Pride of place

This is a story about two places a thousand miles apart—University of the Philippines Diliman and a reef off Palawan—and about the importance of realizing that who we are depends on our sense of pride of place.

Last Monday we had our first flag-raising ceremony for the year at my college in UP Diliman. This is done in front of Palma Hall, more popularly known as “AS.” Every time we have the ceremony, as we play the Philippine national anthem and the university song, “UP Naming Mahal,” I feel moved. And then I spot the paint peeling off Palma’s grand columns, and I feel a bit of despair. Beloved UP, indeed.

Three years ago, shortly after I became dean, we had to repaint the columns after a protest rally where activists did an unsolicited “decoration” job with political graffiti. The activists agreed to buy the paint to repair the damage, but it was all done in haste, and now the paint is chipping off.

It’s not just the columns, though, that is problematic. My staff tells me the last paint job for Palma Hall was a decade ago. The administration came up with a budget, which ran to P5.9 million, to repaint the entire building, exteriors and interiors—and we just don’t have that kind of money for maintenance.

But after Monday’s flag ceremony, I told Norman, our building administrator, that we have to find a way to come up with a budget to at least paint Palma’s façade.

I explained that this is not just a facelift but also an attempt to bring about some pride of place. We have never-ending battles with students littering the steps with food containers, empty soft drink cans and bottles, and cigarette butts—but at one point I realized we hadn’t even installed trash cans in the area.

We have trash bins in place now, which has helped a bit, but more needs to be done for pride of place, and I sometimes think it’s a losing battle. There’s too much of a national culture that needs to be transformed, a culture that is fastidious about personal hygiene but absolutely neglectful of one’s neighborhood, school, work place, and public spaces. “What are janitors for?” students protested some years back, under another dean, when she tried to implement an antilittering campaign.

Ghost ship

I thought, too, during the flag ceremony and looking at the peeling paint, of an article a few weeks back in the New York Times magazine titled “A Game of Winnow and Shark” by Jeff  Himmelman. The article dealt with the contested West Philippine Sea (South China Sea to the Chinese) by focusing on a Philippine Marines vessel called the Sierra Madre which is guarding Ayungin reef, described as a potential flashpoint. Aboard the Sierra Madre are eight Marines, and three fighting cocks.

The New York Times has been trying out a new format for articles on the Internet, where photographs and videos are interspersed with the text to produce a seamless multimedia experience. The NYT editors used this format for the article on the Sierra Madre, using stunning photos and videos by Ashley Gilbertson that make you feel you’re there, out at sea, on the ship itself.

The Sierra Madre was originally the USS Hamett County; it was passed on to what was then South Vietnam in the 1970s, and then to the Philippines in 1976. What we have now is described by Himmelman as a “post apocalyptic military garrison.” Looking at the photographs you hope the crew of Marines have had antitetanus shots. The whole ship is the color of rust because that’s what it is now—close to scrap iron and trying to stay afloat in the middle of the ocean. There was a photograph of a ledge on which the crew members have to do a balancing act lest they fall into the hull, which is flooded.

The dismal state of this ghost of a ship stands almost in stark contrast to the stunning beauty of the sea. The territorial disputes are because of oil reserves, but the place is clearly a marine paradise as well. One video shows a basket filled with jumping lapu-lapu (grouper).

We raise hell about the Chinese presence, and loudly proclaim that the oil-rich area is ours, but I am sure the Chinese crew on fishing vessels, as well as naval patrol boats, crack jokes about us from what they see of the Sierra Madre.

Kalayaan

In July 2011, the Inquirer featured an article titled “Hardy Filipinos fly flag, fight loneliness on Kalayaan island.”  Kalayaan is a municipality in the West Philippine Sea consisting of “five islands, two sandbars and two reefs.” It is perhaps the most remote in the Philippines, 450 kilometers northwest of Palawan (900 from China’s Hainan island and 1,600 kilometers from Vietnam’s coast).

Kalayaan was created in 1978 to stake our claim to the area. Its main island, Pagasa, has 200 civilians and 100 soldiers. The townsfolk have a feisty mayor interviewed for both the New York Times and Agence France-Presse articles, Eugenio Bito-onon Jr. But Pag-asa has no school, no health center.

Himmelman spent time on the Sierra Madre with the crew, listening to their karaoke singing, watching their daily lives unfold. There’s a touching passage about his coming to realize, while playing pusoy dos (a card game):  “For a moment we could see them as they really were, these marines: men who were serving their country in an extreme and unrelenting and even somewhat humiliating situation and trying bravely to make the best of it.”

The Marines, the residents of Kalayaan, seem to be developing some understanding of a pride of place, knowing what’s at stake, but never sure about what it all means for a nation that hardly knows about their existence.

The New York Times article also had photographs of Subi reef, in the same disputed area, with several Chinese fishing vessels, a radar station, a helipad and a dormitory.

We need to go beyond rhetoric when we talk about love of country. Let’s walk the talk, invest in maintaining our public buildings, our public spaces. Our pride of place, too, must become pride of places Filipino, in our backyard or our own hometown, as well as far-flung areas like Kalayaan and Pag-asa and the Sierra Madre.

The article on Ayungin shoal can be found here: www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/10/27/south-china-sea/.

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