LOST AND FOUND

(printed in Philippine Starweek Magazine, March 4, 2008)

What an incredible year this has been! I liken it to looking up to the night sky and seeing millions of glittering stars. They were all just beautiful stars until October last, when it turned out, one of those stars actually belonged to me.

A woman alights from the hotel van with her two daughters. They’re Australian and it’s their first visit to the Philippines. My sister Marie and I look at the older woman intently. She flashes a smile and says “Finally.” We hug her tightly and cry.

Before October and the sixty other Octobers past, she was an Australian working and living in Brisbane. Today, thanks to my sister Marie’s persistent research and the internet, we are hugging our newly found half-sister named Isabel Castner and her daughters Angie and Jacqui.

World War II is the starting point of this story. General Douglas MacArthur, retreating in April 1942 from the Philippines to Australia said to a reporter upon arrival that he was organizing a counteroffensive against Japan “…the primary objective of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.”

Three months later, MacArthur set up the Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB) with headquarters in Brisbane, a combined Australian and American team intercepting and decoding all Japanese radio transmission in the Pacific. A Philippine Regional Section of the AIB was also established to train and send soldiers to the Philippines to collect intelligence, transmit Japanese troop movements and support the resistance.

At the outbreak of the war, our Dad, Saturnino (Tony) Ramos Silva, a graduate from San Francisco State College, was one of seven thousand Filipinos in the United States that immediately enlisted in the US Army to help in the liberation of their homeland. After extensive interviews, he, along with five hundred volunteer Filipinos were chosen and flown to Australia to undergo the AIB’s commando and reconnaissance training for secret missions in the Philippines.

Dad arrived in Australia in May 1943 and was brought to Camp X, (Camp Tabragalba) in Beaudesert outside of Brisbane. They shuttled between that camp and the Canungara Jungle Warfare School where they trained for the next 10 months in infiltrating enemy lines, demolition techniques, sniper fire, and hand-to-hand combat. They also learned to track troop and transport movements and later, radio the information to AIB headquarters, a two-story mansion on 21 Henry Street in Brisbane.
Military historians would say the very demanding espionage course and physical training in Canungra prefigured the CIA and Green Berets training after the war.

Like many soldiers and especially one sent on a secret mission, Dad recounted little about the horror of his war experiences to his children. But on rare nights, after dinner, when it was storytelling time, he talked about his training. They were marched into a jungle with just a knife, a matchbox, and a compass. The challenge was to keep oneself alive. Tempers flared between the Filipinos and the American soldiers and racial slurs erupted. Being called monkeys made Dad furious. In our living room, he’d relive that moment in the jungle, and crouching, assumed a boxing stance. His eyes flared and his mouth tightened as his fists pounded the air knocking down a phantom twice his size. He’d always laugh loud in the end, with his arms akimbo and his chest pushed forward. He’d recall his bloodied face and those of his fellow Filipinos but the moral to his story was never accept prejudice from anyone, intoning this over and over again.

Dad never let on to us children that there was more to the jungle training in Australia. Given the secrecy of their assignment, Filipino privates could not leave camp. As an officer though, Dad was allowed weekend furloughs and, with other officers, made their way to downtown Brisbane. It was in a Chinese restaurant that Lt. Tony Silva first met Private Priscilla Conanan of the Australian Women’s Auxiliary Service (A.W.A.S.) and fell in love. From photos of that period, Priscilla was a very beautiful Filipino-Australian.

It was a surprise enough to know we had additional kin, but even more remarkable that they would be Filipino-Australian. How and when did the Conanans get to Australia? How did they wind up in Brisbane? That’s another remarkable story.

Native men of the Spanish Philippine colony were recruited as deck hands as early as the 16th century for the Spanish fleet that made incursions throughout Asia and for the galleons that plied the profitable trade between Manila, Acapulco, and on to the rest of the Americas and Spain. Small Filipino communities were recorded in the ports of Barcelona and Louisiana by the mid-19th century. By the late 19th century, revolts and uprisings occurred in the colony and, if they were not executed, many Filipino revolutionaries were exiled or fled to Guam, the Marianas, Hongkong and Singapore. There were also Filipinos, given the economic hardships in the colony, who decided to leave and settle in places where their skills could be of use.

The Queensland Australian Filipino Chamber of Commerce cites the first Filipino settlers arriving in the Torres Strait, in Northern Australia in 1880. They bore surnames like Cruz, Cunanan. Caballo, Escobar, Pere, Alfonso, Segovia, Belfonte, Cesar and Tolentino all residing on Thursday Island.

Around 1880, Tolentino Conanan, a pearl diver, settled on Thursday Island around the time pearl, trochus and beche-de-mer industries were being developed in northern Australia. Conanan may have been successful in his occupation for he sailed to Hongkong in 1890 and married a Portuguese woman named Emelia Constantina Da Souza, bringing her back to Thursday Island to raise five children, two girls and three boys. After the required ten years of residence, Conanan was naturalized a British subject in 1892. By 1902 the family had moved to Darwin and one of the boys, Elias, married Lorenza Ceasar whose Filipino father also settled in the Northern territories the same time as Conanan.

Elias and Lorenza had ten children, one of them Priscilla, Isabel’s mother. When Darwin was bombed in 1942 by Japanese fighter planes, a brother of Elias died in the bombing and the family evacuated to Brisbane. A year later, in a Chinese restaurant in Brisbane, the fateful meeting between Priscilla and Tony occurred.

Several people were unhappy about their love affair. Priscilla recounted that both her parents were opposed to Lt. Silva because they had such a brief courtship and he was fifteen years older than her. Priscilla’s friends were not pleased with her choice because of a rule banning Australian privates fraternizing with American officers. And even Supreme Pacific Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur disapproved of the liaison and engagement. After all, Lt. Silva was on temporary training in Australia and being readied for a dangerous assignment in the Philippines.

Nothing stopped the couple and with a marriage request order approved by the camp’s commander while MacArthur was away, Priscilla and Tony were married on January 8th, 1944 at Canungara Base Camp with reluctant family members and soldier friends in camp. A camp newsletter described the bride dressed in white organdie, looking “gorgeous and lovely.” The camp commander gave the bride away since the disapproving parents threatened not to appear but relented and showed up late.

The marriage was brief. Three days into their honeymoon, Lt. Silva was called and ordered to proceed with his mission. With four other Filipino soldiers under him, they boarded the submarine Narwhal on February 14, 1944, at Port Darwin with 70 tons of supplies, ammunitions and guns, for the underwater journey through the Celebes Sea, skirting Borneo and eluding Japanese ships, crossing the Sulu Sea to reach the shores of Mindanao. Their order stated “an indefinite return date” and their secret assignment “…will not be attached to any recognized military unit while in station.” The Allied Intelligence Bureau would disavow their connection to them if they were caught. He left Priscilla in Australia pregnant with Isabel. She didn’t know where he was going and would not hear from him until three years later.

Tony sent three letters to Priscilla from the Philippines but came to her after the war was over. Army censors delayed or confiscated letters and were much more severe with secret missions. The absence of letters, a mission with no guarantee of survival, and the lengthy days took its toll on their tenuous marriage. Less than a year after arriving in Mindanao, Tony met a young nurse named Ester Peralta. They fell in love, had their union blessed by a guerrilla priest, and lived together.

From all accounts, Lt. Silva distinguished himself in the fifteen months of spying, radio reporting and as an infantry advisor, training a local guerrilla force in Davao. He became a hero in a May 1945 major encounter called the Battle of Ising, named after a river in Davao where Silva led the 130th Infantry Regiment, a combined army of civilians and guerrillas stopping retreating Japanese forces from entering Davao’s northern unoccupied territories. He was wounded in the leg during this battle and swiftly brought to an army hospital and flown back to the United States for extensive surgery.

He left a pregnant Ester who later gave birth to a son named Saturnino Silva Jr.

By 1947, Tony had been in and out of various hospitals and while recovering called Priscilla. It was the first time they would talk since he left Australia three years ago. He told her to come to the United States with baby Isabel. But traveling in a military transport in those days were tedious and Baby Isabel’s frail health wouldn’t allow it. Besides, Australian wives of U.S. servicemen had to draw lots in order to travel and the wait was interminable.

