02:40:00.000+08:00

TO HOST the Southeast Asian summit, local officials paved roads, installed lamps, ordered gardens in the middle of previously bare highways, built a convention center.

The private sector helped, from exporters and fashion designers, to artists and young musicians. A two-hour tour yesterday morning for the spouses of the Southeast Asian heads of state didn't stand a chance of making the international news wire reports. But for locals, it was the most visible display of how so many Cebuanos from outside government helped pull the summit's events off.

"We are awed by the cooperation and generosity of the Cebuanos," said Cebu City First Lady Margot Osmeña, who organized the spouses' tour along with Mandaue City First Lady Linda Ouano, Lapu-Lapu City First Lady Paz Radaza, under Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Francisco Benedicto's supervision.

"This just goes to show that everybody is doing their share," Osmeña added.

Exporter Dedon lent some P3 million worth of chairs, tables and patio furniture, for use in the Asean Friendship Garden in Barangay Talamban. An accessories manufacturer who did not wish to be named donated special leis---green wooden beads adorned by delicate sinamay sampaguitas.

Children gave their time. Two hours before the first ladies arrived in Talamban, their first stop, 25 teenagers and children from the Cebu Normal University string ensemble---one of them only eight years old---practiced with their violins. Their contribution was to play Bach, Schubert and Tchaikovsky as the guests arrived.

Nearby, about 400 other children in Filipino ternos, Indian saris and other Asian costumes lined up under the trees, little flags in their little hands. They waited for their cue to smile, wave and greet each newly arrived guest.

About 30 were handpicked to assist the first ladies during one ceremony, watering some sampaguita plants. They had to be cute. They had to have pleasant smiles. "And they shouldn't be more than three feet tall," said Junjet Primor, who directed the show.

The plan was simple. First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo and daughter Luli welcomed the spouses of the heads of state and senior ministers, then joined them in unveiling a copper sculpture commissioned to celebrate friendship in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean).

Artist Raymund Fernandez explained that the 10 bamboo poles in "The Asean Grove" were meant to signify dialogue within the regional bloc. Seven shorter poles represented the Asean's dialogue partners.

From their arrival to their final photo op---near a lagoon, with the cute pre-schoolers no more than three feet tall---the spouses spent no more than an hour in the "friendship garden." All told, the children stayed there for four hours.

The amazing Amos Oz

2007-01-10T01:01:00.000+08:00

Here's an excerpt from one book that I nearly gave away during my annual shelf-clearing, but decided to keep instead. This is the passage that made me decide to keep it:

Sometimes, at the end of the day, I reflect upon Immanuel Kant's observation on 'the crooked timber of humanity, from which you can never carve anything entirely straight.' Again and again I wonder why, for thousands of years, so many redeemers, ideologues, world reformers have been endlessly trying to do just that, often using saws and axes, trying to carve something straight and shapely from the crooked timber of humanity.

Instead of trying vainly to change each other, why don't we simply remind ourselves from time to time that no one should add more pain to the anguish already designated for us in life and by death? That deep down below, all our secrets are the same?

Ultimately, as the evening breeze begins to blow over the darkening hills of the desert, you pick up your pen and start writing again, working like an old-fashioned watchmaker, with a magnifying glass in your eye and a pair of tweezers in your fingers; holding and inspecting an adjective against the light, changing a faulty adverb, tightening a loose verb, reshaping a worn-out idiom. This is the time when what you are feeling inside you is far from political righteousness. It is rather a strange blend of rage and compassion; of intimacy with your characters mingled with utter detachment. Like icy fire. And you write. You write, not as someone struggling for peace, but more like someone who begets peace and feels eager to share it with the readers; writing with a simple ethical imperative: Try to understand everything. Forgive some. And forget nothing...

And so I write about people and what they think and what they want and what they think they want. What else is out there? Well, there is also the primeval chorus: Death and desire, loneliness and lunacy, vanity, void, dream, and desolation.

The book is "Israel, Palestine and Peace", a collection of essays by the novelist Amos Oz. And after reading this passage, I hope you'll understand why I want to hold on to this book just a little while longer.

Booked solid

2007-01-09T01:18:00.000+08:00

Predictably enough, going through my bookshelves late last year pulled me into a bout of reading so concentrated that I completely forgot to post anything during the holidays. I am no speed reader---my personal best is four books in five days, but that was on vacation last year---so whenever I raid my shelves for the titles I can bear to give away, I usually end up re-reading for days on end.

There have been times I plucked a book for the giveaway bin, only to retrieve it hours later for the passages that made me think or laugh out loud, or for the surprising way the words are strung together. (Last week, when one of my colleagues snapped up "Shalimar the Clown" and another went after "Of Love and Other Demons," I had to stop myself from gushing about how much I'd enjoyed those books and why---best to spare them from unsolicited reviews.)

Despite spending extra hours reading---thanks, in part, to the perfect reading-in-bed weather we've had in Cebu lately---I didn't manage to clear my backlog when 2006 ended. I did manage last year's target of reading at least one book a week, though. One of this year's resolutions will be to stretch for two books a week, alternating between fiction and non-fiction. Oh, that and finding out how Harriet Klausner manages to wade through four to six books a day.

All the best in 2007! Here's to a year of good health, the affection of family and friends, learning, credible elections, an authoritative badminton smash and, to borrow Neruda's incantation, "fiery color and undiminished freshness."

Footnotes on 'Notes from the Academy'

2006-12-20T23:40:00.000+08:00

The buzz from an overnight trip to Makati last week still hasn't worn off, thanks to the pleasure of catching up with friends, a few new books (ok, ok four to be exact, plus two more that arrived this week from Barnes & Noble) to spend the all-too-brief holidays with, and the inclusion of my essay in "Notes from the Academy: Filipino Perspectives on Liberal Training in Germany." (Check here for a report and photos on the book launch, courtesy of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation's Philippine office. You'll also find a related blog entry from my friend and fellow Academy alumna Clare Amador.)

You can get free copies of "Notes" from the FNF site or you can e-mail me at isolde(dot)amante(at)gmail.com. The first five to e-mail will get the book gratis, as well as information on the conferences lined up for 2007 at the International Academy for Leadership (IAF) in Gummersbach, Germany. Apply. Getting accepted could be one of the best experiences of your professional (if not personal) life.

I first attended the Academy in the spring of 1996. It was such an engrossing visit that to this day, I can still remember snippets of some of the conversations I had with fellow participants, particularly Selvi from Malaysia, Joyce from Ghana, Khawar from Pakistan, Debbie from India, Bongiwe from South Africa and Dorian from Slovenia. And whenever I read or hear about news from their countries, I can't help but wonder how they are, or if the enthusiasm they shared during our Academy days has weathered the passing of the years.

Before this gets any more mawkish, let me try to explain why that spring had such a tremendous effect on me. There was the diversity, of course, and the gift of seeing how understanding and empathy were possible, despite our apparent differences. There was also, for me, the realization of how little I would get to see of the world "out there"---and how much I would miss!---unless I committed to reading, travel and open-mindedness. Given two weeks away from the demands of work and daily life---two weeks in which all I had to do was listen, learn and accept how much I had yet to discover---I came home surer of myself, yet also humbled by the extent of what I had yet to learn. (I also picked up a fondness for "Volare" that, to this day, I have been unable to shake off.)

Some of my views in relation to the media industry I can trace back to that spring in Gummersbach---for example, the belief that allowing foreign ownership of media companies would benefit not only individual journalists, but the industry as a whole. My preference for press councils and other self-regulating mechanisms, instead of increased government regulation of the media industry, is another.

But more than some specific viewpoints, the best gift I got from those days in the Academy would have to be a fuller appreciation of individual freedom. For the first time, the idea of "the state that exists for the individual" leaped from the often dry perorations of my pol-sci and constitutional law classes, and made practical sense. A long way from home, I found that I could compete and collaborate with the most opinionated, independent individuals I had ever had the chance to meet---and instead of getting intimidated, I thrived. I loved every moment of it.

(About the photo: Dr. Monika Ballin, one of the excellent facilitators, goes over some ideas raised at a seminar last spring on New Public Management: Lean State, Lean Government.)

Shortcut on the paper trail

2006-12-19T23:38:00.000+08:00

It's not something they teach you at university, but one thing most reporters pick up after a couple of years on the beat is the ability to read documents upside down. No, not while they're suspended from the ceiling beams of some Third World torture chamber, but more likely while they're trying to get data from a source who's too cautious (or too suspicious) to let journalists have a look at some public documents.

The law allows you to write the Office of the Ombudsman for help, in case certain government agencies or officials get secretive with the official papers---though by the time you get your hands on them, you'll be several news cycles past your deadline. That's why the ability to read documents upside down---and only public documents, of course---is a survival tactic. All you need is a clear view of the papers on your source's desk. (If you ever get to watch "The Paper" with a journalist, watch him/her squirm at that scene where Michael Keaton, playing a metro editor, sneaks a look at the competition's budget sheet.)

In nearly all cases, however, you'll need more than a cursory glance to make sense of some public documents. Good luck trying to squeeze a story from an audit report after a five-minute reading. Between daily deadlines and pesky editors who keep demanding that they get public documents to back the story up, many a reporter has found it essential to pinpoint every photocopying machine within a two-block radius of the offices she's assigned to cover. But now any reporter with a camera phone or digital camera can do something else.

Like most tech things useful to us newsroom denizens, this came to my attention via online editor Max Limpag, who conducts The Cybercafe Experiments. I was about to copy some story conference notes from a whiteboard to my clipboard pad, when he snapped a photo of the whiteboard and, within minutes, had several PDF handouts that were surprisingly easy to read (despite my lamentable handwriting). He said the photo had been processed, for free, by scanR.

As someone who can't make sense of html code even if you offered to send Edward Norton my way as an incentive, I can vouch for how easy this service is. You just take a photo of the documents you need for a story, like so....

...send it by e-mail to scanR (after opening an account, of course), and voila! You get a digital file that you can then store, or give away to colleagues.

There are many newsroom challenges a service like scanR won't solve---it won't make courtroom or police blotter English any easier to decipher, for one, and it certainly won't make your deadlines less inflexible---but it just might help you spend less on photocopying services and, as a salve to the conscience of your tree-hugging friends, you'll use less paper too.

Now if only we could all get Commission on Audit reports faster.

If you see Murphy, tell him his law sucks

2006-12-13T23:05:00.000+08:00

The flight and hotel arrangements are confirmed. The speech is written, rehearsed and timed to the last minute, so the guests don't keep breaking eye contact and sneaking glances at the cocktails. The book I'm supposed to introduce has been read (twice!). My overnight case is packed.

And then this morning, less than 40 hours before the speech, my voice went kaput. Aaaaaccck. To paraphrase Sunny in "A Series of Unfortunate Events," at this point, I don't just live in Panic City, I'm the mayor of Panic City. (This is why I gave up broadcasting. Too nerve-wracking. Plus the camera adds 10-15 lbs. I don't need.)

Tomorrow, on the well-meaning (if not entirely scientific) advice of friends, I will spend the day in utter silence, drink only lukewarm water or hot calamansi juice, tear through an entire pack of Strepsils and, in the final hour before The Speech That Required The Postponement of the Asean Summits To Make, knock back a stinky herbal tea that certain rock stars (supposedly) quaff before a big gig. Hello, bookstores of Makati. I hope you've room for an avid, if somewhat exceedingly quiet, customer for most of Thursday.

Normally, I love a rainy day...

2006-12-09T17:31:00.000+08:00

...just not today. The drive to work was cold and depressing. It was tempting to just dive back under the covers and read the day away, but duty not only called, it hollered. Today, even the flags outside the Cebu International Convention Center looked forlorn.

On a good day, the P515-million center looks a lot better. Still modest, by international standards, but not depressing.

This bit of greenery as one approaches Cebu City is a bit tacky, I know, but it cheers me up nevertheless. Then again, not today.

Marc Carnegie of Agence France Presse filed a report that's on target and pitch-perfect...and provoked a two-boxes-of-doughnuts story conference at the newsroom, where it took a lot of effort to keep people's usually irrepressible spirits up.

