Monday, December 22, 2003

THE MARATHON OF ERMA GEOLAMIN
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
December 26, 2004

At thirty five years of age, Erma Geolamin took her first step. Erma has been walking non-stop for 5,000 days and she is tired. She wonders if someday someone will ever tell her where the finish line is.

Erma is a Filipina migrant worker, a foreign domestic help for 14 years.

Erma left her country to work overseas in 1990, the year Nora Aunor swept Philippine film awards for best actress for the movie Andrea, Paano Ba ang Maging Isang Ina?

The same La Aunor who would play Flor Contemplacion five years later in a film about the tragic life of the Filipina domestic worker hanged in Singapore whose death “came to symbolize the millions of Filipinos driven by poverty to leave their families and take their chances abroad.” (1)

Erma comes from the Philippines, a curious country that rewards those it calls heroes -- Filipino migrant workers whose remittances alone keep the country’s economy afloat -- with a guarantee that their children will suffer the same fate they have suffered.

Each year, Filipinos working abroad remit billions of dollars to the Philippines. And each year, the Philippine government dutifully sets aside a third of the national budget to pay off gargantuan debts most of which had been incurred by crooks and thieving corporations and have done little to improve the public’s plight except to line the pockets of robber-banks and corrupt officials.

Of the 8 million overseas Filipino workers today, 130,000 are in Hong Kong working as domestic help. Erma Geolamin is one of them.

Erma’s youngest son Romir was still an infant when she left for Malaysia, her first overseas stint.

It was hard work but the pay, which was a pittance compared to her toil, was nonetheless far more than what she would have made if she had chosen to eke out a living in her hometown of Guimbal, Iloilo. Yet the costs that Erma had been made to shoulder were inestimable.

By the time Erma had saved enough to return to the Philippines after her first overseas job -- by the time she got to see her youngest son again, Erma was 39 and Romir was already four years old. And within weeks, Erma was already flying to Hong Kong where the pay for domestic help was said to be higher. And in Hong Kong she has stayed.

I met Erma at the majestic 7th floor Hong Kong residence she was tending on Conduit Road. We had tea and a lively exchange; Erma is very articulate in English and Filipino but her face communicated more. Wry and stoic expressions when she talked about the scars that marked the souls of domestic help working in Hong Kong; glittering eyes when talk shifted to her family.

For all the 14 years that Erma has spent as a domestic help, she has only seen her family eight times in periods lasting no more than two weeks. She would rather save the airfare for her kids, she said. A familiar story.

In 1999 she went home unannounced and caught her husband with another woman and discovered that he had squandered the earnings she had been sending home. Another familiar story.

“It’s like the relationship between overseas Filipino workers and the Philippine government,” I mumbled to myself. Erma nodded, her expression alert.

“I wept that day. And days after I still wept, but quietly. It was hard but I had to control my anger,” she said, her rage overpowered only by a sadness that would wash over her again and again. Erma prayed for strength as she wept and helped her children -- and herself -- make sense of decisions that had to be made. It was a measure of the stoutness of Erma’s spirit that she permitted her husband to accompany her to the airport. Before she boarded the plane bound for Hong Kong, holding back welling melancholy, she told him gently, “This is the last time we will see each other like this. From now on, you can no longer call me wife. You are no longer my husband.”

Her eyes had drifted far away as she finished recounting the episode but she sensed that I had noticed this and with a tilt of her head a smile radiated from her face. Erma’s eyes are like La Aunor’s -- they are beautiful and they speak.

Unlike the kitchens and bedrooms and toilets she has cleaned each day in Hong Kong for 10 years, Erma had jurisdiction over her heartaches. A college graduate with a degree in business administration, her body has been ravaged by backbreaking, mind-numbing domestic work. Erma said she thanks the Lord for blessing her with discipline, for keeping her strong despite her advancing age so that she could continue working for a few more years.

“I have to keep myself healthy, you know. I want all my children to finish school. I think of them every day,” said Erma, who will be turning 50 soon.

She has been walking for 14 years and has spent almost a third of her life in a perverse race that has no prize save for crossing the finishing line. Some nights, before she nods off to sleep, Erma tries to imagine what the finish line would look like.

Someday, she said, she hopes someone will point it to her.

At the back of her mind, she keeps at bay the fear that some of her children may yet join the wicked marathon that she had no choice but to accept. And so Erma is already thinking, at 50 years of age, of one more two-year contract, perhaps a second contract, or a third.

For the government, she is one among many modern-day serfs “to be deployed.” But for some, she is Erma Geolamin, the mother of all our children.

And yet that is only half of her story.
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COMMENTS welcome at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com

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1. “A death in the family,” Asiaweek, December 29, 1995.

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

MEMORANDUM TO EMPIRE

Assembly of Corsairs -- esteemed Pirates of America, Britain and Australia -- we appreciate your generous counsel. We are in agreement with you that the shadow of terror and tyranny grows longer by the day and that we must meet this growing threat with sustained ardor.

