[Oe List ...] Fwd: Last OpEd from Jaime

[LAURELCG at aol.com]

Thank you, Jaime. Beautiful piece, as usual. I'll miss your columns. 
 
Did you get all the maps you need?
 
Blessings,
Jann McGuire
 
 
In a message dated 12/27/2012 12:20:03 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
svesjaime at aol.com writes:

Our last  Saipan Tribune OpEd.  


The usual caveat: curious, welcome; not, see you at the  bend.

j'aime la vie  


Yesterday,  appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all,  
Celebrate!



-----Original  Message-----
From: Jaime R Vergara <jrvergarajr2031 at aol.com>
To:  jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera at saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago  
<mark_rabago at saipantribune.com>; editor  <editor at saipantribune.com>
Sent: Thu, Dec 27, 2012 12:29  pm
Subject: Last OpEd from Jaime


Editorial,


Here it is, the last one, for December  31.




The Way We Are
 
Whitney Houston's One Moment in Time was our song with  40-some graduate 
aggies lassoed to apply their learned skills in watershed  resource management 
projects in three Visayan provinces in the Philippines in  the late 80s.  
We caught the spirit of the song from the 1988 Seoul  Summer Olympics.
 
The song solidified the groups  resolve to expend their individual and 
corporate lives on a task perceived  critical to devastated upland agriculture, 
deforested tropical hills and  plains, overly chemical-laden fields, and 
depleted mangrove and nearshore  fisheries.  
 
It was a marvelous  three-year intervention, our city shoes trekking 
through  island interiors.  We even had the staff of one site sue us in court for  
falling short on our vaunted support promises.  We trained them too well.  
I was in agreement with the suit brought against me since I was the  
President of the sponsoring NGO for the projects.  I moved back to the US  before 
the case was resolved.  I found out later that our charity  foundation lost, 
and I was not too unhappy!
 
This is our last reflection as a  regular opinion writer for the Saipan 
Tribune.  We shall not make  the "thank you" to the publisher, staff, and 
readers, a long process.  We  did have a special niche for Ruth Tighe's brand of 
social commentaries.  We consign our literary output, as is, into history, 
in her name.
 
We shared on the day before  Christmas our curriculum vitae from 
womb-to-tomb.  Not your regular CV,  we took the "one moment in time" metaphor to 
describe a lifetime - in our  case, all 86 years of it - charted in five life 
stages, projected as witness  to our description of every human soul that 
comes into this earth.  "I  am, like each of us, one, unique, unrepeatable gift 
of life into human  history.  There has never been one like me before, and 
there will never  be another one like me ever again."  That whole but single 
journey is my  one moment in time!
 
Most of our university classrooms  are designed for lecture deliveries, and 
students expect that format in all  their classes.  When they come to mine, 
where pedagogy follows the "kill  the teacher" motif in order to make the 
classroom a student-centered affair,  they encounter structured 
time/space/role/story sessions where students meet  themselves ("its a pleasure to meet 
me"), bump into their classmates "again  for the first time", get mentally 
and gracefully assaulted by a teacher, and  gnawed at their awareness by 
printed speeches and writings of prominent  persons. 
 
Maps plastered against the walls  broaden perspectives.  Aired songs engage 
the neglected receptacle of  hearing and listening, and repeating.  We go 
for the ease and comfort of  sounds becoming familiar before we divert 
attention to words seen, then seek  out how they are used.  We let students read 
out loud what others had  written before we invite them to write their own.  
Many encounters occur  at many levels of consciousness.
 
One of the rituals I go through  before each start of the class, after 
chairs and desks are rearranged so that  the focus is on the center of the room 
while clusters of four students are  around one of eight or nine squared 
tables, is to put on a table cloth on a  single desk in the middle of the room. 
 
 
The cloth is a scarf not  unlike what Yasser Arafat's Palestinian head 
wore.  I place a broken  coffee cup at the center with rice strewn around it in 
a circle.  The  cup's broken handle and rim chip are added, with shards of 
very old pagoda  tiles mixed in.  A Chinese hand fan leans  against the 
chipped lip of the cup.  A couple of whole walnuts sit atop  the rice while local 
conch shells from Bo Hai guard the sides.  Chopsticks stay by their 
lonesome at the edge.  Once in a while, a  paper rose protrudes from the cup.
 
The class is only too polite to  ask why the crazy (shen jing ping) teacher 
does this regular  routine.
 
At the end of the semester, I  finally talk about the centerpiece.  "The 
decor is not to make the room  more beautiful", I say.  It is an artform to 
represent who I am and how I  live.  It is way of telling my story.
 
I am like the broken cup, well  crafted but fragile.  In this case, broken. 
 The rice looks inviting  but it is useless unless it is cooked.  That 
entails heat.  The  intricate shell takes a lot of mullusk saliva to create but 
the cask is  casually cast away after the content is consumed.  The fan 
reveals how  unfair life is.  The Chinese worker who makes it gets paid a 
minuscule  amount for time and talent compared to what Korean, German, and 
Japanese  counterparts make to assemble electronics.  The walnut has to be cracked  
to be of any good to anyone.  After 6 decades, I have to learn to use a  
chopstick to survive.  On top of it all, sometimes a fake rose gets to  
preside.
 
"That pretty much tells the story  of my life," I say.  But it is the only 
life I have.  I can live it,  or throw it away.  (Then it dawns on the class 
where my listen-repeat  start of each session comes from.)
 
So, for the last time, the class  repeats after me: "This is the day we 
have.  We can live this day, or  throw it away.  This is the day we have."  
It's the way we  are!
 
Thanks, y'all.

j'aime la vie  


Yesterday, appreciate;  tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate.  In  all, 
Celebrate!






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