Snow fall, wailing wall

The wall was wailing when we walked past the newspaper stands by Howard.  March surprised me as it often does, with its reserved sense of atonement and its off chance of snow.  I remember the March before the Iraq War.  I remember my toes and my hair and America as it used to be.  People said it would be Vietnam but I said, no it will be Iraq.  History looks similar but does not repeat itself precisely.  It is spoken word, not a record.  In this March my hair is long and my thoughts are clear.  Without love there is time for work.  Without love that work is numb.  

We walked past lots and lots of walls- down streets with names of warmer places, we spoke to a man about “Clockwork Orange.”  When will we have such movies about our time in Iraq?  I have not seen the country, but when the first soldier arrived I was there.  Even a March snowfall can’t separate Americans from America.  I am a pair of boots.  I was on the ground near Howard University.  My friend and I walked to a party where girls were dancing to protest “The Wall” and men were saying things like “wack” and “yo”.  

And I say, there is never one wall.  Every neighborhood has one, every man creates one.  Everyone woman and child is building walls to keep some people out and trap other people in.  We are all crying out from behind blockades.  In Gaza they build walls with brick and mortar, but in the Philippines it’s intimidation and fear.  In Washington it’s merely colors that separate and in California it’s language and ideas.

The snow fell like sleep from the tear ducts of God, like dust from the mines, like bodies on Mindanao.  Soldiers there can build walls with the fallen activists, with the brown people our governments say are “collateral damage.”  Is justice not of equal importance everywhere?  Do we not see that if these walls are torn down one at a time, they will only be rebuilt in other people’s cities?

I could hear the wall wailing when I was inside at the party.  Behind my cup of beer I tried to remember how to talk to strangers.  History looks similar but doesn’t  repeat itself precisely.  Iraq’s a red herring and the Philippines is a clay pigeon.  We see them behind the wall and we shoot them down, we don’t even bother to collect the plunder.

My boots touch down in the snow in Northwest.  When I walk past the wall, I caress it with my gloved fingers.

Shards of glass

I know this girl who lived in a village in Grenada and she told me about the glass that would wash up on the shores of the island, broken glass from bottles and other things that had been smoothed down by the salt of the sea.  In Oakland I find more glass in the street.  In Berkeley, the glass stays in the windows, between the yuppies in the bistros and the Asians in the noodle houses.  Homeless folks can feed off the warmth of the windows and in liberal Berkeley they’re not chased off the sidewalk, but there’s still no glass that stands between them and February cold.

In Oakland, I feel like most industrial towns, those windows are shattered.  What are we hiding?  Who are we fooling?  My imperfect heart longs to hear “We don’t like you for this” and “There’s no place for you here.”  Because in all this acceptance, in all these hyphenated words, I worry for honesty- just like salt worries down the shards in Grenada.  Just say that you’ve learned to hate, just tell me I’m not who you want me to be.  Speak to the darkness, because if you don’t, it can sneak up on us from behind.  

Don’t say equality like it’s a temple, speak to it like it’s a child- not a destination but a fleeting concept we must devote ourselves to chasing.  It will lead us to places we’d rather not go; our past, our future, downtown, out-of-town, past our parents, through our children, down rivers of tainted water and into cities left to fall.  If we ignore equality, we lose it, if we fence it in, we pervert it.  A child locked inside will never know life and equality kept in a block or two will wilt in its isolation.

On a cold day on the West Coast, I dream of walking along an island with a friend at hand: I run my fingers over a smoothed piece of glass that tells me time is endless and mankind is no more powerful than the salt in the sea.  Does my salt perfect or merely pacify?  Shards of glass can refract light into the darkest sewers- once glazed over they can get lost out among the sand.

Water and light

When I left Davao the moon was full enough to light the way off the island, to reflect in the open sewers and draw the foam of the waves ever closer to their death on the shore. The tides, so tragic and final, are unaware of their sadness. When resurrection is immediate and clear there is no need for grief.

My last night looking into the bay I could not bring myself to tears. I floated in the cool water, my belly button facing the stars from underneath my cotton pajamas. My body rejoiced in the homogeneity of complete fluidity.