Tony demanded unreasonably that Priscilla and Baby Isabel travel to his bedside in three months. The distance, the inadequacies in phone calls in ascertaining feelings and commitment worked against them. In the interim Dad had a family in Davao that needed to be resolved. In the interim too, Priscilla had lived and taken care of Baby Isabel by herself for three years, not knowing if Tony was alive or dead or even be same man she married if they ever met again.

Tony filed for a divorce that same year. By that time, he had met Elena Ledesma who had recently arrived in the United States from the Philippines to go to college. Dad and Mom were married within a year in a civil ceremony in Arizona.

Dad never revealed his past lives to us four children. But one day, my oldest sister Marie, then ten years old, was snooping in Dad’s briefcase and found a letter with a reference to a girl named Isabel Conanan in Australia. Later, Marie as a teenager would stumble onto a picture of a young boy in Dad’s drawer with the name Saturnino Jr. Fifty years later, we reunited with our half-brother Saturnino Jr., living in Davao and have since visited his family many times.

But Isabel was more daunting to track down. In 1990, while traveling in Australia, Marie pored over telephone books and called every Cunanan listed. She was not successful because Isabel’s family spelled their surname with an “o” (Conanan) rather than the prevalent Filipino spelling of Cunanan.

In October 2006, Marie, living in Manila, and being computer savvy, decided to track Isabel in cyberspace. In the past 15 years, she tried this route many times and had no luck after hundreds of hours of searching. But in the past few years, there have been a host of genealogy websites on the internet. It was in Ancestry.com, searching for Saturnino Ramos Silva, she learned she was the second person to inquire about that name. Several more clicks and Marie found the name Isabel Castner who posted a search for that name. Marie was worried though, for the posting was five years old. More clicks and Marie found the name Angie Castner, Isabel’s daughter with a more recent posting of Saturnino’s name. Marie quickly contacted Angie who gave Isabel’s e-mail. At around two in the morning, when Marie e-mailed Isabel telling her that she might be a sister and Isabel replying yes, she was, Marie let out a shout waking her husband to proclaim “ I Found Her!”

Six months later, there we were at a hotel entrance in Manila tearfully embracing each other, noting the undeniable proof that we all looked so alike. Our rounded dark eyes, the skin tone, the prominent front teeth and that smile were all Dad’s. The resemblances were not faint and as we hugged each other in disbelief Isabel looked at us intently and declaimed softy, “Now I have a sister and a brother!”

For a week Marie and I showed Isabel, Angie and Jacqui the city sites, the best dining and shopping. They were touristy activities but were preludes to a belated bonding that couldn’t be rushed. The getting to know one another, the filling in of unknown years had to be drawn gradually from each other, in between selecting a souvenir, savoring a local dish, or gazing at a painting. As Priscilla’s and Tony’s lives together and apart became clearer, our kinship strengthened. Isabel told us that for many years, two colored photo portraits hung side by side in their dining room. Priscilla in her AWAS uniform. Tony in his US Army uniform. It was love in a time of war and the portraits were Priscilla’s proof while she waited.

A highlight of their Philippine trip was an afternoon visit to the American Military cemetery in the suburbs of Manila where 17,000 American and Filipino soldiers who fought and died in World War II are buried. Huge rectangular slabs of granite etched with the names of the war dead jut outward and form a circle. Beyond the circle, on gentle slopes are the crosses and markers in neat exact rows. There are galleries in the memorial with large mosaic murals showing the Pacific War operations with arrows representing the Allied forces, traversing through the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, heading north for the Philippines and onwards to Japan.

One particular gallery contained a mural devoted to submarine operations. My sister and I had seen this mural many times before but in the company of our newly found sister and her daughters, it had deeper significance. With pointed markers representing submarines, we followed one, the USS Narwhal’s route, leaving Port Darwin, bearing our father and other Filipino soldiers, headed for Mindanao.

We are having a reunion in a restaurant. Seated across me is my half-brother Tony who flew in from Davao. Beside him is Isabel, holding his hand and whispering how wonderful to have yet another brother. Isabel’s daughters are talking to Tony’s daughters, their new found cousins. Marie and I are surveying the scene.

As I look at Isabel and Tony, who never saw our Dad, Marie and I have taken on Dad’s guilt for abandoning them. In the first few weeks of having found Isabel, there were e-mails between Australia and the Philippines. One I sent with a picture was Dad holding me less than a year old. I am fond of this picture because despite the stern military man that he was which pervaded family life, there were many moments of tenderness he gave to us children.

Isabel e-mailed back to share her reaction.

“I loved the photos you sent, John. I rather think that my early baby photos look more like you than Marie. My mother thinks so too.

While I was looking at your photos (I received them at work), a feeling, oh so fleetingly, rippled over my consciousness but then I was back again caught up with the tasks of my ever present work day at the office.

But then this morning sitting patiently on the bus on the way to work, it was back, suddenly flooding me with many, many memories. Memories that evoked that same feeling that I had hidden away deep inside me: looking at other children getting hugs from their Dads; other children being swung up on their Dad's shoulders; being helped with their homework; other girls being eagerly photographed by their Dad's at play, at special times; other girl's having secrets with their Dads, getting special treats from them, dancing with them, having their hands squeezed with pride at graduation, being walked down the aisle, holding their first child... And I realized that as time went on I had steeled myself from this longing, this envy, behind a façade of spirited independence or the old Aussie saying, "I'm alright, Jack!".

But one little photo of our Dad holding you shattered that façade leaving the poor people in the bus wondering why the little brown lady in the seat behind the driver has tears streaming down her face.”

Dad, who passed away in 1987 without telling us his long-held secret, has now given Marie, myself, and our two other sisters the task of sharing his life with Isabel, Tony Jr., their children and grandchildren. If and when they want to. There’s much sensitivity to be employed here presenting a man who was father to some and not to others. Sharing a Dad’s life can satisfy a long-held curiosity or exacerbate a hurt.

Uncovering Dad’s life opened perhaps some childhood pain for Isabel and Tony. But in our week together and now middle-aged, we were able to cast kinder glances on Dad’s relationships with Priscilla, Ester, Elena (my mother) and Letty, the last woman he married after my parents divorced. As for these women’s own lives and feelings towards Dad, that should be their story. Priscilla still lives in Brisbane and Letty lives in Fresno, California.

I’ve rationalized this tangled saga with a war that altered my father’s career, brought him to Australia, later to the Philippines and, injured, back to the United States. Each part of the trip didn’t lend well to love and obligations. It’s hard to think of Dad as totally heartless but then I write this privileged with having known him. Our family pictures, him doting on us, partially vindicates him.

I visited Dad regularly at his Fresno fruit farm in the last ten yeas of his retired life. There were many late afternoons seated on his veranda looking at his pear trees and recalling the good times we had. I was never stingy telling him how he had molded us children to be upright, fair, and hate prejudice. Looking back now, my tributes may have only deterred him from ever telling us his past. He lived in a society where male privilege was unquestioned and hearts broken in the course of bravery and courage were intertwined.

When I was young and war stories abounded there was an oft repeated phrase “Hanggang pier lamang” (Until the pier) describing numerous Filipinas weeping at pier side as their American soldier lovers board their ships homeward bound. The women were always portrayed as loose, as naive if not stupid for falling in love. But were they? What about those who did love and promises by soldiers were made?

Important events in World War II are often centered on the day of the battle, the victorious Allied forces appearing from out of the blue and just at the nick of time. The long awaited date of the American liberation of the Philippines often overshadows the years of preparation leading up to it. In Australia, there were thousands of Australian military and civilians working in the A.I.B. headquarters deciphering enemy codes, thwarting planned attacks and helping the Allied Forces mount counter-offensives. There were bands of radio operators operating mostly in Mindanao sending troop movement reports to Brisbane and tens of thousands of Filipino guerrillas operating around the Philippines sabotaging enemy operations. The combined ground work efforts of countless people, many laying their lives, directed Gen. MacArthur to decide a major naval battle and landing in Leyte Province, instead of Mindanao as originally intended. This was to be a wise decision in the retaking of the Philippines.

