A shorter version of this story appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on March 20, 2010
CAGAYAN DE ORO -- “Ana, please, one more time,” Ana’s mother exhorted, as she dipped closer to her daughter’s head, clasping tight Ana’s right hand, running her left hand over her daughter’s cropped hair.
“Push one more time, please,” she whispered close to Ana’s ear.
Ana remained still, her eyes closed.
“Just one more time, then the midwife can bathe your child. Please.” This time, it was Ana’s mother-in-law who cajoled her to push. Just one more time.
Ana, 28, had just given birth a few minutes ago and her second child, a boy, was shrieking beside her on a blanket, his skin still smeared with blood and a thin, oily white sheath.
The labor was short, and the baby came out in less than an hour after the pregnant Ana had lain on her bed right by the flotilla of fighter-planes postcards pinned on a corkboard below the sky-blue cotton towel hanging on a rack right next to the 14-inch television set.
As the financial crisis continues to ripple its effects towards the economic peripheries, Ana is one among the increasing number of pregnant women who risk the complications of birthing at home.
But she is not representative of the woman who would usually opt for such home birthing. Neither is she among those who fancy home birthing as a back-to-basics defiant act against established tradition or governmental advice for healthy and safe motherhood.
In the 1900s and at the beginning of the new century, women who gave birth at home were rural residents and availed of the services of the traditional, non-medically trained hilot, a traditional birth attendant.
By 2000, 65.3 percent of the total births in the country was attended by doctors, nurses and midwives. The figure is a high jump from that of a 1993 National Safe Motherhood Survey showing that 75 per cent of deliveries in the Philippines take place at home, with a hilot, attending 73 percent of the deliveries.
Almost two decades ago, home births used to make up 85 percent of deliveries in the rural areas, and 54 percent in the urban areas. By 2004, the number of women who opt to have medical attendants increased to 67.6 per cent, most of them giving birth in a hospital or clinic.
In urbanized cities like Cagayan de Oro, the figures are much higher, with cities in the National Capital Region at a high of 75 to 82 percent of births at a hospital or clinic.
City-bred Ana is an urbanite at heart. Her family lives in an apartment just a tricycle ride away from the financial district and a mere five-minute brisk walk away from the nearest private hospital.
Ana is schooled and has an accounting degree and so is her husband but the times had been difficult for both them lately. The husband has been jobless for months and she is juggling her hours selling herbal medicines and bookkeeping for small firms.
“I think it is safe to give birth at home. As long as you have prepared well and have gotten pre-natal counseling,” she said, assuring herself a few hours ago as her labor pains began.
She also trusted her midwife, who had assisted at the births of other mothers in the neighborhood in the past seven months previous to her own. “May is a professional and has a lot of experience.”
There was a popular hilot in the barangay who had delivered births for decades but she had recently died. No one trained under her wing anymore. But Ana noted that several young girls and boys are now taking midwifery courses, a cheaper and shorter route to a medically-related profession than nursing or medicine.
May the midwife works at public hospital but lately has been accepting requests for home-based deliveries. “It helps me earn more,” she said. She had to ask permission from her supervisor who allowed her to accept appointments as long as it does not interfere with her regular 8-hour day shifts. She earns at least P1,800 for each delivery but she also has to provide post-natal care and counseling for both mother and child. A hospital-based delivery could costs between P5-10,000.
“But really each delivery means a bigger responsibility for me. I have to plan for emergencies,” she said. “I have to make quick decisions. Like bringing the patient to the hospital.”
This delivery with Ana was unnerving to her, she would confide later when it was over. It could have lead to one of the causes of maternal deaths, post-partum complications like hemorrhage or hypertension.
That’s why all the women were coaxing Ana to push once more because the placenta was still inside her. Normally, it should come out with the baby.
“Anybody who took note of the time? How long since the baby came out?” asked the midwife, a slight sign of worry in her otherwise calm voice.
She was still in front of the prostrate Ana, trying to pull the rope-thick sheath connected to the placenta, the way a fisherman would hold a rope tied to a boat being borne away by the high tide, holding it tight and tugging back with all his strength so the vessel could be tied safely to a buoy.