Now delivered to my origins and to the fruits of over anticipation, I am surprised to see that even the moon, to whom I was so faithful, has continued on. Her phases are not like mine- they’re solid and real, they last and give meaning to earthlings below. The moon waxes and wanes at the heaven’s command while I fade like laundry in the sun. In Davao I’d believed we were something special. But here, the whiteness of the moon fades in the wattage from the skyline. And here, I’m no longer a daisy in a pineapple field, but a piece of paper in an air-conditioned warehouse. Loneliness is when I could slip through a crack in the floor and the world would just switch to a different box of toner.

What is it that draws us back to the known? The world is moving on and we’re keeping ourselves sane by imprisoning our memories in sound bytes and photographs. Water does not keep its pictures. Each ripple clears the palette. The waves do not record their breaking. The timelessness of being keeps everything safe in the sea. Back on land, time is dangerous. And the moon is the same now as it ever was but here instead of lighting the way, it just blocks out the view of the stars.

Christmas trees and pineapples

The white Christmas tree reaches out its coarse branches like the dead coral I saw off Mindanao.  The crown of thorns starfish had attached itself to the reef, sucking it dry: the coral around it was white as snow.  Nothing else on the reef is white, except for me, frog kicking my way through the tropical water jungle, taking in all I can before I go, giving nothing back but my carbon dioxide.  What is is like to be the predator of heaven?  Who can blame a starfish for what it’s evolved to do?

The white Christmas tree also lives in Mindanao, rather it was sent there by foreign manufacturers for Christmas, which was put there by the Spanish.  I saw the tree in one of the many western shopping malls on Mindanao, the tree’s whiteness representative of the snow the islanders have never seen.  Its branches curled like the fingers of an arian ice princess, its ornaments mirrors of consumerism.  Mindanao has its own trees, but they’re not for Christmas.

The air condition chilled me my last week on the island.  All I could think of was why I had to go home, even if home wouldn’t want me.  I was so tired of standing wide and pale, one of just a few pine trees scattered in the endless pineapple fields.  But now, far from the island and not yet home, I already long for something that is gone forever.  Pineapples are sweet, worth fighting through any prickles to get to the heart.  They were sweet enough to welcome a white pine tree like me.

I was sold, but I am not a soldier

In Lanao del Norte 30,000 people still live under tarps and sleep on the concrete, afraid to return home for fear of the fighting.  When we arrived there in October, we had little comfort for them- sacks of rice and packets of noodles, the hands of doctors and the minds of counselors.  I hefted the sacks on the shoulder; my brawn attempting to make up for my helplessness, our helplessness.  Thirty thousand is too many to make a difference and fighting that’s lasted decades and decades has no hope of waning.  The government says “No peace until disarmament” and the rebels say “No disarmament until justice.”  No one can hear what the people are saying- their voices are eaten in gunfire.

I took pictures of women and children, soldiers and Muslims.  I washed my hair in the pouring rain and noticed the beauty of the mountains.  The pictures seemed to say that something was happening even as the burned out homes said that something was over.  The babies in Barangay Munai were dehydrated and weary from diarrhea.  I covered my head and rolled down my sleeves.  Sometimes that’s all you can do.

A week after we returned I read in the paper that a measles outbreak killed fifteen children in Munai.  There were only a hundred or so in that place, so as I scroll through my pictures, I wonder which ones.  Who did I capture a last time?  Who among them now can only be seen in my camera?  There wasn’t money for inoculations, there was barely money for rice.  This is just the collateral damage of war, the collateral damage of a “supply/demand” system allows drug companies to charge whatever the hell they want because that’s the free market.  ”Free to choose,” capitalists say.  I guess these children just forgot to decide.  

For my part, I see the US Government has been generous to send guns to the Philippines, like this M-16 pictured above.  This child may be among the dead.  At the very least he lost a sibling, cousin or friend.  I wonder if he would have traded one of those bullets for a measles shot.  The price of production would have been about the same.  But the only shots that protect Western interests and foreign investment in Mindanao are those fired by soldiers.

