Garden Invasion: Stalking the Flowers (Part II)

There are flowers with textures that resemble specialty papers–they looked like the tiniest drop of rain could tear them but they don’t;

Then there are those that looked like velvet;

There are those that look like artificial flowers.  You have to touch them to see if they are real;

By their looks, there are also tough ones;

There are those that resemble other creatures in their environment…such as insects;

There are those that seem to defy gravity in order to demonstrate daredevil acts;

Delicate.  Fragile.  In their lightness they seem to just float in the air.  But they have nerves of steel;

Others could smell bad and still radiate beauty.

Others are quite plain passersby tend to ignore them…

but when they spring to life, they will surprise you!  Astound you.

And then, there are those that simply radiate beauty inside and out.

But what amazes me more is the story of transcendence that flowers tell.

At one time it is just one small kernel that developed on a modified shoot from a determinate apical meristem.  Then, the petals unfold, the flower matures.  With maturation comes changes in color, shape, size.  Then, just when it is about to wither, fall and mingle with the soil to become an organic matter that fertilizes the same plant from whence it came, another kernel breaks out from the meristem.

Garden Invasion: Stalking the Flowers (Part I)

It rained excessively last December until mid January as if the skies poured water more than the volume it took away in months.  Originally, the plan was to spend my Christmas vacation seeing old friends, taking long walks and playing with my young cousins.  But the rain kept us marooned inside the house for two weeks.  It seemed like the cold and gray weather was a good prelude to boredom that there was a time when I felt I could practically write a discourse on the Anatomy of Boredom. Then, the sun broke from the horizon, parted the gloomy curtains and bathed my side of the world with colors.  My Mother came out to inspect the damages the rain wrought to her flowers; I followed and invaded their silence with my camera.

As it turned out, boredom is a great inspiration.  Whenever I look at the pictures I took, despite the lack of brilliance and technique on my part, I could not help but marvel at the creatures before the lens.  It is such a wonder that even in the delicate folds of petals, you can see all the laws of nature imprinted clearly.

In retrospect, I picked up the book Anatomy of the Rose that my friend Jean Claire gave me during those rainy days (though I abandoned it midway for Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ring Bearer which, by the way, is an interestingly colorful, funny, cerebral subversion of the ring narrative woven by J.R. Tolkien).  Anatomy of the Rose tells of something we knew all along: flowers are intelligent creatures.  Like humans, they fascinate, they beguile, they ensnare, they fight back in ways that they have evolved through the centuries.   They emit odor to ward off predators even when they also imitate other smells to draw insects to them. Delicate flowers like roses have thorns. Tiny ones have colors that attract attention.

Flowers are very much a part of this big narrative of life that we build every millisecond.  There is something in their pattern, texture, color and shape that speaks of, gives us a preview of that still-to-be-completed (and who knows if we ever complete it?) story of life, of our existence.

Whoa, You’re Conned!

Scoundrels and Scalawags, an old Reader’s Digest compilation of the exploits of con men throughout history, is one of my father’s favorite books. Admittedly, the modus operandi of famous con men sometimes made me quip, “Conning may equal brilliance!”

When I was a kid, five men were put to trial for one of the biggest swindling cases in the history of my town. The complainant was a rich dowager. As the trial progressed, what the accused did, an idea which may not be that novel and yet brilliant just the same, begun to unfold.

One morning, Rich Dowager’s tenant came running into her house bearing some mysterious news: she heard voices that seemed to emanate from a mound within Rich Dowagers’ farm. The voices were chilly and haunting; it gave her the shivers.

“Juaniiiiiing*, Juaniiiiing*, Juaniiiiing*,” the voices echoed. “We are the spirits of your ancestors. This mound on which we stood is a holy ground. If you offer this X amount, you will get them back threefold.”

This went on for weeks. Rich Dowager heeded the voices—coins at first, then bills, followed by more bills and then bundles of bills until she gave about .3 million pesos (a helluva lot of money!). But when the offerings started to vanish without her getting any centavo back, Rich Dowager started to have doubts and brought investigators to survey her property for anomalous activities.