Tears and fears end Asia summit

By Marc Carnegie

CEBU, Philippines, Dec 9, 2006 (AFP) - The Philippine dream of hosting an ASEAN summit ended in disarray Saturday, with rain leaking through the roof of a new convention centre and delegates jamming the airport to get out of town.

After calling off the annual meeting of regional leaders under the shadow of a looming typhoon and fears of a terrorist attack, the government of President Gloria Arroyo said the show would go on next month.

But as foreign ministry officials from her own administration privately disputed the official explanation of the weather as the reason for postponing the summit, the mood in the island resort of Cebu was gloomy.

"It would have been a big chance for the Philippines," said Jonalyn Cacal, a security worker at the luxurious seaside Shangri-La Hotel, where disconsolate workers were packing up the signs and banners meant to celebrate the summit.

"We have been preparing ourselves on security for so long," she said.

Amid reports of a pending terrorist attack, and warnings from Britain, the United States and other nations that danger was at hand, Arroyo's government insisted that Typhoon Utor was the only reason for calling off the summit.

"The Philippines is responsible for the safety and well-being of the summit participants in the face of inclement weather," she said in a statement, adding that the summit would be held here in January by ASEAN agreement.

"I thank the leaders for their understanding and support," she said.

But newspapers, journalists and officials questioned the official line, and some said concerns about a possible attack in Cebu were legitimate.

"The real fear was an incident on the fringes of the summit and that fear was very real," said Mike Clancy, one of the organisers of an ASEAN business and investment forum on the sidelines of the political events.

After the last-minute cancellation nations rushed in planes to transport their top officials away -- while for everyone else, chaos was the order of the day.

At the new $10-million convention centre, purpose-built to house the thousands of journalists sent in to cover the summit, rain from the storm leaked through the roof and dripped from the lighting fixtures.

Large bouquets of flowers, sent to mark the meeting's success, lay toppled by the wind into puddles of water. One offered congratulations from a local building contractor.

Workers covered the lone X-ray security machine in cardboard and plastic bags to keep the water out.

At the local airport, staff hammered away on typewriters -- no computers in sight -- to make hard copies of tickets for the throng racing to get back home.

Hotels, which had ratcheted up their prices in hopes of a big payday, were besieged by frustrated media companies looking for some kind of refund. And for the locals, there was a sense that the opportunity to present their island's best face to the international community had been lost.

"Many people are still wondering why," said Maria, a worker at the Shangri-La hotel, who declined to give her family name. She was stacking up chairs that had been intended to seat Southeast Asia's movers and shakers.

"Some say it is the storm, some say it is due to political reasons," she said. "We just don't know." (AFP)

Here's to a sunny (and travel-advisory-free) January.

Safety nets woven into Asean integration draft

2006-12-09T00:01:00.000+08:00

A DRAFT declaration on a single Southeast Asian economic community mentions safety nets for vulnerable sectors, a position that Philippine Trade Secretary Peter Favila supports.

It also seeks to move to 2015, instead of 2020, the integration deadline.

But even if leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) adopt a declaration that "provides for appropriate flexibilities," the 39-year-old alliance has no choice but to push integration faster, if it wants to compete for global business.

Delegates at the Asean Business and Investment Summit (BIS) at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel were urged Friday to guarantee stronger private sector involvement in the creation of an integrated Asean economy.

"The process of integration should be viewed with caution," Secretary Favila told reporters in an ambush interview after he addressed BIS delegates.

But Asean integration, with its promise of an expanded production base and a market nearly 570 million strong, is "a parallel route to competitiveness," the secretary also said.

"The ease of flow of production across Asean borders not only serves to enhance the flow of intra-Asean investments. They also make the region an attractive base for third countries seeking to benefit from economies of scale and specialization, by linking up various bases into a seamless production network," Favila told BIS delegates.

He later told reporters that the draft he read Thursday night contained "appropriate flexibilities" that, once sent back to the technical working groups, could translate to safety nets for some sectors. No details were provided on these safety nets.

The Cebu Declaration on the Acceleration of the Asean Community by 2015 is among the documents that Asean heads of state were scheduled to sign during their summit from Dec. 11 to 14, now postponed to early January.

Asean economic ministers, whose meeting will continue as scheduled this weekend, will work on the draft declaration further.

Favila said it is critical for the private sector to make themselves heard in consultations on an integrated Asean economic community.

"Our cross-border linkages are an added source of competitive advantage. Competitiveness, after all, is achieved with the right combination of operating cost, skills, infrastructure and institutional support built on sound macroeconomic policies," said Favila.

Deeper regional integration and accelerated industrial upgrading are among the urgent challenges if Asean wants to firm up its global presence, which includes dealing with "the China challenge," said Dr. Ponciano Intal, chief of party of the Universal Access for Competitiveness and Trade advocacy group.

While intra-industry linkages are strong in electronics and relatively strong in health care and the automotive industry, Asean's greater market fragmentation compared to China is a competitive disadvantage, Intal added.

He also raised the need to improve dissemination and tap greater private sector buy-in for the Asean acceleration plan, saying it "leaves much to be desired in private sector involvement."

Asean wants to demolish barriers to the movement of workers, capital and production factors by 2020, and hopes to hasten integration in 11 priority sectors by 2010. These sectors include electronics, health care, automotives, wood products, rubber products, textile and garments, agriculture products, fisheries, air travel and tourism.

Have you ever seen a cow that's happy getting milked?

2006-12-08T23:44:00.000+08:00

Yes, the Asean Leaders' Summit and the East Asia Summit have been postponed to January, ostensibly on account of bad weather. The Pag-asa weather bureau recommended pushing through with the Dec. 10 to 14 summit, but national organizers say they had to take into account that the visiting leaders "would be uncomfortable" conducting a summit while Philippine officials had to deal with devastation in Cebu or elsewhere.

It's a 95 kph tropical depression, people. Is it really the weather that's to blame, or is it a verified terrorist threat (the postponement having come a day after five countries issued travel advisories against Cebu)? Or is some other storm (say, a political one) behind the decision?

Part of me wants to trip the Pollyana switch and say this just gives local organizers more time to put finishing touches on the Cebu International Convention Center, even out the roadwork that's slapdash in some places, and complete various other preparations. But if the skies are bright and sunny during the weekend---and for everyone's sake, I hope they will be---every conspiracy theorist and his distant aunt will have a field day.

(A note on the post title: I had the punchline ready, but remembered some former students read this blog, so I have to be proper. Heh.)

You won't smell the ink...

2006-12-06T02:04:00.000+08:00

...if that sort of thing makes you enjoy reading your paper more, but you'll see an online replica of the Sun.Star Cebu issue, and it's free until Dec. 15, 2006. The alphabet soup snippet in this post, for instance, appears in context in today's Asean special feature, in pages A8 and A9. Check out the e-paper here. (Since I cannot take money for this plug, Nini Cabaero hereby agrees to waive five of her killer overhead smashes next time we manage to play badminton.)

Still on the 12th Asean Summit (so incessantly in the local news these days that at least three staffers, so far, have dreamt about some aspect of the preparations), the Sun.Star Network Exchange is hosting an online chat with the Cebu City Government's Nagiel Bañacia and Mandaue City Mayor Thadeo Ouano at 8 p.m. (Philippine time) Thursday, Dec. 7 on the summit preparations and how to cope with the traffic, among other concerns. More details on that here.

No EPGs in rallies, nor HOGs in farms

2006-12-06T02:01:00.000+08:00

IT SOUNDS like one of those things angry militant groups set fire to during rallies, but the EPG deserves a lot more dignity than that.

The EPG stands for Eminent Persons Group, and this year, their task is to hammer out a charter for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), which has not had one in all of its 39 years.

Perhaps potential writers of the Southeast Asian constitution had trouble swimming through the alphabet soup.

Newcomers to the summit coverage scene are testing these waters---and finding there are enough acronyms to rival a high school teenager’s secret diary.

Except, of course, that Asean’s acronyms are serious stuff. There’s ASC or the Asean Security Community, an important venue for conflict prevention. When old tensions simmer, the Asean Regional Forum---or ARF---makes sure a country’s bark is much worse than its bite.

So far, we’re getting along just fine, thanks to tact. And TAC. That’s the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, forged in 1976, which binds all Asean members to a policy of non-interference in another’s internal affairs.

When potential conflicts over turf or trade are kept at bay, grand plans are hatched in the IMT-GT, or the BIMP-EAGA, or the CLMV.

(To the unitiated, that’s the Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle; the Brunei-Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines East Asia Growth Area; and the Cambodia-Laos-Myanmar-Vietnam grouping.)

Credit for much of the grunt work goes to the SOM (senior officials and ministers) and the SEOM (senior economic officials and ministers), who hobnob with the likes of MOFCOMs and METIs.

No, not dotcom millionaires or believers in extra-terrestrial intelligence, but Ministers of Commerce and Ministers of Economy, Trade and Industry.

After all the spadework is done, a seal of approval from the HOGs makes all the late nights worth it. You’ll find them in the best hotel rooms, not farms, these HOGs: that is, heads of government.

If you didn’t know that, don’t fret. No one gets penalized---or burned in effigy---for not knowing these things. Still, as Asean constituents, it’s good to know these things---you know, FYI.

Small time

2006-11-21T18:03:00.000+08:00

This week's issue of Time Asia has their annual list of the year's coolest inventions, a movie review in which Richard Corliss describes Daniel Craig's pecs as "so well defined they could be in Webster's" (yep, Craig smouldered as the poet Ted Hughes to Gwyneth Paltrow's Sylvia Plath, and he gets my vote as the sexiest Bond ever) and a glowing review by Pico Iyer of the brilliant Alice Munro's latest short story collection.

Fortunately, instead of logging on to Barnes and Noble to drool over Munro's latest, I decided to finish the magazine and found a revealing example of a trick that every writer should have in her toolbox: comparing an unknown quantity to a known one, so the reader gets a better grasp of it.

In this case, the example comes from Kay Johnson's feature on Vietnam's entry into the World Trade Organization. It's typical of Apec coverage: the host country almost always get a detailed feature, as the Philippines did in 1996. (Remember? Our hosting the summit was billed as a coming-out party for an economy that was reaping the early benefits of the liberalization policies pursued by the Ramos administration. And then of course the financial crisis struck in 1997, and Joseph Estrada seemed unbeatable for the 1998 elections, and the rest, as they say, is comedy. Or tragicomedy.)

Sorry to digress. Anyway, Johnson's story explains how Vietnam will have to get its legal system and infrastructure ready to lure in more multinationals, and how enormous its potential gains are. Here's the trick phrase:

While it's true that Vietnam's economy is still relatively small---at US$53 billion last year, the country's total GDP is about half that of the Philippines---it is also vibrant, with a growing entrepreneurial class and thriving commodity businesses. (Itals mine)

Earlier this year, I showed a friend the back-of-the-mag stats that my favorite magazine (which insists on calling itself a newspaper), The Economist, does so well, to illustrate just how much catching up we had to do, relative to the economies of Malaysia, Singapore, China and India. She nearly cried. Now I know the feeling. My country, the benchmark for smallness. Ay, how the truth hurts sometimes.

Calamity lane (Now with a photo!)

2006-11-21T00:26:00.000+08:00

One of the strangest developments in the run-up to next month’s summit was the Lapu-Lapu City Council’s decision to approve the use of P10 million in calamity funds, citing imminent danger and the threat of terrorist strikes.

How serious these threats are, no one from the military or police intelligence community will categorically say, but majority of Lapu-Lapu City’s legislators apparently have information of such import that they felt the need to get the funds ready---you know, just in case.

The whole idea mystifies---approving the release of calamity funds for a calamity that has yet to (and, hopefully, won’t) hit the city in December. So, since the council’s decision, local journalists have been trying to keep track of how much Lapu-Lapu is spending on Asean preparations. Initial accounts show part of the funding has gone to support out-of-town policemen who have been detailed to Cebu as part of summit security.

And then some reporters found these, uhhh, busts of Lapu-Lapu.

There must have been at least 10 of them, from the shrine that marks the Battle of Mactan to the gates of the Shangri-la resort, where the Southeast Asian heads of state will meet. They (the busts, not the heads of state) all look the same, incomplete and awkwardly tilted, Lapu-Lapu staring off into the distance as though he’s trying to remember where the rest of him has wandered off.

