Simplicity theology' for sustainable future

(Reprinted from Maurice Malanes'file)


Simplicity theology' for sustainable future

By Maurice Malanes, Ecumenical News International |

MANILA (ENI, 1/8/09) — A group of Christian leaders is pushing for a "theology of simplicity and caring" to bring hope to a "prodigal world" teetering under a burden of widespread economic crisis, and climate change that could submerge small islands in the Pacific.

"It is time to challenge the growth-is-success myth, which also has contaminated the Church, and shift to a more transformative way of thinking and lifestyle in tune with God's creative order and purpose," said Daniel Kim Dong-Sung of the Saemoonan Presbyterian Church in Seoul, which is said to be the oldest Protestant congregation in South Korea.

Linda Mead, a lay leader of the United Reformed Church in Britain, said the call of the times is for Christians to help lead the way in "living more simply amidst climate change."

Dong-Sung and Mead proposed actions such as taking public transport instead of using cars, recycling, and re-using products like old clothes, plastics and paper to reduce wastage and to help prevent unnecessary exploitation of resources.

"Let's recycle everything but sermons," urged Jione Havea, originally from Tonga and currently with the Charles Sturt University and the United Theological College near Sydney in North Parramatta, Australia.

The three Christian leaders were among participants from 24 countries who met from Dec. 12 to 16 in Manila to launch a global ecumenical movement for "economic and ecological justice" called Oikotree.

Mead reported that in Britain many churches are seeking to lower carbon emissions, to make lifestyle changes and to work with local communities. She noted that churches are looking at the theology behind climate change and how it will affect Bible studies and liturgy.

Edith Rassel of the United Church of Christ in the United States said her involvement in the movement for economic and ecological justice was not limited to resisting "neo-liberalism." It also includes promoting spiritual practices and lifestyles such as vegetarian meals and biking instead of driving.

Referring to small Pacific islands under threat of disappearing due to climate change, Makoni Pulu, a Pacific Conference of Churches youth leader, urged Christians to "see things in a new way as we wrestle to cleanse injustice and greed in our hearts."

Christians may also learn from indigenous and rural communities where sharing and caring are part of life, said Josephine Muchelemba, a Zambian theologian and church leader from Lusaka. "As children, my sister and I would share a blanket and our parents and neighbors would work the farms through the exchange of labor," said Muchelemba.

In the search for alternatives, Park Seong-Won of the Young Nam Theological University in Kyeong San, South Korea urged Christians "not to grow tired and weary in doing good" and to search for better alternatives to humanity's current rut.

Baguio's Ibaloi street names

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/regions/view/20090610-209669/Ibaloi-street-names-also-replaced
INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON
Inquirer Northern Luzon : Ibaloi street names also replaced
Inquirer Northern Luzon
Posted date: June 10, 2009

FROM SESSION ROAD and Leonard Wood Drive to Governor Pack and Harrison Roads, many of Baguio City’s streets have been named after American colonial officials who became the icons of a history still dominantly written and taught from the colonizers’ viewpoint.

But a few street names in Ibaloi reveal something else.

Before it was transformed into a hill station for colonial officials to escape the heat, humidity and dust of Manila, Baguio was home to the indigenous Ibaloi with their herds of cattle.

Many parts of what is now the business district used to ooze with springs where carabaos (water buffaloes) wallowed. Just a few meters from City Hall, a street was thus named Chanum (water).

Intersecting Chanum are Chugum (Wind) and Chuntug (Mountain) streets. These names may appear simple, but water, wind and mountain (or earth), besides fire, are considered among the essential elements of life.

So it was not surprising that Ibaloi and other Igorot peoples would build their homes near springs where they could have access to water.

Also near City Hall and behind Abanao (Wide) Street is a narrow street called Otek (Small). A street that goes uphill from Abanao is also called Kayang (High).

Other streets or roads and villages with Ibaloi names include Kisad (a condition when a priestess is possessed by a spirit during a religious rite), Bokawkan (wherever something has been removed), Lucban (orange), and Guisad (the same as Kisad and the name of a valley at the head of which the early Filipinos lived).

Some Ibaloi place names, however, have been replaced by colonial names and no longer evoke memories of the old topography and Ibaloi past, says Laurence Wilson, a former Presbyterian minister who moved to Baguio and became a mining prospector in the 1930s.