“Tell me when it is past 20 minutes.”
Ana’s mom looked at her watch. About 15 minutes, she said.
“You can make it, one more push and this will be over,” the midwife said. Still Ana won’t move.
“We’ve got to get the placenta out now or else, we have to go to the hospital,” said the midwife, her voice almost a command.
At that moment, as if she had heard some magic phrase, Ana heaved and pushed hard once more and moved the placenta out.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Not just a toy story
A version of this story was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer
on Nov. 29, 2008
Photos of bakwit children at play can be viewed here.
MAMASAPANO, MAGUINDANAO -- Nothing could persuade four-year-old Ider to show us his toy. He hides it in the shallow cave of his own cupped hands, his eyes close to tears.
"He is afraid you will take it away," his sister Fatma explains the boy's terrorized look. "It is the only one he has." Ider's lone possession, according to his sister, is a plastic white horse that has lost its two front legs and its tail, broken at the tip.
Moner, 10, stays almost all day inside a trailer-cum-cart, where household utensils lay by his feet and above him, some black-sooted pots. The cart carries everything that his family salvaged as their house burned after being hit by artillery fire in the village of Dugengen here about four months ago. It too has become a temporary dwelling.
He slays imagined enemies with his plastic silver sword. But he refuses to play with other boys. "He would not play with others," says his mother. He missed school, she added. It has been almost four months since he stopped going to school in July. The schools which have become evacuation centers are already congested so Moner’s family along with about 200 others have built makeshift lean-tos out of the tarpaulin mats used to dry rice grains and copra along a dirt road here.
Under the canopy of a tent, Mohammed Macadisdis pretends to fly a toy helicopter that has lost its wings and propeller with his right hand while his other hand grips a plastic bottle of milk formula from which he drinks.
His father, who is nursing a swollen foot, cuddles him. "See, the copter has blood all over. It got hit, ," the father explains in jest why the yellow-painted toy was smeared with red paint, ”from the anti-mortar of the Moro.”
Ider, Monir and Mohammed are just three of the hundreds of children who are among the bakwit, or the internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the village of Mamasapano.
They belong to the civilian population of Maguindanao descent who are caught in the crossfire of protracted hostilities between the government troops and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) after the peace talks collapsed over the ancestral domain agreement in Aust this year.
The children were also among the 10,000 who stood for hours along the Maharlika Highway last month to launch a campaign launched so that the rights of IDPs, especially of children, and including the right of return to their homes, will be upheld by government.
Globally, the non-governmental organization Save the Children, reports that “of the estimated 24.5 million conflict-related IDPs in the world, about 50 percent are children. “ With an uncertain future, repeated emotional stress and only minimal access to education, children are at risk of sexual abuse and exploitation, physical harm, separation from their families, psychosocial distress, gender-based violence,” says Save the Children.
According to data compiled by the Cotabato-based Consortium of Bangsamoro Civil Society (CBCS), most of those who are victimized by this war are children. “ The casualties and injured are mostly children and women, “ observed Mike Kulat, CBCS Peace Building Officer at a recent stop-the-war peace rally and dialogue in Midsayap.
Child therapists say that toys, especially soft ones, give children a mooring to normalcy and soothe their nerves. But there are children IDPs who don’t even have toys. Norhamir Sulitan, whose tarak-tarak (toy truck) got left behind as they fled from burning homes, spends time drawing the same images over and over again on the pages of a notebook: he draws a house and above it a helicopter.
Then, he draws circles and hatches over the house till there is almost nothing but a dark blot. “It is on fire,” he explains when asked why must he blot the house. “The plane threw fire on our house and our house is burning, burning.” Whose plane is it? The enemies, the military, he answered quickly.
As a result of the military offensives, a recent interfaith fact-finding mission reported, many children among the evacuees are suffering from trauma. “This is manifested in restlessness and the disruption of sleeping patterns, “ according to Amabella Carumba, secretary-general of the Mindanao People’s Peace Movement (MPPM) , which led the fact-finding mission.
