Chapter 4

Every Sunday, if you have a newspaper, or else on Wednesdays, when the mail comes in, you’ll find yourself inundated with so much ‘junk’ mail that if you had to go through them all, it would take you more than a day to finish.

While a lot of Americans find this annoying, I for one saw it as really exciting. Why? Let me count the ways....

PENANG, Malaysis (MindaNews/07 April) -- At past 5 pm, Tuesday, April 6, Uncle Harris was stabbed and shot dead while riding along in his motorbike in Cotabato City Plaza. He was brought to the Regional Hospital but was declared dead on arrival. He was 51 years old.

My earliest and most vivid memories of my maternal great grandaunts would be of three beloved matriarchs of Laminusa island of Sulu of southern Philippines: Omboh Dindu’, Omboh Ua’, and Omboh Saning, who had lived in the late 1960s up to the late 1970s and were then ushering into their ripe late mid-life age. These three sisters, my mother’s grandaunts, would come to our home and spend some days with us as soon as my mother entered the onset of her last trimester of pregnancy. The great grandaunts would be midwives and surrogate mothers to the infants, my three younger siblings to come, until my mother had regained her health, gathered her strength and was back on her feet. While maintaining an embarrassed distance, I would always observe them in complete awe, these dainty women, fair-skinned and beautifully upturned narrow-bridged but small nose and chinky eyed were like delicate china-dolls, who seldom raised their voices nor left their cloisters except for social functions and life-and-death ritual cycles that they would lead with confidence and wisdom, perfectly knowing how and dexterously taking care to prescribe the right kind of food and the proper propitiations for both the living and the dead, satisfying the requirements in both the lahir and batin worlds (i.e. seen and unseen worlds) in rites and rituals of a specific kind and of exact measure for birthing, rites of passage to pubescence, marriage and death. In the midst of their spiritual duties and social functions they were well disciplined and strong-willed and led the community firmly as a captain would her ship.

Valentine’s Day and the Chinese New Year are on the same day this year, I realized. As one who has always been a “one-tasker” kind of person, the double celebration kind of squeezed me into a momentary (less than a minute lang naman) pause. That is, which one I would take the time to celebrate more than the other. And, thanks to the fact that I just arrived here, I don’t have to think of President’s Day which falls on the Monday after Valentine’s and the Chinese New Year. Phew! This is one of the “long weekends” Americans seem to have every once in a while.

DEMISTYFIED IN DJOGJA
Remembering the Massacre of Jabidah*

A Moro woman writing: writing as creating a path to self-determination.

By Mucha Q. Arquiza

YOGYAKARTA (MindaNews/18  March)What I am about to tell is a very personal story. It is a map of my own journey complete with the gallery of faces and people I have met and parted ways with; the panorama of landscape and seascapes, places I have strayed and tarried about and lain as a fallen seed basking under a moonlit night and shivering cold after a thunderstorm; there, I noduled, rhizomed, rooted deep and, there, my nascent buds were mercilessly uprooted from; and the relationships I have forged and have broken in the course of time. Some I vividly keep in memory, others happily and conveniently forgotten. It is a personal story that I look back to and carry forward with pride and confidence, and one that I would be as enthusiastic to relive and to re-tell to my children and grandchildren when that opportune time comes [and I am sure you would recognize your self in this story, too].