No regrets

 My husband Daniel passed away last September 2021. We were together for 24 years. He battled leukaemia for five of those.

Daniel was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) at age 73. The doctors told us he was too old to undergo chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant. They suggested a new type of medication that would be injected under the skin in his lower abdomen.

Before agreeing to that, I sought second and third opinions from other specialists but they came up with the same diagnosis.

We went to the hospital for his weekly injections. His prognosis was good and his haematologist marvelled at how well his body was responding to the medication. The doctors warned him, however, to stop travelling abroad to avoid catching foreign infections.

For four years, I watched my husband handle his disease like a boss. Nothing slowed him down. He continued working as a freelance writer. He made short trips around British Columbia and wrote about people, places, and social issues that were regularly neglected by mainstream media. I joined him on many of these forays and got to observe how he did interviews and interacted with people, how he noted tiny details material to his story.

Daniel was organized, disciplined, and focused, both professionally and personally. He was fearless. He was creative. These qualities made him one of the most awarded magazine writers in Canada.

To my husband’s credit, he had faith in my writing ability. He believed that if I worked a little harder and procrastinated less, I could achieve so much more. He tried very hard to encourage me, but failed miserably. Unlike him, I mostly rely on inspiration. I was just too lazy.

Daniel spoiled me every day. He planned and cooked all our meals. He vacuumed and dusted while I sat around and read. He kept me supplied with my favourite treats. He bought me nice things.

Mostly though, he loved winning arguments. It helped that he had a strong personality and a loud voice. I compared him to a Zamboni. He could run me over and flatten me like a pancake, if I allowed him. Whenever I was right, I stood my ground firmly during a disagreement until he realized that being taller and louder didn’t ensure victory all the time.

Our loud discussions tapered about 11 years ago, after one of my visits to the Philippines. During that trip, my fourth big brother was stabbed and killed by a drug addict. He was my favourite big brother and my best friend. There were so many things I still wanted to do to help make his life better, but I missed my chance.

In my work as a writer, community volunteer and advocate for foreign domestics in Canada, I have seen and written about suicide, separations and failure. I’ve listened to grieving family members reminding others to do their best for loved ones before it got too late. Somehow, those words never touched me until I lost my big brother, until I felt like I was drowning under relentless waves of guilt and regret because I failed my big brother.

That event changed my attitude towards relationships. I promised myself that from that day on, I would try to live a life without guilt or regret. To be kind to everybody, to love my people the best way I can, every day, without becoming a push-over. To pick my battles. To express my side during arguments without enmity. To listen without judgement. To forgive myself when I fail.

Two years ago on March 2020, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic. Canada went into lockdown. People lost their jobs. Businesses closed. I happily stayed at home with Daniel. He was a sociable person who thrived on company. I prayed very hard that I would stay healthy and not leave my husband behind. I didn’t want him to end up sick and alone.

Six months ago during a writing trip, Daniel contracted pneumonia, which in turn worsened his leukaemia. He ended up in the hospital twice. I stayed there with him 24 hours a day and read the news to him. I fed him his favourite ice cream. I sang to him. He thanked me repeatedly for looking after him so well. When he decided to die at home, we hired a nurse to help me out. I sat beside him most of the time and held his hand until it was time for him to go.

Today I feel so very bereft. I miss Daniel so much, but I have no regrets. I am guilt-free.

(Previously published on the Mill Woods Mosaic, January 15th, 2022)

Loving Vancouver

 It was love at first sight.

I have known from childhood that Vancouver was a place I definitely wanted to visit, if only to see the colourful leaves that its trees produce in the fall. I saw a picture of those autumn leaves at the Readers Digest when I was about nine years old, and I was amazed. Leaves could do that?

I arrived in Vancouver for the first time in the summer of 1988. Having worked in Singapore for three years before that, I wasn’t too impressed with the mellow pace of life in North Vancouver, my first destination. Buses were scheduled in 15-minute intervals on weekdays, and every half-hour on weekends. In a community called the British Properties where very rich people lived, buses only went up once in the morning and once in the evening.

In Singapore at the time, waiting for a bus didn’t take as long, even in the suburbs.

It rained consistently in Vancouver in the fall of that year. In fact, I remembered that it rained or got cloudy every day in the autumn, for the next two or three years after. I’d never seen so much rain in my life. The leaves went from green straight to brown and then fell off, skipping the part where it was supposed to go yellow, orange or red. I saw however, that leaves did change colours back east. I felt so cheated.

Going to school in the evenings wasn’t easy either. It could take several bus rides to get to the classes I wanted, and waiting in the bus stops took the same amount of time as what I spent attending those classes. I got back home from school well beyond my bedtime.

I realized that if I wanted to do things faster, riding the bus wasn’t the way to go. I learned to drive in the same year, and by the start of my second summer in Vancouver, I was already driving a second-hand car. The ease and speed with which I could acquire a car, something that had seemed impossible in the Philippines and in Singapore, was a revelation.

Having my own ride gave me the freedom to chase the rest of my plans with amazing ease: going back to school, doing volunteer work, visiting places, getting a new job. That was when I finally fell in love with my new home country. Suddenly, Vancouver became to me a place where dreams are easier to reach, if one had a plan, coupled with self-confidence and the ability to work hard and see things through.

Despite the inherent racism within, Vancouver is still a great equalizer among peoples. What diverse community, by the way, whether openly or subtly, does not suffer racism? It’s the way one deals with racism that matters. Being smart and educated alone in a strange place does not cut it. Having the right attitude did. I knew that by having brown skin and speaking English with an accent, I might have to work doubly hard to prove myself. Speaking up and standing for oneself helped as well. So that’s what I did.

In Vancouver, I learned that being different is a strength in itself. So she’s white and you’re brown and he’s yellow, but it doesn’t really matter. Having the courage to resist blending in and to pursue your own interests gives a person a different kind of freedom. For an artist or a writer, especially. Finding your very own voice in a community already teeming with a multitude of different voices, and believing in that voice gives you an edge. It’s really up to you to decide where that difference will take you.

In Vancouver, where nature lurked in almost every back yard, I learned to hike the mountain trails, walk in the woods, camp by the lake, and picnic by the beach. (The first time I was invited to go for a walk, I had to ask why. Back in my rural village in the Philippines, one only walked for important reasons - to gather firewood or fetch water or do an errand. Otherwise, one stayed home and read, or do chores. I was told that down here, one can walk just for the joy of walking.) I’ve become a dedicated walker since.

In Vancouver, I learned that being different is a strength in itself. So she’s white and you’re brown and he’s yellow, but it doesn’t really matter. Having the courage to resist blending in and to pursue your own interests gives a person a different kind of freedom. For an artist or a writer, especially. Finding your very own voice in a community already teeming with a multitude of different voices, and believing in that voice gives you an edge. It’s really up to you to decide where that difference will take you.

So yeah, I love Vancouver. I love its weather, its people, its diversity, its bike lanes, its mountains, its parks, its beaches. I love that people are mainly tolerant of others, that animals are loved and protected. I love the city, despite its expensive housing market, its homeless population, even its seedier corners. It all belongs with the territory.

What I love most about Vancouver is the fact it helped me grow and test my limits. It allowed me to help my family and encourage them to strive, in ways that were better than I ever could.