When the Lord passed over the banana trees

That morning we left well before dawn.  We loaded into the back of the flatbed and stood shoulder to shoulder, back to stomach, feet on the edge.  Our walking sandals were strapped on our feet, theirs brown, mine white.  In a different time we would have carried walking staffs, but on that morning we all had our packs strapped to ourselves or the truck and our sarongs and hijabs wrapped around our heads to keep out the cold.  When the Lord passes over the Philippines, he does not dictate his people to make unleaven bread, but we did brew corn coffee on a fire under the stars and sipped it out of metal mugs, praising God with our slurps and silence.

Orion turned on his feet above us while we floated through the dark.  I could feel the cold migrating through my nose to my cheeks, my eyes turned up to the sky thinking of anything other than malnutrition and military occupation.  God moves the stars above all those things and the headlights of the truck pull us across the island below them.  Banana trees lined the road to the bridge- in the dark they looked like creatures trudging through a swamp, their massive leaves crowns of shadows over bodies bearing gifts of fruit for the Lord.  They told us the spirit of God rested on the other side of the bridge and we did not dispute.  Trees are not like people.  They are upright and true.

Inside my hiking sandals, my feet fell asleep and my pack wore a pain on the shoulder but my eyes did not come down from the sky and I did not blink when the cloud moved over us.  The fog was thin, merely a veil on the stars that gradually faded in the east, and it only took a breath before it floated into our past.  Can air still be cold when it’s inside the lungs?  Can clouds grab light and hurl it into space?  On that morning the whole universe revolved around a tiny valley on a tiny island in a vast ocean in an unending space.  And so the spirit of the Lord came down and blessed the valley with its cold breath.  Because banana trees are reborn each season, they have a better understanding of the world.  They were not surprised to see the Lord- they had their offerings out and ready to bless the cloud as it passed.  God’s children, on the other hand, still had sleep in their eyes and coffee on their lips.  

The Spirit isn’t bothered with details, it loves us all differently.  The cold kiss stayed on my nose until the sun rose a few hours later.

A space between

On my way home from a brief stay in a cloistered convent in Digos City, the bus took a path between the mountains and the sea.  We rode the space between, the land rising on our left and disappearing on our right, for a good two hours as we passed through massive crowds out to mourn their dead.  November first is the space between, when the Filipinos grieve who they have lost and not yet found; celebrating the sureness of death with ice cream and Coca Cola, packed in hobo tents in festive cemeteries.  Over the grave of a four-year-old girl I offered sugared breads and ready-made cookies.  I ate cold tuna with rice and vinegar and munched on Western style cornchips while I gossiped with coworkers.

November is a space between.  I am still here on Mindanao but I am already lonely for what I will miss.  My parents count down the days and prepare the fatted calf for their wayward daughter and at night I lay awake thinking of pumpkin pie and snowfall.  In some ways the tropics has consumed me but in others it has only driven me further into America: Here I have found a place that I love but it’s far from the place that makes me who I am.

But that’s not America either.  It’s the space between the earth and the sky, the room inside each cell of our being.  We are created by that moments in between the big moments because just like elections, life isn’t won on the night of the victory.  The real battle happens in the silence when no one is watching, when we’re just cruising along the water in a seat by ourselves.  November for me is just in between, but that’s all it ever is, really..  We’re just pages in between the beginning and end- filler in book whose cover we never glimpse but is all we ever know.  We’re trapped in the middle of something we don’t really understand.

I leaned back in my seat on the road from Digos and watched the mourners on the streets.  They had their candles lit high in the air and their bottles of Coke were tucked under their arms.  The smell of the sea mingled with their barbeque and rice and the moutains reached up to the sky.

Big moon

Certain things can never be translated, are not to be found for the people in between languages, those of us just passing through a place and a time.  Some words are only for one generation, are only for one country or population.  When in visiya I say the moon is big, I mean I’m thinking of the time the moon was looming over my parents’ house so large I thought its gravity would pull me off the earth.  But as we walked to buy cola in the October night, my Filipino friend laughed and said the moon was fat and white like me.  I allowed my mouth to smile in its luminescence.  Fat and white is only a general interpretation.  Tambok and puti mean something else.  Somewhere else.  This thought is lost, this moment is lost.  I record it in a way that only warps it into a half-truth.  I hope the moon isn’t self-conscious.

