Remembering Ninoy

Note: I posted this topic on bedista.com's forum. Later on, I realised I have a blog that has been blank for weeks. So here it goes...with some additions/revisions from my original b.com post.

Of course, we all know Ninoy Aquino.

He's the glum-looking guy on the 500 peso bill.

He's Kris Aquino's dad -- whether it's a Deal or No Deal.

He "owns" the airport. (I heard this once)

(this is the actual gate where Ninoy was gunned down. Picture posted in flickr by brownpau)


Officially, he's the country's first First Gentleman -- his wife, of course, being the country's first woman President.


"Wala kaming pasok kasi Ninoy Day" -- is the expected quip of today's student or yuppie (do they still use this term?) when asked why they had a long weekend.




To the "oldies" like us, we remember Ninoy as the "subversive" who dared run -- and expectedly "lost" - against Imelda Marcos in the Interim Batasang Pambansa elections. I remembered that I was hushed with a collective and quick "shhhhhhhhhhhhh" when I asked my elders who this "Ninoy" is.

We were then in Grade 2 (San Beda was still fresh from successfully defending its NCAA basketball crown) and a "subversive" classmate secretly gave us "Laban" stickers, which we proudly displayed on our "Six Million Dollar Man" lunch boxes.

At that time, Manila stood still and all tellys were tuned in to Channel 4 to watch a rare live interview of Ninoy, who singlehandedly matched wits and openly traded barbs with Marcos propagandists like JV Cruz and Ronnie Nathanielsz (yup, the Sri Lankan smart aleck you see calling basketball games and boxing matches and writing sports columns for the Manila Standard Today). Laban's iconic 1978 campaign was capped with a Metro-wide "noise barrage" where everyone came out banging pots and pans in symbolic defiance of Marcos' strong-arm rule.





My generation was already in high school when the gunshot that reverberated around the world and changed the nation's history was fired on Aug 21, 1983 (a time when most b.com members were not yet even part of their parents' consciousness).

Lagi rin kaming walang pasok noon because Mendiola became a battleground immediately after Ninoy was buried and rallies became an "in" thing before the bridge over the estero was named after Don Chino Roces.

When I was active with the CAS-SC, Mike Abasolo (of inboundpass fame) and I initiated an annual memorial week for Ninoy Aquino - the Great Bedan. We held the first one in November 1986 in time for Ninoy's birth anniversary and the following year -- the SC under now Atty Boks Lauron -- we did it in August.

Fr. Tarsi (then HS principal) and Fr Paul de Vera allowed us to take Ninoy's bronze bust from the HS library and put it on display at the mini memorial set up at the main driveway. We were told it was the first time that the bust was allowed out of the library named after the hero who is a member of HS Class 1948.

The late Atty Juan Cabrieto, then registrar, opened San Beda's archives and allowed us to reproduce Ninoy's school records. We invited Ninoy's siblings -- Butz Aquino and Mila Aquino Albert -- to come over and meet Ninoy's "present" generation of Bedan brothers. We held extemporaneous speaking and art contests, and a host of other activities.

The black spot then was somebody stole the yellow "Ninoy" banner which our predecessors in the SC had used during the pre-EDSA 86 anti-Marcos demonstrations.

I wonder if San Beda continues to have Ninoy-related activities. After all, we're the only school that could rightfully claim him as a full-fledged alumnus.

***

The Ninoy Aquino Foundation is launching an "I Am Ninoy" campaign...addressed to the youth... here's Ichu Villanueva account on how the project goes.

For this alone, there is a reason for me to sometimes drop red and turn yellow.

I am Ninoy
COMMONSENSE
By Marichu A. Villanueva
Monday, August 18, 2008 (Philippine Star)

She may be in the thick of battling the most serious threat to her life but former President Corazon "Cory" Cojuangco Aquino has not allowed it to slow her down from her latest pet project for the Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr. Foundation.

Currently undergoing chemotherapy for her colon cancer, Mrs.Aquino has actively kept running the affairs of the Foundation as its founding chairperson.

The Foundation, named after her slain husband, is in the middle of preparations for the 25th death anniversary of the late Senator who was assassinated on Aug.21,1983.

The slay of the late Sen.Aquino is considered as the turning point in the hard-fought battle of Filipino leaders like him to regain our country?s democracy from the shackles of two decade-long of martial rule imposed by the late President Ferdinand Marcos.

Aquino's widow subsequently became the country's first woman President after the February 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution. And as they say, the rest is history.

But 25 years later, the sacrifice of the slain Senator to restore our country's democratic institutions seemed to have been relegated to annual commemoration of his death anniversary as Ninoy Aquino Day officially declared as a national holiday.

