Earlier last week, while most of us are into the slapping fiasco between presidential candidates Mar Roxas and Rody Duterte, the peasants in Compostela Valley are fighting for their land, fighting for their lives.
Around a long-neck bottle of Emperador we gathered and happily exchanged holiday greetings and peered on each other’s radiant faces and exhibited our dirty-white teeth to one another and hummed or sang the jingle bells and silver bells the way we wanted our uneasy joy to manifest on this bright evening twodays before Christmas Day.
Not only students, but teachers also suffer from end of sem blues: wrapping up lessons, checking papers and exams, calculating grades, beating deadlines.
Reading Roland Simbulan’s book The World is a Classroom — and this time about Vietnam— I couldn’t help but breath a mute cry of deep, deep, deep admiration. My heart skipped and pumped into my eyes a teardrop.
A continuing discourse on Neoliberalism is needed in order to awaken all and sundry and address the perennial issue of poverty and underdevelopment that has plagued the Filipino nation for so long.