When mining threatens the flock

            Bishop Jose Manguiran is a friend to trees.  Before he said anything about the foliage around his residence, before I even met him, I knew this to be a fact.  His premises in the Diocese of Dipolog is a beautiful overrun forest.  If they were anything other than trees, they would smother the house itself.  But trees don’t smother- they open the air unto the sky.  And if for no other reason, this is why Bishop Manguiran leads the crusade against mining in Western Mindanao as he has for more than a decade: to protect the trees and the people who live under them.

“Tribal Filipinos are in danger,” Manguiran said on a warm August evening.  “The Canadian miners are (so) hard headed about mining.  Once they find gold they will never (stop).”   The tribal Filipinos he referred to is the Subanon tribe, one of the 18 indigenous peoples left on the island of Mindanao.  Their ancestral lands are those coveted for mining by “the Canadians”, or TVI, a mining corporation from the North American country.

TVI was the first corporation to open a mine in Mindanao post-Mining Act of 1995, a law passed by the Filipino Government that relaxed laws restrictions on foreign mining corporations operating in the Philippines.  It opened the doors for these large companies to gobble up vast quantities of precious land and virgin forests on Mindanao, and while other organizations soon followed in TVI’s lead, it’s this particular company who has remained a thorn in the side of the Subanon people.

TVI has various capitalistic projects in Western Mindanao but the main threats to the area right now are in Balabag and more so on Mount Canatuan, which is sacred ancestral land for the Subanon people.  But as Canatuan is not listed in the heritage inventory at the National Historical Institute, TVI did not need any consent from the people before it ripped the sacred mountain apart.

Bishop Manguiran is justifiably enraged.

“I went to (the area) to publicly pray with the tribal Pinoy leaders,” he said.  “We prayed to bring down (God’s power) against the Canadian mining project.  We prayed together- the leaders, Protestant pastors and myself.”

The suffering was reenacted to create solidarity with the people.

“I wore a black robe and I prostrated on the ground,” the bishop said with a wry smile that quickly fled from his face.  “Our Lord Jesus announces the good news, but he also denounces the bad news.  We are given that power in (his name).”

Bishop Manguiran did not shy away from the bad news.  He knows full well what is happening to the environment, to the livelihood and lifeblood of the people.

“Mining destroys the soil, it doesn’t just displace it,” he said.  “And (this is) the destruction of bio diversity, large animals down to microbes.  And geological restitution is already impossible.”

Cyanide, according to the Bishop, is just one of the many poisons used by the mining corporation.  In its continuous processing of gold and silver from the Canatuan, TVI releases abundant quantities of cyanide and other chemical components into the soil.  From the soil it seeps through into the water supply, where it poisons not only the fish and wildlife in the rivers but also the irrigation systems the river supplies. 

So not only does mining destroy the land in the mining site and then cause soil erosion to lands below, but the poisoning of the water supply threatens the entire ecosystem for miles around.  The Subanon’s livelihood dies with the wilderness.  They cannot eat the fish or drink the water and their crops will not grow in the toxic environment.

Bishop Manguiran holds the government responsible.  “Our laws are meant to protect the indigenous people (and the land).  But in implementation they only help the foreign corporations.”

Such laws include the Indigenous People’s Rights Act (IPRA), which the government claims protects ancestral lands.  But in actuality, the gaping loopholes in the law make it even easier for foreign investors to secure indigenous lands for their own endeavors.  According to Manguiran, the investors acquire these lands dirt-cheap and government officials, corrupted by bribes and desire for development, waive taxation on revenues.  It’s a dirty deal with godless entities.

Manguiran illustrated his conviction with an American dollar bill he keeps in his wallet.  “(Foreign investors) are hypocrites,” he declared, waving the dollar in the air.  He pointed at some of the writing.  “Here it says ‘In God we trust’.  But it’s not in God (they trust); it’s in their money.  In their filthy profit!”