The market site used to be called Javjavan (native blacksmith shop); Cathedral Hill was called Kampaw (a social gathering place reminiscent of the Bontoc ato or Sagada’s dap-ay, a place where elders meet for dialogues and meetings); Teachers’ Camp used to be called Urengao (oily water); and below City Camp was Oliveg (whirlpool where rainwater runs out through a channel in the limestone).

Only a few Ibaloi street and place names have been retained. But Wilson’s study of these names, including those already replaced, shows that the Ibaloi knew and understood well every nook and cranny of their abode like the palm of their hands, something that got blurred as a result of colonization and urbanization. Maurice Malanes

What’s Baguio to Wood and Wood to Baguio

INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON

Inquirer Northern Luzon : What’s Baguio to Wood and Wood to Baguio
By Maurice Malanes
Inquirer Northern Luzon
Posted date: June 10, 2009

AUTHOR and former University of the Philippines Baguio Prof. Ricardo Torres Jr. has long been familiar with Leonard Wood Drive in Baguio City, but he discovered something that awakened his basic “researcher’s instincts.”

The road was named after the American colonial governor general who helped establish Baguio as a hill station where he and other colonial officials, sick soldiers, sojourning colonials, mine prospectors and bored wives of colonial masters in Manila would come to relax and recuperate.

But Torres, who authored books on development, had an interesting discovery about Wood, which, he said, could make the colonial official “a stuff of legends” and possibly “a perfect material for Regal Films.”

Wood captured Torres’ enthusiasm in 2007 when he visited Culion, Palawan.
Culion in Philippine history books is described as a “leper colony.” The place used to carry a stigma as the island was developed as a sanitarium to segregate and find the cure for people affected with the Hansen disease or ketong (leprosy).

On his last day in Culion, Torres was walking toward the old town and in the middle of the old plaza, he saw a big monument under the shade of old acacia trees. On the faded memorial plate of the monument reads: “Dr. Leonard Wood: Built by patients and friends of Dr. Wood.”

“I didn’t know Leonard Wood was a physician. I only knew him as a road,” Torres said in a paper he read during the Baguio Centennial Conference at UP Baguio in March.
Torres was among dozens of academics, researchers and historians who presented papers—all valuable fragments of Baguio’s history—during the conference, which was UP Baguio’s contribution to the city’s celebration of its centenary this year.

“I was intrigued why Leonard Wood deserved a road in an upland city and a monument in a far-flung, God-forsaken island town,” he said.

Awakened instincts

He typed “Leonard Wood biography” on Google and it provided 239,000 search results in 0.23 seconds. “Leonard Wood” alone had 1,160,000 results in 0.15 seconds.

Among other things, Torres discovered a Fort Leonard Wood for military personnel in Missouri and a Leonard Wood Institute that does military researches to help the US Army brace for the future.

Closer to home is a Leonard Wood Leprosy Research Center in Cebu. And it was Wood who advocated the search for cure and care of leprosy in Culion, ordering the allotment of a big chunk of the colonial budget for this.

Torres discovered that Culion was Wood’s “second Cuba.” Described as a physician with a passion, Wood helped eradicate yellow fever in Cuba.

But Torres’ search always points to Philippine history when nationalism and the clamor for independence from the United States was a raging movement.

Wood had strongly opposed this movement because the soldier and physician, Torres noted, believed that the Philippines was not ready for independence as the country and its people had a very poor and pathetic public sanitation.

Torres had another interesting note: Upon Wood’s advice, his wife got hold of the largest gold tiara that was unearthed in Butuan in southern Philippines in 1922.

Many colonial faces

History described Wood as harsh, heartless, ruthless, uncompromising and tactless. As governor general from 1921 to 1927, Wood was “impatient” with Filipinos agitating for independence. In 1923, he banned the display of photographs of Filipino heroes in public schools.

The famous remark of Commonwealth President Manuel L. Quezon, “I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans,” was said to have been made in reference to Wood.

And Wood’s dispute with Quezon included Baguio, said Torres. While Wood was advertising Baguio as the year-round national capital, El Debate, a magazine that Quezon controlled, “expressed that it is wrong to [advertise] Baguio since it is already popular and needs no propaganda” from someone like Wood.