Who thought of this parade of curiosities? What are they for? And who paid for them? One tries to make allowances for differences in taste, but these busts are just so atrocious that if it turns out taxpayers’ funds paid for them, they’ll stop being so funny and start to look, well, calamitous.

Getting high (Or: One more item off my "Things to do before I die" list)

2006-11-21T00:24:00.000+08:00

Today, my best friend and I got high.

I did consider trying harder for a less corny introduction, but, kind reader, words fail me. The second our crew let the line out and the sails lifted us to the bright skies over Mactan, I squealed like a little girl. And later, the second we landed back on the speedboat, I had one thought: Again! (I wish! Maybe next year.)

Here’s how it works. You put on a life vest, then allow one of the crew to strap you into a harness. You then sit on the speedboat’s prow with your knees bent, and try to keep your mind on the crew’s assurance that no one has ever fallen from one of these “flights.”

Don’t worry, that frisson of anxiety fades quickly, assuming you can tolerate heights, don’t suffer from motion sickness and have enough faith in the basic goodness of people to trust that this stranger in charge of your life for the next 10-12 minutes won’t, on a whim, slash your line. “Just relax up there,” our two-man crew said as Carmel and I began our ascent.

Relax? That’s what you do in the sauna, while you contemplate an ice cube melting on your knee. But at 150 feet up in the air, relaxed is the last thing you’ll be. Giddy, more like it. And grateful. For the wind in your hair, the chance to see a familiar view from a fresh angle, the company of a friend who encourages you to try new things.

I found a new view to love: the ocean’s blue vastness at my feet.

It was the image I kept returning to later, plodding along in Monday afternoon traffic, then getting the groceries and the day’s other errands done. I thought back to the “touch and go.” It’s that part of the flight where the crew lowers you so your feet skim the water’s surface, then release you skyward again---so you can soar fearlessly, if only for a little while.

Edifice complex and other summit notes

2006-11-17T00:46:00.001+08:00

What started out as a P250-million project, whose budget grew to P450 million (owing to the rising cost of steel and other construction materials, Capitol officials have said) is close to becoming a P515-million edifice.

Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia asked Thursday for a supplemental budget of P65 million for the Cebu International Convention Center.

Vice Gov. Gregorio Sanchez, a civil engineer who expects the project’s total cost to hit P800 million, says it’s likely the supplemental budget will sail through the Provincial Board early next week---in fact, he’ll make sure it does. (Certainly, not everyone agrees with the priorities displayed in preparing for the summit. A Bayan Muna congressman has pronounced the CICC “Imeldific.”)

With less than three weeks until the pre-summit meetings begin, the preparations are being carried out at a pace that approaches panic.

Workers have transferred thousands of plants into the islands that divide the north- and south-bound lanes of the Mandaue reclamation area’s highways. (For some reason, this reminds me of the Knights Who Say “Ni!” and their shrill demands for “Shrubbery!”) There are “Asean Summit Specials” everywhere, from tour agencies hawking discounted Hong Kong getaways, to massage parlors, carenderias and spas.

And after years of having to brake for rough patches in the city’s streets, these days, motorists find most of the roads leading to the CICC and the major hotels are a dream to drive on. Last night alone, on my 12-kilometer drive home, I counted five public works and highways crews, hard at work putting an overlay of asphalt on newly tamped streets.

“But what does all this mean to the farmer in Dumanjug?” one radio anchorwoman has asked. How do we explain the possibilities of a market 600 million strong, when most residents know the summit mostly as the reason local authorities are asking them to bear with disruptions in their workaday lives, if only for a week?

Last week, upon reaching the head of a long queue at the bookstore, I heard the cashier muttering about why the customer before me was in such a hurry to get his purchases bagged. “Who does he think he is, an Asean summit delegate?”

Sound advice, Part 2

2006-11-17T00:16:00.000+08:00

Since November began, the videoke machine that so tested my patience I decided to take up boxing has fallen silent. I think the nuns that live across the street from the office finally had enough and threatened the videoke owner with eternal damnation if they didn’t put an end to the caterwauling.

At first the silence was bliss, as relaxing as a midweek massage. And then, strangely enough, I began to feel oppressed by it. I would walk over to a co-worker afflicted with Silly Song Syndrome---moments after hearing a few bars of some really pathetic song, she repeats it a few times without really meaning to---and I'd hum or sing a few lines, as nonchalantly as possible.

I then walk back to my cubicle, wait a couple of minutes, and inevitably she starts singing/humming “YMCA” or “Come What May” or the theme from some ancient spaghetti Western movie. Fortunately for me, she also happens to be my best friend, the one person outside my family who has seen all my highs and lows of the past 17 years, so even if she finds it really annoying, all she can do is yell, “Arrgggh. SOLANG!” Physical violence is not an option. And, in most cases, she keeps on singing.

But she is my best friend, after all, so I’ve had to think of another way to deal with the silence. A recent column by a former schoolmate, businessman John Pages, gave me an idea. In this column, John sings the iPod’s praises and shares a playlist dominated by the Eighties pop that served as the backbeat to our generation's adolescent dramas and confusion.

So, starting this week, I've resolved to stop pestering Carmel with the silly songs. When in need of a break from the videoke-purged silence, I switch on an mp3 player that not only allows me to listen to the fantastic Bat Segundo podcasts, but also carries, in its slim, silver frame, the internal soundtrack that makes my workday a lot more fun.

Here's a partial list of what's playing this week:

Beautiful Day (U2), Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 2, 3 and 4, Caught Up in the Rapture (Anita Baker), Don’t You Forget About Me (Simple Minds), Giving You the Best That I’ve Got (Anita Baker), If I Aint Got You (Alicia Keys), Just Because (Anita Baker), Let’s Dance (David Bowie), Money for Nothing (Dire Straits), My Generation (The Who), Mysterious Ways (U2), No One in the World (Anita Baker), One (U2), Same Ole Love (Anita Baker), Say What You Want (Texas), Sledgehammer (Peter Gabriel), Start Me Up (The Rolling Stones), Stay (Faraway, So Close/U2), Sweet Love (Anita Baker) and Wonderwall (Oasis).

I know, I know, it's mostly old stuff, but for reasons I have yet to fathom, I seem hard-wired to cheer up whenever Sledgehammer plays. It's the way the horns and percussion work together, not the suggestive lyrics, that I go for (I think), but if anyone out there can lead me to an mp3 of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes", you would really make my workweek.

Deadlines

2006-11-14T23:52:00.000+08:00

A couple of brief dispatches from the Associated Press and Agence France Presse wire agencies had two of our reporters resorting to a phone brigade for most of the afternoon Tuesday.

Here's AP's report:

MANILA, Philippines (AP) - Organizers of a Southeast Asian summit in the Philippines have made a last-minute venue change due to delays in the construction of a convention center, an official said Tuesday.

The Dec. 11-13 summit will be held in Shangri-La Hotel on Mactan Island, near the central Philippine city of Cebu, instead of the Cebu International Convention Center, said police Deputy Director-General Avelino Razon.

“Some of the foreign delegations expressed concern about the date the convention center would be finished, so it was transferred to Shangri-La,” Razon told reporters. Construction on the huge center, begun in April, was originally scheduled to be completed by Wednesday, but was still in progress.

Razon said authorities had not monitored any threats, but have deployed an additional 7,000 police and 3,100 soldiers along with the thousands of security forces already in Cebu.

The summit will involve leaders of the 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations - Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam.

Leaders from China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand also will join Asean heads of state for an East Asia Summit on Dec. 13. (AP)

Because of the timing, that story was the shoo-in for the front-page banner. Nov. 15 is the Cebu Provincial Government's self-imposed deadline for the completion of the Cebu International Convention Center, a project that's going to burn a P450-million hole (at least) in the Capitol's pockets.

But when reporters Minerva Gerodias and Aledel Gonzalez-Cuizon checked with officials in the summit's Cebu Organizing Committee, no one could confirm the supposed decision not to use the CICC at all for any of the summit's meetings or ceremonies.

More importantly, Deputy Director Razon himself said he had been misquoted. Razon had granted our reporters many interviews when he was based in Cebu as chief of the Central Visayas Police Regional Office from 2001-2002. We all know some news sources are quick to draw the "I was misquoted" card---even if the reporter has a tape or MP3 that proves otherwise. But Razon didn't have a history of doing that with the Cebu press, as far as I can recall.

So now what? Sun.Star Cebu's report for today focuses on Razon's clarification and tells readers that, at least as of Tuesday night, selected events will still be held at the CICC, but that the leaders' summit (as repeatedly announced in recent weeks) will be at the Shangri-la Mactan Island Resort. Even if only for the traffic implications, the final arrangements are something most Cebu-based readers will want confirmed---categorically and definitively---soon.

*******

On a personal note, today (Nov. 15) is also a deadline of sorts: my 34th birthday, the first birthday I've ever mentioned in a blog. Since I've long decided never to lie about my age, I may simply choose never to blog about it again. Ever. But at least for today I will count my blessings. "Old age is not so bad," Maurice Chevalier once said, "when you consider the alternative."

Update: 16 November 2006

Parasailing's been put off until next week, but it was still a great (albeit not entirely age-appropriate) birthday.

This space reserved

2006-11-10T23:21:00.000+08:00

There are at least two things cyberspace has heaps of. One is spam. The other, predictions---some grim and some gleeful---of the impending death of newspapers, or at least the ink-smeared-on-dead-trees variety.

Not all the doomsayers are easy to read or particularly useful, but many provide essential reading for those of us still optimistic enough (or word-besotted enough) to try making a living close to the ink.

Here are some of them: Newsosaur shares some pithy ideas and wake-up calls for "the stressed-out souls trying to save our newspapers." A recent Washington Post report talks about Gannett's attempt to use citizen journalism in order to respond faster to readers' desires and to behave in a less imperial, less distant manner. And Time magazine's Michael Kinsley warns that merely bickering about staff cuts, while failing to reexamine journalism's traditions (and "encrusted conceits") won't slow down the papers' march to extinction:

The "me to you" model of news gathering--a professional reporter, attuned to the fine distinctions between "off the record" and "deep background," prizing factual accuracy in the narrowest sense--may well give way to some kind of "us to us" communitarian arrangement of the sort that thrives on the Internet. But there is room between the New York Times and myleftarmpit.com for new forms that liberate journalism from its encrusted conceits while preserving its standards, like accuracy.

Incidentally, journalism teacher Mayette Tabada led me to the NowPublic site, which allows readers to share any interesting or relevant material they've found online---and gives editors (at least American ones) an idea of whether their choices match those of their readers. All these may sound grim to the journalism major considering a future in print (instead of racing to the nearest call center, where entry-level pay is, in most cases, higher). But I think there's room for optimism still.

Newspapers may increasingly find themselves going after niche markets, instead of today's general audience. This in turn could drive newspaper prices up and put more pressure on newspaper journalists to deliver smarter content: more in-depth, more local (in some markets), more investigative and certainly better-researched. At some point, newspapers may exist only online, as e-papers or as constantly shifting images on a portable reading device, as one train scene in "The Minority Report" so memorably showed. (My editor doesn't think the shift will be that rapid here, given the still limited access to the Internet. "Try swatting a fly with a computer," he quipped.)

One area where change is overdue is sourcing. "Official" sources dominate news content in all media. But the journalists who make it a point to go beyond their well-worn address books will surely find more informed sources by trawling online.

About nine years ago, I was part of a media "experiment" in Cebu: a cooperative-owned broadsheet called The Independent Post. One of the things we wanted to do was improve coverage of local governments by refusing to rely on the "he said, she said" model of pingpong journalism so popular then. When the annual budget came up for discussion at the City Council, for example, the plan was to bring along two "citizen journalists" (say, one accountant and one NGO worker) who could help assess whether the decisions being made were relevant to their lives and, by extension, the community.

It never really worked. As much as people complained about the top-down decision-making process in newsrooms, they were reluctant to "participate" (overused buzzword, I know, but still useful) in how these decisions were being made. We wanted to give them a real say in deciding the priorities that would be reflected in the next day's paper---but what most people wanted was for us to send reporters to whatever news events or press conferences they had lined up.

