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 OneMoment in Time was our song with 40-some graduate aggies lassoed to applytheir learned skills in watershed resource management projects in three Visayanprovinces 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 theirindividual and corporate lives on a task perceived critical to devastatedupland agriculture, deforested tropical hills and plains, overly chemical-ladenfields, and depleted mangrove and nearshore fisheries. It was a marvelous three-year intervention, our city shoes trekking through islandinteriors. We even had the staff of onesite 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 againstme since I was the President of the sponsoring NGO for the projects. I moved back to the US before the case wasresolved. I found out later that ourcharity foundation lost, and I was not too unhappy! This is our last reflection as a regular opinion writer forthe 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'sbrand of social commentaries. We consignour literary output, as is, into history, in her name. We shared on the day before Christmas our curriculum vitaefrom womb-to-tomb. Not your regular CV,we took the "one moment in time" metaphor to describe a lifetime - inour case, all 86 years of it - charted in five life stages, projected aswitness 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 anotherone like me ever again." That wholebut single journey is my one moment in time! Most of our university classrooms are designed for lecturedeliveries, and students expect that format in all their classes. When they come to mine, where pedagogyfollows the "kill the teacher" motif in order to make the classrooma student-centered affair, they encounter structured time/space/role/story sessionswhere students meet themselves ("its a pleasure to meet me"), bumpinto their classmates "again for the first time", get mentally and gracefullyassaulted by a teacher, and gnawed at their awareness by printed speeches andwritings of prominent persons. Maps plastered against the walls broaden perspectives. Aired songs engage the neglected receptacle ofhearing and listening, and repeating. Wego for the ease and comfort of sounds becoming familiar before we divertattention to words seen, then seek out how they are used. We let students read out loud what others hadwritten before we invite them to write their own. Many encounters occur at many levels ofconsciousness. One of the rituals I go through before each start of theclass, after chairs and desks are rearranged so that the focus is on the centerof the room while clusters of four students are around one of eight or nine squaredtables, 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'sPalestinian head wore. I place a brokencoffee 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 ricewhile 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 fromthe cup. The class is only too polite to ask why the crazy (shen jing ping) teacher does thisregular routine. At the end of the semester, I finally talk about thecenterpiece. "The decor is not tomake 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 uselessunless it is cooked. That entailsheat. The intricate shell takes a lot ofmullusk saliva to create but the cask is casually cast away after the contentis consumed. The fan reveals how unfairlife is. The Chinese worker who makes itgets 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 anygood to anyone. After 6 decades, I haveto 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," Isay. But it is the only life Ihave. I can live it, or throw itaway. (Then it dawns on the class wheremy 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 canlive this day, or throw it away. This isthe day we have." It's the way weare! Thanks, y'all. j'aime la vie Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, Celebrate!