The famous American writer Mark Twain also characterized Wood as a “colonial savage.” Twain cited how Wood in 1906 ordered and later justified the massacre of 600 Moro men, women and children in Mindanao.

Despite Wood’s ruthlessness and heartlessness, Torres noted another side of the colonial ruler, which could be worth considering at least in terms of governance and exercising political will.

Wood did not only push to develop Camp John Hay when he was commanding general of the Philippine Department from 1906 to 1908. He strove to develop Baguio as “an educational center of forum” for indoctrinating Igorot peoples.

When the basic infrastructures for the city were being built, Wood persuaded Mayor Eusebius Julius Halsema and the city council to fund a nursery for pine and eucalyptus trees to reforest barren areas, expressing alarm over the massive cutting of trees in the city.

He was said to be so concerned about the health of the population that, during one visit here, he dismissed the city physician for failing to contain 15 cases of typhoid fever.

Wood has ambitions, too

“Wood was a man with many colonial faces; a dedicated physician, a ruthless soldier and a military administrator with ambitions to be the next president of America,” Torres said.

He was a dedicated part of America’s Manifest Destiny. On a crusade and on the road to be a legend, Wood imposed a cure for countries that were, in his opinion, unable to govern themselves, Torres said.

Interestingly, Baguio helped cool Wood’s head. Torres noted how Wood and his wife would drive to Baguio “to relax from the rigors of colonial administration.”
He would take long walks and plan for its development and “you can perhaps hear him—no cutting of trees or I’ll shoot you,” Torres said.

According to him, Wood embodies one of the “idols of history” and perhaps the history of Baguio and the Philippines gives an “overemphasis on great men.”

Wood’s monument in Culion, said Torres, is an “idealized representation” of the ruthless man that was friend to the lepers but a burden to public finance.

“From another angle, Wood was made part of history by the councilors of Baguio, those who defined power,” he said. “In Culion, however, it was powerless Hansenites (lepers) that enshrined him to be part of history.”

In Baguio, Wood deserves that road named after him only if roads are for legends, Torres said.

After independence and after Wood, Baguio, he said, is now being built for lowland migrants, tourists, visitors, excursionists, traders and the ukay-ukay (used clothes) crowd.

As Baguio celebrates its centenary, Torres has posed a challenge as the city continues to idolize Wood: “Has anyone asked what happened then to the home of the Ibaloi? Is this part of history now just a mere representation?”

Thinking of the Filipino palate amid Mad Cow disease scare

(Reprinted from archive)

Thinking of the Filipino palate amid Mad Cow disease scare
By Maurice Malanes

Northern Luzon Inquirer--Thursday 29 March 2001

Time was when the traditional Filipino diet depended on where one lived.

Those who lived along the coastlines would rely mainly on fish and other seafood for their protein sources. The Igorot folk of old would get their protein mainly from wide varieties of upland beans and grains, and occasionally from meat when they would hold their traditional thanksgiving feasts called ca�ao or pedit.

Until now, most Igorot folk, particularly those in the hinterlands, still rely mainly on plant proteins and freshwater fish.

So traditionally the Filipino diet has been plant-centered. But thanks to the proponents of the steak and burger religion, the Filipino's healthier vegetable-fish-oriented taste buds shifted toward something meaty as steakhouses and burger chains continued to mushroom in urban areas from Tuguegarao City in Luzon to Davao City in Mindanao.

And proof that these establishments are cashing in on the Filipino's changing taste buds is that they now belong to the country's top 1,000 corporations.

With the Mad Cow and foot-and-mouth diseases now threatening cattle and livestock in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, which export a substantial amount of their livestock products to the Philippines, Agriculture Secretary Leonardo Montemayor has advised Filipinos to patronize locally raised cattle and livestock.

Problem is how can Filipino consumers be assured that the processed meats they buy from the groceries, such as sausages, hotdogs and hams, or the burgers they eat in fastfood chains are not tainted?


Advice

One good advice comes from Dr. Micaela Defiesta, Cordillera director of the National Nutritional Council.

"If it's not possible to eat beef and pork, we can go for fish," she said.

Fish, the traditional protein source in this archipelago, "unfortunately is not given priority," she said. "More and more Filipinos now go for burgers and steaks."

With the Mad Cow and foot-and-mouth diseases, Defiesta agrees with the suggestion that it is time for Filipinos to re-educate and re-orient their palates.

