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and our common law has recognized the right to demand that medical treatment which would extend life be withheld or withdrawn.”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.