The police uncovered bamboo poles running a few kilometers under the ground. Inside the poles were wires connected to a microphone at one end and to a speaker at the other end. This lent the voices an otherworldly effect. The whole device was powered by a battery and took the accused months of careful planning and set up. The accused would position themselves from their hole in the other side of the cliff to deliver their respective lines.

The bottom line of the story is this: if your preoccupation is money, your weakest point might also be money.

Elisa*, a college student and my current roommate told me she was conned herself while working as cashier-cum-server in a small canteen in Manila. One busy morning, a woman came in and ordered the best dishes in the menu. When she was stuffed and contented, she asked for a piece of paper and pen and proceeded to scribble something. Then she asked Elisa to read her writings. The poor girl stared intently at the jumble of indecipherable characters. When Elisa lifted her eyes to ask what it meant, the woman was gone, her orders unpaid.

A family friend was a victim of conning herself. She gave her jewelries to a stranger she met on her way out of the bank. As easy as that! The woman approached her as a long-time-no-see-but-now-see-now relative. They went to a café and talked. Halfway through their coffee, the woman excused herself to the powder room but before leaving she asked our friend to watch the bag where she kept her bundles of bills. So that our friend would not run away with the money, she needed collateral: our friends’ diamond ear studs and necklace. Trustful to a fault, our friend conceded and thus, was conned.

The paper bills? Na, they were bond paper cutouts and play money secured with rubber bands.

Scoundrels and scalawags are everywhere. Part of our daily survival tactics when out in places notorious for con men, swindlers and robbers is to brace and insulate ourselves against their web. Be street smart. We clutch our bags to our chest; we wear our backpacks in-front of us; we walk fast; we avoid seedy streets; we make ourselves appear tough; we keep our money in the least expected places; we keep a low profile; and we don’t talk to strangers.

Then, at times, we just brush fear aside with good old Filipino humor, “Ah, sa maisahan lang” (That would depend on who gets conned first). And we hope that this should get us through the next day!

—————
*Not their real names

Stories From The Field

Who doesn’t love fieldwork? In a research lecture I attended three years ago, a resource person admitted to one of the most blaring ironies in life: He is an anthropologist and he hates fieldwork!

I must admit that this candid admission almost threw me off my seat.  After all, I was a part of that bunch of young people whose passion for fieldwork verged on the ideal, the romantic and the adventurous.

I do fieldwork and I love it.  Even when the appeals of romance and adventure worn off in haste, along with the other essential truths in life, fieldwork is something I cannot do without.  Aside from the scientific and developmental arguments over the critical role of fieldwork in knowledge and community building, the experience is ripe with joy, pain, adventure and survival, learning, unlearning and re-learning.

There is a field story that my senior colleagues love to tell.  At the height of the armed conflict between the communist rebels and the government in the 80′s two female professors did research in a remote village in Samar, Philippines known for bloody encounters between the rebel armies and the military.  Civilians, caught in the middle had to take sides in order to survive and were outright suspicious and fearful.  It was in such a climate that these academics arrived in the community.

They lived with a couple in a one-story wooden house which, characteristic of wooden houses in rural Philippines, stood on stilts and the space under the house served as a storage of sort.  They had been warned to observe the curfew, not to venture in the village unaccompanied, to be careful with strangers, and to never go out of the house at night.  So on their first night, while everyone was asleep, one of them felt a desperate need to pee but was too afraid to relieve herself outside.  They were looking for arinola, a urinating bowl common in the rural areas, but could not find any.  Her research partner suggested she just squat and pee on the bamboo floor.  Water flowed from the bamboo slats down the storage underneath hitting a metal roofing sheet in successive resounding drops so like the sound of an M16 rifle in rapid fire.  The whole family roused from their sleep.  Five pairs of eyes heavy with terror flashed in the dark.  The kids scrambled for cover.  It took them a considerable time to reassure the family it “was nothing” but one family must have slept fitfully that night.