"If our forebears had simple but healthier taste buds, why can't we?" she asked. "My advice is for parents to put more fish in the diet of their children."

Fish, she said, has the same quality of protein as meat and has healthier polyunsaturated fats, which the body can easily absorb.

Other Filipinos, she said, can go for grains and legumes, and legume derivatives, such as tofu or soybean curd.

Defiesta said she saw the Mad Cow and foot-and-mouth diseases as an opportunity for concerned officials to look for, if not innovate, appropriate technologies and food security programs for various regions in the country.

Concerned government agencies and local government units, she suggested, could look at the prospects of further popularizing rice-and-fish culture which can help ensure food self-sufficiency in the localities, particularly in a landlocked region such as the Cordillera.

She also suggested the protection of the Cordillera's river systems that are rich in exotic fish species.

The Cordillera has seven major river systems and several tributaries, which have helped provide the protein sources of villagers since time immemorial. The rivers teem with eels, lobsters and various fish.

Mining operations and big dams, however, have threatened some of the river systems.

Still recovering from the pollution of a copper mine in the 1970s, for example, is the Amburayan River, the source of protein for villagers from Kapangan and Atok in Benguet and those in the uplands of La Union.

The Agno River has also lost its exotic fish species because of mining operations in Itogon town and after the Binga and Ambuklao dams were built in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mining operations in Mankayan town also continue to threaten the Abra River.

If only to secure and ensure the health and nutrition of rural folk, Cordillera's river systems must also be secured and protected, Defiesta said.

Donors help keep school for blind afloat

Donors help keep school for blind afloat
By Maurice Malanes
Inquirer Northern Luzon
Posted date: June 02, 2009

TWO years ago, a US Navy retiree was looking for the Tahanang Walang Hagdanan, a house for persons with physical disabilities, in Baguio City so he could offer his help, but the driver of the cab he took brought him instead to the school of the Northern Luzon Association of the Blind (NLAB).

The man did not turn his back, however. After assessing the needs of the blind children, the retiree, who preferred not to be named, volunteered to supply the school with four sacks of rice monthly and to provide dinner every Monday for the 39 children under its care.

He has been doing this since and has pledged to continue helping when the school year opens this month.

For Dona Rosario, NLAB president and executive director, the taxi driver’s mistake was serendipity. “Who knows the retiree was led by the Holy Spirit?” she says.


Quiet benefactors

An Indian couple has been doing the same thing, providing snacks or lunch once a week for the children.

This breed of quiet benefactors has kept afloat northern Luzon’s only school for the blind, especially at a time when its overseas donors had reduced their funding, says Rosario.

The school offers free elementary education to visually impaired children in northern and central Luzon and continues to encourage parents to enroll their blind children there.

Graduates cross into regular high schools and later pursue university or college education, or technical or vocational courses, such as health massage.

Economic crisis

The NLAB’s future, Rosario says, is at stake because its donors are also affected by the global economic crisis. The school is supported by the Christoffel Blinden Mission (CBM), a church-based German donor; Heinz Woelke Foundation; the Diocese of Baguio-Benguet; and other local civic, educational and religious groups and individuals.

Last year, the CBM provided nearly half of the needs of the pupils. This school year, it pledged only 33 percent, saying the current economic crunch affected its supporters among the low-income European parishioners, says Rosario.

The NLAB spends P6,500 for each child monthly or P253,500 for the 39 pupils enrolled last school year. With the reduced funding, it has to initiate fund drives to sustain its mission.

Rosario is hoping that more people will follow the examples set by the Navy retiree and the Indian couple. “Many people in both government and the private sector have yet to appreciate that if these visually impaired are educated they can become productive [members of society],” she says.

She cites blind couple Rolando and Martha Bitaga, who teach academic subjects, including music, at the NLAB school. Both are graduates of the school.
Other graduates have established their own massage clinics, helping reduce the number of beggars in the city, says Rosario.

The NLAB faces another difficulty this school year. Its lease on the lot along the Marcos Highway, where its two-story school has stood since 1985, will expire this month, forcing the school to relocate to a smaller house on Bokawkan Road.

Repair work of the practically dilapidated house is not Rosario’s only concern. She also has to face complaints of neighbors who claim that the front fence mended by the NLAB workers was illegal because it was not covered by a building permit.

