[Oe List ...] For Nov. 11 from Jaime

Sun Nov 10 16:25:25 PST 2013

In other words was moved to the 14th.  The following is in the Monday edition:

Balikatan ni kabalen sa balangay

My initial feed to colleagues who were curious for news on Yolanda - Haiyuan in the international winds - who left her devastating trail behind in Tacloban City, was the initial count of a hundred casualties, with a sad note of the many unattended bodies by the wayside.  In 24 hours, that number would climb to 10,000 and rising.  We have a tragic disaster of major proportions on our hands.

The wording on our title deliberately mixes local tongues if only to signify that the situation at hand is more than just a localized calamity.  In fact, it is more than an assault on our national awareness.  Pinoys around the world are mobilizing resources to quickly get the "deed where there is a need".  They may do some personal accounting and inventory in the process.

The Philippines is a nation lorded over by landlords who benefited from the inequitable distribution of land from Spanish haciendas, tolerated by benign U.S. governance since they needed local counterparts to run their business interests, and let "local" consent front its military designs.  Were it not for the millions of Filipinos in diaspora diligently remitting part of wages earned outside of the country, the economy would have gone the way of Mt. Pinatubo long time ago. 

Trace family lineage on the names of leaders today and compare them to the ones during the 1935 Commonwealth government; one would recognize that there has not been much of a substantive change.  Devastations of any kind will not change that current arrangement.  Nor feeble attempt at scaling the social ladder to carry one's bench (ma-i-anggat ang sariling banko) is sufficient.  A total revamp (to occasion a major paradigm shift) of social relations is in order.

But right now, comparisons and contrasts of philosophical differences and the accuracy of socio-economic analysis, are not our concern.  There is a need for massive delivery of aid efforts, and those who have the means will do best if they keep their efforts near their chests as much as possible, up close and personal.  The immediate call is not structural revolution to tinker with the system; it is the rapid mobilization of compassion.  If that means working with the Social Welfare office of the government, so be it!

I bear scars on the structural revolution part.  I saw a girl begging in front of the Sto. Niño cathedral in the 70s,  about the age of my eldest daughter.  I resolved from then that whatever efforts I did would redound to the welfare of every child in the region.  I am sure my two eldest daughters would have preferred a doting father, but though I kept an eye on their growing up to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, and self-confident, I treated them in the same way as I treated everyone else, distant but fair.  They lost a normally warmhearted Dad!

Famine struck Negros a few years later.  An Australian ex-priest and I visited one of the hospitals in Bacolod where I saw a fair skin child who looked like my eldest (my primal spouse is of German-Welsh lineage out of Chicago).  She looked like she was only 4 but was actually 8, skeletal and famished to the bone.  I quickly became a poster Dad against poverty.

Two reality checks occurred while on my high horse of structural revolution.  While Negros was in the midst of famine, rice was rotting in warehouses in Masbate and Bicol as speculative traders played the market.  A second, as a Rotarian in Mactan in the 80s, we responded to the devastation of a natural calamity, bringing in some 50 containers of relief goods through Cebu's customs.  Two would have buried under the boxes brand new Mercedes Benz' cars.  Greed is no stranger in the company of catastrophe!

The foregoing are not words of caution.  It is a call to pay close attention to whatever we do.  Those willing to show compassion are doubly responsible to ensure that their relief aids get to the right people.  It is not enough to say one contributed to someone's efforts.  This is the immediate need.

The long-term need was overdue yesterday. Those of us who may still carry two passports, one of Uncle Sam's, are doubly challenged to take the democratic base of our new loyalty seriously.  I do not mean voting during elections and performing volunteer duties through our favored NGOs.  I mean, fully participating in the democratic process, including the devolution of decision-making so that a "central" command would be unnecessary to meet common requirements.

The White House and Malacañang, Congress and the Batasan, were necessary when it took efforts to bring reps from outlying regions into the capital city, but with current modes of transport and communication, it is no longer necessary to concentrate so much power to a handful of places on the purview of a few.  Greed, after all, multiplies faster under confined environments. 

We need a massive reexamination of ourselves as individuals and groups, in the context of a globe that has shrunk to manageable size.  The Pinoy in diaspora is called upon to do that right now while packing the relief goods.

For November and December, I shall be posting to the listserv some reflections tailored for the Saipan Tribune, in case some folks have time to read.

In other words

An English teacher colleague relates the story of how shetried to teach students how to fill up an English application form, so she tookan entrance admission sheet from one of the institutions of higher learning inKansas, and administered it.