However, despite all the benefits that are said to come with it, we must respectfully decline your invitation for us to join the new crusade – what you call the ‘war on terror.’

Your offer of support is sincerely appreciated, even though the blandishments in your missive suggest that you need our support more than we need yours. While your proposal of deepened friendship given our perilous times is positively noted, you will have to forgive us if we can only extend our middle finger in return. The kindnesses you have heaped on the hapless are not forgotten so easily.

We have not forgotten that when martial law was declared in the Philippines in 1972, the first group to congratulate the despot Marcos came from a branch of your assembly called the American Chamber of Commerce, which called the declaration of martial rule a “heaven-sent relief.”

In its congratulatory telegram, we recall that the Chamber – the same one which exhorted the Philippines recently to “Remember, foreign investors go where they are most welcome” – wished the tyrant “every success in your endeavor to restore peace and order, business confidence, economic growth and the well-being of the Filipino people.”

We are very much aware that two years before martial law, US investments in the Philippines stood at $16.3 million, and that by 1981, the figure had grown to $920 million.” We can even recall George H.W. Bush raising his glass in a toast as he told Marcos during his visit to Manila in 1981, "We love your adherence to democratic principle and to the democratic processes.”

Pirates, gentlemen and ladies, when your current leader, George Bush, Jr., said he chose to travel to Southeast Asia this year because he wanted “to make sure that people … finally understand our motivation is pure,” he did not have to explain himself too much. The purity of his intentions was never in doubt.

We have not forgotten the kindnesses that the band he belongs to – your band – heaped on Indonesia.

We have not forgotten the mass graves buried near the holiday hotels in Bali. Graves that hold the remains of some 80,000 people murdered in Bali during the bloodletting of 1965-66, which claimed a total of a million lives across Indonesia.

We recall the slaughter being described by the CIA as “One of the worst mass murders in the 20th century” and recall that the evil deed was perpetrated by a butcher called Suharto with the connivance of the so-called Western democracies (another name of your august Assembly). We have not overlooked the fact that this Suharto was called by corsair extraordinaire Margaret Thatcher as “one of our very best and most valuable friends.”

Wasn’t it a member of yours, Harold Holt, the Australian Prime Minister in 1966, who remarked “With 500,000 to a million communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place”? It appears to be him. We do recall that at the time of Holt’s remark, the Australian embassy in Jakarta described Suharto’s massacres “as a ‘cleansing process’” while in Canberra, “the Prime Minister’s department expressed support for ‘any measures to assist the Indonesian army cope with the internal situation.’”

We are unsure if Australia did “lose its innocence” in the Bali bombing of October 2002; it is possible the innocence died much earlier.

Esteemed pirates, please do not think we have forgotten about the kindness of silence that was extended to East Timor when it was invaded on December 7, 1975 and occupied for over two decades by Suharto’s armed forces. And do not think that we have neglected the fact that for much of the ghastly occupation of East Timor, “Suharto’s biggest supplier of arms and military equipment was Britain.”

We know that US President Gerald Ford and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Suharto in Jakarta the day before the invasion of East Timor. And though both these chaps kept denying it once upon a time, based on recently declassified secret archival documents, it is now an indisputable fact that Ford and Kissinger advised Suharto in their meeting that “it is important that whatever you do [with East Timor] succeeds quickly” but that “it would be better if it were done after we [have left].”

We of course remember, esteemed Pirates, that the Indonesian dictator tried to keep his word. By the time Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor had commenced, Ford and Kissinger were already safely meeting with Marcos in Manila, spiritedly plotting how to recover from the humiliation suffered by the US that year – 1975 -- the year America fled from Saigon.

But Pirates do not learn their lessons well, as we have observed.

By 1979, “the first directive for secret aid” had already been signed by US President Jimmy Carter – the first of many that would in time merge into a massive river of financing -- to groups fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Groups that would later form the Taliban. And the Abu Sayyaf. And Jemaah Islamiyah. Among others.

What goes around comes around.

Didn’t former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzenzinski hector to a French newspaper in 1998, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred up Moslems or … the end of the cold war?”

Some stirred up Moslems did try to answer Brzezinski’s interesting question three years later on September 11. Who can forget that wicked deed – and those men? The men who could not scale the heights of their hatred?

Pirates, we wish to make ourselves clear: while we repudiate the barbarism of the men who conspired and executed the terror of 9/11, we do not intend to follow you into your abyss.

We little people, we are stubborn folks and we prefer to follow our own course.

*****
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Op-Ed, TODAY

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

REMEMBRANCE OF DECEMBERS PAST

It is the beginning of the last month of 2003 – the year America invaded and occupied Iraq.

Welcome, December, month of solace and tribulation. You remind us of many things.

The great Janis Joplin made her final appearance with Big Brother and the Holding Company on December 1, 1968. On the same day in 1957, Buddy Holly and the Crickets made their debut on the Ed Sullivan Show with "That'll Be the Day."

On December 1, 1904, the grand St. Louis World’s Fair in Missouri, USA came to a close.