Carumba added that at therapy workshops held by the same mission at evacuation centers in Datu Piang and Pikit, children expressed fears of war, soldiers and guns. “They also are afraid of going back to their communities ,” she noted. A total of 214 children underwent therapy during the mission.
And, for other children still, war is no excuse for early labor. Norodin at the encampment in the Libutan madrasah, has no time to play nor draw. All he does the entire day is watch over the coconut meat that he is drying under the sun. “We need to sell this soonest. For our food,” he says.
Related blogpost:It All Started with a Mouse
on Nov. 29, 2008
Photos of bakwit children at play can be viewed here.
MAMASAPANO, MAGUINDANAO -- Nothing could persuade four-year-old Ider to show us his toy. He hides it in the shallow cave of his own cupped hands, his eyes close to tears.
"He is afraid you will take it away," his sister Fatma explains the boy's terrorized look. "It is the only one he has." Ider's lone possession, according to his sister, is a plastic white horse that has lost its two front legs and its tail, broken at the tip.
Moner, 10, stays almost all day inside a trailer-cum-cart, where household utensils lay by his feet and above him, some black-sooted pots. The cart carries everything that his family salvaged as their house burned after being hit by artillery fire in the village of Dugengen here about four months ago. It too has become a temporary dwelling.
He slays imagined enemies with his plastic silver sword. But he refuses to play with other boys. "He would not play with others," says his mother. He missed school, she added. It has been almost four months since he stopped going to school in July. The schools which have become evacuation centers are already congested so Moner’s family along with about 200 others have built makeshift lean-tos out of the tarpaulin mats used to dry rice grains and copra along a dirt road here.
Under the canopy of a tent, Mohammed Macadisdis pretends to fly a toy helicopter that has lost its wings and propeller with his right hand while his other hand grips a plastic bottle of milk formula from which he drinks.
His father, who is nursing a swollen foot, cuddles him. "See, the copter has blood all over. It got hit, ," the father explains in jest why the yellow-painted toy was smeared with red paint, ”from the anti-mortar of the Moro.”
Ider, Monir and Mohammed are just three of the hundreds of children who are among the bakwit, or the internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the village of Mamasapano.
They belong to the civilian population of Maguindanao descent who are caught in the crossfire of protracted hostilities between the government troops and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) after the peace talks collapsed over the ancestral domain agreement in Aust this year.
The children were also among the 10,000 who stood for hours along the Maharlika Highway last month to launch a campaign launched so that the rights of IDPs, especially of children, and including the right of return to their homes, will be upheld by government.
Globally, the non-governmental organization Save the Children, reports that “of the estimated 24.5 million conflict-related IDPs in the world, about 50 percent are children. “ With an uncertain future, repeated emotional stress and only minimal access to education, children are at risk of sexual abuse and exploitation, physical harm, separation from their families, psychosocial distress, gender-based violence,” says Save the Children.
According to data compiled by the Cotabato-based Consortium of Bangsamoro Civil Society (CBCS), most of those who are victimized by this war are children. “ The casualties and injured are mostly children and women, “ observed Mike Kulat, CBCS Peace Building Officer at a recent stop-the-war peace rally and dialogue in Midsayap.
Child therapists say that toys, especially soft ones, give children a mooring to normalcy and soothe their nerves. But there are children IDPs who don’t even have toys. Norhamir Sulitan, whose tarak-tarak (toy truck) got left behind as they fled from burning homes, spends time drawing the same images over and over again on the pages of a notebook: he draws a house and above it a helicopter.
Then, he draws circles and hatches over the house till there is almost nothing but a dark blot. “It is on fire,” he explains when asked why must he blot the house. “The plane threw fire on our house and our house is burning, burning.” Whose plane is it? The enemies, the military, he answered quickly.
As a result of the military offensives, a recent interfaith fact-finding mission reported, many children among the evacuees are suffering from trauma. “This is manifested in restlessness and the disruption of sleeping patterns, “ according to Amabella Carumba, secretary-general of the Mindanao People’s Peace Movement (MPPM) , which led the fact-finding mission.