The irony of it, says Rosario, is that the complainants are encroaching on parts of the NLAB property.

Rosario did her homework. Citing a historical document showing the original fence, she explained to city authorities that the NLAB was just involved in restoration work.

At times, Rosario feels like giving up. A former nun who refused to get paid for her services, she says her difficulties and trials sometimes stress her out, giving her hypertension.

“I cannot just abandon these children,” she says. “They are my inspiration.”

Helping heal wounds of Mother Earth

INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON
Inquirer Northern Luzon : Widow helps heal wounds of Earth
By Maurice Malanes
Philippine Daily Inquirer Inquirer Northern Luzon
Posted date: April 21, 2009

NATURAL or organic farming has a way of helping Florence Macagne-Manegdeg recover from what she calls a “senseless murder” that left her a widow and to raise by herself two young daughters after her husband, Jose (Pepe), was murdered more than three years ago.

“Our backyard now teems with fruits – peaches, plum, persimmon, papaya; vegetables – soybeans, lettuce, tomatoes; flowers, such as jade, zinnia and vines; and herbal plants,” says Macagne-Manegdeg or Dom-an, as she is called by her family and friends.
With her teenage children, she tends her backyard in her home village in the upland town of Sagada, Mt., Province, where she was born and raised.

“In dabbling in natural farming, I am, in my little way, helping heal the Earth even as farming helps me and my daughters heal our wounds from our tragedy,” says Dom-an, 36.

Pepe, a 37-year-old lay leader of the church-based Rural Missionaries of the Philippines, was shot and killed on November 28, 2005, in San Esteban, Ilocos Sur.
He had just finished briefing farmers on human rights and was waiting for a bus to Metro Manila when he was attacked. He was to fetch his wife, who was arriving from Hong Kong, where she worked as a maid.

Beyond pity, rage

Coming home only to see her husband’s remains in a coffin was tragic enough for Dom-an and her daughters.

“I am through with mourning and grieving, and I have to be strong for my daughters,” she says. “I should no longer dwell in anger and sorrow. I should not fall into the trap of self-pity. I have to move on instead toward my journey of peace and healing.”
Dom-an is exhausting all avenues to seek justice for her husband. She has been writing to and engaging concerned officials in the military, the Commission on Human Rights and some members of Congress, as well as regional and international human rights watchdogs.

But she is also engaged in what she calls “peace and healing initiatives,” which include promoting organic farming and organizing an organic farmers’ cooperative in Sagada.

She says the key movers of the cooperative are widows, families of overseas Filipino workers and women farmers.

Through her backyard garden, Dom-an has helped show that “healthy and joyful” food could be grown the traditional and natural way, especially in Sagada where chemicals and pesticides are used in some commercial vegetable farms.

In helping promote organic farming and the cooperative, Dom-an has to collaborate with the municipal government, community elders, the non-government Montañosa Research and Development Center, and the Episcopalian Church-supported St. Theodore Hospital.

“In the process, I’m also reintegrating with my community, my roots, and this is all part of healing,” she says.

Cultural envoy

In between preparing compost, sowing seeds and planting seedlings, Dom-an also dabbles in indigenous music, particularly the nose flute, which she has been playing since 1993.

The nose flute is spiritually significant for Dom-an because one uses one’s breath to produce music from the indigenous instrument.

Playing the flute, apart from writing poetry and essays, she says, is one of her ways of “communing with our living planet.”

For her music, Dom-an was invited by the Sacred Earth Network to help perform in a “healing music concert” on Saturday at the La Mesa eco-park in Quezon City.

Dom-an always brings along at least two nose flutes and she would play them if given the opportunity, making her a cultural envoy of her hometown.

During the congressional inquiry on human rights issues at the University of the Philippines Baguio last month, she played the nose flute before reading a statement about the circumstances and the impact of the extrajudicial killing of her husband.

On March 28, when many of Baguio’s establishments switched off their lights for “Earth Hour,” Dom-an did a “Spark in the Dark” concert at Bliss Café in the city.

Peace, healing institute

Despite the violent death of her husband, Dom-an is now busy with peace and healing initiatives. Part of her long-term dream is establishing the Kasiyana Peace and Healing Institute.