Cornflakes, sugar and teardrops: a crazy teen-aged memory

Last year, I celebrated my first 50^th highschool anniversary with most of my old classmates, a few of my best friends, and some of my school idols. They found me through the Internet, and I joined our class chatroom. I didn’t actually graduate with them, because I dropped out in the middle of our fourth year. But I grew up with those guys. A big number of them later congregated at our old school back home to celebrate. They had an amazing time. Unfortunately, I had to stay back in Vancouver because of a sickness in the family.

I went back to school and finally graduated the year after them. So this year, I celebrated a second 50^th highschool anniversary with a different group of people. This batch added me to our Facebook group.

I was particularly excited because I reconnected with my very best friend from this class, another girl whom I had been looking for in the last 20 years. We were both 15 years old at the time. I’ll call her Dora for the purposes of this story.

Dora was everything I had always wanted to be: she sang, she played the guitar, she drove the family car to school. She was smart, funny, artistic and confident. I, on the other hand, was a feral child with absentee parents, and I lived by my own rules. I boarded with my aunt’s family, but nobody paid any attention to me, unless I was needed to run an errand. I was quiet and obedient. I kept to myself. I read mountains of books and magazines, and skipped school when my pocket money ran out.

In my eyes, Dora represented the height of cool. And she was my best friend. She was the head of our class choir while I ran the theatre group. During that year, we won every school competition in music and drama.

One day, I copied a poem called Cornflakes, Sugar and Teardrops from a Playboy Magazine that I borrowed from one of my friends’ dad. It was written by Shel Silverstein. I showed it to Dora. The poem went like this:

I’m eating cornflakes with sugar and teardrops

Since the milkman ran away with you

He stole my every dream and forgot to leave the cream

So I’m sitting here wondering what to do…

Dora loved the poem and immediately set it to a blues tune of her own composition. I was very impressed.

Dora and I had our own kind of fun. We were both crazy kids, and our teachers often looked at us and shook their heads. One time we decided to sit away from each other and had a staring contest for about 30 minutes during our English class. The first to blink would lose. I forgot who won, but our English teacher called us after class because she was worried we were fighting. It never crossed our minds that having a staring contest during class hours could be classified as weird. The teacher kept a straight face when we explained what we were doing.

We drew faces on our notebooks and day-dreamed during our mathematics classes, but kept an eye on the math teacher who habitually moved around the room while teaching. I remembered panicking when we lost sight of her, only to discover her standing behind us, about to knock our heads together.

Dora was gay, which didn’t bother me at all. She would often tell me about her secret crush, a pretty girl in our class. I would listen attentively and silently wished her well. I didn’t think our classmates knew she was gay, though, because Dora got a lot of attention from the boys at the time.

Dora and I graduated from highschool and went our separate ways. There were no mobile phones and no Internet at the time. I lost contact with Dora, but I kept the memory of our one-year friendship close to my heart. Later, I searched for Dora for years but failed to find her.

This year, I found Dora. We got reconnected. We had a long conversation and updated each other on the progress of our lives. She had vague memories of our year in highschool, but she did say that she had fun. Although I didn’t remind her of our crazy highschool antics, I found some sort of closure.

I googled the poem Cornflakes, Sugar and Teardrops and found two musical versions of it on You Tube. I thought Dora’s version still sounded better.

Me And the World Wide Web

Facebook wasn’t around then.

Back in 1989, I had no idea what the Internet was. I was a regular church-goer, along with my buddies who all came to Canada from Singapore to look for a better future. I helped prepare the church newsletter. I wrote about members of the congregation, little personal testimonies that they wanted to share. The man who ran the newsletter was an older white guy who downloaded his material from somewhere --- religious stories and articles he gathered from sources online. Only it wasn’t called ‘downloading’ then. He ‘copied’ them.

What he did seemed strange to me at the time. I got my information from newspapers, books and magazines. I communicated through the phone, the fax machine, or by snail mail. (Snail mail, for the benefit of the millennials, is when you write something by hand, stuff it into an addressed envelope, stick a stamp to it and drop it into a mailbox.) My boss, who worked from home, was very impressed that his foreign nanny owned a fax machine. I heard him telling his friends about my fax machine. Sometimes he even used it.

Back in the Philippines, my family and I talked regularly by long distance phone and less regularly, by snail mail.

At that point, a technological tornado was slowly brewing but nobody among my friends and family members ever noticed, least of all myself. The Internet was about to arrive. According to history, the World Wide Web was launched on the 6^th of August 1991.

The precursor to the internet itself was born in 1969, when scientists working for the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) connected computer networks between the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute. Email was invented in 1971, to facilitate an exchange of information among the networks. (I only started using email in 1997.)

Around the same time, projects like the DARPA’s were also being developed in other countries. Geniuses back then created a system that connected even larger networks together for more efficient information exchange and sharing, and thus the Internet came to be. The same protocols they applied then are still being used today. I didn’t think those guys foresaw how their invention would change the world.

The Internet came to us like a bottomless empty vessel. One could pour into it whatever one wanted. See what we got back: To date, the Internet and the social media have made the world smaller; helped carry out regime changes; overturned election expectations; influenced public opinion, killed some traditional businesses and gave birth to new ones; created its own version of established truths; encouraged crimes; solved others, and made friends out of virtual strangers.

The number of internet users in 2018 totalled 4.021 billion, while social media users were pegged at 3.196 billion.

Millions of these users are from the Philippines, plus over 10 million more Filipinos scattered all over the world. It’s amazing to see how interconnected Filipinos are, by phone or social media, how cheaply communication can be achieved nowadays. Second hand phones back home are readily available. Almost everyone else I meet in urban areas has a cell phone. Less so, however, from the rural areas.  Still, one can buy a load of minutes for several pesos and send a text message for one peso. Wi-Fi is available almost everywhere.

Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook and Messenger have since become a favourite social medium for Pinoys, both at home and abroad. It’s free, it’s always available, and totally democratic. My daughters and I talk everyday by Messenger and follow each other’s news feeds, although we don’t subscribe to the practice of posting what we ate, or purchased, nor our duck-faced selfies. We leave all that to others. The only misgiving I have is, it could have been so much easier and cheaper if Facebook were available in the early years of my absence.

For a lot of people in the Philippines, Facebook has become the place from where we reach out to the world, express our dreams and desires, our joys, sorrows, angers and frustrations. It’s also the place from where can show the best version of our ourselves.

But there’s a flipside to something free, available and totally democratic. Facebook and other social media sites like Twitter, have also been used to change the course of events all over the world, to achieve darker purposes. Even the Philippines has not been immune to all this.

Good thing I only read dog and cat stories that have happy endings.

Published at the Mill Woods Mosaic on January 15, 2019.

What is a living will?

What’s a living will? How important is it? Based on my friend Rossana’s recent harrowing personal experience, I’d say very important.

What is a living will? According to the Internet’s legal dictionary, a living will is a written document that allows a patient to give explicit instructions about the medical treatment to be administered when the patient is terminally ill or permanently unconscious; also called an advance directive. It can be revoked by the patient at any time.

