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@aol.com>
To: jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera@saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago <mark_rabago@saipantribune.com>; editor <editor@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!