Has this age of nanopublishing changed all that? Looks like it. Bloggers with newfound book deals or newspaper writing assignments are the frontrunners. After close to eight months of (admittedly sporadic) blogging, I've been led to at least four ideas that I wouldn't have thought of within the newsroom's confines. There's definitely space for new voices in the media mainstream---but those who want to make the most of it would be well-advised to avoid tarring all "traditional" journalists with the same brush.

(About the photo: Spotted near an intersection in Mandaue City, a reader keeps busy with text---the non-LCD, ink-on-dead-trees kind.)

A Star turn

2006-11-08T23:22:00.000+08:00

A couple of columns by Philippine Star publisher Max Soliven have provoked a scathing reaction from the Cebu Provincial Government. In both columns (which you'll find here and here), Mr. Soliven cautions against rushing the Cebu International Convention Center (CICC) and suggests that the Asean summit be held instead in a more established, presumably safer, venue in Lapu-Lapu or Cebu City.

I'm no fan of the CICC project and am not too optimistic it will earn enough for its upkeep after the summit. But that's one thing I really hope I'll be proven wrong about, and that with better marketing and international exposure, Cebu's convention traffic will increase dramatically in the next few years for the CICC to earn the P450 million that's been spent on it. So far.

In making his arguments, however, the venerable Mr. Soliven raises a few points that, as a Cebu-based journalist, I would like to comment on:

(1) Citing the Film Center debacle and the collapse of the NAIA Terminal 3's ceiling, Mr. Soliven says the CICC "would be unsafe since it is hastily constructed." Granted, speculations about the CICC's safety have made the rounds locally as well. But in the absence of structural safety tests, these speculations have remained merely that: speculations so vague no engineer or some other qualified personality is willing to go on record and say the CICC's roof may yet fall on the heads of visiting dignitaries.

That's a prospect so nerve-wracking it makes me want to knock on wood, but I don't want to be superstitious. Or speculative.

(2) Mr. Soliven quotes a Sun.Star Cebu report on the possibility that the CICC's cost may shoot up from P250 million to P800 million. He says:

On reading the article itself, you realize it was not intended as an expose, but apparently to explain why the cost had shot up.

Here's what happened: Cebu Vice Gov. Gregorio Sanchez, in two separate interviews, announced that he expected the CICC's total cost to hit P650 million, then later P800 million. Sanchez is a civil engineer. His disclosures, understandably enough, provoked questions from a local officials' league and every commentator and his second cousin twice removed. After all, how does a project go from P250 million to P800 million in less than a year?

But the fact is, as of today, no request for a supplemental budget related to the CICC has reached the Provincial Board. So, strictly speaking, the CICC is still a P450-million structure, not an P800-million one. (And one challenge for local journalists, assuming no supplemental budget is submitted because of all the heat the project has drawn, will be to check whether additional CICC expenses get charged against the annual budget, say, for engineering services.)

(3) The CICC is a locally funded project. So Mr. Soliven need not worry about having to "underwrite the Cebu Center's cost from our national pockets."

(4) Mr. Soliven also writes:

Look at Cebu City's Mayor Tomas Osmeña. He's got nothing to do with that CICC project. Everything he undertakes for the Asean is carefully bidded out and stringently supervised for quality. He's taking the role of host city conscientiously and being very careful.

Actually, not everything has been "carefully bidded out" by the Cebu City Government. As of August, the Cebu City Council appropriated P9 million to entertain foreign journalists who will be covering the summit. How that P9 million will be spent---dinners? spa treatments? tours? KTV nights?---no one from City Hall has bothered to explain in detail, despite repeated inquiries. I can think of several ways to describe this particular expense item, but "stringent supervision" doesn't come to mind.

(A couple of quick disclosures are in order: (1) Yes, one of the directors of the paper I work for is the former Cebu City mayor Alvin Garcia, Mayor Osmeña's political rival in the 2001 and 2004 elections; while Mayor Osmeña takes potshots at Sun.Star whenever he can, for the most part, our journalists are given access to City Hall's records and operations; and (2) The Freeman, of the Philippine Star group, is one of our competitors. If Mr. Soliven had quoted one of their reports instead of ours, I would be blogging about something else entirely now.)

(5) In his second column, Mr. Soliven writes:

Incidentally, the now being rushed Cebu International Convention Center is in an area of Mandaue City which is somehow rundown and derelict. In fact, there is a squatter colony right behind the CICC. Mandaue Mayor Thadeo Ouano is having the rusty rooftops of the squatters' shanties painted green, so they won't be too unsightly. Will he erect a fence, too, to conceal the squatters' shacks and other unappetizing sights in the neighborhood? I don't believe this Potemkin Village-type stratagem will be effective. The Asean leaders will come away with the impression that our country is on the same par as Darkest Africa.

The rusty rooftops that are getting a coat of green paint are in the sardonically named Paradise Island, a slum at the foot of the first Mandaue-Mactan Bridge, and not the ones near the CICC. Yes, there are shanties a block behind the CICC, but I'm fairly certain the Asean delegates have seen shanties elsewhere in Southeast Asia (yes, even in Singapore). The reference to Africa I do not know how to respond to, because it's been a while since I've read Joseph Conrad.

I get it that certain Manila journalists have their doubts about whether Cebu is up to the challenge of hosting the Asean summit. It's possible some of them aren't too happy about the inconvenience and expense of sending news crews and equipment here. The constructive criticism I don't mind at all. I appreciate it. It's the condescension, sanamagan, that's so disappointing.

Almost there

2006-10-31T20:45:00.000+08:00

Recovering from an eight-week course that required much (unfamiliar) management reading and a Stephen Covey workbook (yes, guilty as charged: I read self-help), I've limited my reading of late to the books I thought I could enjoy, but stay detached from: John Perkins's "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", Paulo Coelho's "The Devil and Miss Prym" AND "Eleven Minutes", and Nuala O' Faolain's memoir "Almost There." By detached I mean that I would find it relatively easy to pass the book to a colleague or friend, after a swift reading with neither highlights nor marginal commentary, and move on to the next item in my unruly book backlog.

Ms O'Faolain, however, wouldn't let me.

I should have known by page three that she'd be difficult to shake off: "I was so dull back then that even a description of my dullness would have too much life in it." About 275 pages and a couple of private journal entries later, I ended up buying her first memoir and newspaper column collection online.

And I had to wonder what one of my bosses was thinking, when she lent me this. This being a series of dispatches from someone's mid-life, one that encompasses the end of a 15-year relationship, an ill-advised affair with a truck driver, the challenges of writing a memoir without alienating one's family, and this realization: "The conventions of journalism are oppressive to the honest self." She was closer to 60 than 50 by the time she first tried her hand at writing fiction. She is now a published novelist.

"Almost There" is only the third woman-in-journalism memoir that I've read, after Linda Ellerbee's "And So It Goes" and Katharine Graham's "Personal History" so it probably is too early to think of this as an all-time favorite. (At least let me suspend judgment until her "Are You Somebody?" gets here.) Besides, the memoir really isn't so much about journalism, as it is about life taking an unexpected (but not entirely unwelcome) turn so late in the game. Or as Ms O'Faolain writes: "Some very simple things have been late discoveries, which is a reward, in a way, for having lived wrong. A lot of people who were better at managing life begin to find it dull at the age I am now. Not me."

A few weeks ago, in an interview for the paper I work for, one of my former professors said: "I believe in the trajectory my life has taken." Maybe it's all the introspection that my recent course has prompted, or maybe it's just the usual round of self-assessment that tends to bug me at this time of year, but I resolved---no, hoped---that one day I'd learn to say something like that too. (So I guess I won't be ordering one of those "Procrastinate Now" T-shirts, after all.)

Sound advice

2006-10-22T22:02:00.001+08:00

I’m searching for a way to tell these people singing practically under our office window to go torture someone else. I’ve survived 14 years of newspapering while keeping my vision 20/20, but thanks to one of those ubiquitous videoke machines, these past few weeks may have wrecked my hearing forever.

A colleague and I have even considered homicide, although the mere fact that we’ve had mock-serious discussions about it might qualify as pre-meditation. Since murder is non-bailable and both our mothers still harbor the faint hope we may someday give up deadline-chasing and become soccer moms, that and homicide have been put on hold.

What is it that makes people think they should sing in public? And I do mean public. Not one of those karaoke bar cubicles, where what you can neither see nor hear won’t hurt you, but in open air, by the side of the road, right under some long-suffering editors’ windows.

No wonder that in 2001, the noise from videoke machines was the most common complaint---at least six each day---raised to the customer service office of the Cebu City Government.

More complaints were raised that year against videoke machines (or more accurately, the people deluded enough to think they should get within striking distance of a microphone or a videoke machine), than against sidewalk vendors, stray dogs and faulty weighing scales in public markets.

The year after that, the council passed the Anti-Noise Ordinance or City Ordinance 1940, which states:

(1) that videoke machines should be kept in an enclosed place (like a soundproof tank, kept underwater, is my suggestion);
(2) that the owners of these machines should use sound reduction devices (a gag, with ether if possible);
(3) that no videoke machine shall be allowed in open spaces or in residential zones (or within earshot of any overworked journalist, who needs a bit of silence so she can hear herself think);
(4) that such machines can only be operated between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m. (Or not at all, unless said machine is kept in an open field during a thunderstorm---though that, sadly, would violate the enclosed-spaces-only rule.)

The penalties range from a minimum fine of P1,000 or one month’s jail time for the first offense, to a fine of P5,000 or imprisonment of three months OR BOTH, for the third offense.

All that sounds pretty prohibitive, so why is it that from 12 noon to 11 p.m. each day, for the past three weeks, barely recognizable renditions of Radiohead, Abba, Air Supply, The Cranberries and Celine Dion have been ringing in my ears?

After a particularly trying combo---“Zombie” yodeled full-tilt, followed by “Dancing Queen” sung half an octave off---only the rain kept me from running down three flights of stairs, confronting the banshee next door and saying: Please. I’ve been reading Stephen Covey, and you’re this roadblock on my road to personal change, effectiveness and principle-centered power. Do what I do: limit your singing to the shower, or in your car, anywhere no one else can hear you. Or be like Milli Vanilli. You’ll help bring homicide rates down.

Alternatively, I could do what another colleague did. Though he was fighting a losing battle with the flu, the minute the Mariah Carey wanna-bes began vocalizing---you know those Mariah Carey notes so high only dogs should be able to hear them?---he sauntered next door, popped a P5 coin in the torture chamber and sang Sinatra. That shut the racket up. Only for about 15 minutes, but still.

If I can just pull off a convincing Anita Baker, maybe that’s what I should do too.

Queens and pawns

2006-10-09T02:32:00.000+08:00

Every pawn carries a scepter in its backpack, James MacGregor Burns wrote in “Transforming Leadership” (New York: Atlantic Press, 2003).

The Pulitzer Prize winner referred to queening, the twist that allows patient chess players to trade a pawn for a queen, if they manage to push that pawn across the chessboard unscathed. It doesn’t happen often, yet when it does, it’s a jackpot: from a nearly helpless piece that can only plod one square at a time and never backwards, the pawn is transformed into a monarch, able to zip across the board and mow down nearly every obstacle in her path.

Such dramatic transformations are the true goals of leadership, Burns said. The school of thought that he puts forward views leadership as “the basic process of social change” and considers both leaders and followers as “agents of change.” For Burns, one only has to recognize the millions who lack food, shelter, work or freedom, to see the work that awaits “transforming leaders.” (We like to snigger at beauty pageant contestants who speak, dewy-eyed, of world peace. But when a Pulitzer Prize-winning academic extends the same idea, we sit up and take notice.)

Transforming leaders begin by imagining a state of affairs not presently existing. “They begin on people’s terms,” said Burns, and they do so by listening to what their followers want and need. Because they recognize that the work they do has moral implications, transforming leaders do more than guarantee their continued hold on power. They create, out of their followers’ dreams and disappointments, a vision of change. They communicate this vision to others.

How they convince others, above the din of cynics and naysayers, is part of what makes them leaders. Transforming leaders see that conflict is not only inevitable but, for as long as it is non-violent, is even desirable. Followers may see conflict in the gap between what their rulers profess to believe (justice, for instance) and the actual conditions of those they rule (such as widespread poverty).

