My travels to places where there are no paths to follow.
I have this lifetime obsession with boats.
I secretly spend a huge amount of time reading and writing about watercraft of all types. I enthusiastically ride them every chance I get—from the rakit (pontoon barge) of many Abra River crossings in my childhood and youth, to the modern inter-island passenger ships that ply the southern islands from the Port of Manila, which I’d usually choose over airplane rides.
Since I was a child, I’ve often noticed jeepney drivers, conductors, and mechanics wearing one over their shoulders or keeping one handily tucked into their pants pocket. Even though our street corner was teeming with jeepneys all day long, we didn’t use it at home. So I had always associated it with the hoi polloi, the Great Unwashed of the streets.
Then I became an activist. Driven by martial law repression, I went full-time into underground activism from 1976 onward, with Metro Manila as our regular AOR, plus some parts of Cavite and a strip of Bulacan as our “rear base,” sort of. There I first met up-close the plebeian Good Morning Towel, aka GMT. Continue reading “Good morning, towel!”
In 1971, as a “summer-fulltimer” activist of the Kabataang Makabayan (KM) working with MDP’s Radyo Pakikibaka, I was a regular visitor at the KM’s Boni Center along Quezon Avenue. As was the SOP in activist HQs during those times, the Boni Center prepared its daily fare of food for everyone who happened to be there at mealtimes–whether we were five or 10 or (sometimes, especially during busy protest seasons) 25 or more.
Boni Center had a finance and logistics team that, I supposed, worked with a thin and worn shoestring budget. I only assumed this, because occasionally, a team member would arrive with a big sack or two of vegetable rejects and cabbage peelings, solicited from their local public market contacts. Then we who happened to be around would help out in the kitchen, sorting out the still humanly edible pieces from those that were absolutely fit only for the pigsty cauldron. Continue reading “Massacre cooking”