In line, though, with the "holiday economics" policy of the government, we just had a long weekend because this nationwide holiday was moved today.

Mrs.Aquino, now 75, in one of her rare media interviews, expressed her sentiments about how she would like the country's younger generation to remember the heroism of Ninoy.

"I hope our fellow Filipinos, especially the young, will continue to appreciate how much Ninoy suffered for our country. I hope they will ask themselves what they offer, too, to help this country move forward. Ninoy showed the way. I hope they will be inspired by him," Mrs.Aquino was quoted as saying in People Asia Magazine in its July 2008 edition.

It is in this light that the prime movers behind the latest project of the Foundation apparently came up with such a catchy slogan "I am Ninoy."

This project is spearheaded by businessman, Rafael "Rafa" C. Lopa. The 45-year old nephew of Mrs.Aquino is the executive director of the Foundation.

The Foundation will formally launch the "I am Ninoy" campaign this Thursday in a press conference after the Holy Mass for the 25th death anniversary of the late Senator to be held at the Don Bosco Chapel in Makati City.

"My auntie Cory will just attend the Mass but she will not join us in the press conference," Rafa told me over the weekend.

At the launching of the "I am Ninoy" campaign, Rafa disclosed the Foundation will present the "brand partners" that will carry this slogan and the figure of eyeglasses of Ninoy in their signature T-shirt and other apparel products.

Of course, most of these apparels would come in yellow color associated with Mrs.Aquino.

The "brand partners" include such popular youth-oriented apparel-makers like Bench, Penshoppe, Team Manila, and Analog Soul. Under their partnership agreement with the Foundation, a certain percentage of every product of "I am Ninoy" sold will be donated to their chosen charitable institution.

The "I am Ninoy" campaign is actually geared to re-introduce to the young generation of Filipinos the ideals of democracy that the late Senator stood for and died for.

"The Filipinos are worth dying for," was the blurb made famous by Ninoy in the face of death.

The idea of this national campaign is to impress upon the Filipino youth his heroism. But they need not die, too, to become heroes in their own rights.

"We?re talking about a kind of dying of our old selves, our old habits and find a new and better way of doing things that will improve our country for the better," Rafa pointed out.

"We bring Ninoy into the picture and hopefully other people will be inspired to do what he has done for our country without really having to die like him," he quipped.

Another version of the "I am Ninoy" project will be launched in November on the birth anniversary of the late Senator when he would have turned 76 years old. Rafa said he is still working out the details of this project with PLDT, Smart and Globe Telecom as sponsors.

Picture credits: wikimedia, inquirer.net. flickr, beda7882.com

Remember Walt Frazier

Initially, I thought this was just another NBA basketball trivia-nostalgia piece that usually comes a dime a dozen during the week that precedes the NBA Finals (especially now that the Lakers-Celtics rivalry has come out from the dead), but I was wrong.



Francis Kong's piece is inspiring especially to those who feel "down and out". I'm yielding my space to his Star column item. If you need to lift up your sagging spirit, check out his blog to help yourself get back on your feet.

BUSINESS MATTERS (Beyond the bottom line)
By Francis J. Kong

Philippine Star

Sunday, June 1, 2008


There are people in the work place whose favorite part of the human anatomy is the back. These are the people who love to back-stab and back-bite and they feel that the only way they can add value to themselves is to devalue others. They are in the work place, they are in organizations and they are also found in churches too.

What do you do when you are a victim of injustice?

What do you do when you are on the receiving end of a smear campaign? Ask me. I’ve got stories to tell. I am not speaking theory here but I am speaking based on actual experiences. These experiences are not exactly ecstatic for me but I sure am learning a lot from it.

There are people out there whose joy in life is to see me fail as I am sure there are people out there whose mission in life is to destroy you and your career or business. These are insecure people who cannot stand good and healthy competition. These are yellow-bellied cowards who would not dare fight you face to face. They scheme. They mislead. They plot. They conspire. Lying is their native tongue. Hypocrisy is their virtue.

Deception is their character. And then they hurt you or at least they irritate you.

So what do you do?

Some times it gets to you. You have within your means the arsenal to fight back and you are almost there. It is so tempting. All it takes is a hard blow. Just one strike is all it takes and you have all the plans in place. Your mind tells you: “The best defense is offense…!!!” Should you hit back or shouldn’t you?

When you find yourself in this situation…try to remember the celebrated basketball player of the New York Knicks Walt Frazier.

Walt Frazier was the soul and the spirit of the New York Knicks in the early ’70s—unflappable, unselfish, versatile and smooth, he embodied the essence of what made champions special.