On October 24, 1944 a combined Australian and United States force composed of over 200,000 men and women, 200 battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers along with 1,500 planes waged the largest and most decisive Allied offensive of World War II. In three days of relentless sea battles off Leyte the Japanese forces were defeated and their oil supply lifeline cut off from Southeast Asia. Japan’s defeat was imminent. Dad’s own efforts to this victory earned him the Purple Heart received for injuries, the Bronze Medal for valor, and the Philippine Congressional Medal of Honor.

Dad retired with the rank of Lt. Colonel, got a job in the post office and we lived in San Francisco, California. Dad knew this city from way back in the thirties, where he and other farm workers spent their weeks wages in Chinatown, on pool halls and girls. Before college, he was one of over 120,000 single Filipinos who left the Philippines in the twenties to come to America and work the sugar fields in Hawaii, the canneries in Alaska and the fruit and vegetable farms in California.

Dad liked driving his green and white Dodge all over the city and on weekends drove to the fruit farms in Fresno to meet up with buddies that he roamed with years back. They were the unlucky ones who didn’t marry and continued to live in barracks with other Filipinos. His eyes lit up and he’d laugh with his friends remembering those times in Seattle when they’d run from the vigilantes out to kill them for dating white women. Or down in Los Angeles, after harvesting and having a great time with the Mexicanas. Filipino men developed a wandering spirit depending on the season and where the jobs would be. This might explain partially why Dad, like many of his compatriots, couldn’t and didn’t settle down.

When we’d drive home, he loved singing this American folk song. We sang it with him. For us children it was a cheery song. For Dad, it may have been his life story.

“Freight train, freight train
Going on so fast
Freight train, freight train
Going on so fast
I don’t care what train I’m on
As long as it keeps going on.”

PASSING ON THE LUCK. THE GRADUATION OF MY SCHOLAR

By John L. Silva

(Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 21, 2008)

Through the years, I’ve happily attended many of Far Eastern University’s lectures, openings, and performances.

The university’s 80th commencement exercise this April was by far, the most heartfelt of all the events. Our scholar, Ronnie Quiling, was graduating and my partner Jonathan Best and I were there as his adoptive parents.

There was onstage for several hours, a stream of tassels and gowns and the school color green but when Ronnie’s name was called and he strode the platform to receive his diploma, the moment went into slow motion. Like every parent in that huge auditorium, I felt that mixture of tears and happiness for our graduate.

I rewound the days stretching four years back when Ronnie was introduced into my household by Glenn. Glenn, my first scholar and graduate from Emilio Aguinaldo College, was responsible for finding another suitable candidate from his province Zamboanga who would work for us one year as a houseboy. If all went well and there was a desire for college, he would become the next scholar.

Ronnie graduated from a science high school so he came to our lives not with shy rural bearings, but more with a cautious, academic mien. He pondered the world while he washed the dishes or fixed the bed in the morning. He is also of the Iglesia Ni Christo faith, and they possess a discipline and an outlook to succeed, bereft of fatalism.

After a year’s service I told him to choose whatever university he wished. He chose FEU without any prodding. He had visited various schools but loved the serenity of the campus, the friendliness of the students and the competence of its faculty. When he echoed the same feelings I have had about the university these many years, I knew this ward was worth my investment and time.

He was my fourth college scholar and was lucky, for I had turned pragmatic and less demanding. My previous scholars got a direct threat: You get a scholarship only if you signed, in blood, never to leave for work abroad after graduation.

After a decade though of providing scholarships and realizing the snail’s pace by which the job market was expanding, I relented, and with Ronnie, told him his life’s destination was his own after graduation.

To our surprise, he decided to major in Psychology and not the alluring courses that would have been his ticket abroad. In fact, he has never indicated to us a desire to leave the country. I had become the cynic, while he, with FEU’s unremitting idealism, seem to have ingrained in him the possibility of creating a future here.

Since Jonathan and I espouse an American egalitarian philosophy in the midst of a stratified society, Ronnie and the rest of our house-help scholars experienced a dual relationship with us. They did everything demanded of house help but on many occasions, they sat at the dinner table with us, eating the best, learning manners, holding English conversations, and realizing their own worth and dignity. Ronnie reveled in the democracy of our home and I suspect that FEU had much to do with the self-confidence he brought to the table. He was his own strong willed person and his expressions of thanks, for the ballet tickets, the summer outings, the delightful dinners, were always simple but sincere. It was refreshing to take a young man under my wing without the cloying gratitude or feigned cheeriness that Utang Na Loob (debt of gratitude) exacts.

Ronnie mastered the university’s electronic library, and developed strong friendships acutely aware of the network advantages later on. In his senior year, I offered to help find on-the-job-trainings from friends who had companies but he demurred and got it himself. I sense he will need little or no help when he goes out there pounding the streets for his first job. FEU has given him that spunk. Ronnie, like many of the graduates cheerily clutching at their diplomas that day, seem ready to take a swipe at life and become the backbone of a good society we earnestly need. For Ronnie, the first in his family line to graduate from college, poverty is no longer his badge nor lot.

After his graduation, I went by myself to the American cemetery in Makati. My soldier/father is not buried there but I remember him vividly in that tranquil place. I thought about how he got his lucky break, in the thirties. Dad, having graduated from high school, left his poor Pangasinan town and boarded a ship bound for California. He worked the length of that state and, depending on the harvest, picked apples up north and vegetables down south. But he wanted so badly to go to college.

One day, while praying in church hoping to find some way to go to school, a priest named Father Anthony approached him, heard his need, and introduced him to a professor friend at San Francisco State College. The professor, who was disabled, agreed to help Dad through college in return for being his manservant. My dad’s life changed with that diploma. Forever grateful to the priest, Dad made my middle name “Anthony.” And while growing up, he never made me forget to pass on his “luck” to someone else.

Dad would have been proud to see his “luck” continue through Ronnie and even more so through FEU. Its founder Dr. Nicanor Reyes started the school as a night college to allow working people to study and obtain a diploma.

Ronnie’s career path and future is set. My father’s dictum to pass on his “luck” fulfilled. And with the venerable university’s 80th commencement, a founder’s vision endures.

(John is a trustee of Synergeia, an education reform organization which raises academic achievement levels in children through teacher training)

GRANT WRITING AND ADVOCACY WRITING WORKSHOPS FOR MAY 2008

May 1, 2008

Dear friends,

I am, once again, offering my Grant Writing Workshop on May 26, and the Advocacy Writing Workshop on May 27, 2008 in Pasig City. Recent experiences illustrate why my courses are unique and effective.


THE GRANT WRITING WORKSHOP

Actual Story:

She had started work with an organization that provided scholarships to indigent students. Everything was new to her especially writing proposals. But in my workshop she persevered and was a sponge to all the things I shared.

I didn’t see her again until a few months later. She was absolutely thrilled to tell me the news. She wrote her first proposal, did the research as instructed, and made sure her proposal was succinct as I insisted. She submitted it to the Children’s Hour Foundation. Her organization received a three million-peso grant. I was so proud of her and of her organization. For a several thousand peso investment to my seminar, the organization got 3 million pesos. Imagine that!

In my over 30 years of non-profit work either reading proposals for funding or writing proposals to receive funding, I know now what works best in getting proposals approved. First, write succinctly. Second, write with the passion that fuels your own dedication to the cause you believe in. Third, write it convincingly.

If your organization is presented in that light, the chances for funding are very high.

As former Fundraising Director for organizations like Oxfam, Greenpeace, American Cancer Society, and for organizations here like the National Museum, Ballet Philippines, and the Mangyan Heritage Society, I’ve written my fair share of successful proposals and now I’d like to share them with you.

For three years now, I’ve given whole day grant-writing seminars to non-governmental organizations, non-profits, universities, religious organizations, foundations and individuals. I bring to the seminar thirty years of personally knowing what proposal works and what fails. I reveal what funders want to read because I too have been on the other side giving grants. I teach how to write well and sustain the interest of funders who must read hundreds of proposals in a week. I share what will make your proposal stand out from the rest.

