<font color='black' size='3' face='Times New Roman, Times, serif'><font size="3">Our last Saipan Tribune OpEd.</font>
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<div><font size="3">The usual caveat: curious, welcome; not, see you at the bend.<br>
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<div style="font-size: 16px; clear: both; ">j'aime la vie
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<div><i style="background-color: white; "><font color="#000080"><b>Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, Celebrate!</b></font></i></div>
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<div style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: helvetica, arial; color: black; ">-----Original Message-----<br>
From: Jaime R Vergara <jrvergarajr2031@aol.com><br>
To: jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera@saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago <mark_rabago@saipantribune.com>; editor <editor@saipantribune.com><br>
Sent: Thu, Dec 27, 2012 12:29 pm<br>
Subject: Last OpEd from Jaime<br>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">Editorial,</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">Here it is, the last one, for December 31.</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "><b>The Way We Are</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">Whitney Houston's </font><i style="font-size: 18px; ">One
Moment in Time </i><font size="4">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.</font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 18px; ">It was a marvelous t</span><font size="4">hree-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!</font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">This is our last reflection as a regular opinion writer for
the <i>Saipan Tribune.</i> 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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">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!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 18px; ">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 </span><font size="4">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.</font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">The class is only too polite to ask why the crazy <i>(shen jing ping) </i>teacher does this
regular routine.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">"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.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">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!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; "> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px; ">Thanks, y'all.</div>
<br>
<div style="font-size: 18px; clear: both; "><a style="font:lighter 10px Verdana, Arial;color:#000000;"><img align="absmiddle" border="0" src="http://presence.mail.aol.com/mailsig/?sn=jrvergarajr2031"></a> <font color="black" size="2" face="arial">j'aime la vie
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<div><i><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#ff0000"><b>Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, </b></font></i></div>
<div><i><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#ff0000"><b>Celebrate!</b></font></i></div>
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