Greatness is among us

MANY of us will never become president of a country, a CEO of a multinational firm, or probably be even the most read novelist that ever lived. But all of us are called to greatness. This I believe with all my heart.

In my 46 years “on this planet” (and thank you, Manong Johnny, for another memorable line), I’ve met so many people who do great things in their own ways, in their own little worlds. Most of them aren’t even famous for what they do outside of their own communities. Or maybe they get a little attention in the newspapers, if ever their stories actually come to light, like that honest taxi driver who returns his passenger’s money and luggage.

Take our neighborhood postman Mang Rudy, for instance. It was pouring torrents one afternoon because there was a typhoon. Classes at all levels had already been called off and work at the government offices had already been suspended earlier. As I was leaving our subdivision to go to a meeting, I bumped into Mang Rudy, still making his rounds delivering the mail to my neighbors.

I called out to him, “Hoy, Mang Rudy! Ano ba, uwi ka na! Wala na kayong pasok. Bagyo-bagyo na!” And all he did was wave and smile at me. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t help but admire the guy for still slogging at work despite the weather. I mean how many government employees still do that? No offense, my dear civil servants, pero you know what I mean, right?

So to me, that was greatness. You are called to do a job, and you do it well. Even through rain, sleet and snow...as they say.

I’ve written about Efren Peñaflorida before. Before he became CNN Hero of the year, he just did his thing in Cavite. He pushed a kariton with books, and taught street children to read. Who would’ve thought of that? Peñaflorida is not rich; he can hardly afford to buy books for these kids. But because of his strong commitment to education and a desire to reduce poverty in the country, he persevered. Somehow he managed to acquire books through donations, and through the help of a few good Samaritans, he was able to help more streetkids.

These days, Peñaflorida and his Dynamic Teen Co. are trying to raise funds for another project—a kariton school called Kalingain Batang Mahirap Learning Center in Cavite City. I had just attended a pa-bingo hosted by Discovery Suites to raise funds for said project. I hope they have been able to raise thousands of pesos for the worthy cause, so that more street kids will have a place to go to and just chill after school, play sports, learn some new stuff, read, research on computers...instead of making mayhem in the streets and flouting the law.

(By the way, if you wish to contribute, please send your donations to the Dynamic Teen Co. using BPI account no. 00-1273-1633-59 Cavite, Caridad Branch; account name: DYNAMIC TEEN COMPANY-MAKING A DIFFERENCE INC., SWIFT Code: BOPIPHMM; Routing Number: 010040018. Or you may send your checks to Discovery Suites c/o Gemma Batoon, Marketing Group.)

A few months ago, Diane, a sales lady at a major department store, also stunned me. She hovered in the background as I was looking through the goods. Then she gently approached me to offer her services, speaking to me in very good English as a matter of fact. She offered to check on the other colors of the utility kit I wanted, then after, offered possible alternatives when the colors I wanted were not available. She was respectful, pleasant, and not pushy about her suggestions. I couldn’t believe a sales lady like her still existed. Most of the time, the girls at this particular department store are just gossipping among themselves or calling out loudly to each other like they were in fishmongers in a wet market. So before I left, I commended Diane for her excellent customer service.

Just do what it right.

Then there’s businessman Archie Po. He was just someone minding his own business, working to expand his aviation firm, flying planes and deploying air ambulances, and just contributing to the tourism industry by building a couple of hotels.

He doesn’t like appearing on TV, or being interviewed. In fact when I met him for the launch of his resort in Boracay, he even asked me not to publish his photos. He’s just not that kind of guy who likes publicity for himself. For his projects, yes, but he isn’t about to go to town appearing on national TV just to market them.

But kapow! He suddenly finds himself right smack in the middle of a controversial transaction involving an undercapitalized government contractor and the Philippine National Police because of a few overpriced secondhand choppers. He is subpoenaed by our esteemed senators.

So what does he do? He just tells the truth. Asked during a Senate blue-ribbon hearing investigating the scandal, who owned those choppers, and he matter-of-factly said it was the former First Gentleman Mike Arroyo. He was called a liar by Arroyo four days later, and was then sued for perjury.

But think about it. Why would someone like Po risk his own life, his family’s welfare, and his business to make up a story like that? That just goes against all common sense and rationality! According to a report in ABS-CBN’s Bandila the other night, all his proposals to sell those two blasted choppers were always headlined “second-hand,” because those were the specifications asked by the guy Larry de Vera of Maptra, the small-time company that sold the choppers to the PNP.

