Republished: A nation’s passion lives in a rivalry of green vs blue

Surprise, surprise – just in time for what appears to be a fourth La Salle-Ateneo game, this time for the second UAAP men’s basketball finals slot, an article about the fancied rivalry appears in The New York Times! There’s nothing really new here, but here’s what the Americans probably first know about what we are so much into. At least if you’re from either school. Writer Raphael Bartholomew is writing a book about Philippine basketball, probably partly based on his experiences working on that school in Katipunan. Many thanks to Leslie Sy for the tip on this one.

Senators, foreign diplomats, cabinet ministers, a smattering of Forbes’s 40 richest Filipinos, movie stars and enough professional basketball players to play five-on-five. They are the elite of Philippine society, and they all gather at Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City to watch the men’s basketball rivalry between the universities Ateneo de Manila and De La Salle.

La Salle coach Franz Pumaren said, “The janitors in Araneta always say, ‘If there’s an Ateneo-La Salle game, once everybody’s out of the coliseum, it still smells good because of the all the socialites watching.’”

Republished: A good provider is one who leaves

Shale is reprinting yet another (hopefully) relevant article, this time from a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine. Jason DeParle talks to the Comodas family, which has seen many of its members – across generations – work abroad to bring a better life for those who preferred to stay at home. And again it’s never hit closer to home – the Philippine economy relies on overseas Filipino workers, and their remittances every year, which amounts to around $14 billion dollars as of 2006. Again, the New York Times website requires registration, but the article page has relevant photos and other information.

On June 25, 1980 (a date he would remember), a good-natured Filipino pool-maintenance man gathered his wife and five children for an upsetting ride to the Manila airport. At 36, Emmet Comodas had lived a hard life without growing hardened, which was a mixed blessing given the indignities of his poverty. Orphaned at 8, raised on the Manila streets where he hawked cigarettes, he had hustled a job at a government sports complex and held it for nearly two decades. On the spectrum of Filipino poverty, that alone marked him as a man of modest fortune. But a monthly salary of $50 did not keep his family fed.

Home was a one-room, scrap-wood shanty in a warren of alleys and stinking canals, hidden by the whitewashed walls of an Imelda Marcos beautification campaign. He had borrowed money at usurious rates to start a tiny store, which a thief had plundered. His greatest fears centered on his 11-year-old daughter, Rowena, who had a congenital heart defect that turned her lips blue and fingernails black and who needed care he could not afford. After years of worrying over her frail physique, Emmet dropped to his moldering floor and asked God for a decision: take her or let him have her.

Republished: Targeted by the warlords

We found this article on MediaGuardian about the killing of journalists here in the Philippines, and we decided to, well, repost it here. Declan Hill, of British newspaper The Guardian, reports on how the Philippines – where we’re based – has become one of the deadliest places for journalists. Within the last week one radio commentator was killed, while a correspondent for the Philippine Daily Inquirer was shot and wounded. And news like this begins to be unsurprising as of late, as well as the apparent inaction by the government despite pressures, locally and internationally. Since the MediaGuardian website requires free registration for you to be able to view their articles, we figured it’d be in our interests to repost this. As usual, Shale has placed relevant links.

Hekainio Ugaspi considers it fairly routine that in the past two years he has faced death threats, a grenade attack and the murder of two colleagues. “A normal part of our duties as a radio broadcaster,” is how he styles it. Ugaspi is the station manager of Radio Bombo in Koronadal city on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao. The station is not a fancy place, just a low concrete building surrounded by a wire fence. But remote and ordinary as Radio Bombo is, its occupants’ experience is one shared throughout the country’s journalistic community. For according to the international group Reporters sans frontières, the Philippines is now one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, after Iraq. Few of the killers have been caught and the journalists have become so accustomed to threats that it has become part of their professional culture.

Glenda Gloria, editor of a Manila news magazine, Newsbreak, received her death threat in an odd way. After she wrote a story about links between the intelligence services and corrupt politicians, a funeral wreath dedicated to her was delivered with a message of condolence attached. “It was sent to my parents’ home. It was not really where I live, which was worse because it was my mother who received it.”