Is it legal in Canada? Yes, according to a Supreme Court ruling in a British Columbia case in 1993, where the Court ruled that “there is a right to choose how one’s body will be dealt with, even in the context of beneficial medical treatment, that has long been recognized by the common law. To impose medical treatment on one who refuses constitutes battery, and our common law has recognized the right to demand that medical treatment which would extend life be withheld or withdrawn.”

If you don’t have a living will, for instance, and you get very sick, so sick that your body is still alive and consuming medicine and sustenance through tubes attached to your body, but your brain is no longer working, the doctor’s job is to keep you alive by making sure those tubes stay attached. You may wake up and get better one day, or you may stay asleep like that for years. Or you may die. Nobody knows when. A good doctor will have a better idea, and will let your relatives know about your chances. He will suggest courses of action, and give them the option to decide what to do next.

My friend Rossana had been placed in such an extremely difficult position three weeks ago. Her older cousin who also lives in Vancouver, had a massive stroke and landed in a hospital. She was unable to move, talk, or open her eyes, but is alive. There is a very little brain activity. They had been keeping her on life support since then, hoping that one day she’d wake up and start to get better. After her first stroke, this sick cousin gave Rossana a signed Power of Attorney, giving her authority to take charge of any arrangement necessary in case she passed away. The cousin also told her that if she got really ill, she didn’t want to go to a nursing home. However, said cousin didn’t sign any living will, as Rossana had suggested.

After many days, the doctor took Rossana aside and told her that there wasn’t a very big chance that her cousin would ever recover. Hooked on life support, she could go on like that, unconscious, for a long time. There was no way to tell. The doctor wanted to know whether my friend would allow them to remove life support and let nature take its course. 

"Life is short, temporary, and full of surprises. Tomorrow, it could be anybody’s turn. That’s why I don’t buy green bananas anymore. I might not be around to watch them ripen."

Rossana knew she had no right to decide. It wasn’t detailed in the Power of Attorney. She went home and contacted the cousin’s family in the Philippines. They told her No Way. Rossana knew she could overrule the Philippine cousins if she wanted to, instead she asked her cousin’s sister who lives in the US to come down and talk to the doctors. This sister works in the medical field and would understand. They had a meeting with the doctors and made a decision two days later. The sick cousin was taken off life support and was moved to a nursing home where she would receive 24-hour care while they were waiting for her to get better or get worse.

Rossana was now relieved, but emotionally burned out and physically spent. She phoned me to say, “Nobody had to make a decision like that for someone else. I’m thankful I didn’t need to do it. I wouldn’t want my family to go through the same experience that I just did. I’m definitely writing my own living will. As in, right now.”

I see her point. My husband has written his, a long time ago, and I will prepare mine first thing tomorrow morning. You never know.

Life is short, temporary, and full of surprises. Tomorrow, it could be anybody’s turn. That’s why I don’t buy green bananas anymore. I might not be around to watch them ripen.

(First published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, on January 15th, 2018)

The bitter aftertaste of colonialism

Two Sundays ago, I came across a personal essay written by a 30-year-old Dominican-American man, published at the New York Times. Christopher Rivas remembers as a child how his father took great care of his appearance, so much so that he spent more time getting ready to go out than his mother or his sisters did.

His father explained, Rivas wrote, “that as a young man in the Dominican Republic, you had to work so hard, perfecting yourself, preparing your mask, so that when a young European or American woman came through, she might choose you, might take you home with her, like that was your only way out.”

It was a belief, Rivas says, perpetrated by the movies and TV, that a black or brown man gets made better by being with a white woman. It was, he adds, a whole system coded within him.

The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain for over three hundred years.

This story strongly reminded me of the Philippines, another country which had been under the Spanish rule for three hundred years. Before the Spaniards came, the nation we now call Philippines was actually a group of 7,100 disparate islands, every island had its own ruler, language, religion and culture. They were fighters too. The first explorer Spain sent to the Philippines, Ferdinand Magellan, was killed by a ‘Filipino’ warrior as soon as he stepped on the beach.

In response, Spain sent religious missionaries instead. They conquered the people through religion, planted in their hearts the fear of God, and made them feel guilty, unworthy and inferior. Cultures disappeared, religions died, identities got blurred, and languages evolved. Those who resisted were thrown into prison, killed or deported. At some point in those days, they declared those islands one country under Spain and called it Philippines in honour of their king at the time. Afterwards, when the Filipinos decided they preferred freedom, the Americans came to supposedly help deliver us from that nightmare, only to replace Spain’s with their own hidden agenda. This is my simplified version of my country’s history. 

But more than anything else, all colonizers left a toxic cultural spoor that the colonized then absorbed and accepted as their own. In the Philippines, how often has one heard an innocent remark about someone else who could be prettier, if only they had a fairer skin, or a more western nose? Or how proud or how superior someone feels for carrying a colonizer’s genes? As if being brown, short and flat-nosed is being second rate? Or how a lot of people think we can only get our act together when run by another country? Those are conditioned attitude, formed through centuries of colonization.

Dependency, feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and resentment are common by-products of being under another country’s power for decades. Filipinos are not alone. All over the world, I have no doubt that thousands of peoples feel this way. England was in India for two hundred years. In fact, a recent research shows that historically, only 22 countries have never been colonized or attacked by England at some point in the past.

Spain, also known as the Catholic Monarchy, was considered one of the largest empires in history. Spain controlled vast overseas territories that included places in the Americas, in Europe, Africa and Asia for over four hundred years.

Not to mention other countries like Portugal, France and the Netherlands, which left their own colonial mark upon countless places in the world.

More recent, however, more palpable and currently, still being felt in real time are the after-effects of colonization on the First Nations peoples of North America. In Canada, before the Europeans came, First Nations communities were self-sufficient, healthy, and confident of their special place in the world. They have their own form of government, languages and cultures. Their only fault was that they were too hospitable.

Colonizers took their lands away, forced them to live in reservations, destroyed their cultures, and sent their children to residential schools, where they were then converted to Christianity, and many of them sexually or physically abused. This is common knowledge. News media has detailed these abuses and the resulting court cases in the recent years.

I’ve been wondering about what benefits, if any, have the colonized gotten out of all these? I don’t know. Let me do some more research and I will get back to you.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, April 15th, 2019 issue)

THE OCEAN BETWEEN US, a film by Crisanta Sampang

Motherhood for Dollars

“They come from alien cultures to fill our culture’s most important job, raising our kids. We’ve decided to let other women take care of our children so that we can give them a better life. It’s an excruciating decision, as the nannies know better than anyone…” Susan Cheever, Global Woman

It’s beginning of September at Vancouver’s Jericho Park. Today, as I sit alone on a knoll absorbing the sunshine, the oaks and the maple trees around me are gently shedding their leaves. To my right lies the duck pond surrounded by weeping willows. To the east, tall evergreens conceal the apartment buildings that line Fourth Avenue. To the north, the undulating peaks of Cypress Mountain guard the beaches of English Bay. Yet I didn’t see the magic nor feel the peace these surroundings offer. Instead I peer beyond the bay towards the Pacific Ocean. As if I could discern across this ocean the two adjacent houses in Antipolo, a town in central Philippines --- where two of my daughters live with their families. This evening, I watch the bay and I think about them. It’s early morning back there. They should be waking up soon.