Carumba added that at therapy workshops held by the same mission at evacuation centers in Datu Piang and Pikit, children expressed fears of war, soldiers and guns. “They also are afraid of going back to their communities ,” she noted. A total of 214 children underwent therapy during the mission.
And, for other children still, war is no excuse for early labor. Norodin at the encampment in the Libutan madrasah, has no time to play nor draw. All he does the entire day is watch over the coconut meat that he is drying under the sun. “We need to sell this soonest. For our food,” he says.
Related blogpost:It All Started with a Mouse
Thursday, August 07, 2008
The Talaandig soil painters
This story was first published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Feb. 23, 2008
THE WORD BALUGTO in Talaandig means rainbow but ironically even after Marcelino Necosia had renamed himself Balugto in an effort to affirm his tribal roots, his oeuvre’s palette didn’t get a dash of the ephemeral sky-bridge’s varied hues.
Instead Balugto’s colors are a monochrome of earth tones—rich browns to fiery oranges to dark reds.
Balugto, 22, is one of the six resident painters here who belong to the Talaandig tribe and whose works are exhibited at the Museo de Oro, the repository of Mindanao folklore at the Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro until July this year.
Instead of expensive synthetic paints, all the six visual artists use earth pigments, the soil which is readily available, free material right under their feet in the tribal community of Songco on the foothills of Mt. Kitanglad, about 50 kilometers away from Malaybalay City.
Dubbed “Yuta,” meaning “land, ground, soil” in Binisaya as well as Talaandig, the exhibit features large works of, literally, soil on canvas, by Balugto as well as Rodelio “Waway” Saway Sr., Junathan “Sultan” Cruz, Soliman Poonon, Marlon “Tambuloy” Necosia and Raul Bendit.
The exhibit is a landmark of sorts for both the Talaandig as well as the Museo.
For the first time painters of indigenous descent are working together for several months to produce works based on the mythologies of their forbears. Thus the visual narratives are actually a new form of storytelling.
Among the Talaandig, stories are passed on as oral tradition either as chants and songs or as gestures of dance.
The painters say this is their way of giving back to their community, preserving and developing their culture.
For the Museo, it is the first time that illustrations of folk traditions are done by indigenous people themselves.
Before this, the institution, founded in the 1970s, showed folk life of Mindanao’s tribes with visual interpretations done by Nonoy Estarte, its resident artist, who now curates this show.
“Yuta” thus is the fruition of decades-old nurturing of craft among this generation of Talaandig artisans and crafters.
The five look up to Saway, 39, as their mentor. They even grant him the title Master Jedi, after the character of a sage in the epic film trilogy, “Star Wars.” They also acknowledge lessons and advice the learned from lowlander artists like Errol Balcos and Tating Soliva.
It has been 10 years since Saway’s first painting of an earthen jar using Songco’s clayey soil was among those in a survey exhibit of artworks by Mindanaoan visual artists.
It was Estarte, who led the art festival’s host, Cagayan de Oro Art Guild then, who pushed for the inclusion of Saway’s work.
Since then, Saway had painted, using soil as medium, and relayed the love-for-this-earth-based art among the young in workshops right in Songco.
“I saw the arts as a viable path in which these youngsters can go back to the ancient good ways of the tribe,” said Waway. “Otherwise, they would have all drowned in vices when they dropped out of school,” he said.
Waway and company gather soils from different parts of their village as well as in other parts of Mindanao, from Camiguin, Iligan and Davao. These soil pigments are filtered and sifted and then mixed with transparent glue.
The painters use the common paintbrush to apply the soil-glue blend on canvas. On the suggestion of Kublai, a painter from Davao, they apply acrylic emulsion on their work to give it a certain luster that earth colors lack.
Despite using the same material prepared in the same process, each has developed his own signature style and palettes.
“We don’t share styles. Instead we influence each other’s concepts and ideas,” says Sultan, whose works feature land like sinuous human bodies, with trees growing from abundant hair.
“We agree on the ideas and comment on each other’s work. Yet we still allow each one to do something for himself alone, what satisfies his individual cravings,” said Waway.
