Ayang is Leaving

TWO POSTS AGO, I wrote a big metaphor about my recent departure from my old job. My first job for three years, eight months and six days. I was stuck there long enough for me to become a person somewhat similar to a lame duck. So I rather expressed it in a metaphoric way than be literally specific.

Leaving my old job was like finally breaking loose and becoming free: free from a prison-like space where you are pressed down and held to succeed, free to a lot of opportunities, free to the open world that could give me more-than-I-could-handle chances of improving my self and my career.

She will soon be boarding an aircraft for Singapore and join her hubby along with thousands of Filipino engineers who opted to leave for abroad.

When I first came, I never realized I would settle at a gridlock workplace with no dynamics and no improvements. It was my first job and what do you expect from a neophyte, but enthusiasm and eagerness. However, it was not long ago and difficult to know that the work itself is not exciting. I would not think twice of leaving it. It was like, if I were a driver of a PUV, I was given a task of cranking old and dilapidated tricycle in a far away rural community where walking is so much better.

And then another big news suddenly came upon me in a relaxed mood but surprising way. My dear friend and colleague, Ayang, will be finally taking the same exit path. She carries different story lines on how she got into to the place she will soon leave, but I'm pretty sure we bear the same angst and grievances of what we used to be doing.

She will soon be boarding an aircraft for Singapore and join her hubby along with thousands of Filipino engineers who opted to leave for abroad. Before her, there are already a great number of former co-engineers in our company who have gone there, and elsewhere such as Dubai to seek for a "better life".

The trend is evident. More and more Filipinos are leaving this country for a lot of reasons. Worth mentioning is the hopelessness in everything being a Filipino. We may be hearing time and time again news about remittances brought about by the hordes of our countrymen scattered anywhere on earth. However, this is not good news but a sign that there will be a vacuum in terms of labor, workforce, and intelligence.

It is indeed impossible for this country to improve when all the knowledge of our good engineers are consumed for the advancement of other countries. It is an impossibility to wheel our country into the first world level when all our movers have vanished to the promised land. We are forever stranded with this scenario if this migration doesn't stop.

On a lighter note, it is quite sad hearing Ayang’s looming departure, but the thrill on her face was indescribable. I have never seen her beaming with gladness and her cheeks flushed and red. She is indeed happy and we, her housemates in Stockton Belair for countless months, are glad for her new path to take.

Changing Channels

I BOUGHT A television set about three and a half years ago. I was able to acquire it after filling up bunch of forms asking details about me and subjecting myself to a series of bespectacled humans asking questions about what I wrote in the forms and if I am fit to own the TV.

Excitement and elation best described what I felt the moment I got hold of the unit and the remote control, with batteries included. It was the first time that I had my personal wants granted. It was the start of my deeper desires' becoming when I can't even afford to buy myself a shirt before I got this tv.

The good thing about this television is that it captured immediately my attention and I never needed to change the channel at first. I was accustomed to watching the same show aired over the same station everyday. If it were a beer, I must have faltered to its pleasure and became addicted. I took the remote control away and placed it inside its box and hid it somewhere else.

Until such time when I noticed that my friends were having their own TVs and seemed happier with what they had. Consider a chocolate bar: I was only consuming a Safari chocolate while they're feasting on Macadamia's. I was becoming envious of their feat but something in me was solid enough to keep my feet on the ground.

I was contented. I still looked for my television and watch the same show. It has provided me pleasure and entertainment when everyone else was having much more bliss. I had to content on Eat Bulaga and laugh with their perennial jokes while their eyes were glued on cable and satellite broadcast watching live NBA or the Oscars.

Later on I found out, that my TV was beginning to sound boring and almost lifeless. Soon, it has started to crank a bit slower than usual. I spend a couple of minutes just to turn it on and a handful of seconds before images are shown.

That's when I started to hate my tv.

Everyday, same show and same actors were playing the same stupid scripts every now and then. As if they were a living testimony of how insulting my television was. It wasn't a HD tv, it was too small and too heavy to carry around the house. It was a burden that keeps on getting heavy by the tick of the clock.

So I decided to rid of it, no matter how and no matter what it cost. It took me more than a year to realize that this television is hard to let go as there are too many brand new TVs sprouting on the market but pays a high price to gain. I could lose my arm, my limb and my leg, before I could even lay my eyes on the smooth edges and fine buttons. It was a struggle similar to how squail would try on getting out of the basin before being cooked and served for lunch.

I was feeling hopeless. Day by day I ask myself, will I be fed with this same show for the rest of my life? With the same Tito, Vic and Joey doing their antics except for the fact that they are not the real Tito Vic and Joey but a pseudo representation of Erap, Saddam and Osama Bin Laden? I pray that one day God will move heaven and earth and save me from this inner demolition.

Then all of a sudden, a week before Christmas time of 2006, I stumbled upon a box that surprisingly appeared above my head. I was adamant in opening the laces that had covered this box but my curiosity is much powerful. I opened it deliberately and found inside, still inside its seal and left untouched, the remote control.

I thought I lost it and never even bothered to look for it. I was given one chance to switch my channel to a far greater station and I wasted no time in pressing the keys.

Killer Candle and the Stupid Nurse

SHE WAS PRAYING on her usual hours of meditation and silence with God inside her room. She stepped outside and casually spoke with one of her daughters, who practically been living beside her house after all her other sons and daughters setup their own homes a few meters away to the amianan or bagatan, while others have fled to other far away places where they brought up their own families. Suddenly she remembered leaving the altar with the candle still lighting the room.

At a very old age of 86 and known to her kin as Mami Bakèt, she went back up stairs to whisk it off. Her daughter, Lumeng was unmindful of the what will be happening in the next few minutes and didn't bother to help her mother. Because she's been praying with a candle burning beside the altar since time immemorial. Minutes later, she was struggling to put out the fire from torching her that started with her blouse up to her old curly hair. Lumeng's youngest son JR quickly came to the rescue when she managed to got out of the house. It was all too late.

She had to absorb third degree burns that is pitiful to ones eyes. Her face suffered most with indescribable burns down to her upper body skin.

Immediately, they took her to the nearest hospital somewhere in Guimba in Nueva Ecija, and was confined there for several days. The absence of adequate hospital resources and technologically advance equipment has made the situation worst. The wounds were not healing.

The elders decided to transfer Mami Bakèt to PGH with full of hope that she will recover from the inevitable demise. However, her body began to succumb to the suffering. Eventually, she went to a state of coma that dwindled all hopes and fears of all the persons that have love her dearly, down to her last apo sa talampakan.

She died a few hours after because of the in-charge nurse's inability to monitor the instruments that's been keeping her alive. That's why, I can't imagine what would happen if all our good nurses in this country have fled to the US or to some other place that will provide them with a good paying job. It was explained that the food (it was milk) being injected to her has penetrated the lungs, thus, causing her misfortune on the same day she was born.

The last drop of hope has finally evaporated and tears began to fall.

This is the story of how Mami Baket died, my grandmother on the father side, who was still strong and kicking despite her age. Unfortunately, she took a tragic way of saying goodbye.