For my whole day seminar, you will review my winning proposals that have secured funding from 50,000 thousand to 5,000,000 million pesos. You will receive summaries, gained from experience on the language, the style and the content to include or avoid when writing proposals. I give tips on polishing your writing so that your proposal shines and cannot be overlooked. (Tip: Present something educational that the funder did not know and the chances of remembering your proposal from the pile is much higher). And having experience with local and international funding agencies, I’ll clue you in on the latest trends and interests looked for by these funders.

You will also learn how to personally present your proposal. Increasingly, funding agencies want to meet members of your organization and actually see the projects you want funded. The etiquette, the nuances, the pitfalls in presenting your cause will be shared so that your proposal will have a greater chance of approval. Aside from a well-written proposal, funders take great stock in the visionary and the staff entrusted with the grant.


The Grant Writing Seminar starts at 9:00 AM and ends at 4:30 PM. A CD is provided so all you need to do is come informally, bring your notebook or laptop and we're set! 



THE ADVOCACY WRITING COURSE

Actual Story:

An environmentalist group had concerns they needed to raise with a commercial real estate company. They sent out an e-mail appeal to like-minded groups with a note hoping that it would reach the real estate company. The group noted the company president’s name and the contradiction between the president’s public stance in support of the environment and his company’s seemingly anti-environmental position. The group sought help.

I gave the group high points in documenting the specific circumstance of their grievance. But as an advocacy writing piece, it fell short of my expectation. First, an e-mail appeal shouldn’t be sent out at random with the hope it would get to company ears. Second, they named the wrong company president.

I helped the group by writing to the correct company president and sending the e-mail directly to him. I summarized the group’s concern and in less than an hour received a reply from the president who alerted his people to meet with the group. The meeting happened several days later to everyone's satisfaction and the company was praised for living up to their Corporate Social Responsibility credo.

My Advocacy Writing Course puts a lot of weight on writing succinctly and forcefully but it also puts a lot of weight on doing research and directly addressing the decision makers who can act in your favor.

I advocate for education, the arts, heritage preservation and the environment. I’ve had a good track record in getting my concerns responded to by companies, government agencies, and local governments. I want to share my skills with you with a course I have been doing for three years now to thousands of non-governmental organizations, private foundations, universities and advocates. I teach how to write well-written and concise pieces with persuasive arguments that achieve results. I share my successful advocacy pieces and dissect them so you can harness their effective points for your own pieces. I boost the confidence of fellow advocates in writing effective pieces because I am not just a technical writer but a fellow activist wanting results and positive changes to occur. Many who have attended my course report how they have been able to write better newsletters, e-mail alerts, get published in newspapers, and most importantly, get the results they needed.

For a whole day, you’ll review successful writing pieces, learn the mechanics of a well-written piece and have a writing exercise (you’ll write a Letter To The Editor). I’ll share with you key ingredients to effective writing by revealing years of advocacies and how I’ve been able to get my points across to seemingly formidable adversaries. Just through my writings, I’ve gotten as far up as the country’s president and various corporate heads to rescind anomalous orders, agree to my viewpoints, and accede to my requests. Samples of my pieces are in the other sections of this blog.

The Corporate Connection to The Billboard Blight:

http://johnsilva.blogspot.com/2006/10/corporate-connection-to-billboard.html

My response to Inquirer Columnist Isagani Cruz on his homophobic columns:

http://johnsilva.blogspot.com/2006/09/obstinate-isagani.html

My successful fight to remove a Greenwich food stand in a plaza deemed a historical site:

http://johnsilva.blogspot.com/2006/07/successful-advocacy-letters-to.html

The workshops start at 9:00 AM promptly and end at 4:30 PM. Lunches and snacks are on your own. A CD is provided so all you need to do is come informally. Bring a notebook or your laptop. 


Workshop Fees and Location

It's 2,400 pesos for either workshop for Pasig City. The workshops will held at the Ortigas Library, 2nd floor, Ortigas Building, corner Meralco and Ortigas Avenues, Pasig City. You can reserve a seat by e mailing me at jsilva79@mac.com or you can text/call


0917 – 419 – 5928 (Melinda my assistant)

0926 - 729 – 9029 (John’s cell phone)

Some of my participants have this to say about the course:

“I had been infused with renewed hope for our country after attending your Advocacy Writing workshop. For one day, I was taken out of the lull of callousness and was made to see how we could actually change things. It was great!”


Jennifer Domingo
British Council Manila


Dear John,


“I have attended workshops where the style was too technical. I left the place daunted and had the
 feeling of writing a scientific paper instead of a proposal. 


But last Saturday's session was great! You brought back the FUN in fundraising.” 


Juvy Esperanza, Fundraising Officer
American Chamber Foundation



“...you shouldn't miss John Silva's grants writing workshop!

I attended his advocacy writing workshop last Saturday and it was one of the best learning experience I’ve had this year. And that's me, the educator, speaking :) 



In the workshop, john sequenced ideas/concepts we needed to learn in a systematic way, it was a breeze to follow through the process of advo writing with him! 



john used/gave tons of practical tips, inspiring stories about his advocacy work, funny and fiery anecdotes, attractive photos and visuals, a CD-full of resources. Never a dull moment!”


Deanie Ocampo
 University of the Philippines


Participants to my seminars have included staff members from the Ayala Foundation, World Vision, KASAMAKA, ABS-CBN Foundation, CITEM, Makati Business Club, DLSU Alumni Office, Miriam College, Philippine Population Association, Philamlife, Meralco Foundation, Pathways to Higher Education, Philippine Center for Substance Abuse, St. Louis Center, Diocese of Tandag, College of Public Health, UP Manila, UP Los Banos, British Embassy, American Chamber of Commerce, Globe Telecom, FEU, Cartwheel Foundation, Philippine Senate, Trinity College, Hands On Manila, Synergeia Foundation, Mirant Foundation, Figaro Foundation, Ateneo de Manila University, Pacific Link Health Care, Ilocos Norte Trade and Tourism Office, Philippine Educational Theater Association (PE TA), Pila Historical Society, Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP), Holy Family Home, Asia Foundation, Asica Society, Resource Alliance, Venture for Fundraising, Municipality of Concepcion Iloilo, Bahay Bata, Magsaysay Shipping Lines, Institute of Social Order, Asian Institute of Management (AIM), Aboitiz Foundation, Associate Missionaries of Assumption, Hagonoy Institute, Kythe Inc., ERDA, SM Foundation, Manila Symphony Orchestra, Christian Broadcasting Network, UCPB-CIIF Foundation,Sisters of the Little Mission for the Dear, the Joseph Gualandi School for Hearing Impaired, Homer Foundation, Palawan Tourism Council, Centex, British Council, Child Protection Unit, Philippine General Hospital, Greenpeace, Bato Balani Foundation, Philippine Eagle Foundation, UP CHE Resource Generation, San Jose Seminary, Simbahang Lingkod Ng Bayan, Promoting English Efficiency (PEP) and the Cradle of Joy Center For Learning. (Partial Listing)

WHAT IS THEIR PROBLEM? The Piolo and Sam Libel Case

American matinee idol Tab Hunter comes to mind while reading the multimillion peso libel suit filed by actors Piolo Pascual and Sam Milby against gossip columnist Lolit Solis for insinuating that they’re gay. In 1956, Tab was at the peak of his career. The handsome “boy-next-door” was the leading man in movies with co-stars like Lana Turner, Natalie Wood and Sophia Loren. His stature rivaled James Dean and Marlon Brando and his studio, Warner Brothers, made a lot of money on him. He went into singing and released his first major nationwide hit “Young Love.” Everyone had a crush on Tab that one Valentine’s Day, he received over 60,000 Valentine telegrams. Everything was on the up for the young star despite the fact he was gay.

Tab wasn’t out then but in his tell-all autobiography released in 2005, (Tab Hunter, Confidential) he talked about a Hollywood peopled with gay producers, directors, writers, and actors. So, there was an unwritten agreement in Tinseltown: If you had a same sex love affair, do it discreetly.

At the height of his career, Confidential, a tabloid magazine ran a story about Tab caught by the police after raiding a private gay party. Tab was worried but his producer, the movie mogul Jack Warner didn’t pay the controversy any mind nor issue retractions nor demand that Tab go on “arranged” dates. He simply told Tab “Remember this. Today’s headlines-tomorrow’s toilet paper.”