The form she used might have been an outdated one since acategory called "sex" is still in where its newer incarnations mightalready have replaced it with "gender".  In any case, what she gotback in return: six of ten boys wrote "yes", and four wrote"no"; of the girls, five out of ten wrote "secret", and theother five, evidently riled boldly asserted: "It's none of yourbusiness".

Were the form in Chinese, I am sure the genderidentification would have been unmistakable, but English in its written conceptualform always needs grounding.  It is notalways the case in Chinese because its written words are pictographs andideograms, an amalgamation of separate characters to form an abstracted meaning.

One of the words I put on early on the board in my class isthe word "listen", since I wish for the students to focus on trainingtheir ears to get familiar with sounds, a requisite skill in learning aphonetic language as contrasted to the Zhongwen which, when recognized as written,already carries nuances and meaning.  

Though I kept writing the word in bigger and bolder letters,I did not get the desired behavior.  Asstudents enter the classroom, I played either a recorded English song they arefamiliar with, or play a speech from a famous person (Hillary Clinton at the UNWomen's Conference in Beijing in '96, or Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I havea dream", or, John F. Kennedy's explanation of "why we go to themoon", or, most recently, Barack Obama's Grant Park speech when he won the2008 presidential election) hoping they would get the hint and settle down.  The din of the place resembled the hagglingat a public market.

The phonetic word for "listen" is "ting", which does not do mypurpose any good just uttered or written in pinyinon the board, so I learned to write the Chinese character, monosyllabic insound and squared in its written form, but comprising a mixture of independent symbolsdenoting varied descriptions.  Thecharacter for "listen" is led with a picture of the "ear" witha qualifying symbol underneath for "grand or great", thus,"intense hearing"; added to two symbols, those of an "eye"and the other, "attention", it then means "paying visualattention while intensely hearing". The final symbol at the bottom right quadrant is the heart, so the fullmeaning of the character for "ting" to this English teacher is"hearing intensely while visually paying attention with an openheart".  When I wrote the characteron the board, I received the silence I asked for!

Shifting from one language to another is not just a matterof translating words from one spoken word to another, particularly from a formthat moves from describing sense experiences to expressing the intensity ofemotions before articulating a concept, to an ideogrammatic construct that hasall of the above in one character and syllable. 

Chinese students in U.S. universities are known to do wellin accurately repeating a teacher's vocabulary during written tests.   As long as they can see a figure written,the memory does not fail the countless drills in vocabulary.  Having to recognize at least 4,000 charactersin order to make it to the University, students have brains trained torecognize abstracted pictures and images. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that their attempt at English comeshighly abstracted. 

To the question, "what did you eat for lunch?" thereply is most likely to be: "I had delicious food!"  Written in Chinese, that is no problem sincethe characters are most likely, similar to "listen-ting", to be more than just the spoken syllable.  Clarity in English requires grounding, so weask further: "Did you have vegetable, meat, or a dumpling dish?""Was it boiled or fried?" "Was it served warm or cold?" Atwhich point, an exasperated Chinese might give you a look that says, "Ialready told you, I had a delicious meal?" And that would be the end of the conversation!

Commercialized Chinese language learning promises fast foodservice satisfaction.  One gets a box ofCDs and a debit of $399 off one's account. When we trained Peace Corps Volunteers in the 80s, we immersed learnerson their target language 8-hours 5-days a week for a whole month with a tutor,and another 2 weeks on site with instructions to actually use what theylearned.  Volunteers confessed that aftertheir tour is over in two years, they actually began to get comfortable in thelanguage they learned.   Both English andtheir new language were phonetic based. Think what a challenge it is if the language is character-based?

Zhongwen is simplifying its characters and unifyingphonetics with Putunghua.  They are learning to listen.  English speaking countries are embarrassed bythe state of its literacy (recognizing and pronouncing written words), so it isencouraging reading with writing to start at the basic sense rather thanconceptual level. They are learning to read.

We are hopeful at the confluence of words seen and wordsspoken.

Jaime Vergara
pinoypanda2031 at aol.com

yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!

-----Original Message-----
From: wangzhimu2031 <wangzhimu2031 at aol.com>
To: oe <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Fri, Nov 8, 2013 8:54 pm
Subject: For Nov. 11 from Jaime

For November and December, I shall be posting to the listserv some reflections tailored for the Saipan Tribune, in case some folks have time to read.

In other words