Lift

 

LOVE came disguised as fear. Professor Madrileña dela Cerna had a formidable reputation even among the terror teachers undergraduates love to parody when they are unable to separate love from the farrago of fear and awe.

Later, when I taught in the same campus, I respected from a remove a senior member of the faculty, research director, and advocate of causes from women empowerment to history and heritage.

In 2007, I crossed the threshold when Ms. Madz became my editor in the Cebu Provincial History Project.  

The husband and I conducted field interviews and archival research for the histories of Badian and Alegria. We worked on the field with our two sons in tow and, once or twice, with Ms. Madz, not quite yet a tita but no longer the paragon of academia whose presence always snapped me out of my slouch, real and imagined.

After work took the husband off the research, I continued with the writing of both histories and lapsed, time and again, in meeting deadlines. I dreaded the confessionals with Ms. Madz.  Bending slightly over the short maternal figure and leaning to hear her soft-voiced inquiries, I felt the weight of my transgressions. 

Being Ms. Madz, she jacked me out of that sinkhole. If ever there was a person destined to be a mentor, she was. She shepherded our team to cross the finish line years after the deadline with ferociousness and empathy. 

Ferocious because she recognized no obstacle in seeking the truant among us. She persisted and succeeded in getting a contemplative order to grant her a phone call so she could ask a fellow writer, who was in strict seclusion in monastic silence, about a manuscript in progress.

Empathetic because she made us listen to another writer digress into the manifold ways the families in one town cooked “humba (braised pork belly)”. Ms. Madz praised the writer after this soliloquy, which made me savor history for the first time as pork lard simmered slowly melts on the tongue and suffuses the soul.

“Humana gyud (finish it),” she said in her soft as steel Madrileña tone after she listened to my personal Calvary. And we did, those town histories. As I did years later, my master’s thesis. 

When I talked to her about the dissertation I am pursuing on Cebu journalism, Ms. Madz was already my mother’s “classmate” in a renal unit, undergoing regular hemodialysis. 

The familiar figure was much diminished by the machines softly whirring, flushing and cleaning blood. Somehow she always turned our talks to focus on what I had to finish. Last July 27, my shepherd, and for countless other students and mentees, went home. 

“Nahuman na (it is finished)”. Puhon, Ms. Madz, in our next confessional.

Source of the image of Prof. Madrileña de la Cerna: cebudailynews.inquirer.net

* First published in the August 1, 2021 issue of SunStar Cebu's Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

Pass the bucket

IT took nearly two months before the “Ice Bucket Challenge” showed signs of morphing.

Launched last June, the campaign has a participant endure having a bucket of ice-cold water dumped on her or him. The freezing sensation supposedly resembles the numbing effect of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), where nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord deteriorate until the person dies.

ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease after the baseball icon revealed his diagnosis to the public in 1939.

In the original version, one either took the Ice Bucket Challenge or donated $100 to fund research to find a cure. The version that’s currently popular involves taking the drenching, donating to ALS research, and challenging others to do the same.

Fueled by social media, the Ice Bucket Challenge has gone viral. According to Rappler, donations to the U.S.-based ALS Association reached $41.8 million during July 29-Aug. 21, 2014, compared to only $2.1 million during the same period in 2013.

Yet, it seems that the Ice Bucket Challenge’s success in fund-raising is not yet matched in the educational front. Critics say there is too much focus on the spectacle of a public dousing, with some participants not connecting the act to ALS awareness or uploading only their videos and not donating to credible institutions for ALS research.

When I came across Daphne Oseña-Paez’s Aug. 20 blog post about her response to the Ice Bucket Challenge, I appreciated that she emphasized in her video and post the effect of ALS on people and their families, the importance of donating to fund medical research, and breast cancer awareness.

According to the celebrity blogger, she included breast cancer prevention in her ALS challenge because the Philippines has the highest cases in the region. Since early detection is still the best option for saving lives, Paez donated free mammograms for those in need through I Can Serve Foundation.

Asian activists have also modified the Ice Bucket Challenge to respond to local realities and needs. According to an Aug. 26 report by the Agence France-Presse (AFP), Manju Latha Kalanidhi of India came up with the Rice Bucket Challenge. The rice researcher has convinced 138,000 Netizens so far to focus on feeding the hungry and not wasting water.

In Nepal, Fill the Bucket Challenge is mobilizing buckets of food and medicine for victims of flooding and landslides. In Sri Lanka, where drought and water scarcity affects communities, the Ice Bucket Challenge “insults” the suffering of those deprived of this basic, noted activists interviewed by AFP.

In its original version and various mutations, the Ice Bucket Challenge reaffirms the belief that social media can be used for good, that its reach and power to persuade and mobilize extend beyond the momentary and sensational.

Former students, colleagues and friends of Professor Madrileña de la Cerna recently banded to form a Facebook (FB) community. “MADZ,” the FB page they created, is dedicated to mobilize online help for Ms. Madz, who needs approximately P51,000 a month for her twice-weekly dialysis treatments in a private hospital in Cebu.

When she retired years back from teaching full-time at the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu, Ms. Madz was not just known for spreading love of history inside the classroom but also out of it. Indefatigable, she worked with nongovernment organizations and local governments to preserve and promote local history and culture.

A professional who embraced the concept of service so publicly is, by contrast, private in her personal life. Until the FB page was created by a colleague, few of us knew she shouldered her dialysis treatments for more than three years with her pension as a retired public school teacher.

Like the proverbial glass, social media can be either half-full or half-empty. The choice is ours.


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


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 31, 2014 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column