Other gay baiting items about him appeared from time to time in the tabloids but Tab continued making more movies and more money while having a discreet two year romantic fling with actor Tony Perkins. There were several more lovers after that and eventually Tab settled down with his current long time partner Allan Glaser. The eventual decline in Tab’s popularity had nothing do with his sexual orientation. It was simply age; In Tinseltown, the search for young fresh faces was a constant. Tab, by then a veteran actor, was able to move into television and later perform in dinner-theaters throughout the country.

Lolit Solis was suppose to have seen, with her own two eyes, Piolo and Sam in an amorous situation at a hotel poolside. The actors’ lawyer, Joji Alonso denied that her clients were there that day. Attorney Alonso contends that such accusations destroys the “bankability” of her clients and fans would no longer watch their movies or attend their concerts if they found out they were gay. The whopping 12 million pesos in moral damages being demanded in the libel suit was to make up for the “mental anguish, besmirched reputation and social humiliation” the actors are now undergoing for being branded gay.

Aside from the movies and the concerts, the two actors, using their grins and bods, have peddled on billboards practically every product known to mankind. If Attorney Alonso now categorically states that her clients can’t sell a can of tuna, and their movies will be boycotted, and they are now mentally distraught because they’ve been called gay, what do you think we gays feel? Suicidal?

Even before Solis and other gossip columnists took aim on the Piolo/Sam affair, there had been for years the constant talk in many circles that Piolo is gay. It may have raised a few eyebrows but no sensible person (except for gossip columnists) was going to raise havoc with an earnest young man making a go of his career. Like actor and gay supporter Paul Newman would say “There are so many qualities that make up a human being…by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.”

Failed marriages, sex, and checking who’s gay is the redundant theme in show biz gossip. If you’re young and handsome and trying to make it in show biz, you’re automatically grist for the rumor mill. A 12 million peso lawsuit on a hapless columnist with a checkered background and whose writing isn’t worth getting one’s panties in a twist, seems like overkill. It actually raises unduly more eyebrows and even more fevered speculation.

Lawyer Alonso gets the prize though for her reasons on pressing the libel suit. She says the gossip item is a crime against her client’s honor, their purity and dignity now destroyed. “Because up to this day,” she adds “we all know for a fact that again, with all due courtesy to the members of the third sex, it is not still an accepted thing in this country.”

Stating that one’s purity and dignity is ruined for being called gay offends and insults gays. Calling us in the politically incorrect term as a “Third Sex” (does that mean we sport both a vagina and a penis?) and saying our behavior is not an accepted “thing” in this country makes one wonder what country and century she inhabits. Alonso seems to be oblivious to the fact that, barring a few morality crusaders, Filipino gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals live and work in one of the more tolerant and accepting societies in Asia. Caught having same sex in India? Ten years imprisonment. Making your partner orally happy in Singapore can lead to a jail term. In Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia, you’ve virtually no rights being gay. And until recently in Hong Kong, if you happen to love another man, it was life imprisonment. If Attorney Alonso believes that we gays are not an “accepted thing” in this country, I shall tell all my gay friends and supporters to boycott her client’s movies, concerts, and products. Why spare our hard earned gay pesos to people who don’t accept us? I shall also tell all my gay Fil-Am friends the next time Piolo and Sam wants to crash the Fil-Am market. Gay power and gay dollars will teach Attorney Alonso the meaning of acceptance.

The network studio ABS-CBN, should have repeated Warner Brother’s class act manner and counseled their twink stars to weather the gossip. After all, the studio has made so much money from their gay talents, gay writers, gay producers, gay executives and gay make-up artists, you’d expect a little more gratitude. Why, if the studio was swallowed up by an earthquake tomorrow, there goes half the gay population!

And where are the ad agencies and the companies who’ve overused these two stars to hawk their products? Doesn’t anyone of them have the gay balls to tell Attorney Alonso that it is BECAUSE of their sweet-handsome-probably-gay looks that sells and sells big? Remember that billboard with Piolo baring his gorgeous sexy abs while promoting a coffee brand? Today, so many gays will drink nothing else but that!

Piolo and Sam seem to be cashing in as singers given their concerts. There’s been some incredible singers. From Johnny Mathis to Boy George to Elton John to George Michael. The latter alone sold sixty seven million albums. None of these singers lost their fans or popularity when they lived open lives or came out. As George Michael would say, “I’ve wondered what my sexuality might be, but I’ve never wondered whether it was acceptable or not. Anyway, who really cares whether I’m gay or straight?”

Like Tab Hunter who came before all of them and crooning his hit song inspite all the gossip, it will be the singing (like the song) and not the “singing” (like slang for fellatio) that will ultimately prevail in the marketplace.

THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB'S CLUBBING OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

By John L. Silva


The National Press Club’s defacement and censorship of a commissioned mural in their club restaurant recalls to mind a celebrated incident involving the Mexican artist Diego Rivera and the Rockefeller Center.

In 1933, Rivera was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to do a mural for the lobby of the RCA Building at New York’s Rockefeller Center. Rivera, a leftist, was well known for his grand murals replete with sinewy laborers in all forms of working poses. He had just finished a large scale mural with a similar theme for the Detroit Museum of Art sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, and despite the bias for proletarian vistas, the liberal, art loving Rockefellers decided their center should have a Rivera mural too.





Rivera though added a portrait of Lenin in the mural and this was over the top for Nelson Rockefeller. Despite his wife Abby’s lament, who collected Riveras, Rockefeller confronted the artist demanding he remove the offending Lenin. Rivera, already paid for the mural, refused, was summarily fired, and the mural destroyed. Rivera would have his revenge by recreating the same mural back in Mexico with Lenin in his glory and the patriarch John D. Rockefeller inserted elsewhere drinking martini at the expense of the toiling masses.





The National Press Club is in a similar imbroglio, having commissioned the Neo-Angono artist collective to do a mural with a press freedom theme. But the tack the Club undertook was downright abhorrent. They decided the mural was “leftist” and proceeded to have it altered without artists’ permission. They altered the mural to censor texts which included the current plight of a mother seeking an abducted son, defacing well-respected journalists, and painting over sections deemed offensive to the current Philippine president.




Paintings, particularly murals, if well done, have changed people, norms, and societies. We only need to recall Juan Luna’s Spoliarium which would influence a medical student named Jose Rizal to alter his career and write his devastating anti-colonial novels and become our national hero.

Paintings often reflect the times and if the Neo-Angono mural reflects the current state of Philippine affairs and the unpopularity of the current President, so be it. One would shudder to think if the National Press Club lived in the 19th century and found the Spoliarium to be offensive to the Spanish monarchy.

The cavalier and contemptible manner by which the National Press Club blithely desecrated a work of art is evidence enough that these so-called journalists haven’t a clue about freedom of expression. In a free society, contending thoughts, contending works of art are allowed and respected despite its inherent inclinations and viewpoints. The National Press Club’s actions has just put their profession to ridicule, painted themselves as cowards, and now insinuates itself as being in-the-pay of the powerful. Fellow journalists who abide in the freedom of expression should call for the immediate dismissal of the club officers.




Despite the destruction of his mural, Diego Rivera secured even more artistic commissions, gained world fame and lived financially comfortable to a ripe old age. Abby Rockefeller continued collecting Riveras, later donating them to the Rockefeller funded Museum of Modern Art for the public to see and appreciate. Rivera’s works are now revered and have a universal appeal transcending its leftist themes.

The Neo-Angono artists collective have the last laugh. In the current booming Southeast Asian art market, the moronic act by the National Press Club has just increased the appeal and selling cachet of current and future works of the Neo-Angono collective by ten fold. And, if it has universal appeal, a work of theirs could probably hang proudly in the National Museum, along with the Spoliarium.

John L. Silva is senior consultant to the National Museum of the Philippines

HEALED A SECOND TIME

Hope For Education in Sagada

(published in Philippine Inquirer, Sunday Sept. 30, 2007

By John L. Silva

You have to psych yourself for the six-hour bus ride from Baguio to the northern mountain top town of Sagada. But, on the road, you don’t figure the added time for the stalled jeep ahead laden with vegetables blocking the road. Or my bus having a flat tire. Or that it wouldn’t start after a pit stop. Or the bus screeching to a halt with a fresh landslide in front of it.