Jericho Park represents the North American edge of my fractured life, the cliff upon where I could look down at the deep, invisible divide that keeps my dreams forever incomplete. Season after season, this park never fails to remind me where my brain says I should be as opposed to where my heart wants to be, and that getting them in the same place remains to be done.

But I’ll see my girls tonight when I get home. We’ll exchange news, trade stories, laugh together and have a good look at each other, then blow kisses and say, “Bye-bye. Lub you. Mwah-mwah!”  Afterwards I’ll go to bed happy, back to my own life. And they back to theirs. We do this regularly through our web cams. I’ll have to wait for a few more months though, before I can really kiss them and hold them in my arms, and distribute the presents I’ve been hoarding in my Balikbayan Box.  My life revolves around these homecomings.

I’m here and they’re over there because years ago I made a tough choice.  A single parent at the age of 26, I left my three daughters in my mother’s care to look after other women’s children in Singapore, then four years later, in Vancouver, Canada.  In return, my children went to a good school, they had generous allowances, mobile phones, and all the brand-name denim jeans my money could buy. They had everything, except my presence.

I remember the first time I left for Vancouver. My whole family went to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport to see me off. We walked together to the departure gates, as far as the security personnel would let us. When it was time to go, I kissed each of my three daughters goodbye, then walked towards the doors. I heard Maricel start to cry. Maricar and Catherine joined in. My heart was pounding. I walked away, faster and faster, without once looking back. Because I knew that if I stopped, if I looked back --- like Orpheus at the gates of Hell --- my dreams would disappear. But I had to leave. My plans for them were only half-achieved.

While working in another country, I think about them every day. I silently tallied in my calendar all the birthdays and hugs and kissies that I missed. I made sure that I talk to my daughters by phone at least once a week, to send their allowances twice a month, and go home to them every year. I reminded them every chance I got that I was here and they were there because I wanted them to have the things I never had as a child. I told them that going away was very hard for me, but sacrifice was required of us to break away from poverty and lack of education, circumstances that most of the people from my farming village in the Philippines will spend the rest of their lives in.

Until today, I never realized I’ve been living my life in smug delusion. Although I had been physically absent from my kids’ daily lives, I’d believed I’ve raised them right, and expressed my motherly love in a variety of personal and material ways. I thought I’ve learned from, and done better than other mothers like myself.

“Not so,” writes Catherine, my youngest, about the past: “When I was a kid, I’d wanted to tell you, ‘I don’t care about the allowances and the toys. I want you to stay home with me and my sisters. You’ve always said you loved us. Do you think I believe you?’ But I never expressed these things because I was afraid that if I did, you would never come back.”

“Not so,” says Maricar, my middle child, of the present: “Me, I would never leave my kids to work in a foreign country. I can’t imagine my child crying alone in the middle of the night because I’m not there. I know what it feels like.”

Because I waited too long, I failed to bring my daughters to Vancouver. Maricar and Catherine both dropped out of college and got married in their teenage years. Only Maricel, my first-born, has a university degree. All three of them have their own families now and are living away from me. Catherine lives in Washington, USA, with her American husband. Yet, despite these kids having grown up and chosen their own paths, they remain little children in my mind. I stay trapped in a time warp, doomed to be fighting my guilt and trying to make up for the years I’ve lost: visiting yearly, bringing them chocolates, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and umbrellas; treating them to mall shopping trips… cooking with them, snuggling with them and telling them stories; treating them like little kids. And whenever I leave to pursue my own life once again, we’re back to replaying the same old good-bye drama at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, only this time my daughters are accompanied by their own children and husbands.

Until perhaps, I promised myself, I’ve managed to bring all of them to Vancouver. Next time I leave them at the airport gates, I will look back and wave, because my dream has changed.

 

It’s all fun and games at the Foreign Workers Cooperative Launch

It’s all fun and games at the Foreign Workers Cooperative Launch

The Chicken Catchers of Abbotsford

Let me tell you a story. 

Last summer, a colleague in the non-profit group I was working for organized a Sportsfest, where caregivers, temporary foreign workers (TFWs) and supporters from the community were invited to compete in basketball, volleyball, and badminton. The event attracted a huge number of participants. Elimination games were played every weekend, and by the time the finals rolled in, everybody knew everybody else by first names, and permanent friendships had been forged.

A group of young men who were working in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia came down to Vancouver and competed under the name Javita Superstars. They were extremely fast and fit and they played good basketball. The boys became a hands down favourite among the girls and they got the biggest applause in every game. They lost on the points system but they won everyone’s hearts.

The Javita Superstars were TFWs. They were chicken catchers. The word ‘chicken catcher’ sounded funny at first, nothing serious, but something that inspires jokes, or even an idea for a sit-com.

As the media person for my organization, my job is to research and write about things that we do regularly. I interviewed the chicken catchers to find out more about them. This was the first time I have talked in-depth with a group of TFWs and heard about their stories. First I realized that there was nothing funny or easy about chicken catching.  These men work all night, going from barn to barn across the Fraser Valley, braving the cold and the rain, until they have caught and sent off at least 30,000 chickens to the processing factories. Then they go home to their dormitory to sleep all day. They wake up in the early evening and set out to do the same thing that night. In between breaks, some of them will get out their phones to connect with the outside world, by texting or by Facebook.

The amazing part is the quality of these chicken catchers’ education and their work experience from back home, the Middle East or Asia. One of them ran an internationally-funded NGO in a farming belt in the Philippines, helping farmers switch to ecologically sustainable agriculture; another one was an IT expert who established and maintained the computer networks in his workplace in Taiwan; one had a business degree and had supervised a meat processing factory in Japan, and swore he could pluck, cut and bone a chicken in seconds. My list goes on.

What this group has in common with every TFW who came to Canada is their desire to change their future, their willingness to work menial and low-skilled jobs in exchange for the chance to become landed immigrants here. They are equally ambitious, highly educated, and hardworking. Being ready to be chicken–catchers, and being good at this job, are good signs. They’re not afraid of hard work. These are the people who could make this country a great one, and even better, an economically powerful one.

My personal research on Filipino TFWs has indicated that almost everyone who came to Canada is over-qualified for the job they’re currently doing, like these chicken catchers.

Yet not everyone who come here to work get to stay. I compare getting a provincial nomination to apply for landing in Canada to winning a game of roulette. If you are a temporary foreign worker, the odds are rarely on your side. Firstly, the number of nominations are limited, and secondly, how does a worker get noticed, then nominated by the employer in the first place? There is no hard and fast rule to this one. Mostly, you go home after four years, your dreams and your qualifications notwithstanding.  I’ve met a few jobless TFWs who fought tooth and nail to stay in Canada after their contracts weren’t renewed, but who eventually gave up and went home defeated.

I rage regularly against the unfairness of the TFW process and I have never stopped looking for ways to make it work for the thousands of workers who leave for home disappointed and broken, year after year. Things have to change.

But how do you telegraph this fact to the federal government? How to make the decision makers understand that these workers aren’t just numbers, but individuals, with individual capabilities, qualifications and specialties that they can contribute towards making Canada a better place?

Gear up!

All set!

