Category: Geography

Posted on

Boatless Badjaos

Badjao houseboat
Badjao houseboat in modern times. (Photo from http://carrieannt.blogspot.com/2011/02/badjou-people-forsaken-but-not-god_16.html)

I was just telling my neighbor here, Kabsat Kandu, about a chance encounter I had with a Badjao beggar family who were stranded in flooded urban streets, minus their boat.

I was recently in Manila, gulping down my second cup of coffee in a rush to catch an appointment, when someone banged on the steel gate of the old family home (which now housed a printing press) where I was staying. She was waving a letter and shouting in an unfamiliar language. The noisy machine drowned her out, and no one else in the house seemed to want to indulge a visibly desperate beggar.

“My lucky day,” I told Kandu with no trace of irony. Continue reading “Boatless Badjaos”

Posted on

You have your Bangkok, I have mine

A slice of Bangkok history
Everyone can partake of their own slice of Bangkok. This piece of street art along Ratchadamnoen is a celebration of color and innocence. But how many tourists are really aware that just a few minutes from here, just behind those gaily-painted walls, in a quiet and unobtrusive street corner, is a memorial to the October 14, 1973 uprising of heroic Thai students, workers and other citizens that led to the overthrow of military dictator Thanom Kittikachorn? That was one slice of Bangkok I set out to seek.

There’s a bit of a gentle rant here, but not a big one.

When I was told that my trip to Bangkok would push through, actually I was a bit underwhelmed. This was because–apart from the colleagues we needed to meet there and the critical collaborative work we needed to accomplish, which were of course the main reasons for the trip–I couldn’t think of any tourist feature of that ancient Siamese city along the Chao Phraya that made my innards pulsate with excitement. Continue reading “You have your Bangkok, I have mine”

Posted on

The half-forgotten Aytas

Boxer codex Negritos
The Boxer Codex included illustrations of pre-colonial Filipinos, including the Negritos (Aetas) depicted here.

In the public mind nowadays, going ethnic has become hip. To wear your tribe’s gaudy colors and beads on gala occasions, or even for everyday work in provinces where ethnic diversity abounds, no longer elicits questioning stares. To declare one’s indigenous or minority roots is no longer as embarrassing as it was in earlier generations.

In fact it’s increasingly worn as a proud badge, on parade even in the halls of the United Nations in this Second International Decade of Indigenous Peoples.

Not so in the case of Aytas or Philippine Negritos. They are the half-forgotten minority among our national minorities, the most oppressed and down-trodden among our indigenous groups. Continue reading “The half-forgotten Aytas”