Although he was overflowing with basketball talent, he was first and foremost a team player. And although he’s often remembered for his on-court and off-court smoothness, his game was definitely not all-style-and-no-substance. Frazier brought the goods—he had an inner toughness and heart underneath the controlled flow.

Many years ago during a Knicks-Bullets playoff game, one of the Bullets came up from behind and punched Walt Frazier in the face. Strangely, the referee called a foul on Frazier. Frazier didn’t complain. His expression never changed. He simply called for the ball and put in seven straight shots to win the game, an amazing display of productive anger. This provides us with a great moral lesson as well.

Watching Frazier played his ball game many years ago, I officially considered him my hero for “Coolness.” I taught myself at a very young age that being “cool” is the tool of the intelligent.

Being destructive is the tool for fools. Being “cool” accomplishes more than being emotional and explosive.

And in being cool, I have discovered 3 ways of hitting back these cowards who continue their mission of destruction. And if you are currently being hit these days, do the following:

1. Pray. God does not sleep. Vengeance is His not yours. He knows how to deal with the situation. And when you know that you have Him on your side you will always be on the winning side. No, don’t pray for God to hit those losers with thunder and lightning but you should pray that God forgive them for they do not know what they are doing. That they may come to genuine repentance and realize the sins they are committing.

2. Learn. Realize that wickedness lies in the heart of people. And if this could happen to them the same thing could happen to you as well. The heart is hopelessly and wickedly deceiving. So learn form the experience and be on guard. Determine never to decline and deteriorate to their level.

3. Live. The best form of revenge is a life well lived. Excel in what you do and use the energy and channel them on doing more than what you are able to do. Let these losers fuel you with the creative anger and passion to succeed more.

Be a Walt Frazier in the hard court of life and business.

And always remember this:

Never wrestle with a pig. And there are 2 reasons why:

Number 1: You get yourself dirty and number 2: The pig loves it!

Too many nurses!

I wuz proven right!

In my earlier entry, I snorted about the situation of nurses in the Philippines and I based it on Mara's experience.

My rants are now backed with hard stats and industry stalwarts even serve as "talking heads" validating the issues I raised.

Again, I give way to my former Chronicle boss, Boo Chanco, who zeroed in on the issue in his Philippine Star column.

Read on . . .

Now we have too many nurses
DEMAND AND SUPPLY
By Boo Chanco
Monday, April 7, 2008 (Philippine Star)

Guess what… we now have too many nurses. According to published reports, Dr. Josefina Tuazon, University of the Philippines College of Nursing Dean, said we have so many nurses so that many fresh graduates are now opting to work in some local hospitals as volunteers… for free.

I can believe that. That happened too with physical therapists, once a popular course because of the foreign job possibilities. I was shocked when some of the physical therapists from a leading hospital (who worked on the rehab program for my aching back some years ago) told me they are working for free… as volunteers.

Now it is the nurses’ turn. Philippine Nurses Association (PNA) National President Leah Paquiz was also reported to have disclosed that the United States, home to almost 250,000 Filipino nurses, stopped issuing work visas this year because the quota requirement for migrant workers has already been reached. There were 21,000 Filipino nurses seeking employment in the US in 2007.

Dr. Tuazon and Paquiz agree that the oversupply of nurses is fast becoming a serious problem for the country. Yet, local nursing schools, many of them nothing more than diploma mills, continue to graduate thousands of nurses every year.

The situation is also being aggravated by government’s move to “ladderize” nursing education so that thousands more can “graduate” as so called practical nurses. Practical Nursing is a two-year course that focuses on the basics of nursing.

“There is no local demand or positions for practical nurses within the Philippine Health Care Delivery system particularly in the light of the oversupply of nurses and subsequent unemployment of graduate nurses,” PNA’s Paquiz emphasized.

In a sense, all those schools that have mushroomed in the country overnight promising overseas employment for graduates of this two-year non-degree course are really just scamming hopeful parents and students of their hard-earned (or borrowed) money.

Paquiz said the promise of work abroad is not true as foreign employers prefer the four-year college-degree nurses who passed the Licensure Board Exams.

This is why the PNA had asked the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) to put a stop to this Practical Nursing program.

The PNA “strongly objects to the institution of the Practical Nursing program and vehemently rejects the proposed ladderization of the nursing curriculum,” a PNA statement said.

Our people must now be told that taking up nursing is no longer a foolproof means of getting out of this country to earn enough for a better life.

If what the nursing dean is saying is true, a nursing diploma has now become a kind of “fool’s gold” that can only disappoint for those who want a quick ticket out of our country’s poverty.

This is more reason why government, through CHED, must cut the number of nursing schools by enforcing tough quality standards on the nursing schools that are allowed to operate.