Besides promoting organic farming and cooperativism, the institute seeks to complement the indigenous restorative justice system of Sagada, which stresses peaceful resolution of conflicts, reconciliation and healing, rather than falling into an endless cycle of violence through vengeful killings and retaliation.

“The institute dreams of helping heal our wounds and those of our very own planet,” says Dom-an.

Faith-based public vigilance emerges in Baguio

(Filed with PDI 31 March but unpublished as of 1 April 2009)


Faith-based public vigilance emerges in Baguio
By Maurice Malanes

BAGUIO CITY, 31 March – A new form of public vigilance based not on ideology but on faith has emerged in Baguio.

This has been dramatized by a well-attended March 30 religious-led multi-sectoral “awareness rally” against the reported opening of a casino at Camp John Hay. And not only the Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelicals and Pentecostals, but also Muslims participated.

Instead of the usual red flags and banners of militant activists, the estimated 2,000 or more anti-casino rally participants held streamers, placards and banners bearing biblical passages and statements pointing how gambling could corrupt society’s sense of right and wrong, break up families, and could add to the city’s rising crimes.

Marching for almost a kilometer from the Baguio Convention Center down Session Road, the rally participants led by bishops, priests, pastors and an imam converged at the City Hall grounds where they held a 20-minute ecumenical worship service.

Selected representatives of the Baguio Multi-Sectoral Group and the Baguio-Benguet Ecumenical Group later made an audience with members of the City Council who were having their regular session.

The council accommodated the religious leaders, who also officially handed over a resolution opposing the opening of a casino in Baguio, which was signed by 15,000 signatories in just a week.

Their resolution pointed that the Bases Conversion Development Authority and the Camp John Hay Development Corporation “surreptitiously signed” a “Casino Cooperation Agreement” on July 1, 2008 for the establishment of a casino at Camp John Hay without informing the Baguio public.

Their resolution also said that the establishment of a casino at the former American resort violates the second item of 19 conditions, which the city council in 1994 required before approving the Environmental Compliance Certificate of the Camp John Hay developer, Fil-Estate.

The second condition contained in City Resolution No. 362, series of 1994, states that “the BCDA shall ensure only wholesome, family-oriented entertainment and recreational activities are conducted within the (John Hay Economic) Zone” and that “no casino operations shall definitely be allowed under any guise or form.”

Participation in governance

At the council’s session hall, the religious representatives accompanied by lawyer and church lay leader Alex Bangsoy actually engaged the city council and in a way participated in policy-making and governance as they took turns in arguing why Baguio, being an educational center and a city with a youth-dominated population, couldn’t be transformed into a gambling capital.

Vice-mayor Daniel Fariñas assured the religious leaders that the city council wouldn’t allow casino or gambling in any guise or form. To this, Roman Catholic Bishop Carlito Cenzon of the Diocese of Baguio said he had so much confidence in the city council that it wouldn’t fail its constituents.

But Cenzon asked whether the 19 conditions, which the city council required in 1994 for the development of John Hay, were weakened as was reported.

Earlier, Bangsoy cited a Philippine Daily Inquirer report, which quoted Mayor Reinaldo Bautista as saying a 2003 Supreme Court ruling on Camp John Hay had weakened the 19 conditions set by the Baguio government as prerequisites for its development, including a prohibition against a casino inside the tourism complex.

This statement plus the council’s “changing positions” on casino and other gaming forms are, according to Bangsoy, “very disturbing.” He again cited the same Inquirer report (March 8), which quoted BCDA president Narciso Abaya as saying “the city’s position on the casino kept changing.”
Besides the 19 conditions for the operation of the Camp John Hay Special Economic Zone, the city council has banned all forms of gambling in Baguio, including a casino, since 1989.

The council has affirmed this ban in a resolution approved in 2002, and another measure passed on Feb. 2 this year.

But Abaya noted the city council also passed a resolution in 2003 that approved the request of the Camp John Hay-Poro Point Development Corp. (JPDC), the office that previously managed the CJHSEZ, to operate a gambling and entertainment complex there. The JPDC has been replaced by the John Hay Management Corp., a subsidiary of BCDA.

The only condition the council imposed in that resolution was that only tourists and Camp John Hay club members can enter and participate in gambling activities. The council again overturned this 2003 resolution with another resolution in 2008.