Po could’ve just said he owned those choppers and ended the mess just like that. He could’ve just gone back to his old routine, running his firm and flying his clients. But as he told journalist Ces Drilon, how could he live with himself knowing that he lied? I know that Po still has young children and I guess, if there was to be any significant teaching moment in their lives, this was it. The message - just tell the truth. Period. If other people don’t like the truth that you speak, sorry na lang.

Greatness.

Perhaps you are a call-center operator just dealing with another irate client complaining about the product he had bought from the company you are servicing. By the mere fact that you are being courteous to the customer, trying to help address his problem, and going the extra mile to answer his needs already raises you above the rest.

Or you are perhaps a waiter in a restaurant, just taking orders and serving out dishes to the customers. You too can be great. Just pay attention to your guests, be unobtrusive but available immediately to answer their requests respectfully, help them out in choosing their food by being knowledgeable first and foremost about the menu, and you have fans for life.

It doesn’t take grand gestures to do great things in one’s life and community. All you really need is some heart, and the passion and commitment to do what is right.

(This piece was originally published on Aug. 12, 2011. My column, Something Like Life, is published every Friday in the Life section of the BusinessMirror. Photo courtesy BusinessMirror.)

JD Salinger, 91

"I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetary. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody." (Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger, 1919-2010)

Rest in peace...away from it all.

A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves

By JASON DePARLE
Published: April 22, 2007

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.

(The Comodases with their granddaughter Precious Lara. Stephanie Sinclair for The New York Times)

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.

God answered in a mysterious way. Not long after, Emmet’s boss offered him a pool-cleaning job in Saudi Arabia. Emmet would make 10 times as much as he made in Manila. He would also live 4,500 miles from his family in an Islamic autocracy where stories of abused laborers were rife. He accepted on the spot. His wife, Tita, was afraid of the slum where she soon would be raising children alone, and she knew that overseas workers often had affairs. She also knew their kids ate better because of the money the workers sent home. She spent her last few pesos for admission to an airport lounge where she could wave at the vanishing jet, then went home to cry and wait.

Two years later, on Aug. 2, 1982 (another date he would remember), Emmet walked off the returning flight with chocolate for the kids, earrings for Tita and a bag of duty-free cigarettes, his loneliness abroad having made him a chain smoker. His 2-year-old son, Boyet, considered him a stranger and cried at his touch, though as Emmet later said, “I was too happy to be sad.” He gave himself a party, replaced the shanty’s rotted walls and put on a new roof. Then after three months at home, he left for Saudi Arabia again. And again. And again and again: by the time Emmet ended the cycle and came home for good, he had been gone for nearly two decades. Boyet was grown.

(More at NYT Sunday Magazine.)

I cannot imagine the terrible homesickness and great sacrifices made by our kababayans overseas just to have a decent room over their families' heads, clothes, education, and at least three square meals a day. They endure the separation with quiet dignity all in the name of a better future for their families. Mabuhay kayo!

Pinay makes it big on YouTube

I've watched a few of Christine's vblogs, and she is hilarious! There have been a handful of Fil-am comedians out there who have been charging good money for spoofing their experiences growing up as Flips. Most notable of course is Rex Navarette who has been coming to the Philippines regularly performing sketches about his mother as well and growing up in a country where people spoke 'wers-wers.'

But Christine has pushed the envelope by taking her comedy to the Internet...thus her newfound fame (or notoriety?). Asian Sentinel features her in its latest issue. Read on...

For decades, actors of Asian descent have been trying make it big by breaking into mainstream Hollywood, usually with limited success. Thirty-one year old Christine Gambito, an American born to Filipino immigrants in Virginia, took a different route and achieved what others have been trying to do for years in only a matter of months – become famous.

With a little help from technology, Christine is now one of the most popular faces on the Internet. Proof of this is that an entry from her video blog, or vlog, HappySlip.com, garnered enough votes to be named second Best Comedy at the 2006 YouTube video awards. Her video “Peelings”, which is a spoof on a fractured conversation between three family members – all of them played by Christine ‑ has had more than 200,000 viewers on YouTube and admirers have even begun posting videos about Christine herself on YouTube, praising her as a new star for the Internet age.

Happy Slip, which is a one-woman production team, is a play on the term “half slip”, which her mom, in her Filipino-English accent, always reminded her to wear as a young girl. “Christine, put on your happy slip!” she parodies in one of her videos. (More on Asia Sentinel, April 13, 2007.)

Back in the day

Today I was reading the blog of Malou Mangahas, one of the more respectable journalists in the country, and in it she talked about how cellphones have become part and parcel of our daily lives. Especially for us journalists, the cellphone is our link to the world and we will hardly be able to function without it. (Click here).
This brought me back to the days when journalism was just a lot of plain hard work.

