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

Thu Dec 27 15:57:34 PST 2012

Jaime - would like your email address / Sherwood and Eunice

Sherwood Shankland, Senior Facilitator

Shankland and Associates LLC

19381 East Tufts Circle 

Centennial, CO 80015  USA

303-993-8935

From: oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net
[mailto:oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Jaime R Vergara
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 4:51 PM
To: oe at lists.wedgeblade.net
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Fwd: Last OpEd from Jaime

Jann, (an anyone else in this listserv within US mailing distance) - 

There were three good responses to my previous request who sent me something
in the mail to my Honolulu address.  I will visit my Mom the last week of
January, so if you still have maps, send them to me at:

Jaime Vergara

91 2059 Pahuhu Pl

Ewa Beach HI 96706

Thanks, y'all!

j'aime la vie 

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

-----Original Message-----
From: LAURELCG <LAURELCG at aol.com>
To: oe <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Fri, Dec 28, 2012 3:18 am
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Fwd: Last OpEd from Jaime

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.

  <http://presence.mail.aol.com/mailsig/?sn=jrvergarajr2031>  j'aime la vie 

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

Celebrate!

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