May 30, 2005
gleanings from last week
in a meeting of government agencies about prioritizing legislative agenda, one of the participants found the title of one of our bills ("addressing the system of prostitution") inappropriate because prostitution in the country is illegal so it has no system yet to speak of. he just made corruption and jueteng legal.
an executive order made my office, an oversight agency for gender as a cross-cutting concern, under the oversight and supervision of dswd. our head said it was an upgrade rather than a downgrade for the office. well...
going to davao, i arrived at the airport one and a half hour before the 5am flight only to know that it was rescheduled to 620am. i slept and luckily, woke up a few seconds prior to the closing of the boarding gate. whew!
in the training that i attended in davao, i was excited to see some of the people whom i developed friendships with from the previous training. one of them is a manobo leader from bukidnon. she has been involved in almost all of the workshops and focus group discusions of the project that we are doing. very articulate, she has no problem about sharing her experiences and views with others. but in this last training, she shared one experience which she has never shared before. it was the first time that she talked about it. indeed, there are stories that take time to come out.
another friendship developed in davao is with arvin, an intelligent and talented guy. we talked about a lot things over several cans of san mig light. we also went to a piano bar with his other friends. it was fun...kindred spirits we must be!
suddenly last saturday, while talking to some members of a voluntary organization, these things sounded so ancient to me: no phone signal, no electricity, no running water.
i woke up last sunday from the adobo aroma coming from the kitchen. my mother is cooking adobo chicken which was one of the two live native chickens that she brought from the province. i looked at the other chicken... i haven't seen the house before as a death row.
eyed at 3:48 PM