In the council’s recent dialogue with the religious leaders, councilor Pinky Rondez was already pushing for the outright repeal of the 2003 City Council Resolution 248, which practically approved a casino at Camp John Hay.

Bautista had said no casino would rise inside Camp John Hay “while I am the mayor.”

Still, leaders of the Baguio multi-sectoral group – the same group that catapulted a cash-strapped Braulio Yaranon to the mayoralty seat in 2004 on an anti-gambling and anti-corruption platform -- made a strong message to City Hall last March 30 – that they are closely watching their elected officials every step of the way.

Landscapers meet, compete

Landscapers meet, compete
By Maurice Malanes
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:50:00 02/15/2009

Filed Under: Construction & Property, Economy and Business and Finance

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines—At 45, Simplicio “Simple” Sawey, has remained single partly because he already is married to his passion—landscaping.

“Landscaping and propagating and buying and selling plants are my bread and butter,” says Sawey, a native of Cervantes, Ilocos Sur, who quit an education course when he had only a year left to finish it.

For Sawey, dropping out of college didn’t mean that he would forever be tied to a blue-collar job. Instead, he let his creativity run loose and wound up with a livelihood to which he is totally devoted.

Stress relief

Edna Dollaga, a government employee and a mother, also shares Sawey’s passion for landscaping. But she considers it more of a hobby that relieves her of stress from work.

“I can say that I have less wrinkles than many women my age because of the stress-relieving effect of the orchids and other plants I water each morning,” she says.

But landscaping, as Dollaga has found out, can also be profitable.

Another landscaping hobbyist is Rose Cuilan, an entrepreneur who shares her passion with her husband. Her husband propagates white anthuriums and other plants, including balete, which form part of Cuilan’s landscaping work.

Like Dollaga, Cuilan gets delighted, while the stress of work flows out of her, “as I get to encounter plants with blooming flowers.”

Sawey, Dollaga and Cuilan are among artists competing in a landscaping event under “Market Encounter,” one of the features of the Panagbenga (Baguio Flower Festival).

Extra income

Market Encounter at Burnham Park also offers landscape artists the chance to generate income by allowing them to put up stalls at the park where they can sell plants.

Through Market Encounter, potential clients may get to meet talented hobbyists and landscape artists to help them spruce up their gardens.

The landscaping entries Sawey had submitted in past competitions, for instance, did not only catch the eye of local clients but also resort owners from as far away as Marinduque and other provinces.

The landscaping tilt has two categories: The open and Cordillera.

Under the open category, the landscape artist can unleash her creativity, making use not only local but foreign designs as well.

The second category involves designs patterned after the Cordillera landscape. Apart from the mix of perennial and non-perennial plants, a common thread ties the 11 entries under the Cordillera category—the integration of stone walls that reflect the age-old engineering skills applied on the rice terraces in the region.

Rocks and stones

But the 14 entries under the open category also has something in common with those vying under the Cordillera category: The use of rocks and stones.

“Rocks and stones really play a big part in landscaping,” says Sawey, who has submitted entries in both categories.

Almost all the entries in the two categories also incorporate water—a waterfall or a spring in the Cordillera category, and gushing fountains or wishing wells in the open category.

Salvaged driftwood and old pieces of lumber have also found comfort among the plants in the various landscape entries.

Organized as the Panagbenga Society Landscapers Association, the landscapers and plant enthusiasts understand a common language—plant taxonomy. And in knowing each plant species or variety, they have come to know how to make the right mix of plants in a landscape.

Landscaping and trading plants at an orchidarium in Burnham Park occupy a great part of Sawey’s life and art.

He says he feels fulfillment in pursuing his passion, which also allows him to earn enough to send poor but talented relatives to school.

For Dollaga, landscaping, even as a hobby, has helped her augment her income as a government worker in these hard times.

Since she also incorporates white anthuriums in her landscape entries, Cuilan is promoting the rare plant, which she and her husband propagate in a greenhouse. The Cuilan couple supplies white anthuriums to regular customers in Metro Manila.

The three landscapers, and other participating artists, tend to shy from discussing the income they generate in creating art.

But lawyer Damaso Bangaoet, a Market Encounter coordinator and one of the founders of Panagbenga, pointed to a brand new vehicle parked at Burnham Park, and tells the Inquirer: “Katas ng landscaping yan (That vehicle came from a landscaper’s earnings).”