Prints and Traces

There’s no fiesta like Christmas holidays.

Yesterday, a group of three young Lumad mothers and four very young children including a one-year-old baby came to the house to ask for pinaskohan (Christmas presents). No sooner had they announced their purpose in coming than I ushered them into the courtyard of my house and bade them settle on the benches and table that used to be utility components of our defunct bakeshop.

​One recalls a suspected CIA Filipino Jesuit priest who was instrumental in the Indonesian student-youths’ mobilization and participation in the coup d’etat that toppled President Sukarno of Indonesia some decades back.

In face of the pervasive injurious effects of the prevailing culture to the over-all social life of our people, there is an urgent need for a counter-consciousness to supplant it. This is a call of the first order and necessitates a propaganda movement that shall mobilize the youths in their greatest number. It shall be of a vigor and magnitude that can surpass the Second Propaganda Movement of the 1960s to the70s.

It is an economic malady, as much as it afflicts the political and cultural superstructure of society.

An abridged English version of a Talk I delivered at a Youth Forum in UP-Mindanao last November 21, 2014

This gentleman who has held the reins of the BALSA is none other than Ka Francis “Bong” Morales who has tirelessly engaged the tyrant seasons’ scourges of sun and rain,relentlessly braved the storms, swam against the tide.

I could not help but recall the almost inaudible voice with which he briefed me about the role I had to play in that people’s uprising in Eastern Visayas, the seat of People Surge.

A symbolic performance act opened the Kumperensiya ng mga Disaster Survivors at 8:00 AM in Cawachsi Conference Hall in Tacloban City last November 5, two days short of the November 8 anniversary of the tragedy caused by Yolanda Supertyphoon.

A germ of anger is whispered by the wind
To the heart of the calm ocean
Where it was seeded at its deepest
And soon grew into a whirlwind,

Churning and whirling and churning