Waway’s work are abstracted human figures in a tableau framing the narrative of the seven altars, the last step towards the immortality of the folk leaders. Soliman’s works highlight the adventures of Agyu and Bataay whose powers include flying on air astride a shield and a winnowing basket.
Balugto’s and Bendit’s works may yet herald the subtle shift of attitude towards women as tribal heroes in a still largely patriarchal community as well as a breaking away from gender stereotypes. In their frames, women are recast from mere passive faces and figures to be ogled into heroes of survival and power.
Balugto’s “Bai Ginamayong dawsa lenep” (Bai Ginamayong during the big flood) illustrates the travails of Bai Ginamayong, a folk hero, as she clings for dear life on a drum during a great flood while Bendit’s shows “Anac,” another folk character in Ulaging, the creation myth, playing the “pulala,” the long nose bamboo flute, floating on a leaf.
“It is how I imagined our tribe’s version of ‘rapture’, floating away, and since I don’t know how to visualize rapture, I use the leaf as the seat on which Anac takes flight,” says Bendit, appraising his own work’s coarse spontaneity. According to Bendit, like the Christian version, rapture is a state in which a human being goes to heaven without dying, a form of immortality.
In Bendit’s work, Anac is said to have thrown her flute back to earth and it became a species of bamboo good for making musical instruments.
When asked why both had chosen to portray strong women as heroes, Bendit quickly replies: “Because we are disgrasyados.”
Disgrasyados, what? Bendit explained it is a play on the term, disgrasyada, and we somehow get the drift.
Literally, disgrasyada means “the victim of an accident,” a term coined from the Spanish to mean a woman who begets a child out of wedlock.
“Our woman left us,” confess Balugto and Bendit, forsaken young lovers and fathers, on their faces the looks between a grin and a grimace.
The use of earth pigments is not unique. In several parts of the world, it is part of a global emergence of organic arts created from non-toxic, organic materials.
And, of course, thousands-years-old stick figures on cave walls in Mexico and France dated even before the Australian Aborigines chew and blow ocher on rocks, for instance, show that human beings first use soil to tell their stories in the shadows cast probably by camp fire.
Note the Inquirer version further cited a description of the Talaandig that was taken from an article by Maurice Malanes. Malanes also had an article on the Talaandig in the Inquirer. And Vic Saway, a Talaandig leader, described his own people in the National Commission on Culture and the Arts.
THE WORD BALUGTO in Talaandig means rainbow but ironically even after Marcelino Necosia had renamed himself Balugto in an effort to affirm his tribal roots, his oeuvre’s palette didn’t get a dash of the ephemeral sky-bridge’s varied hues.
Instead Balugto’s colors are a monochrome of earth tones—rich browns to fiery oranges to dark reds.
Balugto, 22, is one of the six resident painters here who belong to the Talaandig tribe and whose works are exhibited at the Museo de Oro, the repository of Mindanao folklore at the Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro until July this year.
Instead of expensive synthetic paints, all the six visual artists use earth pigments, the soil which is readily available, free material right under their feet in the tribal community of Songco on the foothills of Mt. Kitanglad, about 50 kilometers away from Malaybalay City.
Dubbed “Yuta,” meaning “land, ground, soil” in Binisaya as well as Talaandig, the exhibit features large works of, literally, soil on canvas, by Balugto as well as Rodelio “Waway” Saway Sr., Junathan “Sultan” Cruz, Soliman Poonon, Marlon “Tambuloy” Necosia and Raul Bendit.
The exhibit is a landmark of sorts for both the Talaandig as well as the Museo.
For the first time painters of indigenous descent are working together for several months to produce works based on the mythologies of their forbears. Thus the visual narratives are actually a new form of storytelling.
Among the Talaandig, stories are passed on as oral tradition either as chants and songs or as gestures of dance.
The painters say this is their way of giving back to their community, preserving and developing their culture.
For the Museo, it is the first time that illustrations of folk traditions are done by indigenous people themselves.
Before this, the institution, founded in the 1970s, showed folk life of Mindanao’s tribes with visual interpretations done by Nonoy Estarte, its resident artist, who now curates this show.