In some sort of mistaken identity, another pair of female researchers found themselves threatened.  They were part of a team implementing a collaborative project in historic Bohol, Philippines.  One night, tired of listening the guys talk shop over dinner, the pair decided to take a breather at the park.  Not long after they settled themselves on a bench, they were accosted by another woman.  “Where are you from?,” started the insistent, loud, threatening investigation.  “Why are you here?” “What are you doing here?” “Where are your identification cards?” But nothing braced them for the heavy accusation that followed: “You are rebels, no?! No?! Spies sent out on a mission?!”  Afraid and shocked, the academics stammered their replies and produced their IDs.  Later, when they reported the incident to the police they were told the woman “was not in her right track of mind.”

While doing field research in Thailand, a former professor hailed a public utility vehicle. As soon as she climbed the bus, she spotted a vacant seat beside a Buddhist monk and settled herself in.  Upon seeing this, the female collector wasted no time, crossed the isle and pulled Prof out of her seat.  Prof resisted and held on to the armrest as the collector, spewing words Prof did not understand, yanked her away from the monk’s side.  As Prof would later learn, it is transgressive for a woman to sit beside a Buddhist monk.

In one of my early experiences as a field evaluator, I happened to be the only female and the youngest member in the team.  We were going to a village high up in the mountains.  Alta Vista, the village was called. True to its name, to get there you have to traverse a winding river eight times, skirt around a dense secondary forest, walk winding paths that rose and fell, beat thorny bushes, evade dangerous outcrops dotting the mountains like crocodile snouts breaking out of the red clay soil.  Because the rain poured incessantly for days, the river was murky and the current was strong, the red clay was sticky and slippery, and the mosquitoes whirred above our heads like miniature helicopters.

The other team members rushed through the forest like trained scouts leaving a faint rustle in the bush.  I was trying desperately to keep up.  My heart beat like a gong, my muscles strained, my breath short and ragged…we did not even bother to rest.  It was as if my companions were very eager to get over the 12 km trek up the mountain and the other 12 km trek downhill.  Besides, to avoid an encounter with armed groups, we had to get going.  My lungs hurt and threatened to burst out of my ears.  I had to match my teammates’ speed and push back the tears of exhaustion slowly creeping behind my eyes.  Worst, I left my hiking boots at home and had to wear a sorry pair of flipflops which always found themselves stuck in deep mud.  One-third through the climb, I had to take them off and walk the rest of the way barefooted.  A number of times I had to make a choice between stepping on thorny sedges or clumps of horse manure strewn along the path.  Stepping on thorns is painful to even contemplate so, you know what happened next.

On our way home, the farmer served us steaming bowls of chicken stew. Famished, I immediately took a bite of the chicken leg I was served.  To my disappointment, it was tough like rubber inside my mouth.  That night, nursing the cuts on my feet, I was unable to take my mind off that chicken dish.

Recently, as part of an evaluation team, we visited a farm site in Northern Samar where we had to cross rice fields and a gorge which even if not so deep and not too wide was quite risky.  Three bamboo poles tied together served as a makeshift bridge to help people get across it. Midway, the second evaluator to cross the bridge lost her footing.  She grabbed the rail in order to regain foothold but the bamboo rail broke under the pressure of her weight and she landed on the river below.  Had I crossed the bridge with her as I did on our way to the site, it would have been the two of us swimming the murky river.  In an instant I muttered to myself, “This must be one of the reasons why someone out there hates fieldwork!”

While most of my field stories bordered on the physically aggravating and the comical, other people’s field stories are colored with sadness and loss.  A Filipino botanist was killed in crossfire during a rebel and military encounter while collecting specimen seedlings of endangered tree species in one of the provinces in the country.

Fieldwork is not for everyone and not everyone wants to do fieldwork but those who chose to breath in it must embrace not only the rigor but also the prospects and the risks.