Get catching!
(Photos by Anne Lee)

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

Memories of My Third Big Brother

The road is long, with many a winding turn

That leads us to who knows where, who knows when
But I'm strong, strong enough to carry him
He ain't heavy, he's my brother… The Hollies

The evening before my third big brother Toto passed away, they said he declined dinner and went off to bed early. He never woke up again.  

Kuya Toto was 64. He never married, and for nearly half his life, he lived in the house I built for my mother back in our farming village, and I was supporting him. He couldn’t hold down a job, he didn’t socialize, and he existed in a world real only to him.  

On good days, he did gardening around the property. The flowers and the vegetables he grew were the joy of the neighborhood, and everyone was welcome to pick whatever they fancied.

On bad days, he could be seen walking around the village, conversing with himself or with some of his invisible friends. In the grip of a full psychotic episode, he would walk away from the house and disappear for days, and nobody could find him. Eventually he would come home, dirty and hungry but wouldn’t say where he had been. Thankfully, he didn’t do such disappearing acts often.

Sometimes he would lock himself up in his bedroom, but stood guard near a small peephole he carved out of the wall, where he could observe the activities outside. He was convinced that someone or something was coming to get him. The only person he trusted was our mother, and later, our big sister.  

The one time he actually agreed - or more precisely, was physically forced - to go to the doctor, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. 

My brother refused to go to the doctor ever again and no one was able to make him. He never acknowledged his condition. He knew the stigma attached to mental illness. (Villagers talked about people like him behind their backs while exchanging conjectures as to which evil spirits (engkantos) could have possessed them. Word was that my brother may have inherited the same spirit that took possession of a neighbour, long dead, who used to haunt the banana groves brandishing his wooden sword and loudly challenging imaginary enemies to a duel.)  

My family and I knew otherwise. I’ve researched paranoid schizophrenia extensively and found that it was caused by chemical imbalance in the brain, and can be medicated, even if not cured. It can be hereditary, or be triggered by stress and other environmental factors.  

After my mother died, I requested my big sister and her husband to move into the house so they could keep him company. My sister, who’s now 74, made sure that he had everything he needed, and reported things back to me. Whenever I prayed about my brother, I always asked that he would at least stay physically healthy or go early and without pain, because I worried about him eventually having to live alone. God had now answered my prayers and I'm grateful, but it didn't make the loss any easier.  

Before schizophrenia claimed the best of him, Kuya Toto was smart, ambitious, and good looking. My other older siblings used to tease me that I was his junior female version, (ahem) but then again, only to point out my bad posture and quick temper, things that I had in common with the guy.

Kuya Toto was also a good teacher and a compassionate man. A self-taught first-rate electrician in his younger days, he helped many of his friends get jobs in Manila and trained them to be electricians, like himself. Those whom he trained became trade electricians, good enough to work even in the Middle East.  

One day about thirty years ago, my fourth big brother Fernando had a jeepney accident which landed him in the hospital for weeks. This event seemed to have triggered something in Kuya Toto’s brain and he was never the same again.  

Today I grieve for his wasted life and for his unrealized potentials. If not for schizophrenia, he could have achieved whatever he wanted.

But today I also rejoice at the memory of the times he spent with me when I was growing up. I was the youngest child in the family, and he was eight years older. I remember being three years old, playing by the side of the creek where he and Fernando were swimming. One of them dived and accidentally toppled me into the deep pool along with them. I nearly drowned. Kuya Toto grabbed me and put me back up onto the ledge and said, “I’m going to teach you how to swim.” He then showed me how to float, ‘like a dead person’; how to dive; and how to paddle with my arms and kick my legs properly.

He taught me that the water was my friend.  

Kuya Toto tried his best to turn me into a little warrior.  When I was four, he built me an arrow gun from pieces of bamboo and taught me how to shoot accurately. I was very accurate. The first time I let my arrow fly, I hit his leg. He trained me to drop mangoes off a high tree with my sling shot. He said ‘aim for the stem, not the fruit.’ I was happy to hit the fruit. When he was older and became interested in the martial arts, he instructed me on the rudiments of judo and karate. He showed me how to pull a balisong - a local fan knife - out of my pocket and have it unlocked and ready in 3.5 seconds.  ‘Watch me: One. Two. Three!’ He even constructed for me a sort of weapon he called a chaku, made of two wooden sticks attached to each other with a metal chain, and demonstrated how to swing the end stick as fast as they did in the movies, without strangling himself. He would draw a target mark on a green coconut and dare me to hit it with the tip of my chaku.  

He taught me focus and concentration.

He made me fearless. 

After he went off to study in the city, he only visited with us on holidays. He would bring treats like peanut butter and cookies whenever he came home, and would tell me and Kuya Fernando endless stories about city stuff, like the wired contraption where one dialed some numbers and be able to talk to someone far away. Other times he would serve us triangle-shaped scrambled eggs and other things like that.

He taught me that there was another world worth exploring outside the village.  

We didn’t hang out very much after we grew older. He got a construction job in Manila, and I did my own things. I went to college, dropped out after two years and got married. Many years later, I separated from my husband and came home to mother with my three little daughters. After failing to find a good job locally, I decided to work as a nanny in Singapore. It was around the same time that his schizophrenia reared itself, and he ended up coming home and living with our mother as well.

On medication during the early years of his disease, he could do some contractual electrician work around our area, while he helped my mother look after the girls. This time around, although he was still a good teacher, he also had become a stern disciplinarian. I heard that when the girls were little, he oversaw their daily activities like a drill sergeant. 

He taught my daughters self-discipline.

When I thought about my years of absence from my children’s lives, I’ve concluded that they turned out alright, partly because Kuya Toto was around to look out for them, in his own paranoid kind of way.  

I've decided not to go home for Kuya Toto’s funeral because I’m in the middle of launching a big project. I know he would understand. Besides, I’ve let my children take over. My two older daughters who live in the Philippines have gone home to the village to organize his burial services. They got him some really nice flowers and hosted a big festive memorial, one that included the fourth and ninth day celebrations. It’s a village tradition. My youngest daughter who lives in Washington, USA, paid for most of the expenses. These girls loved their Uncle Toto. He was around during most of their childhood.

Although none of us became electricians, a big part of my third big brother's legacy resides in the things he taught my daughters and me. 

Sending all your money home? Expensive. Saving some for yourself? Priceless.

I have simple needs, and I've never paid too much attention to money, unless I was thinking of spending it. Until today.

One of my part-time jobs is coordinating activities for foreign live-in caregivers (LICs) and temporary foreign workers (TFWs) for a non-profit organization. I help plan educational workshops, organize sports competitions, fundraising and other group events, all of these tailored to arm the workers with tools to adjust seamlessly to their new environment. These activities also help provide newcomers with a sense of belonging to a community, a sort of family away from their families.

Getting twenty or more foreign live-in caregivers in one room for two hours on a Saturday, however, is not an easy job.  These men and women are the hardest-working people I know, and most of them are out on weekends, working part time to make extra money to send home to their families. Money to educate their kids, pay their rents or mortgages, or support aging parents. Sometimes they get so caught up in making money because the need is too great, that two things get neglected: their health and their own financial future. Many of these workers have no savings nor insurance, the importance of which only gets noted when the ability to work and earn money fails.

