Thank you, Ma'am.

A blurred shot of our class's last day with Ma'am Simbulan

Forty days after someone dies—that is the time to say goodbye. It is the time the soul leaves Earth and makes its way to heaven. It is final.

It took me 40 days to accept Ma’am Lourdes Simbulan’s death last May 13. As the cliché goes, no one saw it coming. And finding out one of my professors died was a shock. Before her passing I had this illusion my teachers were immortal, veterans of the real world whose experience made them invincible. But hearing how Ma’am Simbulan died changed all that.

I learned my teachers are human. Their bones break; they bleed; and they can ride taxis on a “killer highway.” Their luck can turn against them, put their taxis in buses’ ways, and wait for inertia to do its job.

Everyone dies. It is just a shame that no one was prepared for Ma’am Simbulan to go and that we only had 40 days after to make up for it.

Waking up at an ungodly hour to get to the College of Mass Communication at 6:30 a.m., running along Commonwealth to UP Technohub in the rain, attending mass after months of not going, and listening to the tribute at San Agustin Church ‘til 7 p.m.—this was my way of making up for it. It was my way of saying “thank you and goodbye.”

It is not like I knew Ma’am Simbulan well; I was only under her for one semester. But it is hard not to be affected by losing someone I had learned from and had once thought would never die, at least not in the way she did.

But perhaps she is not gone completely.

“I will see you in every student and journalist you have taught to be upright and honest, and who knows the meaning of what you call ‘the right thing to do,’ Mahal, I will see you in others who will continue what you stand for,” Professor Roland Simbulan, Ma’am Simbulan’s husband, said to friends, family and students before her ashes were stored at the San Agustin columbarium.

Imagine how long Ma’am Simbulan’s memory will live if all her students did “the right thing” and stood up for what she believed in. She would live beyond 40 days. Her legacy would last forever. -30-

(Submitted for a class at the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication last June 28, 2011)

Of University Toilets and Adaptation

Source: http://blog.toiletpaperworld.com

Bathed in soft yellow light and boasting brand new toilets, the female restroom at the first floor of the University of the Philippines’ College of Mass Communication was a haven from the gray, footstep-stained restrooms at Palma Hall. Where could a girl find any other bathroom with the luxury of a full-length mirror and bidets for all three stalls? The doors to each cubicle were unlike any in old AS (Palma Hall for the non-UPians out there)—dark brown wood, misty glass at the center and shiny silver locks that looked like it was strong enough to last for decades. All that was missing were toilet paper rolls for the girls’ disposal, but you can’t have everything.

City slickers take to bird watching in Metro Manila | Inquirer News

This is an article I wrote as a summer intern at the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Huzzah!

With the members of the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines after finishing a bird watching session at the Las Piñas-Parañaque Critical Habitat and Ecotourism Area

Check out the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines:
http://www.birdwatch.ph/
http://www.facebook.com/BirdwatchPhilippines.

Be One with Makiling

 

The kapa-kapa--an indicator of primary rainforest 
(Picture by Sara Pacia)

The magenta-pink beauty of this endemic Philippine flora captivated England so much that in 1854 it received an award from the Royal Horticultural Society of England. No one had yet seen such an unusual plant, with four brightly-colored leaves forming a cape over its stalk of small white flowers hanging overhead from the high bark of thick trees. The exotic kapa-kapa (kapa is Filipino for “cape”), as it is called in the Philippines, has since become popular among plant lovers. 

 

Metro Manila dwellers may not have to look far to see this plant themselves, as they are only a car ride away from where the kapa-kapa was first discovered: Mt. Makiling.

Marikina with the Papa

From inside a car on a sunny Sunday morning, I saw how time can change things: fix the road from potholed asphalt to smooth concrete, rename buildings or weather them down, add stoplights, and wash away homes; so that when one comes back to it, what was once home is now unrecognizable.

Walking Tips for the Would-Be UP Freshie

From http://tagta.ni.guissmo.frih.net/2009/06/up-diliman-map/

Good old Murphy once said anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Who knew he was talking to freshmen—or to me, for that matter, hiding in the restroom at Palma Hall; chin-length hair expanding because of the humidity, face contorted in worry, and back swimming in sweat; as if water were thrown at me, landing on my nape and gluing a clump of hair onto my skin?

No one told me there were shortcuts within the University of the Philippines’ Academic Oval, and I was too enthralled by the fact that this campus was actually big enough to have a 2 km oval to bother.

But please, no matter how amazing you think the huge campus can be: Never walk half the UP Academic Oval and back on a hot June day, wearing thick blue jeans and a heavy back-hugging backpack—no matter how much you think you’ve outgrown your heavy pubescent sweating.

Riding on the Old Days

The afternoon was hot in Binondo, Manila’s Chinatown, and the sun beat down on pedestrians’ backs. It was the kind of heat that experienced walkers know will bring rain in a few hours, or maybe even minutes.

 In the hodgepodge of stone and wooden houses and contemporary concrete buildings are the kalesas, horse-drawn carriages dating back to the time when the Philippines was still under Spain, either roaming the streets or parked by the shade of the historic Binondo Church on Ongpin along with the 21^st century cars and tricycles that already outnumber them.

  Mang Benjie and his kalesa were parked past Carvajal alley, where a left turn from the narrow street market would lead straight to the Church. He was one of three kutseros waiting for passengers to board amidst the calls from competing tricycle and pedicab drivers offering faster transportation. Business was slow that day—it has been for years with all the quick, new and motorized competition—so Mang Benjie and his horse had time to lounge by the shade.

Kutseros like Mang Benjie offer trips around Chinatown, and for the traveler on a tight schedule, this could be the best way to see this historic place in an hour…or to experience the kalesa before it’s gone.