As of June last year, a staggering total of 632,108 students were enrolled in more than 400 Philippine nursing schools, up 30 percent or 145,875 from the 486,233 enlisted in 2006.

TUCP spokesperson Alex Aguilar urged regulators to “be extra vigilant, and see to it that nursing students are kept away from substandard schools.”

Aguilar urged the CHED to step up the policing of nursing schools nationwide to protect parents and students from the so-called “diploma mills.”

“We must stress that regulators are duty-bound to safeguard the hopes of tens of thousands of Filipino families to produce a nurse who will eventually lead them to greener pasture,” Aguilar said.

CHED’s failure to protect parents and students from substandard nursing schools had also been criticized by the Commission on Audit (COA).

In a report to acting CHED Chair Romulo Neri, the COA said it was necessary for CHED to exercise its regulatory function to “maintain and protect standards set to ensure the quality of nursing graduates.”

Fat chance that’s going to happen! CHED had been totally remiss in its duty to regulate nursing schools. We only have to look at the results of the licensure examinations conducted by the Professional Regulation Commission for proof.

In that controversial nursing examination in 2006, 42,000 took the exam on June 11 and 12 but ONLY 42 percent passed, despite the leakage.

According to COA, “from 2001 to 2005, only 111 of 263 nursing schools nationwide managed to have 50 percent of their nursing graduates pass the licensure examinations. Worse, at least 19 or 7.22 percent of these schools had failed to pass even a single student,” said the COA.

The COA also pointed out that in the last 10 years, not a single nursing school whose graduates fared badly in PRC exams had been closed by the CHED.

The failure of CHED to perform its function is also affecting the professional reputation of Filipino nurses.

In a sense, CHED is destroying our brand. COA made a very apt observation: nursing schools with poor quality nursing education continue to proliferate and consequently affect the global competitiveness of Filipino nurses in the eyes of employers in America, Europe and the Middle East.

The Philippine Nurses Association in America (PNAA) had issued a statement expressing its concern on just this point. It said it wants to be able to assure the people of America that there is quality nursing education in the Philippines but there is evidence that our nursing graduates, the greater majority produced are not passing our own licensure tests. It is a national embarrassment.

Now that there is already an oversupply of nurses, this popular strategy of becoming a nurse to escape poverty may no longer be viable. #

Postscript -- Over two months after Mara started her frantic search for a nursing position, she's still jobless and so are her batchmates who are now joined by the thousands who passed the December 2007 licensure exam. Tens of thousands more are set to join the ranks of the unemployed now that the graduation season is over.

We were initially "encouraging" our daughter Ara to take up nursing, but with the way things are going, I'm now inclined to stand down.

Pee-rtilizer

Wuz trawling the Net – as always – in search for quirkies for Sarat’s “Good Week, Bad Week” column here in XPRESS when I found this …. Hmmmm,, very interesting piece from the Philippine Star that could probably put the Philippines in the world map of agriculture modernisation.


Human urine seen as crop fertilizer

A government scientist urged Filipino farmers to use human urine as crop fertilizer.

Rafael Guerrero, executive director of the Philippine Council for Aquatic Marine Research and Development (PCAMRD) of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), said human urine is high in nitrogen.

“Veggies respond more to nitrogen,” he said, adding that continuous use of fertilizer exhausts the soil.

“There’s need for restoring life of the soil by bringing back organic matter,” he said.

According to research, urine is being actively considered as a fertilizer for use in food-crop agriculture in developed countries.

Farmers often recommend a dilution of 10 to 20 parts water to one part of urine for application to pot plants and flower beds during the growing season. Pure urine can chemically burn the roots of some species, reports said.

Urine typically contains more than 50 percent of the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium content of whole sewage, and is widely considered as good as or even better than commercially available chemical fertilizers or stabilized sludge from sewage plants.

Urine is also used in composting to increase the nitrogen content of the mulch, accelerating the composting process and increasing its final nutrient values.

In developing countries, the application of pure urine to crops is also rare, reports said.

In Japan, urine used to be sold to farmers who process it into fertilizer.

* * *

And as we’re at it.

Summer has finally come (change the subject to “hell” for us here in the Middle East).

And for us Filipinos, ‘tis the season for boys to subject themselves to a rite of passage to manhood as these pictures show:

can't help but remember a popular Pinoy rhyme on tuli (circumcision)...hope i got it right

Andres Bonifacio a-tapang a tao
a-putok a kamay, hindi a-takbo
a-putol a ulo, hindi a-takbo
a-putol a paa, hindi a-takbo
a-putol a-utin a-takbo a-tulin!

(my sincere apologies to our national hero)