I know because I've seen it happening and I've been part of the community that helped raise funds for a few unfortunate members of this group, those who might have suffered a severe or fatal illness, and those who passed away. With no money for expenses or repatriation of their remains, it becomes the community's job to help finance their hospitalization or repatriation.

In response to these circumstances, I organize workshops that encourage them to put away some earnings for such a rainy day, or buy insurance to fall back on in cases of illness or death. Morbid but practical.

My boss, the president of the non-profit group that I work for, is very passionate about getting LICs and TFWs to upgrade their skills and become financially independent. He believes that financial security is the number one reason why everybody comes to Canada. To help make things easier for some of these people, my group worked with a school to get our members discounted tuition fees, and with a bank to get them low-interest caregiver education loans. We invited representatives from both the school and the bank to give talks and answer everyone’s questions about how these deals work. The first batch of our students graduated last August. A new batch are in the process of enrolling.

The school director called me recently to say that out of twelve enrolees, six had pulled out. They told her they’d changed their minds. We needed twelve students to proceed with the weekend curriculum that the school had specially set up for them.

A few days ago, the bank officer in-charge of releasing caregiver loans took me aside and told me in a grim and urgent tone: “We need to have one of those financial literacy workshops really soon. We have to get the newcomers as early as we can, before they can develop some bad spending habits.”

Apparently, he had declined the application of five of the caregivers we sent him for educational loans. The applicants whose names he kept confidential, already have incurred too much debt, even before they've become landed immigrants. Now I know why they cancelled their enrolment.

O the perils and pitfalls of easy credit. The intense attraction of acquiring material things. The joys of shopping for what my boss calls ‘anik-aniks’ (shiny, expensive, but ultimately useless items). And the guilt that comes from denying your relatives back home what they ask for, when you yourself live in a country of plenty. Those are the hurdles one has to get over, to achieve financial security in a new country.

First and foremost, my banker wants to address the danger of credit cards and bad borrowing habits, because he understands how easy it is to get mired in debt if one isn't careful.

“Letting them hear how credit cards really work will make them think twice before acquiring one,” says my banker friend. I totally agree with him. I’m already planning that financial literacy workshop as we speak.

My own advice: put away a small portion of your money regularly, in a place where you can’t easily touch it. Also, avoid credit cards like the plague. Take it from me. I once had two credit cards, so I know what I’m talking about. 

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, September 2013)

The Holy Week: Sunny with a chance of Easter Eggs

The Lenten season is upon us, and Christians all over the world are celebrating the life of Christ; how He lived and died to save humanity from the eternal fires of hell. How the Easter Bunny and the Easter eggs got into this picture is beyond me, but I won’t question the wisdom of western traditions.

Rather I’ll take you back to the days of my childhood in rural Philippines, when my parents and others of their generation celebrated the Holy Week just as differently, and perhaps as weirdly, as hunting for coloured eggs on Easter Sunday morning. Not for my village folks, though, was the unbridled physical display of piety seen in other Philippine towns: no self-flagellation, no wearing the crown of thorns, and most of all, no nailing of anybody to a wooden cross.

My village's Holy Week officially started on Palm Sunday, when people carrying intricately woven palm fronds go to church to commemorate Christ’s entry into Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.

The real action began on Holy Thursday. One of the well-off families in the village would host a reading of The Passion of Christ, and invite all the usual suspects, regular passion readers who did this sort of thing every year. My father was one of them. These readers would sing, not read, every stanza in the Book, using a well-established tune. One reader after another, man after woman, stanza by stanza, until they reached the very last line. Then back again at the beginning. This went on until the morning, or perhaps even up to 3:00 in the afternoon of Good Friday. When a group of singers took a break, another group would pick up the tune. A huge dinner of meat stew and rice, along with an endless amount of brewed ginger tea would be served. A regular infusion of ginger tea kept the singers going. Neighbours and relatives dropped in regularly to listen and partake of the food.

In those days, life at my village came to a standstill at the stroke of 3:00 p.m. on Good Friday. No more singing, no bathing, and no physical work. No going to church. Just praying at home, sometimes with lighted candles. Jesus was dead and we were showing respect.

Activities get re-started early in the morning of Sabado de Gloria --- the Saturday of Ascension. Jesus had gone up to heaven to join the Father, and we were free to do as we wished. Mother would sweep the yard early. Being a tiny kid, I got picked up by my ears by various adults, then hoisted up to the heavens a few times first thing in the morning. I was told this would help me grow taller. I’ve often thought about reminding my big brothers that not only did they fail to make me taller, I could also have lost an ear and it would have been their fault.

After breakfast, my mother would cook sticky rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves, which were then eaten with sweet coconut syrup. Those cakes made the Holy Week worth waiting for.

Easter Sunday was the day of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: The more pious villagers would hire a jeepney to go to church in the city to celebrate Jesus’ return to life. A lavish, church-organized ceremony took place at 4:00 in the morning every Easter Sunday in our city. The event featured two processions starting out from two different parts of the town. One was headed by the statue of the Virgin Mary on a float, her face covered in a dark veil. The other was headed by the statue of Jesus Christ in another float. The two processions met at a thoroughfare, under a structure where an angel lay in wait to snatch away the Virgin Mary’s veil to signify the joy coming back to her life. The two processions then merged and headed back to church where a mass would be held to celebrate the Resurrection.

My mother never went to church on those occasions, and I loved the extra time I got to snuggle with her. By Monday, the passion books were all put away and everything was back to normal.

After my parents and their contemporaries have all passed away, passion singing went out of fashion in my village. Now all I have are childhood the memories. Back here in Vancouver, the Easter eggs are calling my name.

(previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, March 15, 2013 issue)

Languages by the pound

Back in the olden days, on the very first Sunday of my first nannying job in Singapore, my lady employer wondered whether I wanted to go to church with them.

“Do you want to follow us to church?” she asked.

“Can’t I just ride with you guys? I asked back.

“That’s what I mean,” she told me.

My first lesson on Singaporean English: when you ‘follow’ someone in Singapore, you are actually going together to the same destination; you aren’t walking or travelling in another vehicle closely behind them. Singaporeans, like other English-speaking peoples, have created their own version of English, called Singlish, a language that also incorporated words from Malay, Tamil and various Chinese dialects. I soon learned to listen and speak the same way to get my point across.

When I first arrived in Canada, I wasn’t too surprised to find that the same linguistic challenges applied. Nothing ever grows and mutates faster than a language, a many-headed entity that changes form and shifts shape to accommodate the changing times. It brings to my mind the vision of an avalanche rushing down a mountainside, picking up and swallowing all sorts of debris along its way, landing at the bottom much bigger and less purer than when it started going down the slope. The only difference is that a language just keeps on going.

I can speak for English and Tagalog, the two languages I know best. Growth in technology and globalization has brought so many new words and expressions into the lexicon that they would probably drive language purists, if such people still exist, out of their minds. Heck, it could drive a Taglish-speaking Filipino crazy, when he still has to figure out about 7 other major languages already being spoken in the country, on top of the techno-speak being developed by call-centre workers and the gay-speak, the dialect of the Manila gay and show business communities. And when he goes out of the country, he then has to contend with how other English speakers so mangled the language that it makes him feel as if he’s talking to a Martian.