When I began my journalism career in 1987 (tagal na noh?), I had a notebook to take down my notes with, a bulky tape recorder for interviews, a rectangular plastic container to alphabetize calling cards, and an addressbook to keep the phone numbers and addresses of my sources handy. For interviews, I would leave my home in Quezon City and travel by jeepney and bus when going to Makati or Manila. (Airconditioned na din ang bus non pero kahit naka-jeepney ka, mahihinga mo pa naman ang hangin. Wala pang air pollution masyado so pag-uwi mo sa bahay, hindi mo kelangan ng isang toneladang eskinol para matanggal ang dumi sa mukha mo.)

Sometimes I would have to wait for hours just to get an interview with an official. But that's really our job as journalists...wait to death 'til we got some answers. If there were no interviews, or scheduled press conferences, I would be at some statistics office or library researching the topic I intended to write about. It would take half a day or even days to just do that.

My beat was the Department of Agriculture then, and when I had a story already, I would have to queue for the typewriter. The older reporters, of course, had priority to use it. Do you still remember the typewriter? That huge contraption which you would insert a paper in, start typing on a raised keyboard, shift a lever to make the carriage go left and move up to the next line, and your hands would get all ink-stained because you had to replace the ribbon?

After typing out my story, I would call up my editor, who would then pass me on to an editorial assistant to take down my dictation. Yes! We had to dictate our stories then because there was no fax machine nor email in those days. Computers were very new, and were not permanent fixtures yet in the offices I hung out in. I was lucky because at BusinessWorld, the first paper I worked in, we already had the first Macs so the EA would just type up our stories easily. Pero kung medyo nabisaya ang pagdi-dictate mo, mali na ang masusulat ng EA, of course, mali na ang storya lalabas sa dyaryo. Nge. Anyway, I got to use the computer at the office a few times a week when I had the time to return to the office from my interviews. But more often than not, I was out in the field and just dictated my stories over the phone. Oo, rotary pa ang dial non at me party line pa.

After a few years, the beat I was assigned to finally got a fax machine so we had an easier time sending our stories to our offices. I had also replaced my notebook with a filofax which I used to take down notes with, organize my schedules, and write down the addresses and phone numbers of my sources. It had a few plastic slips at the back for calling cards I always referred to. I also had a pager which my editors used to beep me so I would call the office, or to issue instructions. In those days, the TV and the radio were our constant sources of news.

Nowadays, I use my Ibook to download data I need for my stories, type then email the stories to my editors here and abroad. It is also my primary news source, not newspapers. In fact I can read the news online, or watch the TV feed on my Ibook, or listen to the streamed radio reports. Yup, I sometimes listen to streamed DZBB reports, while reading or writing on my computer.

If I'm at home, I use my cordless phone to call up my sources and interview them. If not, I use my cellphone...a Sony Ericsson K800i, or my old beatup Siemens S45 as spare. I use the SE K800i to take down some notes (although I still carry a small notebook in my bag), put down my appointments, input addresses and phone numbers of contacts, shoot photos using its 3.2 MP camera, and listen to songs on its MP3 player. When I'm out of the house, I use it to send and receive email or read the latest news (it has an RSS feeder). I think it has a built-in recorder too but I still have to try it out, so in the meantime, I still use a small Sony micro-cassette recorder for interviews. I intend to change this, however, and upgrade to a digital voice recorder which I can connect to my Ibook and download my interviews already transcribed! And believe me, transcribing an interview really eats up a lot of one's time and gets your hands all cramped and unsteady.

Of course, none of these conveniences have made news stories any better nor more improved from the olden days. In fact, if you read one news item in one paper, these days, it will probably be the same as in the eight other newspapers, almost word for word. This, of course, is an issue of reportorial quality and not technology. No matter how hi-tech the world becomes, if reporters are sloppy, lazy, have bad grammar, and are on the take, we will get lousy carteled news stories.

Only one thing has remained constant throughout the years. That despite the conveniences now available to us to make our coverage easier, we're still always late for our deadlines! :-)

Bus riders get gifts from Secret Santa

SPOKANE, Washington - A woman hopped aboard buses, greeted passengers with "Merry Christmas" and handed each an envelope containing a card and a $50 bill before stepping off and repeating the process on another bus.

She did it so quickly that descriptions of the woman varied among surprised Spokane Transit Authority passengers on several routes Thursday, The Spokesman-Review newspaper reported Friday.

"She kind of kept her head down. I don't remember ever seeing this lady before," said bus driver Max Clemons.

"I had a young man in the back of the bus. He looked like he was going to start crying. He said in broken English, 'She don't know how much this will mean to me at Christmas,'" Clemons said.

Read the rest of this heartwarming Christmas story at GMANews TV, Dec. 24, 2006.