The rescue

SURROUNDED by a phalanx of reporters and recorders, Presidential Assistant Michael Dino presented an unenviable sight before and after the Cebu Citizens-Press Council (CCPC) quarterly meeting.

But during the Aug. 18 meeting of the CCPC, where he was a guest, the Visayas alter ego of President Rodrigo Duterte mentioned a detail that made me curious.

He said that even before he has moved into his office at the Malacañang sa Sugbu, “half a sack” of letters is already awaiting.

I turned this fact over and over in my mind, wondering if I ever would receive such a bounty in my lifetime. When my boys—a husband and two sons—were younger, they wrote me letters, often with a drawing or two.

And then text and email came, followed by Hangouts and Facetime.

Also kept as keepsakes are the yellowed notes that a class presented me during one birthday. Now yellow and curling in a paper box covered with news articles, my students’ letters linger longer than the chocolate cake we shared.

Letters, of course, have different flavors. Mr. Dino implied that some of the letters may be divulging more names that may end up in a narcolist.

As a child, I woke up every morning to my late father’s favorite radio commentators reading aloud letters demanding official action. These were sent by “concerned citizens”.

The current War on Drugs and the lengthening “Kill List” stain the civic letter-writing of old with a repute that puts it more in league with medieval plots, wily whispers, and Judas kisses.

More than political vagaries, technology accounts for the dramatic decline of letters. Reading the missives drafted by students for news sources, I am appalled at times to discover how the curtness, informality and self-entitlement of instant messaging and Tweets have turned the letter into a Frankenstein creation of mismatched intentions and expression.

So Education Secretary Leonor Briones’s decision to continue the “Salamat Po (Thank You) Letter Writing Project” on its fourth year should be celebrated by all those who believe there is more to communication than composing and reading “Wer U :-)”.

The Department of Education (DepEd) and the Philippine Postal Corp. (Philpost) will award P50,000 to a student who mails at any post office a handwritten letter to any person he or she is grateful to.

Written in Filipino or English and using the proper format, every letter sent locally entitles the student to a raffle coupon. If sent abroad, the letter writer receives two raffle tickets.

Prizes of P10,000 will be given to students, as well as to their teachers and schools, in the semi-grand draw on Mar. 15, 2017. The grand winner will be announced on April 2017, also the Philpost anniversary.

I would have preferred that the contest involves reading and selecting the winning letters. Other stakeholders have to take up the slack to get more than the luck of the draw to restore the lost art of writing letters.

For instance, will newsrooms recognize the most unforgettable letters written by the public? Do editors still print a letter that’s handwritten? Who has the patience to untangle penmanship?

Letter-writing, penmanship—what else is for the rescue?



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 21, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Second reading

HOW many times should one reread?

When I was a young student, I blamed my teacher when I could not understand an essay after the first reading. Why did she choose something so difficult?

Now that I am older and still a student, I know better than to blame the teacher. I blame the writer: why did this fellow have to make his point only after 600 pages?

Historian Chen Shou of the Jin Dynasty had a retort for that: “When a book is read a hundred times, all its meaning naturally becomes clear.”

I find no fault in his logic except that during his lifetime (233-297 A.D.), he didn’t have to deal with a Gmail inbox left unchecked for a day.

But even to this logic, the Republican Party has a rejoinder. They are going over 55,000 pages of emails that Hillary Clinton sent when she was U.S. secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

The person most likely to become the next U.S. president is under fire for using a personal email account when she headed the State Department from 2009 to 2013.

The Republicans say they want to study how Clinton handled the September 2012 attacks in Libya. The real intent is to find fault.

Malice does not always guide rereading. Last May 19, Alvin Yapan posted on Facebook a photo of the Grade 10 textbook, “Filipino: Panitikang Pandaigdig,” whose table of contents described the Harry Potter series as a “novel from the United States”.

Again on Facebook, Joseph Salazar posted about the same book, which cited the Epic of Gilgamesh as a “literary work from Egypt”.

Most 16-year-olds know British writer J. K. Rowling, creator of Harry. Few Filipino teenagers and their parents know the Epic of Gilgamesh. I didn’t.

Thanks to the vigilance of Yapan and Salazar, who are assistant professors at the Ateneo de Manila University, I verified online that the Epic of Gilgamesh is a poem of ancient Mesopotamia. In modern times, Mesopotamia covers a region that includes Iraq, as well as parts of Syria and Turkey.

Education Secretary Armin Luistro has admitted the “editorial lapses”. He said the Department of Education remains “open” to “valuable” feedback from stakeholders.

But this latest textbook error casts another shadow on the K to 12 program. How can we overhaul the educational system when slipshod scholarship bedevils the very nuts and bolts holding up the structure?

For better or worse, textbooks shape not just memories but attitudes, which harden into bias.
For years, I blamed “kaingeros” for their practice of burning a forest to clear space for farming. The notoriety stuck after more than a decade of textbooks and teachers repeating kaingin’s list of ecological crimes: deforestation, soil erosion, flooding.

As a community worker covering the virgin forests in Negros Oriental (barely) and southern Cebu (none) during the 1980s, I saw other ghouls devouring our forests: illegal loggers, furniture and fashion accessory exporters, and the small- and big-time leeches that grew fat on bribes when trees were cut and transported without permits.

Recently, researchers from Melbourne and Copenhagen reported at the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture that swidden agriculture or kaingin offers climate-change benefits, aside from giving residents a livelihood that does not disrupt ecology.

Will scholars finally correct the injustice to kaingeros? It’s time to reread.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 31, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”