“Conflict is crucial to creativity, as when new insights are tested and refined in the struggle to dislodge habitual patterns of thought,” wrote Burns. Transforming leaders know they cannot be empowered by subservient followers, Burns added. In a functioning democracy, only graveyards are truly silent.

Last week, I saw a TV news clip that showed Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia and University of the Philippines professor Cherry Ballescas confronting each other at a provincial development council meeting. They looked like two queens on a large and crowded chessboard.

The video clips and news accounts provide a limited picture, but it seemed to me that for all the raised voices, their positions were not irreconcilable. The professor wanted a full and detailed accounting of how the proposed P672-million annual investment plan for 2007 would be spent. The governor said some flexibility was needed---that she did not wish the Province to be “shackled by bureaucracy”---but that nongovernment organizations were welcome to inspect every project, to make sure no funds were misspent.

What at first seemed like a nasty argument may yet turn out to be a case of what Burns called principled conflict. “Conflict that sharply poses alternatives…mobilizes citizens and opens possibilities of decision and change”---the change that turns pawns into queens.

(Also appears in the Opinion pages of today's Sun.Star Cebu.)

2 women who write, and write well

2006-10-01T13:05:00.000+08:00

The blogosphere just got a lot better if you ask me, with two of my favorite women now in it. Check out Mayette Tabada's blog, and hope that the ability to write so wisely can be passed on by blog-osmosis. And if you've never managed to shake off the travel bug, pay Clare Amador's blog a visit. She'll make you want to pack up and head for that destination you've been waiting all your life to see.

I haven't felt the urge to blog lately (well, that should be obvious), and it isn't for lack of material. This week alone, the antics of some lawmakers were just begging to be parodied: "If he thinks he's Batman, then I'm Superman," said one congressman. But work and schoolwork have momentarily taken over whatever region it is in my mind that allows me to write---or at least attempt to write. So that reports and memos and other daily necessities do get committed to paper and screen, but the other bits of writing (journals, correspondence, blog entries) get shelved till I can somehow find the will to confront the empty page again.

"I am often writing when I am reading," the journalist Donald Murray has said. "The content of the reading makes me stop and think about the topic I'm working on. Sometimes that means marking the book, making notes, scanning a paragraph or even pages into my computer. Most of the time, however, it just stimulates a kind of shadow narrative that runs alongside my reading the way a coyote kept pace with our car in Yellowstone during one visit. We each knew the other was there, but we kept our distance. The story I'm reading stimulates the story that is being written in my subconscious while I'm away from the writing desk."

Finding Mayette and Clare's blogs couldn't have come at a better time.

Using performance + poverty in computing transfers

2006-09-25T22:40:00.000+08:00

This post by A Nagueño in the Blogosphere, on why it's not a great idea to be performance-neutral in apportioning the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA), brought to mind a story I wrote in late March this year. Here's an excerpt:

VISAYANS eager to try a federal government are in for a long wait—at least 10 years, a prominent political scientist estimates.

In the meantime, what local governments can do is campaign for changes in how national tax funds are divided, and hope that more local powers will set the stage for federalism.

“Decentralization is not meaningful unless there is financial decentralization and the costs of devolution are financed,” said Dr. Alex Brillantes Jr., dean of the University of the Philippines’ National College of Public Administration and Governance.

At present, local governments get 40 percent of the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA), while the central government keeps 60 percent. The local share is then divided among provinces, cities and towns based on population and land area.

It is time, Brillantes suggested, that poverty and performance were factored into that equation.

“Those who have more resources should get less (in IRA shares or transfers). Why should Makati, Quezon City or even Cebu get as much as poorer areas like Tawi-Tawi?” Brillantes said in a presentation at the Regional Forum on Decentralization.

However, he also raised the need for a “performance index” so that local governments can get incentives for delivering services better.

Consider that the IRA shares of local governments only account for about 14 percent of the national budget, after nearly 15 years of devolution, the political scientist pointed out.

Brillantes urged local governments to be more entrepreneurial, to learn “not to be forever dependent on transfers from the National Government” and to work together in solving problems that one local government cannot solve on its own, like solid waste management or pollution.

He cited some best practices in local fiscal management, such as the collection of user fees for health services, tax mapping, bond flotation for tourism development and greater involvement by the private sector, such as in build-lease-and-transfer arrangements.

“Certainly, we are ready for federalism, but we cannot fast-track it,” said Brillantes. “The Local Government Code is a good foundation, and if we are serious about empowering local governments, we have to move in that direction. But we cannot federalize overnight.”

On covering the Asean

2006-09-23T02:28:00.000+08:00

Ambassador Marciano Paynor of the Asean summit's national organizing committee visited Cebu early yesterday to address journalists and students on "The Asean Challenge: Covering the Big Stories in the 12th Asean Summit."

Journalists Linette C. Ramos and Atty. Rose O. Versoza filed separate reports on the ambassador's speech and some notes from an ambush interview. You'll find their stories here and here.

As part of the reactors' panel, I had a chance to thank Ambassador Paynor for granting my colleagues a couple of detailed, exclusive interviews a few months back---and for always responding to our pesky questions with candor and graciousness. Pending a more detailed account of this year's Press Freedom Week activities, here are the notes I used for my reaction to Ambassador Paynor's speech. (Of course I scrawled notes---they're in that black memo pad I'm holding in the photo. Given my fear of public speaking, OC note-taking is the only thing that saves me from sheer paralysis.)

(1) For the community press, the coverage of the Asean Plus summit is an opportunity to be less inward-looking, to recognize the immense potential offered by working with and learning from our Asean neighbors. We hope that as a result of our exposure to the workings of the Asean, we may become less of what the writer Eric Liu has called "accidental Asians."

(2) We will make a conscious effort to highlight "positive developments" as Ambassador Paynor has pointed out. Should substantive commitments be made, perhaps in the areas of energy security, human rights, or health and disaster management, we will be more than glad to report about them.

At the same time, however, we cannot turn away from certain questions and stories. For instance, were our authorities able to keep our streets safe and orderly? Were construction deadlines met without audit rules getting bent out of shape? And at the end of the day, when the receptions have ended and the red carpets have been rolled up, what difference did hosting the Asean make to our lives, as taxpayers and as citizens?

(3) One of the most uplifting facets of the Asean preparations is this sense of a greater partnership emerging between the public and private sectors. This is seen in various ways, from the untangling of "spaghetti wires" by our utility companies, to the better roads and cleaner shop fronts, and the efforts of volunteers who have offered their time and energy to make the summit in Cebu a success.

We hope that long after the summit has ended, this partnership will be sustained; that we will continue to have good roads, safe communities and---best of all---leaders who, despite severe limits on our resources, can (and do) get things done.

Right problem, wrong answer

2006-09-18T02:08:00.000+08:00

In the litany of complaints from local government officials, two words stand out as a golden oldie: unfunded mandates.

No surprise, then, that Bohol Gov. Erico Aumentado proposed that local governments be given at least half of all internal revenues, instead of only the current 40 percent.

He also suggested that shares from other revenues, such as customs and tariffs, be distributed among local governments as well. Aumentado, as head of the Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines, discussed his recommendations in a forum in Cebu City last Friday on fiscal decentralization and local governance.

I believe in subsidiarity---the idea that the central government should limit itself to functions that cannot be performed adequately by smaller or local governments. So up to that point in Governor Aumentado’s speech, I found nothing to disagree with.

Even when he described fiscal decentralization as “an elixir” to local governments, I had no objections---although one probably should avoid mentioning anything even remotely connected to alcohol or drugs when one discusses taxpayers’ funds.

And then, he linked fiscal decentralization to the supposed need for constitutional amendments, particularly the shift to a parliamentary government. As if that wasn’t enough to wake up one’s Inner Skeptic, the governor added he saw the need to ease the restrictions imposed by state auditors on how public funds ought to be spent.

To that, the forum’s speaker gave a succinct rejoinder. “There can be little sympathy for the demand to limit audit functions. In a democracy, we have to open our books,” commented Dr. Paul Bernd Spahn, a professor of public finance at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt.

“Scholars of decentralization all agree: Local autonomy cannot exist without fiscal autonomy,” said Spahn, a former consultant of the International Monetary Fund.

Equally important, however, is the national government’s responsibility to make sure that taxpayers’ money is well spent on service delivery---which is why conditions are set, so that critical services like education and health are financed.

(Blog-only aside: For instance, one percent of all real property taxes are supposed to go to a special education fund. Five percent of the budget is meant to be earmarked as "gender and development" funds; another five percent as calamity funds. At least 20 percent is set aside as local development funds, which in turn are used to pay for the infrastructure wish lists more formally known as the Annual Investment Plan. Granted, these restrictions rob local executives of the flexibility that could help them answer local needs more swiftly. Without these restrictions, however, local governments could simply spend on barangay halls, gyms and other "edifice complex" projects, then declare "savings" and award themselves fat bonuses and "extra cash gifts" at the end of the year. Which is exactly what state auditors have complained about.)

Local authorities, for their part, need to shake off a “grants dependency” on the central government and make the most of available options---like taxation powers---to prove they are ready for the responsibilities of autonomy, Spahn recommended.

In the open forum, one regional government official observed that perhaps the reluctance to flex tax-collecting muscles stems from the fact that most local officials and their social circles own the properties and businesses that would get hit by such taxes.

As for shifting from a presidential to a parliamentary system, Spahn commented that it “doesn’t really change much for the citizen.” He urged instead that the costs of functions transferred from the national to the local governments be computed accurately---so that not only mandates, but also resources, get devolved.

What will that take? For starters, a long overdue review of the Local Government Code, which marks its 15th year this year, and an assessment of how well our local officials have implemented the code’s provisions. Unfunded mandates are a real pain, yes. But for that, amending the Constitution isn’t necessarily the only solution.

(Also appears in the Opinion pages of today's Sun.Star Cebu.)

2 killed in Basak, Mandaue blast

2006-09-11T19:14:00.000+08:00

Police officials have confirmed there were no bombs at the site of a laundry shop in Barangay Basak, Mandaue City, where an explosion past 7 a.m. today killed two persons and injured at least 10 others.

What caused the accident: a tank of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) that had leaked overnight and exploded once an employee switched on one of the shop's dryers. To keep costs down, the shop's owners had opted to use LPG, instead of electricity, to run their machines. (Some cab operators use cooking gas as fuel as well.)

Most of the casualties were pedestrians who stood outside Gene's Laundry Shop, waiting for a ride to school or work. The explosion threw one of the fatalities, a 48-year-old woman, some eight meters from the shop; her body landed right in the middle of the Cebu North Road. Across the street, the signboards of general merchandise stores were shot through with holes left by metal shards and other debris from the explosion.

Rush-hour traffic slowed to a crawl as authorities sealed off most of the four-lane highway in front of the shop, some 12 kilometers north of Cebu City. Long before law enforcers or the bomb squad could confirm anything, speculations of terrorism rang out over Cebu's airwaves---this being Sept. 11 and some radio commentators being particularly prone to quick conspiracy theories.

(Do these people have any idea how scary they're being? My mother had already left for work and since that was her usual route, the moment the cars were diverted through our subdivision and I knew something had gone wrong, I couldn't rest easy until I knew she was safe. It turned out that she and a friend passed by the scene no more than five minutes before the explosion.)

Teams from the Emergency Rescue Unit Foundation later said what happened served as a drill of sorts for their disaster preparedness plans, when Cebu hosts an international summit in December this year. Authorities were quick to point out the explosion had nothing whatsoever to do with the Asean Inter-Parliamentary Organization's assembly, which opened today in Cebu's Marco Polo Hotel---this seems like common sense really, when one considers that the hotel and the laundry shop are easily 15 kilometers apart.

(You'll find the full report here, a sidebar on how local police and other government officials reacted here, and a shorter sidebar here, on using LPG safely. Sun.Star Cebu fielded two lead reporters, Mia E. Abellana and Aledel Gonzalez-Cuizon, with help from their colleagues Azucena K. Quilantang, Linette C. Ramos and Minerva B. Gerodias. The day's assistant news editor, Charmaine Y. Rodriguez, kept a close and very competent eye on developments from the newsroom. It's days like this that drive home how lucky I am to have these dedicated young journalists in our team. )

Virtual press conference

2006-09-04T02:05:00.000+08:00

A PRESS conference is like a tango, equal parts connection and evasion.