(Don’t even get me started on how words are pronounced. For instance, why would the word ‘swam’ be spoken like ‘swam’ but ‘swamp’ be ‘swomp’ and swan ‘swon’? Aaaaaargh!)

Nothing gives English-as-second-language (ESL) speakers more trouble than the slang being spawned and spoken by various specific groups. ESL people learn English from books, and generally speak that way, but you’ll find out right away when what you’re saying translates very differently to an ESL speaker.

For instance, a friend who’s a nurse by profession once asked an elderly Canadian male patient on which side would he like to be laid? She didn’t report what his response was, but I could imagine celebratory bells clanging inside the old man’s head: “Service with benefits, baby!”

Or the nurse’s German husband who once requested her to check a pimple on his ‘foreskin’, when he actually meant on his ‘forehead’. To him, those words were similar. I heard that the nurse corrected him immediately, although on further thought, maybe he did have another pimple somewhere else and really wanted his wife to have a look at that one.

Or take the case of my daughter who lives in the US, who overheard her colleagues talking about dogs being sold by the Pound. A curious person by nature, she had to know: “How much per pound?” Judging by the scandalized expression on their faces, my daughter realized she must have asked the wrong question. On the other hand, dogs do sell per pound in underground markets in the Philippines, or so I heard.

Keeping any language pure is a losing battle, because language is alive. Language evolves. It adapts to its surroundings to survive. I sincerely wish all purists who want to fight this trend the best of luck.

A friend of mine has stronger words for such people. He says there will always be some narrow-minded idiots who will want to keep their language ‘clean’ and not allow foreign words to infiltrate it.

“Wanting to keep a language clean”, he tells me, “is another form of discrimination.”

“Like Hitler said in his book, urban mice should only mate with urban mice, and rural mice should only mate with rural mice. Well, Adolf, ” my friend adds, “I've got news for you: Mice don't care whom they mate with, as long as it's another mice!”

(previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, January 15, 2012 issue)

What exactly, are the roots of racism?

“Are all the Filipinos poor?” The man sitting beside me in the bus turned to me and asked.

I looked at his face to check if he was joking. The man, also an Asian, was serious. He actually wanted to know. Although I found his question ignorant and offensive, I didn’t say so. Instead, I asked him back: “Are all citizens from your country poor?”

He didn’t think so. I held my tongue after that. I got off on the next stop still upset about the man’s question. That interaction happened twenty years ago. I’ve thought about the incident every now and then; thought about various snide ways of answering him. I always come back to the conclusion that perhaps I should have told him that not all Filipinos are poor, instead of feeling insulted and defensive.

I could have told him that the very rich and the very poor Filipinos usually stay back home. That the rich ones didn’t need to leave the country to find a better life, while the very poor aren’t educated enough and didn’t have the wherewithal to pay their way out. That the Filipinos he meets in Canada are what I would call the adventurous, the middle, the educated class. These include the nannies.

I’ve experienced other expressions of racism since then, some of which were ironically well-meaning. A long time ago, a friend told me that her car broke down in the middle of the Lions Gate Bridge. Said bridge only has three lanes, the middle of which changes direction every twenty minutes or so. It’s one of the two bridges that connect our town to the mainland. Traffic on this bridge notoriously reaches bottle-neck proportions during rush hours. My friend’s car was caught in one of these bottlenecks. Fortunately she was able to steer her car out of the bridge into a safe shoulder.

“Otherwise, I could have been lynched!” relieved, she recounted her experience to me. Then to make sure I understood her, she inquired, “By the way, do you know what ‘lynched’ means?”

Bad question. I was young and rather proud of my fluency in English. I remember giving her three synonyms for ‘lynched’ in one breath. After that, she never assumed I would misunderstand her ever again. We remain close friends.

I’d been in conversations where a Caucasian would speak to me very, very, slowly, word by word, so that I’d get his point. Whenever this happened, I rudely interrupt the speaker by finishing their sentence for them. That usually shuts them up.

I’ve actually lost my temper and shouted at people for being racist to me, at least twice. I’ve now regretted having done so. Forgive me. At the time, though, I found it very satisfying to watch the objects of my anger being rendered speechless with shock. I’m sure they’ve never seen a little brown person explode in their presence before .

Through the years, I’ve grown more tolerant of people’s false assumptions regarding Filipinos, or of other races, for that matter. I myself have been guilty of subscribing to ethnic stereotypes and although I don’t say them aloud, I definitely think them. I have a collection of racist jokes culled from my travels, which I enjoy reading and sharing with others. After all, as my friend says, there’s a little racist in everyone of us.

Which leads me to wonder --- what exactly, is the root of racism?

Firstly, I think it’s borne of ignorance. Not knowing much about a particular ethnic group, aside from what we’ve read in the papers and heard from our friends, we often draw our own skewed conclusions from such limited stores of information. We listen to stereotypes. We believe in blanket classifications of different races. Those guys are bad drivers; this group treat their women like furniture; those people are mostly involved in drug-dealing and other criminal activities. In reality, bad drivers, sexist men, drug dealers, and criminals can be found in every racial grouping.

Secondly, it’s the economy. Take the Philippines, for instance. Due to lack of economic opportunities at home, Filipinos leave the country in droves to seek their fortune elsewhere. Women work as nurses, hotel staff and domestics abroad. In Canada, the Live-in Caregiver Program has brought in thousands of our women to work as domestics and caregivers. A Canadian man admitted once that whenever he saw a gaggle of Filipino women in the bus on weekends, he used to assume they were nannies on a day-off.

And finally, it’s a by-product of colonization. The bitter irony in this type of racism is that a sense of superiority stays with certain members of the colonized long after the colonizers have left. I’ve felt it. I’ve fought against it in my own country. There’s another name for it: colonial mentality. It comes from being born in a place where one is expected to take pride in having some conqueror’s blood running in one’s veins, of being considered prettier than the indigenous because one has a fairer skin or a more western nose. Sad but true.

These days, I’ve stopped reacting violently to whiffs of racism. I try to live by example. Pessimists say there’s no cure for racism, but I’m thinking if I could help open one person’s mind every now and then, that’s good enough for me.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, Oct 15, 2010 issue)

A Salt Spring Holiday

(previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, Oct 15th, 2010 issue)

For many immigrants, working usually takes precedence over taking a vacation. I speak from experience. I myself often feel guilty about going on holiday when there’s so much to do. You know, deadlines to meet, mortgage to pay, and children to support. Yet, everytime I came home from a vacation, I couldn’t help feeling inspired.

Take last week, for instance. I went to Salt Spring Island to attend the Apple Festival, only because it was a working holiday and two high-end hotels --- the Hastings House and the Harbour House Hotel --- kindly offered to host us for a week, courtesy of BC Tourism. Even so, I packed my bags with books, scripts and research notes. I didn’t want to find myself idling on such a trip.

Guess what, my work bag came back untouched but my head was buzzing with new ideas.