“Yuta” thus is the fruition of decades-old nurturing of craft among this generation of Talaandig artisans and crafters.
The five look up to Saway, 39, as their mentor. They even grant him the title Master Jedi, after the character of a sage in the epic film trilogy, “Star Wars.” They also acknowledge lessons and advice the learned from lowlander artists like Errol Balcos and Tating Soliva.
It has been 10 years since Saway’s first painting of an earthen jar using Songco’s clayey soil was among those in a survey exhibit of artworks by Mindanaoan visual artists.
It was Estarte, who led the art festival’s host, Cagayan de Oro Art Guild then, who pushed for the inclusion of Saway’s work.
Since then, Saway had painted, using soil as medium, and relayed the love-for-this-earth-based art among the young in workshops right in Songco.
“I saw the arts as a viable path in which these youngsters can go back to the ancient good ways of the tribe,” said Waway. “Otherwise, they would have all drowned in vices when they dropped out of school,” he said.
Waway and company gather soils from different parts of their village as well as in other parts of Mindanao, from Camiguin, Iligan and Davao. These soil pigments are filtered and sifted and then mixed with transparent glue.
The painters use the common paintbrush to apply the soil-glue blend on canvas. On the suggestion of Kublai, a painter from Davao, they apply acrylic emulsion on their work to give it a certain luster that earth colors lack.
Despite using the same material prepared in the same process, each has developed his own signature style and palettes.
“We don’t share styles. Instead we influence each other’s concepts and ideas,” says Sultan, whose works feature land like sinuous human bodies, with trees growing from abundant hair.
“We agree on the ideas and comment on each other’s work. Yet we still allow each one to do something for himself alone, what satisfies his individual cravings,” said Waway.
Waway’s work are abstracted human figures in a tableau framing the narrative of the seven altars, the last step towards the immortality of the folk leaders. Soliman’s works highlight the adventures of Agyu and Bataay whose powers include flying on air astride a shield and a winnowing basket.
Balugto’s and Bendit’s works may yet herald the subtle shift of attitude towards women as tribal heroes in a still largely patriarchal community as well as a breaking away from gender stereotypes. In their frames, women are recast from mere passive faces and figures to be ogled into heroes of survival and power.
Balugto’s “Bai Ginamayong dawsa lenep” (Bai Ginamayong during the big flood) illustrates the travails of Bai Ginamayong, a folk hero, as she clings for dear life on a drum during a great flood while Bendit’s shows “Anac,” another folk character in Ulaging, the creation myth, playing the “pulala,” the long nose bamboo flute, floating on a leaf.
“It is how I imagined our tribe’s version of ‘rapture’, floating away, and since I don’t know how to visualize rapture, I use the leaf as the seat on which Anac takes flight,” says Bendit, appraising his own work’s coarse spontaneity. According to Bendit, like the Christian version, rapture is a state in which a human being goes to heaven without dying, a form of immortality.
In Bendit’s work, Anac is said to have thrown her flute back to earth and it became a species of bamboo good for making musical instruments.
When asked why both had chosen to portray strong women as heroes, Bendit quickly replies: “Because we are disgrasyados.”
Disgrasyados, what? Bendit explained it is a play on the term, disgrasyada, and we somehow get the drift.
Literally, disgrasyada means “the victim of an accident,” a term coined from the Spanish to mean a woman who begets a child out of wedlock.
“Our woman left us,” confess Balugto and Bendit, forsaken young lovers and fathers, on their faces the looks between a grin and a grimace.
The use of earth pigments is not unique. In several parts of the world, it is part of a global emergence of organic arts created from non-toxic, organic materials.
And, of course, thousands-years-old stick figures on cave walls in Mexico and France dated even before the Australian Aborigines chew and blow ocher on rocks, for instance, show that human beings first use soil to tell their stories in the shadows cast probably by camp fire.
Note the Inquirer version further cited a description of the Talaandig that was taken from an article by Maurice Malanes. Malanes also had an article on the Talaandig in the Inquirer. And Vic Saway, a Talaandig leader, described his own people in the National Commission on Culture and the Arts.
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