A journalist who wants to dig for a good story knows a press conference is rarely where it’s at. For one thing, you’re guaranteed to get no exclusives, unless you somehow corner the speakers after the event and interview them while the competition’s not eavesdropping. More importantly, a press conference is a controlled event, where the organizers decide what information to reveal and what to conceal---which makes the term press “con” apt, to a certain extent.

It’s a convenient way to get information, yes, particularly when the news source involved isn’t always that accessible, or is too busy to grant interviews to every journalist who calls. But the better journalists know they need to dig deeper for background information, documents and different viewpoints. There are many ways to tell the story of a bank’s closure, for example: the bank’s owners, government institutions and bewildered depositors all see the same event from different angles.

So when the invitation came last week to cover a virtual press conference, I was intrigued. For the first time, I got to “cover” the same event with a group of press workers from as far as Ilocos in the north to Davao City down south, although we wouldn’t get a chance to see one another. There was streaming video available, but considering my sluggish---and, on bad days, virtually antediluvian---connection, I decided not to risk it and stuck to the text-only chatroom instead.

Right off the bat, speakers from the Institute for Solidarity in Asia said they wanted to “revolutionize public governance” by helping cities make long-term development plans and by involving as many sectors of society in the process. In that sense, the choice of a virtual press conference was a case of making form complement substance.

It is rare for community journalists to interact with news sources based in the capital, much less in the comfort of our own environments. I “participated” in the press con from home, with my 10-month-old nephew sitting on my lap and babbling as I read aloud the comments on the computer screen. (A blog-only aside: I made sure he kept his adorable hands away from the Enter key as I typed the three questions I had the chance to ask.) I took notes, out of habit, although the organizers promised (and delivered, albeit a day late) the transcript of the chat session.

Some drawbacks were evident. We obviously couldn’t see the speakers’ mannerisms or hear any hesitation in their voices---in an actual press con, these could be read as nervousness, or evasiveness, in some cases. Some journalists were so eager to get a word in edgewise, they kept interrupting the discussion instead of awaiting their turn to speak.

(Another blog-only aside: Also, the chatroom was configured to show the participants' "movements" onscreen; we knew that one of the reporters logged on 2.5 hours late---don't worry, I'm not telling your boss :)---and that a few others left and returned to the chat several times. In an actual press con, it's quite distracting to see one's colleagues take frequent bathroom breaks or keep skedaddling outside to take mobile phone calls. Well, it's just as distracting online. However, it seems easier to pace questions in an actual press con. The organizers had briefed us by e-mail to type "?" if we had a question to raise, but there were some who happily typed away without waiting for a cue, while a speaker was still addressing a previous question. But then again, I've seen actual press cons where commentators and columnists perorated endlessly during the open forum, leaving the speaker little choice but to say, "I agree. You've said it all.")

Overall, however, the virtual press con was useful. And if officials from, say, the Commission on Audit, the Department of Budget and Management, or any public agency with ongoing projects in the provinces could do this regularly, it would be a great service to journalists who cover the country from outside Metro Manila.

Unless they don’t really want to face the music, as it were, and would prefer evading to connecting.

(This appears in the Opinion pages of today's Sun.Star Cebu. The story I wrote from the press conference is here. And one of the other participants, from the Palawan Sun, wrote this very interesting blog entry on his impressions from the chat.)

Dream cities

2006-08-30T19:12:00.000+08:00

AT LEAST six local governments in the Visayas, including Cebu City, are working on long-range development plans, in an attempt to ensure that projects continue regardless of who's in charge at City Hall.

They will also use scorecards to measure progress made against targets in 12 areas, from competitive infrastructure and lean government, to responsible citizenship, growth in the per capita gross domestic product and greater productivity.

Under its Dream Cities program, the Institute for Solidarity in Asia (ISA) hopes to encourage strategic planning in cities and compel them to involve the community in government's affairs. The ISA launched the program today.

The Visayan cities of Cebu, Dumaguete, Bais, Iloilo, Tagbilaran and Calbayog are in various stages of complying with the ISA's Public Governance System (PGS), a measurement tool similar to the "balanced scorecards" now in vogue in the private sector.

Each participating city will need to raise P200,000 a year, with ISA's help, to pay for training, planning and monitoring activities.

Asked how local officials can be compelled to make long-term plans, when each term lasts only three years, Mayor Oscar Rodriguez of San Fernando, Pampanga, said: "Precisely, we are trying to institutionalize the PGS, where each citizen is a stakeholder... It is time to deviate from the ordinary and pursue a different, but correct course toward governance."

The "Dream Cities" program sets measurable targets, such as making the scorecards available to at least one million Filipinos and using these in 90 percent of all cities and towns.

Once a city is selected, ISA conducts a series of training sessions that bring together government and private sector participants.

"This multi-sectoral governance coalition will help the city plan, make programs and monitor, and this will lead to transparency, good governance and, to a certain degree, eliminate graft," Rodriguez added.

It was not clear how such a coalition will avoid duplicating functions of the local development councils, special bodies required under the Local Government Code so that accredited non-government representatives can have a say in how local governments set priorities and spend taxpayers' funds.

"We will use a methodology that will ensure participation of the various stakeholders," said Dr. Nick Fontanilla, president of the Asia-Pacific Center for Research.

Dr. Fontanilla announced that ISA has also crafted a road map, which spells out "what we'd like the Philippines to be in 2030, how we can get there and a guide to tell us if we are successful in this journey."

ISA hosted Tuesday afternoon an online press conference that gathered journalists from Ilocos to Davao City in a chatroom provided by www.yehey.com.

The League of Cities is signing a memorandum to commit a counterpart fund of P75,000, which the ISA will match. Each participating city will be required to earmark P200,000 in its annual budget for each year the city remains in the Dream Cities program.

According to its website , ISA's core programs are funded by the Center for International Private Enterprise in Washington, DC.

Led by former finance secretary Jesus Estanislao, the ISA also lists at least 37 organizations as sectoral partners, including the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, Foundation for Worldwide People Power, Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas and the Rotary Club of Cebu.

(First published in today's issue of Sun.Star Cebu. The photo, snapped during my day off last Monday, is from one of my favorite spots in Cebu, a quiet corner of a coffee shop where one can read undisturbed or just rest one's eyes by looking at greenery. If only they had wifi. :)

Friday night with a gorilla

2006-08-28T02:04:00.000+08:00

ON Friday night, a gorilla passed in front of my eyes---and I completely missed it.

The task seemed simple. We were shown a video of two groups passing a ball. One group wore white shirts, and the others wore black. Count the number of times the ball gets passed among those wearing white, instructed Cebu Holdings Inc. president Rene Almendras. (His talk on innovation and collaboration gave us a welcome chance to step back from the near-chaos of a newsroom just hours shy of press time.)

So count we did. But when he asked whether we had seen a gorilla walk into the midst of the ball-passing teams, thump its chest several times and walk away, you could hear the disbelief in the crowd’s voices. For the replay, I quit focusing on the ball, gazed at the entire frame instead and---lo and behold---there was indeed a person in a gorilla suit, sauntering into the center of the action. How did I miss that?

It’s a phenomenon known as “inattentional blindness” and it shows us how focusing on one detail or one task can keep us from seeing a change, whether in the midst of the big picture or at its periphery. A Wikipedia entry neatly sums this up as an “induced failure of awareness.”

For organizations, this raises the challenge of reevaluating and perhaps discarding “the premises and behaviors that may have made the enterprise successful, but will now yield the opposite effect,” Almendras said. Simply getting better at what you do will, at some point, yield less. You need to keep coming up with new products or new processes, but in order to do that, the organization must first create an environment where new ideas are constantly generated.

“In order to stimulate creativity and innovation, the organization must allow people to make mistakes,” Almendras added. Organizations need to create and encourage a “questioning culture”---which may be anathema to managers who think one’s ability to contribute or criticize diminishes, the lower one gets on the corporate ladder.

Organizations that fail to stimulate creativity and innovation miss a lot, and not just gorillas in their midst either. In “The World is Flat,” Thomas Friedman quotes a 2004 study by the BankBoston Economics Department, which estimated the windfall from US university research projects in this fashion: 4,000 new companies, 1.1 million jobs and annual world sales of $232 billion.

Strangely enough, before Friday night’s lecture, it was the possibility of second acts that had occupied most of last week’s conversations with friends. We kept saying how fortunate we were, that unlike our grandparents’ generation, we face a world writ larger---thanks to technology, trade and the ability to share far more vast amounts of information, faster. The challenge, for organizations and individuals alike, is to take risks, “learn to unlearn” and find new ways of seeing.

(This also appears in the Opinion pages of today's Sun.Star Cebu.)

Orbits

2006-08-27T01:53:00.000+08:00

I love this bit of "odd" news from the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) - "My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas."

That and variations on it are the way millions of people learned to remember the names of the planets in the solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

The problem is that an international convention of astronomers decreed Thursday that tiny Pluto no longer meets the definition of a planet.

What a way to spoil a good mnemonic. Now how will students learn the planets?

Some possibilities:

-My Very Extravagant Mother Just Sent Us Nachos.
-My Very Elderly Mother Just Sits Up Nights.
-Major Volcanoes Erupt, Making Jolts, Shaking, Unsteadying Nerves.
-Make Very Extraordinary Meals of Jell-O, Strawberries and Unsalted Nuts.
-Mary's Violet Eyes Make Jack Stare Until Noticed.
-My Very Exotic Mistress Just Showed Up Nude (perhaps this one is for college lads).

The planetary change also spells trouble for science museums. The National Air and Space Museum, for example, has a popular song called "The Family of the Sun," set to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell," that children love and which helps them learn the planets.

Spokesman Mike Marcus said a decision on rewriting it has not been made yet.

The museum also has a scale model of the solar system outside that spans the length of the National Mall.

At least cutting planets eliminated fears that the museum model would have to float new, more distant planets, in the Potomac River to stay on scale. (AP)

It's been quite a day: an hour of Spanish, 11 newspaper pages grappled with and closed, and still no column idea in sight, with deadline just hours away, hovering over my neck like a hatchet. And now there's an 8 a.m. getting-to-know-you chat session ahead, part of a course organized by the Center for Journalism at Ateneo de Manila University. Yet while admittedly bone-tired, I feel pretty good.

Here's part of the reason. On Friday night, I had the good fortune of being invited to a very thought-provoking talk on innovation by Rene Almendras of Cebu Holdings Inc.---more on that in a later post. And as a bonus, Rev. Fr. Roderick Salazar of the University of San Carlos recited this snippet from Rainer Maria Rilke as part of his opening remarks:

I live my life in growing orbits
Which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God,
around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for thousands of years.
And I still don't know if I am a falcon,
Or a storm, or a great song.

Have a great weekend, everyone, and---as one of my former students has taught me to say---toodles! :)

Notes from an economic forum

2006-08-24T22:59:00.000+08:00

Cebu is projected to corner at least 32 percent of the P189.8 billion that the Arroyo administration hopes to invest in the Central Philippines mega-region between 2006 and 2010, an official of the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) revealed.

Speaking at Wednesday's Sun.Star Economic Forum, Neda Central Visayas Director Marlene Rodriguez said that President Arroyo's economic managers hope to spend P60.8 billion on Cebu in the next four years, specifically for the following projects:

* Roads and bridges: P6.29 billion, or 15.8 percent of the total amount earmarked for Central Philippines;
* Railways: P33 billion, or 40.51 percent;
* Ports: P18.87 billion, or 87.38 percent of the mega-region's total;
* Airports: P749 million, or 7.35 percent; and
* Tourism infrastructure: P1.9 billion, or 5.17 percent.

Dead center in a mega-region being packaged as a tourism hub, Cebu accounted for 28.5 percent of all foreign tourist arrivals nationwide last year. Its hotels and resorts reported an average occupancy rate of 73.6 percent.