Salt Spring Island is located about halfway between Nanaimo and Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia. It’s part of an island group called the Gulf Islands. Salt Spring is mainly a farming community with over ten thousand residents, several thousand sheep and cattle, and a thriving deer population. Those in the know consider Salt Spring Island a special place, it being the residence of choice of numerous writers, artists, photographers, cheese makers, sculptors, ex-hippies and gentlemen farmers from all over Canada, many of whom came to visit the Island in the olden days and never left. Artist Robert Bateman and multi-awarded writer Brian Brett, among others, call it home.

There’s a palpable atmosphere of enlightenment and do-gooding around the place. Every other person seems to be involved in some worthwhile cause or another: to change the world, fight poverty or look after the environment. For example, there’s The Pie Ladies who bake and sell hundreds of pies during the apple festival, with proceeds going to the various charities they’re sponsoring. Then there’s the Coffee Ladies who raise money to buy coffee from the Nicaraguan coffee farmers at free trade rates to sell it on Salt Spring. Profits are sent back to Nicaragua to build schools and other facilities. Or those who raise money to send impoverished local kids to school.

But my friend and I are going after other quarries, one of whom is the Apple Man of Salt Spring himself, the organizer of the Apple Festival and dedicated organic apple farmer Harry Burton. Burton’s apple farm is overrun with weeds and vegetables growing among his 125 varieties of apple trees, which in turn share the 4-acre space with innumerable wasps, at least three garter snakes, two dogs, one cat and dozens of chickens. One chicken seemed to have lost its feathers around the neck, looking as if it narrowly escaped being plucked. He told me it was a rare breed called the Naked-Neck. I had to ask.

Harry Burton was proud to say that no insecticides or chemical fertilizers ever touched his farm. He relied on compost, seaweed and oyster shells to feed his plants. Burton, a former professor of Environmental Protection at Canadore College, North Bay, Ontario, developed a strong affinity with the outdoors during childhood. Farming is his “attempt to come back in line with Mother Nature”.

On his website appleluscious.com, Burton cited several advantages to growing organic food: it protects the quality of water, keeps chemicals off your plate, prevents soil erosion, restores biodiversity, and helps reduce global warming by saving energy. Besides, you don’t have to waste money on pesticides and herbicides.

Eating organic food is one of the most important contributions any of us can make to save the planet, according to Burton. Tons of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are used in commercial farms every year. More than half of these are known to cause cancer, birth defects, genetic changes or serious irritation if ingested directly, but somehow people have allowed themselves to be convinced that food can be exposed to such poisons without absorbing them. When we invest in organic farming, he added, we get a huge dividend: good, healthy food.

Another organic farmer/writer we sought out was Michael Ableman, owner of Fox Glove Farms and the guru of sustainable agriculture, described by a local newspaper as the man “who can grow carrots on rocks.”

An organic farmer for over twenty years, Ableman has been running Foxglove Farms in Salt Spring Island for almost ten. He also established on this farm The Centre for Art, Ecology and Agriculture, to raise awareness and demonstrate the vital connections between farming, land stewardship, food and community well-being. He organizes workshops on how one can help conserve the environment through organic farming. Wow. Listening to Michael Ableman reminded me of a similar center I’ve been planning to build in my own village in the Philippines one day. Now I don’t have to re-invent the wheel. All I need to do is pick the brains of this man before getting started with my own project.

After I shared these thoughts with him, Ableman gave me a copy of From The Good Earth, one of his books. It’s all about growing organic food around the world. I just knew I have to talk to him again.

As you can see, going on holidays can be very beneficial, especially vacationing on a place like Salt Spring Island.

The Final Journey Home

When Ramon Cutillas was hit and killed by a pick-up truck while cycling along a street in Edmonton, the event spawned some problems for his community and for his family back in the Philippines.

Cutillas left his wife and four children in the Philippines some three years ago to work in Edmonton under Canada’s temporary workers’ program. He was jobless when he died, and didn’t have any savings nor unemployment insurance. The family couldn’t afford the expense to have his body shipped home, and were seeking financial help from the Filipino community in Edmonton.

According to Edmonton’s Serenity Funeral Homes, the process of getting a death certificate and obtaining documentation from the Philippine Consulate in Vancouver, plus preparing the body for shipping, to finally loading it on a plane to Manila usually cost between $8,000 and $9,000.

I have no doubt that the Filipino community will come through for Cutillas and his family, as they have always done in situations like this. They will not rest until enough money is raised and Cutillas’ remains is sent off to be reunited with his wife and kids back in the Philippines. These people understand a family’s emotional need for reunion and closure.

I can fully comprehend this need myself. Having been away from my three girls for many years, I would love to, at least, pass away in the Philippines, surrounded by them, and leave peacefully after saying my good-byes. Failing that, I’d try to make sure that my body is shipped home and buried in the family plot.

Wildly romantic, says a friend of mine, and totally unpractical. He added that in view of this, perhaps I should start saving. This friend doesn’t subscribe to the idea of spending thousands of dollars on shipping someone’s lifeless body to some country, when her survivors could otherwise make better use of that money.

Meanwhile in Vancouver, another close friend recently died of cancer. Everyone who knew this woman visited her in the hospital. When the time came for her to go, we were only grateful that her sufferings had finally come to an end. She was married but childless. Her husband had her remains cremated and ashes packed in a special container; he then obtained a special permit to carry the package in his backpack on board the plane for burial back in Iloilo, Philippines.

The total cost he paid for cremation and documentation: $775, GST included. Getting his wife interred back in the homeland: priceless.

This amazing disparity between the cost of shipping an embalmed body and a cremated one, however, raises some important questions in my mind. I’ve since asked myself: do I really want to spend $10,000 dollars to get my frozen dead self back to the Philippines to get buried, where I won’t be able to hug or talk to my kids anyway; or, send them an urn containing my ashes along with $9,000 in cold cash? Will it make any difference to me whether they mourn over my actual body or my powdered form?  I don't think so. I will be dead by then and probably couldn’t care less. The children, however, may beg to differ.

But speaking of Ramon Cutillas' case, wouldn’t the same amount of money be more useful to his family, the same family who has now lost its breadwinner? Another friend, a European, thinks so. And despite myself, I agree with him. But it’s not for my friend nor me to decide, right? The Cutillas family had spoken and they wanted their husband and father’s body back. They wanted him there so they could say goodbye properly, mourn his loss adequately, and bury him at the place they could visit every now and then. And talk to him, even with the knowledge that he would never again answer them back. The future can take care of itself.

Let’s be practical for a moment, though: how much would $9,000 Cdn be in Philippine pesos, based on the current rate of exchange? That’s about P400,000, give or take a few pesos. Enough to buy a small house in a rural area or start a small retail business. But in times of death and bereavement, it’s not something people think about.

A very Filipino thing. Even a cultural thing. Definitely an immigrant thing. Because if you’re a Filipino working or living overseas, and most of the members of your family are still based in the Philippines, wouldn’t you want to go back home to them when you die, to know that they will feel some form of closure, rather than an eternal sense of loss because they’ll never see your final resting place?

Lately, I’ve been thinking of this more and more. The best thing to do, isn't it, is to get one's affairs in order before death comes along? It would save one's family a lot of anguish and even guilt, because then they wouldn’t have to choose practicality over personal wishes, because you’ve made the choice for them.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, May 15, 2010 issue)