We got off the bus and in freezing pouring rain climbed the huge muddy mound about two stories high, to slip and slide down the other side to wait for another bus.

After awhile, the rain stopped, the mist cleared and I looked up to the night sky and saw tens of thousands of stars twinkling. You don’t see this spectacle in the city. Cold, wet, and muddied, I smiled and the trip’s misery was forgotten. Nature has a way of doing that.

I first visited Sagada as a young troubled man. A love affair ended painfully and I was in despair. A friend suggested Sagada. There was an orphanage there and needed help. Go, she said, make yourself useful to the kids and stop the self pity. Heal in Sagada.

Thirty six years later, I was back to teach public school teachers the elements of aesthetics. Six hours became almost nine hours of travel and the last third of the way in pitch darkness, swaying headlights and bumpy roads. The night stars were my only solace.

I was welcomed in Sagada by Dennis Faustino, the principal of St. Mary’s High School who lives in a charming wooden house built in 1924. A jovial man with a continuous smile, he had some of his students watching a movie in the living room. When we sat down to eat, the students were also invited and I found them to be curious of my work, polite, and eager to listen to my conversation with Dennis.

Early the next day, I was at St. Mary’s, a well-kept two-storey building, donated by fellow La Salle Green Hills classmate Boy Yuchengco, and nestled in pine trees seeing groups of teachers signing up in the auditorium where I was to lecture. There were many young teachers astonished when I told them I was in Sagada when their parents were still in high school. Uttering it astonished me too!

None of the teachers ever had an arts education workshop let alone any continuing education courses for their professional development. Much as I thanked them profusely for coming on a Saturday, their personal day, and spending jeep and bus fares to get to the workshop, the teachers told me they came because they wanted to learn and know what the arts is all about.

In Mindanao, the teachers cluck when they are entranced by a painting they see from my powerpoint. Here in the Cordilleras, they swoon with long deep oooh’s. They take notes about how arts education can lessen absenteeism and be antidotes to drug addiction. Their faces glow as they become enlightened by what constitutes a beautiful picture. They start to connect aesthetics with being a citizen, learning that visual pollution – billboards, advertising banners, garbage thrown indiscriminately – affect the pristine sights of their community. Sagada has been touted as a mountain top Shangri-La visited by local and foreign tourists. Given its distance from “civilization” Sagada has little to worry for now. The view outside the school auditorium has a sweeping scene of mountains and rice terraces spotted with houses. Greenery and their unique stone terraces still overwhelm and captivate. This workshop with emphasis on appreciating nature as art has a very practical economic value to Sagada.

My lesson plan on photography as a fine art and weaving Philippine history into it using old photographs excites the teachers. I incorporated old photographs of the Cordilleras taken at the turn of the century. The teachers are wide eyed seeing their ancestors in native garb, the thatched huts their grandparents lived in, the majesty of their stone terraces and the dances. In the Cordilleras, people danced on so many occasions and scrupulously documented on film by anthropologists and missionaries. The women were oftentimes bare-breasted and the men wore loincloths. The early missionaries imposed modest dressing in these parts and these pictures of their half naked past are unnerving for the older teachers. The younger teachers though are more astute having been raised to take pride in local customs and missionary influence long receded.

Sagada, like many rural areas have no museums so I teach a module on setting up a simple school museum. Developing an exhibition theme, writing captions and wall text, and producing an exhibit for very little money demystifies curator-ship and the teachers are introduced to yet another pedagogical method.

We end the workshop by 3:00 pm to allow the teachers to get home early. Buses and jeeps plying the route are scarce and unscheduled so the long wait adds to the travel time. Some of the teachers from the rural villages have not been to “big town” Sagada in a while and this was a time to shop or go to the hospital and get checked up.

I get the chance to walk the town again and see what changes have occurred. My first stop was the orphanage on the hilltop. I see the playground fronting the orphanage and remember the many games I played with the children there. The orphanage had a large number of twins in my days. Twins born were bad luck. One of them was thought to have the mother’s spirit so they were buried alive, abandoned or wound up in the orphanage.

The spartan dormitory I stayed in for the three months I was there was being remodeled into a tourist inn. The one street in the center of the town had several new restaurants but gone were the little stores I remembered that sold tribal artifacts. I walked to the town’s entrance and lamented the destruction of the limestone cliffs by local developers. The large cluster of thatched huts were no longer in sight. These huts which often caught fire have been replaced by galvanized sheets and concrete blocks.

As I walked to my guest house, several of the teachers who attended greeted me on the road effusive about the workshop. They were still waiting for a jeep to take them home.

The next morning, I took the first early bus back to Baguio.

It was sunny throughout the whole trip and memories returned. I took this same Jalsema Highway years ago on a similar sunny day. The same exhilaration came over me as the bus gingerly weaved down the mountain. The same scent of flowers and the same bracing morning air. Flashbacks of tearful twins singing to me as a boarded the bus. They must be now in their forties I thought.

First there were glimpses of a terrace; then halfway down, the mountains unfolded revealing full vistas of terraces, their lines rounding every contour of every mountain in sight. A swath of clouds rested on the mountain tops and way below, a river snaked at the base. The travel brochures always called it an engineering marvel. I just found it breathtaking. I could hear the teachers voices in unison having learned the elements of aesthetics. COLOR! SHAPES! TEXTURE! LINES! they exclaimed as proof.

Despite a swaying bus, I marveled at the profusion of parallel lines incising green mountains and watered terraces below me glistening in the morning sun. As we rounded a mountain, the panorama continued as another set of perfectly chiseled mountains came to view. This panoply went unabated for almost the whole of the bus ride. I laughed out loud, realizing the Sagada teachers were being polite with Mr.-Know-It-All from Manila. Teach them aesthetics? LINES? Hah! Their ancestors were aesthetes for thousands of years.

There are threats to the beauty of the place. Signs at interval on the Jalsema Highway warn and forbid the dumping of garbage over the roadside. The signs are not working because the dumping continues. Rice terraces and vegetable plots post signs of fertilizers and chemicals used. In a increasingly organic oriented world, the signs are anachronistic, threatening their produce and their own health.

It is the education of the Cordilleras students that will decide the fate of this region. Illiteracy and drop-outs rates are twice higher in the non-Christian and tribal communities than the national average. The catching up, the learning curve, the ratcheting up of student academic achievements in these parts are an imperative.

It boils down to good teachers. At St. Mary’s, Dennis Faustino, former teacher now principal is turning a once ailing school around. In just three years, academic achievement reached higher levels in his school with a new core of dedicated teachers well trained, well paid, teaching in spanking classrooms and labs brimming with all the equipment necessary. An alumni network and a working board allows Dennis to do his job. Bottom line results? All graduating high school students have passed the exams and will enter colleges and universities this year. Where only two out of every 100 fourth year high school students in the country are equipped for college and almost all with failing achievement scores, the St. Mary’s graduating class, in toto, have just beaten insurmountable odds.

I’ve traveled the breadth and length of this country teaching teachers who make do with so little, teaching in classrooms so pitiful and inadequate, seeing students seemingly vacuous but actually just deprived of books to read. One can give up at times with the rapacity and neglect that the government affords on education. It just breaks your heart.

And then you get to Sagada, and you see a school like St. Mary’s. Teachers determined, students enthused. Shangri-La still existing.

I am healed a second time.

John L. Silva is the Senior Consultant for the National Museum.

DEFYING A CONFLICT TO TEACH AESTHETICS

(Bringing Arts Education to Tawi-Tawi Teachers)
by John L. Silva

It seemed foolhardy to go to Tawi-Tawi. There was all-out war raging in the neighboring islands of Basilan and Jolo. The fighting was fierce and ten marines in one encounter were decapitated by Muslim rebels. Retribution was in the offing.

The request though from Synergeia was urgent. If I-LOVE-MUSEUM, our training program for public school teachers did not travel within the week, the window of opportunity to teach there would be lost. Synergeia’s teaching program in Tawi-Tawi was to end in a month and the holy fasting month Ramadan was coming up prohibiting these activities. We had to go now or not at all.