To contribute further, Cebu needs to pitch to prospective visitors its strategic location as a take-off point for satellite destinations, Rodriguez said. It also needs to plug its room shortage and get more flights from East Asia, currently its top tourism market.

It will also have to work with other provinces in the Central Philippines mega-region on the following challenges: (1) setting up and promoting a Central Philippines Tourism Center; (2) linking the islands through telecommunications and transport; (3) protecting coastal and marine resources; (4) developing SMEs, agribusiness and exports; (5) ensuring reliable power supply; and (6) improving social services such as health, education and disaster preparedness.

For more Sun.Star Economic Forum 2006 stories, click here.

Today is Ninoy Aquino Day

2006-08-21T01:16:00.000+08:00

AS OBVIOUS as that fact may be, I feel compelled to state it. As I was driving to the office, my regular fix of mindlessly cheerful dance music was interrupted when the disc jockey chirped: “Enjoy your holiday on Monday, people! I’m not sure what it’s for, but it’s a holiday!”

I waited for what she’d say next. I thought she was being ironic, that she would tear into a deceptively casual riff about whether the Filipino is still worth dying for. But as the next song segued into place, it dawned on me that she didn’t really know. Hadn’t bothered to find out. She must be under 23, I thought.

But so what? There are 302,000 sites on Google that mention Ninoy Aquino---that’s more than the 275,000 devoted to his ubiquitous daughter Kris---and you couldn’t be bothered to check? This past week alone, many newspaper stories reported that Ninoy Aquino Day will be a “no work, no pay” holiday. So even if the usual tributes haven’t aired yet, and television stations haven’t played that slow-mo scene of Aquino rising from his plane seat and walking out for slaughter, there have been enough mentions for today’s significance to make a blip on everyone’s radars. Well, apparently, not everyone.

Radio has an access and reach that most people, ink-stained newspaper journalists included, can only dream of. So even if you’re tasked with nothing more than introducing the next cut from the Black-Eyed Peas, you’re expected to have a clear-eyed grasp of current events at least. Think of all the impressionable youngsters who hang on to your every word.

Perhaps this forgetfulness merely confirms we are in an age with no sympathy for martyrs. That said, however, an individual’s accomplishment surely must count for something. Covering the Korean War at 17, mayor at 22, governor at 28, senator at 35: it’s an impressive arc, a full life worth learning about. And, oh, he died for his country at 50. What does one have to do to get remembered around here?

Memory is an imperfect record. It’s possible for many people to witness the same event, yet much later recall different versions of it. In my case, my clearest memory of Ninoy Aquino is a taped interview from his days as an exile in Boston, shortly before his return home: I remember him reciting the 23rd Psalm, and explaining why he didn’t wish to seek asylum in America.

“I feel it is my duty,” he said, “as it is the duty of every Filipino, to suffer with his people, especially in a time of crisis.” Later, it was learned, he had planned to say the same thing in his arrival statement. But that’s a statement history had no time for.

In the anthology “Versus”, the poet Alfrredo Navarro Salanga wrote: “A full epic will, no doubt, be written one of these days. That will come in due time when what we know of today as events in the news become the stuff of history, and history itself achieves fullness as legend.”

It’s been 23 years, and Ninoy Aquino’s life has achieved fullness as legend. Yet why is it so easy for some to forget?

(Published in the Opinion pages of today's Sun.Star Cebu.)

A walk in Parian

2006-08-14T01:16:00.000+08:00

Heritage of Cebu Hosted on Zooomr

If you ever wander into the Parian district in Cebu City, chances are you’ll see the Heritage of Cebu Monument, a brass, steel and bronze tableau that took nearly five years to complete and cost a local foundation some P33.2 million.

It sprawls at the center of the old Parian plaza, towering over a fire station, a basketball court and the noise and fumes of downtown traffic.

I confess I’ve never given the monument much thought before. A quick visit after its unveiling in late 2000 felt obligatory, and I’ve often mentioned it as something friends from out of town could see, given that Casa Gorordo museum (below) sits just around the corner. But I’ve never really looked at it.

After hearing so many complaints about how little we know of our history---hence our tendency to steer visitors to the nearest beach or mall---I decided it was time for a good look.

Reader, it didn’t move me. Now, before admirers of the national artist Eduardo Castrillo get upset, I admit I am no art critic. Where others may see a grand narrative---the high points of Cebuano history unfolding above everyday, pedestrian traffic---I only see bronze and dust. I can’t help but wonder what the jetlagged or sunburned tourist would make of it, especially without a historian, an informed local or an accurate guidebook.

He would miss, for example, the fact that he’s standing on the site of one of the most critical battles in Cebuano history. No, not a battle with blood or bolos, but no less “a struggle between the ruler and the ruled,” wrote the historian Michael Cullinane in “Global Trade and Local Transformations.”

In the early 19th century, Parian was a thriving community of Chinese mestizos, the wealthiest of whom rivaled the Spanish authorities in influence and prestige. Its residents “inherited commercial opportunity from Chinese fathers and a Philippine-Hispanic-Christian culture from Filipina mothers.”

As a sign of the district’s wealth, they built an elaborate parish, walls inlaid with gold and silver, with virtually no help from the Spanish government or church.

Writes Cullinane:

The power, influence and sense of community of the Parian elite are well demonstrated in their long struggle with the colonial authorities, particularly the Augustinians, for control over the Parian parish. The conflict was unavoidable and the stakes were high. For the mestizos, it meant the survival of their parish, which was the central focus of their community life and the institution through which they controlled much of the indigenous population and maintained a claim of jurisdictional control over the agricultural land behind the city.

For the Augustinians, it was a struggle to confirm their ownership and spiritual administration of all the city's hinterland and to consolidate their control over the municipalities surrounding the port area.

...Understandably, the Parian parish, dominated as it was by wealthy, assertive mestizos, posed a threat to Augustinian control over the area it considered its own. Recognition of the Parian's spiritual jurisdiction would lead to the area becoming incorporated into the mestizos' municipality and could ultimately lead to permanent mestizo control over the land and its inhabitants.

Not a single stone from that church remains in Parian today. In 1875, after decades of conflict with the Augustinians over land ownership and urban jurisdictional control, the Spanish bishop ordered the Parian parish demolished. Appeals made in Manila and Madrid---organized by, among others, Guillermo Osmeña and Catalino Veloso---had failed. The Parian parish was forcibly brought under the control of the Cebu Cathedral (below).

“By the time the last stone was removed,” wrote Cullinane, “the center of Cebu’s society had already shifted away from Parian.”

None of this struggle is apparent in Parian today. You won’t see its story---in fact, the story of how Cebu’s present-day elite came to be, including its capacity for both opposition and collaboration---in mere brass and bronze. Memory, more than monuments, is what will help us see Parian more clearly.

(A shorter version appears as my column in today's issue of Sun.Star Cebu.)

Cebu + 3

2006-08-10T22:29:00.000+08:00

This blog entry comes to you from what may be known in the future as the Province of Central Cebu---if three of Cebu’s lawmakers get their post-congressional retirement plan in place: the creation of three new provinces.

Just when everyone had all but written off the proposals to create the provinces of Cebu del Sur, Cebu del Norte and Occidental Cebu, all three bills were approved at the level of the House committee on local governments earlier this week.

Basically, this means the committee found that the proposed provinces meet the requirements of income, land area and population. It didn't even bother to wait for the report of a technical working group that was created last year to study the bills' feasibility.

But for Cebuanos who oppose the proposals, the battle is far from over yet, as the bills still have to weather two more readings in the House and scrutiny in the Senate, all within this year. (Because most of Congress will be too busy campaigning next year to do anything substantive.)

To this day, the proponents have yet to present detailed arguments for creating three more provinces in Cebu. All that Reps. Simeon Kintanar, Antonio Yapha and Clavel Asas-Martinez have said so far is that they hope to (1) bring government closer to the people; (2) end the neglect of certain towns; and (3) bring Cebu a greater share of the national internal revenues.

Motives, being neither tangible nor measurable, aren’t of much use when you want to argue against something, but in this case, one can’t overlook the fact that all three proponents happen to be on their third consecutive term and, as such, cannot seek reelection in Congress next year.

Gerrymandering comes to mind.

So, unless these aspiring governors present more convincing evidence, as a voter I’m going to have to pass, on three grounds: (1) we can’t “brand” Cebu effectively if we split it up; (2) any neglect of the towns, whether real or perceived, can still be addressed within the existing set-up, by putting pressure on (or channeling more pork barrel funds through) the town mayors and the incumbent governor; and (3) the taxpayers’ money can be put to better uses other than helping these three get a stronger hold on their turf.

In a paper reissued last year, the Local Government Development Foundation estimated that each new province would require at least P789 million for its first year of operations alone.

Each time a new province is created, it also costs all other provinces some P158.21 million that would otherwise have been divided equally and paid for operations and services in the existing provinces.

The organizational costs for setting up a new province include an estimated P17.89 million for a plebiscite, another P17.89 million for a special election and P3.68 million for a survey that will delineate the new province’s boundaries.

In its paper “Fragmentation vs. Consolidation”, the foundation also presented some arguments against splitting provinces into smaller ones. Some excerpts:

(1) Creating new local governments has no strategic value to the Philippines.

Beyond the Philippines, the trend is toward the consolidation of local authorities. The reasons are varied. However, the strongest argument advanced thus far is that local autonomy, in the strict sense of the word, can only be achieved if a local authority has a local reserve base sufficient to finance development programs and projects, as well as basic services—far greater than central government grants, allotments or subsidies.

(2) Small local governments that are parochial cannot deliver services to counter the problems of urbanization.

Urbanization trends suggest that the Philippines will require effective authorities that will be able to provide service metro- or region-wide. Because of in-migration from the countryside, local governments will not be able to respond to urbanization’s challenges if they are fragmented into smaller political units. To counter the dysfunctions of urbanization, bigger local or regional governments are necessary, to coordinate metro-wide services.

(3) Fragmented local governments cannot afford to take advantage of technology on their own.
As local governments continue to function in the present millennium, the use of public technology in local governance will increase. The only way for local governments to avail themselves of the advantages of public technology is to increase revenues and financial viability. This would mean retaining big local governments at present, as the smaller local governments that do not have the revenue base will not be able to afford and take advantage of technological developments.

(Hat tip: The editorial cartoon by Josua Cabrera first appeared in Sun.Star Cebu.)

5 gas tanks and a goat

2006-08-07T02:43:00.000+08:00

A couple of years ago, the neighborhood where my family lives was agog when a large steel mat---it covered a ditch that municipal workers were digging---got stolen. It must have taken at least seven men to lift the thing, and one eyewitness later said the thieves got away in a multi-cab.

I was reminded of that incident while reading a story a few nights ago about how barangay tanods arrested two men and a 16-year-old boy who were spotted trying to steal two flagpoles from Mandaue City's United Nations Ave. (It's that stretch that leads into Mandaue City, from the Marcelo Fernan Bridge). When I first heard of it, I thought it must have been a fraternity prank or something along those lines, but the police said there are plenty of scrapyards that would pay for the poles, no questions asked. It also wasn't the first time someone had tried to steal a flagpole on United Nations Ave.

I found the incident so tragicomic, it insinuated itself into this week's column. It's no surprise for mobile phones or flashy jewelry or wallets tucked carelessly in one's back pocket to get stolen. But why flagpoles? Were the culprits so underwhelmed by the level of police visibility in the city that they felt confident enough to steal 20-foot steel poles, without even bringing a getaway vehicle? I had to check the news archives to find out what other strange stuff have been reported stolen in recent years. Here's a sampling:

(1) 1,391 water meters: The Metro Cebu Water District reported the items stolen between January 2000 and May 2004. That comes down to an average of about 26 meters each month. Each meter cost the water district around P1,600.

(2) 15 plastic chairs from the Centro barangay hall in Mandaue City: The police arrested a couple and recovered the items in early February 2002. (Fortunately, that night's headline-writer resisted the urge to pun, like so: "Thieves unseat Centro barangay officials.")

(3) About P547,000 worth of construction supplies: These were stolen from a warehouse at the Cebu City Sports Center, where the Sinulog Foundation kept its supplies. The thieves, who struck in June 2005, took 3,000 steel bars and pipes, 100 tarpaulin sheets for tents and 15 rolls of electrical wire.