The World’s Fair was designed to showcase to Americans the fruits of their country’s unbridled progress. On one side of the fair, astonishing technological exhibits and feats of scientific prowess. On the other, displays of the subjugated people of America's recent past.

"[A] practical illustration,” as one fair organizer described it, “of the best way of bearing the white man's burden," referring to Rudyard Kipling’s infamous poem “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands,” which called on America to enter the imperial stage alongside the terminally tottering British empire.

On display were exhibits showing America’s Negro slaves and bucolic plantation life, exhibits of American Indians, and the Philippine Exposition – one of the largest and most popular exhibits showing abducted Filipino “savages” – which “gave Americans a chance to see the people they had recently conquered.”

A sampling of “Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child,” as Kipling described the natives of the Philippines -- before they were moved up the evolutionary tree thanks to America's civilizing presence. That’ll be the day.

While the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was a story of racial supremacy intended “to rationalize deep social divisions in a society that proclaimed its belief in equality,” it was also an imperial narrative that sought to make the link “between Manifest Destiny on the home front, and America's burgeoning drive to expand overseas.”

Welcome, December, month of comfort. Make us remember.

International Human Rights day falls on December 10 – the day the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948.

UDHR – the badly dented armor crafted to protect the world from tyrants, agents of wickedness and aggressor nations.

Welcome, December, month of transgressions; help us make the needed links.

Exactly fifty years before the passage of the UDHR, on December 10, 1898, representatives of Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Peace in Paris.

The Treaty of Paris gave disgraced colonialist Spain the peace of $20,000,000 – courtesy of America’s coffers. And through the Treaty, America acquired the Philippines along with Spain’s other “possessions.”

Peace for the predators; slaughter for the prey.

America chose an opportune time to enter the stage. At the time of the signing of the Paris “Peace” Treaty, the Spanish colonial regime was already crumbling, battered by the offensives hurled by Filipino revolutionaries who were already setting up the first republic in Asia.

But this mattered little to the new empire determined to claim new territories. And so by the time of the actual conclusion of America’s brutal pacification campaign in the Philippines, a quarter of a million Filipinos – some estimates reaching up to a million – had been killed or had died of disease as a result of the US occupation.

So savage was America’s imperial army in the Philippines that the normal casualty statistics of war experienced a horrific reversal. According to figures made available to the US Congress during the Filipino-American War, “US troops killed fifteen times as many Filipinos as they wounded.”

A sample: Report for April, May, June and July, 1900 of Major-General Wheaton, commander of US forces in Northern Luzon (whose people the US government said “received us with open arms”): Filipinos killed, 1,014; Filipinos wounded, 95.

“People do not need to be taught so much as they need to be reminded," wrote Kenneth Champeon, paraphrasing Samuel Johnson.

Reminded, perhaps, of other Decembers such as December 21, 1898 – the day US President William McKinley issued the infamous Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation which instructed the American army to forcibly impose American sovereignty over the Philippines.

“[W]e come, not as invaders and conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives,” said McKinley as mighty imperial America prepared to destroy the fledgling Philippine Republic.

Familiar words. The British virtually spluttered the same rhetorical poison when they entered Baghdad in 1917. As did the Bush administration when its forces penetrated the Iraqi capital just months ago.

Remember Mr. Mission Accomplished waving onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln last May 1, 2003 – waving in front of a backdrop made by the Whitehouse declaring, well, “Mission Accomplished”?

So painfully familiar.

The US still officially views the end of Filipino-American hostilities on the date President Theodore Roosevelt issued his “Proclamation Ending the Philippine-American War” on July 4, 1902 even though armed resistance to American rule continued well beyond the first decade of the 20th century.

In fact, right after Roosevelt’s own “mission accomplished” proclamation, the “Brigandage Act” was imposed on the Philippines. An act which classified resistance to US rule as “banditry” and which caused the hanging of Filipino heroes such as Macario Sakay, who was part of the revolt against Spain and whose forces -- years after Roosevelt’s proclamation -- continued to resist American occupation.

By 1903, US military operations had commenced against Muslim Filipinos “aimed at exerting full U.S. control over the southern islands.” “Full US control” being equal to America’s earlier definition of “peace” for the Philippines: in March 1906, in one its infamous massacres, US troops fired upon and slaughtered 900 Filipinos – 900 men, women and children who had sought refuge in a volcanic crater on the southern Philippine island of Jolo.

A feat – not a horror – that did not go unnoticed by President Roosevelt, who immediately commended the general who had led the Jolo massacre: “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.”

Support the troops.

“Take up the White Man’s burden-- / In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror / And check the show of pride.” Remember Rudyard Kipling’s poem?

Remember Kipling – dead bard and worthy companion of an American empire still dreaming of new conquests.

Remember Kipling, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907 -- the year after the slaughter of Jolo. The Kipling who was born on December 30, 1865.

Let us begin the last month of a most turbulent year. Welcome, December. You remind us of many things.

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Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Op-Ed, TODAY