Synergeia has been training public school teachers for several years in the Sulu Archipelago where Tawi-Tawi and Jolo are located. They were yielding results; children’s reading scores had increased by over 10%. Now, Synergeia would add arts education, convinced that children learning aesthetics and loving their local arts and culture would also help their overall achievement scores.

There was never any good time to go to Sulu with some conflict or another arising. But recent events were nerve wracking. This war was serious.

I dug deep into the recesses of my devil-may-care past when life was intensely and precariously lived. Why should I, in mid-life become so safe and boring? To hell with the war. I’m teaching aesthetics!

So I hopped on an early morning flight to Zamboanga, transferred to a small plane for a bumpy two hour ride, through a scary monsoon rain and zero visibility to reach Bongao, the capital of Tawi-Tawi.

A book I read years back called Song of Salanda by H. Arlo Nimmo drew me to Tawi-Tawi. Nimmo, an anthropologist, studied the people of Sulu in the sixties and wrote his encounters with them. They were memorable subjects: a Badjau woman known for her singing but unhappy with her marriage, a nun schooled abroad but returned to work as a doctor, a smuggler/pirate loved by his village, these were just some of them, living in exotic sounding islands like Siasi, Sitangkai, Simunul. I never forgot them and vowed one day to visit.

All anxiety faded as the plane touched the grassy airfield, the sun broke out from the clouds and a group of happy teachers awaited me with welcome banners. In less than an hour I was in a makeshift audio visual room with over 70 veiled teachers curious of my mission.

The teachers had an air of subtle indifference to me in the beginning. Here was a person from Catholic Manila, carrying National Museum credentials making me part of a government that has not cared for them. It’s a matter of course that public school teachers there get their salaries late, sometimes 4 – 6 months late. The part time and probationary teachers aren’t paid for up to two years. Compound this affront with a three-decade civil war, their villages destroyed, a stagnating economy, no local taxes earmarked for education, no school textbooks distributed in years, and rotting schools and you’d expect a demoralized bunch of teachers. Yet, here they are in front of me, having paid their own way to travel hours to learn about art. They are teachers first and foremost. You see it in their smiles and feel it in the soft handshakes ending with a tap to the breast. They never forgot nor forsaken their childhood ambition to be teachers.

It usually starts with a joke, an irreverent quip. If they laughed, I was in their confidence as a fellow teacher rather than some boring bureaucrat on a talking junket. Beside, I was part of Synergeia, and they’d seen the success in their students reading levels. Surely, an art program could only help their students as well.

Of all the ethnic groups in the country, Filipino Muslims were never totally subjugated by the Spanish and the Americans. Their culture, melded with Islam, remained intact while the rest of the country assimilated into colonial culture. The teachers may have warmed to my program but they let it be known they had enough mat weaving, kris making, brass ware, jewelry crafts, epics, songs and dances to rival whatever art forms I was showing. And they were right.

In my powerpoint, there were more than enough of the finest Muslim artwork and artifacts throughout the Islamic world for them to take pride in. One of my teaching modules, about the Elements of Aesthetics - Color, Line, Shapes and Texture - appealed to them since Islamic art is devoid of figurative works. The intricacy of calligraphy, the geometric patterns in their walls and carvings, and the brilliant colors and designs in their fabrics became more pronounced and esteemed. Aesthetics transcended the cultural distinctions of Muslim and western civilizations. By the end of the day, the teachers were enthralled and convinced about arts education.

Much as they had significant culture to bare, the teachers knew it was endangered. There is cable television and video games in far flung Tawi-Tawi with children spending an inordinate amount on them. The elders, fast disappearing, are the only ones weaving, carving, pounding brass, and melting gold. The teachers themselves no longer know these processes. In their survey forms, they realized arts education would be the hedge to the possible decimation of all their indigenous art forms.

At the end of the long day workshop, a space was cleared in the auditorium and a dance troupe replete in traditional clothing appeared. They performed ancient ceremonial dances about courtship, combat, and sea myths, evoking the motions of seagulls and the waves of the sea. Hands, arms, shoulders, torsos and legs possessing fluidity and grace writhed in sensual motion with the hands ending in an upward curl. It reminded one of the curled Okir design so prominent in their artistic environment. The dances’ indigenous purity recalled similar dance forms in neighboring Borneo and Indonesia, evidence of the artificial divide colonial powers imposed in these parts. One teacher confessed that she had seen these dances often, but, after Art Connection, saw deeper implications. For her, these dances were reminders of a regal past.

To maximize our trip, we obliged our hosts to do I-LOVE-MUSEUMS the following day in an outlying island, forty-five minutes away. At the crack of dawn we were on the fastest speedboat I had ever ridden (to elude pirate speedboats still plying the waters) headed for Panglima Sugala. With Malaysia just fifty miles away, one could see the phantom peaks of the mountains of Borneo.

At the pier, we were greeted by high school students performing more native dances, another subtle reminder that they manage, despite the odds, to keep their culture alive. The towns people including Mayor and Mrs. Nurbert Shahali welcomed us and encouraged the attending teachers to learn from the workshop.

Like in Bongao, the hall where I taught were makeshift rooms that had large windows covered in black cloth for my LCD presentation. However, there was no airconditioning and the room turned quickly into an oven with over 60 teachers in attendance. But it didn’t faze the teachers one bit as they gave me their full attention and took copious notes.

Panglima Sugala,with its sluggish swaying trees, is quite rural; the slow village tempo as the teachers trickled in from early afternoon prayers and their long expressive smiles created an intimacy among us not found in an urban setting. The humor I injected to ward sleepiness in an airless humid room was received with long-drawn-out laughter. And to my surprise, in this bucolic village where neither orthodox Islam or Christianity had much sway, I found the teachers less reserved, more forthcoming, analytical and open to new ideas. Pictures with nudity elicited quite earthy remarks and raucous laughter. Panglima Sugala prides itself as one of the rare communities where Christians and Muslims live and work peacefully with one another.

The teachers were divided into three groups at the end of the workshop and asked what they had learned and their plans from thereon. On large rolls of brown paper taped to walls they wrote how they learned to develop creativity in children and to appreciate the art works of their ancestors. Almost all of them wanted to bring their students to a museum and build their own school museum. As they excitedly promised to introduce arts to their students, outside, since we started that morning, were six heavily armed soldiers stationed for our protection. I wasn’t worried about my safety but this was Sulu; soldiers and guns were regular fixtures whenever visitors came to town.

The sun was setting and we had to be back in Bongao for the evening. There was one more dance performance by the students and we did not hesitate being treated to another rendition of delicate sinuous movements accompanied by hypnotic gongs and the gamelan.

A profundity came over me, watching a brilliant sunset, windswept on a speedboat skimming the Sulu Sea returning to Bongao. It had been two days of intense teaching, tiring, yet exhilarating. The epiphany in the faces of teachers learning Aesthetics 101 was so discordant with the fighting, killing and bombings going on in nearby islands. The irony invigorated me, prodding me further to teach the sanctity and beauty in life against a moribund culture of death and destruction.

Mayor Albert Que of Bongao invited me to dinner that evening at his beach side home. Amidst the delicious seafood and the calming breeze the Mayor looked particularly glum. Synergeia’s reading program, funded by USAID would end this September after just two years of teacher training. Student reading scores were up, but the program was to inexplicably end. It was tempting to wax cynicism: Tawi-Tawi was being penalized for being relatively peaceful and funders like to go where there’s conflict. In a Mindanao strewn with AUSAid, and CIDA and a host of other international funding acronyms, there is a serious temptation for geopolitical jockeying and overlook the original objective. The one on raising reading scores.

There was a lunar eclipse on our last night. We all waited in the open veranda of our beachside quarters. The dogs began to howl, piercing screams were heard in the distance, while gunfire punctuated the night. We rushed outside joining the townspeople all gathered looking at the moon. In these parts, with little artificial light, and a flat immense sea, the slow encroachment of the moon’s surface was very clear. The townspeople were talking animatedly in agreement, “Bakunawa, the giant lizard is eating the moon.”