(4) And on New Year's Eve 2003, a police team from Consolacion town, some 13 kilometers north of Cebu City, arrested three robbery suspects who, in their haste to get away from the scene of the crime, rammed their getaway car into an electric post. The police found their loot inside the wreck---five gas tanks and a goat. (The goat survived.)

In "Crime, Society and the State," Greg Bankoff writes there is likely to be less crime in communities where: (1) there are no significant disparities in wealth and (2) a high degree of social cohesion exists---"where an individual's action had to conform to traditionally accepted standards at the risk of social ostracism." These are said to explain why crime is more prevalent in urban, rather than rural, areas.

But when the state fails to address perceptions that law enforcement is weak or inconsistent, the state itself becomes a victim of crime, including such cases as counterfeiting, misappropriation of public funds and smuggling. Of the four examples above, you'll notice that the first three groups stolen were state property. But they're small fry when you think of the ship that disappeared, or the pier. That, more than the flagpoles, is what really gets my goat.

No all-seeing ‘I’

2006-08-04T03:04:00.000+08:00

As a journalist, one of the things I wonder about after reading a well-written story is the so-called “story behind the story.” When the material comes from a particularly difficult assignment (whether it’s the dangers of a war zone, or the doublespeak and tedium of a congressional hearing), I want to know how the reporter chased and fact-checked the story, what resources the news team had to work with, and what solutions worked whenever they faced certain problems.

Not too many readers might find this facet of the story relevant, or even interesting. As a journalist, I do. (I'm nerdy that way.) So when I read that the newswire Reuters had asked its correspondents to write “Witness” stories, I thought that was something our news team might want to read. (Hat tip: Dee Nicolas e-mailed the story that provoked this blog entry.) We may not have the luxury of spending six months working on a story about dwindling fish populations, but it couldn’t hurt to read about a team (from the National Geographic) that did.

You’ll find examples of the “Witness” reports here and here.

Not everyone, however, finds the occasional first-person reports useful. Writing in the New Statesman, columnist Michela Wrong laments the “journalistic narcissism” implicit in the "Witness" project. She says it will probably erode the subscribers’ confidence in a newswire “that puts its writers’ human foibles prominently on display.”

Never mind the prospects for war in the Middle East: how did John Newshound feel, rushing from his pregnant girlfriend’s bedside to cover the crisis?

Yes, there is some amount of “showbiz” at play here, or what Ms Wrong sees as an attempt to make writers into “extrovert polemicists, appreciated not for the information they provide but for their flamboyant personalities.” But, with a little tweaking, the “Witness” stories can also be another way for journalists to be held more accountable.

The “Witness” reports can, for example, provide links to the documents the story is based on, or transcripts of interviews. (It would be interesting for news readers to see how much of an interview ever sees print. And that might also help answer a common complaint among news sources: getting quoted out of context.) Knowing that they’d have to explain to readers how the information was gathered, journalists might also think twice before resorting to old tricks: unnamed sources, masquerading or misrepresentation.

Closer to home, Newsbreak magazine prints “Off Duty”, a column that features first-person accounts by their writers about the challenges of covering specific beats or about the judgment calls they’ve had to make. (Examples here and here.)

There is indeed a possibility that efforts such as “Witness” and “Off Duty” will distract readers from the story and encourage “celebrity journalism” instead. (The paper I work for has this stern reminder in our Code of Ethics and Standards: Journalists are stagehands, not stars.) But attempts to explain why and how certain journalistic decisions are made signal a maturity that the industry needs. If for nothing else, these attempts are an admission that the days of trust-me-on-this-journalism are indeed over, and that a more open, more transparent age is inevitable.

2 Gothic Cathedrals: Survival Stories in Stone

2006-07-27T16:52:00.000+08:00

Text and photos by Isolde D. Amante
(Published in today’s Sun.Star Cebu Travel)

GOTHIC architecture can be a pain in the neck. It is, however, a pain worth suffering.

The roads to places like the Cologne Cathedral and the Notre Dame de Paris are worn smooth by tourists, yet these churches never seem at a loss for surprises.

They draw your gaze skyward, as the pointed arches and cloud-tapping spires of Gothic architecture are meant to do. They give music ample room, the notes sounding clearer and sweeter in all that elevated space.

And when you think about the labor that went into them---the faceless thousands who lugged stone and scaled heights to build something they would never see completed in their lifetimes---these cathedrals become more than sermons in stone. They become testaments to human creativity and endurance.

Now, isn’t that worth enduring neck pain for?

The Dom Köln

If a people’s faith were measured by the size of its cathedrals, Cologne would have no equal in all of Germany. Its cathedral is believed to have the largest church façade in the world.

The Dom sprawls at the center of Cologne’s Old Town, overlooking the Rhine. The spaces around it are rarely without mimes and musicians, who play for loose change.

If it were set in the middle of nowhere, the cathedral would be too grand for its own good. But surrounded by a train station, a museum, souvenir kiosks, bookshops, hotels and cafes---a constant traffic of human commerce and communion---the cathedral comes to life.

If you’re ever lost in Cologne, the cathedral is your best place to get your bearings. At 157 meters, its towers are hard to miss.

Yet saying the Dom Köln is impressive only for its breadth and height would be like calling Cologne remarkable because it has a chocolate museum.

What about its museums and fairs, its preservation ethic and light beer, its famously tolerant attitude?

For pilgrims, the high point of the cathedral visit comes when they catch sight of a gilded sarcophagus near the high altar. It is believed to house the relics of the Magi.

Apparently, long after they followed a star to the birthplace of Jesus Christ, the Wise Men (or at least their bones and garments) became spoils of war. These relics were brought from Milan to Cologne in 1164.

It was to house the precious relics that work on the Cologne cathedral began in 1248. Construction ceased in the 16th century when funds dried up, and it wasn’t until 1880 when the cathedral was finally completed.

To this day, there’s always scaffolding on parts of the cathedral, part of the incessant effort to keep the façade free of grime and to check for any damage from wind and rain.

For two years starting 2004, the cathedral was in the Unesco’s list of “endangered” World Heritage Sites. It was removed from the list only last July 10, after local authorities scaled down the plans to build nearby high-rises that would have obscured the cathedral’s view.

A wise move: after all, anything that took 632 years to build has to be worth saving.

Notre Dame de Paris

Only four hours away by high-speed train, the Notre Dame de Paris sits in the center of its own city, as its German cousin does. It is the literal center: the French capital’s Ground Zero, from which all Parisian distances are reckoned.

From its western face, where the lines await, the cathedral appears squat, fortress-like. One tourist describes the cathedral’s appearance here as one of “lumbering grandeur.”

The side view, however, looks nearly delicate, from the lace-like tracery on its Rose Windows, to the curves of its flying buttresses. In reality, they’re anything but delicate. These buttresses support the nave or central corridor, while the pointed arches inside shift the weight of the walls downward, rather than out.

Inside, the nave is dark by design. Its darkness helps pilgrims focus on the light that suffuses the altar and choir. The light comes from the large Rose Windows at either end of the transept, that horizontal area that bisects the nave to form the cross shape that all cathedrals are built on.

If you’re lucky enough to visit on a Sunday, wait for the free organ recitals in the afternoon. The way the light falls on the choir, while the music soars---this is heady stuff.

Thank God the novelist Victor Hugo had organized a petition to save Notre Dame from ruin, otherwise it could have fallen to pieces, like the three other churches that used to stand in its place on the Ile de la Cité.

After its completion in 1345---work that took 182 years, short by medieval standards---the cathedral has played host to some grand affairs. Napoleon was crowned here in 1804. Here, too, St. Joan of Arc was beatified. An image of her, solemn-faced and wide-hipped in full battle dress, stands in one of the chapels.

But Notre Dame is, above all, a survivor. In the Revolution of 1793, the citizens mistook the saints on the west wall for kings, and tore them down. Nearly burned in the Commune of 1871, it was once used to store food and livestock.

Yet the cathedral has outlived all its trials, a tribute to those who, amid hunger, violence and technological helplessness, built something whose reach exceeded their grasp. Something meant, against all odds, to last.

It's all transactional

2006-07-26T01:24:00.000+08:00

Of course, the question on most people’s minds would probably be: Where are we getting the money to pay for all that? (And here’s a close second: Was that Rep. Imee Marcos wearing a red floppy hat and a black shirt marked `Don’t steal. The government hates competition’?)

I don’t know what Congress can do to enforce dress codes, so it’s the first question I’m stuck with. For that, I checked the Medium-Term Public Investment Plan (scroll to the bottom of the page, below Foreign Policy Overview, and click on Link 2, which will take you to a PDF file). It opens with something that, obviously, should have been mentioned in last Monday’s State of the Nation Address (SONA), but wasn’t:

The cost of these infrastructure projects is enormous and beyond the capacity of any one level of government.

The tourism infrastructure bill for the Central Philippines alone will cost some P19 billion for the roads and P14 billion for the airports---which either means that (1) huge war chests will somehow materialize for local administration allies running for office in 2007, (2) or we’re in for a lot more borrowing by local governments.

The Public Investment Plan identifies the following strategies for funding its long and ambitious wish list:

(1) Tapping the local government units
(2) Reviewing the Build-Operate-Transfer Law and getting the private sector to foot the bill (which, if you’ll look at the list of seaports identified for the Visayas, is already the case---why these were trumpeted as if these would be publicly funded ventures is anyone’s guess. Anyone?)
(3) Creating a Philippine Infrastructure Corp. to build airports, seaports, railways, dams, irrigation systems, using seed money from government bonds sales and relying on build-operate-transfer agreements for the rest (again, the private sector)
(4) Encouraging a “users pay” culture among road users and amending the Road Fund Law to include a fuel levy
(5) Creating a special levy or imposing higher property taxes to capture part of the windfall gains in land and property values once these infrastructure projects are built (to, I suppose, help cover maintenance costs and debt payments)

So, in sum, it seems that the government proposes to pay for all these infrastructure projects by: (1) challenging local governments to quit whining for greater autonomy and instead put their money where their mouths are by paying for big-ticket projects; and (2) getting out of the private sector’s way. Which, then, leads seamlessly to a pitch for amending the Constitution to bring down investment barriers. I missed this (among many other things) during my attempt to liveblog the SONA:

Bohol now merits its own international airport, just as our country deserves a world-class Constitution strongly supported by Gov. (Erico) Aumentado and the league of local authorities…

The subtext is hard to miss. Stand by me on the Charter amendments, and you get an international airport. Or, as any fan of transactional analysis will tell you: “I’m OK, you’re OK.”

And now for a flashback...

2006-07-26T01:19:00.000+08:00

Of all the bells and whistles used in President Arroyo's six SONAs so far, the ones I remember most are “the strong republic” (2002) and the paper boats on the Pasig River (2001).

I remember the “bangkang papel” for a skeptic’s reason: what sort of industrial-strength paper did those three boys use, for the boats to survive crossing the Pasig River to Malacañang, where the President could then read about the hopes written on those paper boats for a good job, education and a home of their own? Perhaps I really shouldn’t take this too literally, but she did trot those children out during her 2001 and 2002 SONAs---did anyone ever get to see the actual paper boats? I know myth-making is part of what these speeches are meant to accomplish, but this one just couldn't make me suspend my disbelief. (And I'm gullible!)

Anyways, for those of you who want to keep track, here are the promises she delivered in last year’s Sona. (You’ll find the full text here.) Think “Beat the Odds” as a mnemonic device:

Balanced budget through collecting the right amount of revenues and spending right
Education for all children of school age
Automation of the electoral process
Terminating hostilities through a just conclusion of the peace process

Transportation and digital infrastructure to link the entire nation
Healing the wounds of Edsa 1, 2 and 3
Electricity and water for all barangays

Opportunities for livelihood: 6-10M jobs
Decongesting Metro Manila through railways and road projects, and new government centers
Developing Subic and Clark into the most competitive international service and logistics center in Southeast Asia

I wonder if Congress’ powers of oversight include verifying any progress made or promises delivered after each SONA. One could argue that this violates the separation of powers, but there are also some necessary overlaps between these two departments. This is why the President could, in theory, call Congress to a special session to hammer out urgent legislative work.