And the profit, he said, which is their greatest strength, is also their greatest weakness.  Certainly it’s what allows them to buy up land and control the economy, but it also limits them, because without it, they fall apart.

“It’s the one place we can hurt (the foreign companies),” Manguiran said with a smile.  He said he believes there are alternatives to armed struggle.

“You see, they make the guns.  They manufacture the weapons.  When we fight, they just make more money,” he said with a laugh.  “If we minimize their profits, they will be shattered.

Bishop Manguiran alluded to one of his heroes, Mahatma Gandhi.  According the Bishop, Gandhi led the overthrow of the British in India by convincing Indians to boycott British goods, to only buy and use what they could make themselves.  And this is possible for Filipinos too.

“We (need to) minimize our use of chemical fertilizers, chemical medicines,” he said.  “We (need to) remind the people about the natural products and herbal medicines we used before (colonization).”  The people don’t need to buy farming equipment and textiles from foreign companies.  They need to develop their own “appropriate” technology and sustainable economy, he said.

“We need to minimize our buying and consuming,” Bishop said.  “We need to link with other (impoverished countries) throughout Asia to gain true independence (from the West).”

Before I left his home, the Bishop insisted that I take a moment to see his trees.  He boasted over 30 different kinds, ranging from huge towering fortresses to baby saplings he was nursing in tiny pots.  He pointed out the ones he was particularly proud of and took note of the ones he needed to prune or mulch.  And he could not resist a Biblical metaphor as we discussed the power of the West over the Philippines.

“You see, the Southern countries, like the Philippines and the people who are pro ecology are David,” he said.  The Western powers are of course, Goliath.

“We only have a slingshot to defeat that horrible giant and the battle may be long, but the hand of God is with David.” He crouched down and patted the dirt around the young sapling. 

When he stood up he said with a grin, “David always wins.”

One year: for better or worse

So, as September 9th has rolled around, I have now been in the Philippines for the entire year.  The sun returns where it was when I first stepped off the plane and into a muggy Manila morning, when I sat on my luggage outside the airport and wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into.  There seemed to be no end in sight then, home was 10,000 miles and 16 months away and now here it is, so close by, less than 100 days and still so much left for me here on an island I didn’t know existed this time last year.  

This causes me to reflect on who we are from year to year- if such changes are possible, just how unstable are our characters?  When I took time to grieve for the death of an American friend earlier this week, I did not fully recognize the eyes that grew red and puffy.  My sadness for injustice now lacks specificity which I once felt made me who I am.  The emptiness that harbored within filled itself with moments in the forest and with feelings of brotherhood.  My personal struggle that so defined my angst and sadness is now, a year later, a drop in the bucket of a movement of people.  And they’ve taught me that to fight for serious causes an activist cannot take himself too seriously.  To be a true crusader, one can never use a word like crusade.

On Monday my heart ached to not be home near my father, for this friend (Mark McCusker, some of you may have known him) was much more a friend to him, a younger brother, persistent spirit, though really none of these formal words suit him at all.  I hope in the next year to grow more like him- to not be someone who requires great recognition or dramatic sermons, but rather just a nod.  Or nothing at all.  I think one of the hardest lessons to learn is to only live for recognition from the true On High, and not from the mini-gods we create in societal hierarchy or institutional governance.  (Here I digress from mentioning anything about American politics, though I wonder when we, American Christians, will put serious pressure on our American politicians to treat all of God’s people with a little bit of dignity.)

And in the past year, I have learned that there is no one to really change anyone.  I can write and tell folks about what’s happening here, but if they don’t want to petition their politicians for different foreign policy or change their consumer habits to not benefit abusive big business, there’s nothing I can do.  If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I’m just me and that even that changes daily.

That’s enough.  Not every moment is profound and those that are only reveal their meaning further down the road.  But every moment is something and every chance to listen to someone society has deemed “unworthy” is a moment to be in solidarity.  And every moment in solidarity is a chance to hear from God.