More gunfire erupted and I noticed that the people around me were rubbing their nails together. They believed the friction of nail to nail caused a sound that frightens the Bakunawa. Everyone including myself rubbed our nails as the moon disappeared. After a long period, a crescent appeared and the moon slowly came to view again. The people around me felt victorious. The sound of our nails alarmed Bakunawa causing him to spit out the moon.

“See, there it is, the moon is back.”

Before retiring, I walked to the beach, my path and the shore illuminated by the moon. The distinctive crag of Bongao Beak rose like a frozen black tidal wave in the distance. The lunar drama earlier was fading and what remained in my mind was Nimmo’s book. Returning to Sulu twenty years later, he barely recognized it. There had been a war in the interim and the Bongao he knew was destroyed. The people he wrote about were either killed or left Tawi-Tawi. The population had increased several fold, straining the island, its forests denuded and fishing scarce. He ends his book by saying

“I shall never return to Sulu. I cannot. My lovely Sulu is gone.”

Despite his lament, and the depradations haunting Sulu today, Nimmo revealed in his earlier chapters a people immensely kind and generous, determined to make life better for their community. I thought of the teachers and their indomitable spirit to continue teaching their students even if unpaid for months on end and scantly respected. I thought of Mayor Que and Mayor Shahali, two rare officials who valued education for their students. I thought of the various people who were generous to a fault and were in the background doing logistics so all I did was click on my remote and the workshop came off perfectly. No compensation. Just a desire to see their students get smarter. These teachers, these people of Bongao and Panglima Sugala are composites of the people Nimmo once knew, documented and loved.

I will always return to Sulu. I will. My lovely Sulu still exists.

John L. Silva is the Senior Consultant for the National Museum. For further information about Synergeia’s reading programs or wishing to attend an I-LOVE-MUSEUM whole-day art appreciation workshop, call or text 0926 729 9029 or e-mail jsilva79@mac.com

SCHOOL FIELD TRIPS SHOULD BE EDUCATIONAL FOR ALL!

John L. Silva


It’s been over six years now since the late Secretary of Education Raul Roco issued a school wide directive (DEP ED Order No. 56, s. 2001) acknowledging school field trips “can supplement classroom instruction” when students are brought to the “National Museum, Museo Pambata, provincial and local museums, Science Centrums, botanical gardens, historical sites and scientific sites.”

The next Secretary, Edilberto de Jesus, underscored the directive by issuing another (DEP ED Order No. 52, s.2003) ordering field trips “to educational places, such as cultural and historical sites or science exhibits in museums.” Secretary de Jesus would add emphatically “Trips to malls and attendance at noontime tv shows especially during class hours are discouraged.”

Most of the school field trips today seems never to have heard of nor comply with these directives. Polled public school teachers throughout the country in the course of my museum appreciation program confess that they still bring their students to malls to wander the shops, play violent video games, and hang out in fast food restaurants. Worse, students are brought to these noontime tv shows to watch vulgar shows that insult women, gays, and the physically challenged as well as featuring skimpily clad women gyrating on stage hawking products. In other school systems throughout the world, this would be considered officially sanctioned truancy.

Schools need to address this appalling situation. Parents, who complain about the costs of field trips with no education value should demand conformity with DEP ED directives. However, schools and parents are easy targets. Let’s focus on the companies that contribute as well to this sorry state.

To give teeth to the DEP ED directives, mall establishments, large and small throughout this country should take proactive steps in hindering if not eliminating school field trips to their malls during official school time. Many of these establishments have corporate foundations that fund education programs in public schools. They can transmit their directives to their sponsored schools and education programs. On a larger scale, they can band together and publicly declare a no-tolerance policy to field trips to their malls.

There is however, a growing trend of establishing science museums and holding educational exhibitions in the larger malls. Fine and good. School field trips should be encouraged to those specific places. It is not the mall that is anathema; it is their deficient educational value that is in question.

Television stations should ban students to noontime tv shows on school days. What values do students learn seeing poor people humiliating themselves so they can get a prize? What is so exemplary for students about a tv host who’s been warned repeatedly for lewdness? What lessons do they bring home seeing young people dolled up and applauded for looking and dancing lasciviously? Sexual trafficking is not always a one-way transaction.

We are in an educational calamity. Only five out of ten words can be read and understood by our students. 94 out of 100 students not qualified for high school. One third of all students will drop out and not finish grade school. Every supplementary educational activity like school field trips should be used to stave off the learning morass our children are in.

Calling field trips supplementary does not mean lesser educational value. Students learn past the four classroom walls. They learn arts and culture in museums which, in turn, have been proven to boost math and science scores, increase literacy, and decrease absenteeism. They develop environmental consciousness by visiting parks. They learn to love their country visiting historical sites. They learn to value our past when ethics, morals and decent men and women prevailed in our society.

The corporate sector has recognized the correlation between educated well-rounded students and economic growth and have given resources accordingly. Now it is time for this sector to look into their core businesses and identify what may actually hinder the educational leapfrogging our country needs to catch up with the rest of the globe. Like banning students from internet cafes during school hours, banning smoking and liquor advertising near school grounds, and imposing the age limit for cigarette purchases, the corporate sector must establish very stringent rules when their business intersects with student learning and wellbeing. The quality of school field trips needs to be addressed as well.

If I were to ask businessmen and businesswomen if they approve seeing their own children go to malls and tv stations on official school time, there would be a resounding NO. They know fully well that every opportunity for learning will only improve their children’s future.

Why then are we not exacting the same rigor with our public school children?. School field trips should be educational for all.


(Public school teachers interested in a free whole-day museum and arts appreciation workshop sponsored by the League of Corporate Foundation, Synergeia Foundation, and Charities Aid Fund Australia can e-mail jsilva79@mac.com John Silva is the Senior Consultant of the National Museum of the Philippines.)

THE PAPAL BUT BLUNDEROUS VERSION OF AMERICA’S CHRISTIANIZATION

By John L. Silva

Pope Benedict’s controversial statement in a Brazil bishops conference on the ready acceptance by South American Indians of the Catholic faith resonates across the Pacific Ocean to the Philippines.

The Pope’s speech was a rousing call to reinvigorate the local clergy in a country whose Catholic population of 120 million has decreased by over 15% in the past two decades.

The Pope in outlining the history of the Christian faith in Latin America noted the “…encounter between that faith and the indigenous people” and the emergence of the “Christian culture of this Continent” with a “…shared creed that give rise to a great underlying harmony…”


Glossing over the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the region which entailed the extermination of millions of native Indians to secure this Christian culture, the Pope’s most ahistorical remarks centers on his charge that the early American Indians were looking for “…and welcoming Christ, the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it, in their rich religious traditions. Christ is the Savior for whom they were silently longing.”

Every Native American Studies Department in the Americas has on its reading list Bartolome de las Casas’ “A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies.” De las Casas detailed the genocide and wholesale destruction of the Taino Indians in the West Indies several decades after Christopher Columbus arrived in those parts. As a priest, de las Casas pleaded with then King Phillip II that the decimation of the Indians which he numbered at three million through wars, diseases and slave labor would end all attempts at converting the Indians. Of course. A dead Indian cannot be converted.

How could a population “silently longing” for Christianity’s arrival be so greeted with barbarism? Pope Benedict conveniently puts aside the conqueror mindset which believed that any lands and people “discovered” were theirs and such ownership included the coercive right to Christianize the natives. If they resisted, and they did, the conquerors had the right to kill them.

A clue to the Pope’s imbroglio can be found in a similar “silent longing” scenario foisted on Philippine history and still reverberates in current tourism brochures and pop history articles.



The arrival of the Spanish Conquistadores in the Philippines just twenty years after their arrival in the Americas is made to look convivial. The natives were reported to be friendly providing food and bartering with the Spanish. There was a mass in Cebu and Rajah Humabon and his queen were baptized, and breaking with Christian monogamous practices, baptized the King’s other wives as well. The acceptance of the Christian god along with the planting of the cross on Philippine soil (the same cross allegedly) still stands now gated, covered, and a tourist attraction. A model of the Child Jesus, the very same one given to the queen by Magellan and found,