Friday, April 01, 2016

Connecting the Dots at 74 - a way to celebrate one's birthday

For The Bohol Tribune
In This Our Journey
NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

In a few days, I will turn 74. Let me share with you some thoughts on the way to this personal milestone.

Specifically, let me pass on to you a few things I remember from this journey, seven decades and still counting.

First, on the need to be action-oriented.   It’s great to have a dream and to always talk about it but in the final analysis, it’s what you do that counts. Having action plans and carrying them out are vital for survival. Otherwise, we will end up daydreaming our life away.

In college, I used to carry in my wallet a typewritten quotation from a philosopher who says: “Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” This bit of wisdom served as antidote to a pernicious tendency on my part to intellectualize intent and purposes and to pursue them in seemingly endless talk with friends and relatives.

The inability to act on some critical matters gave me so much remorse in my younger days. Since my Grade 4 teacher, Miss Cruz, gifted me with a Webster dictionary which opened up a whole new vast world for me in what I thought then as the intellectually arid landscape of a copra-making village, I never gave up reading anything. I voraciously read books and magazines , in both English and vernacular,  some of them given by well-off friends. Until now, I see to it that I know the library or book store in places where I live or work as refuge when I am bored or depressed.

While reading had its obvious merits, it could lead to an analytical but passive way of life. Opportunities pass by while you are left on the shore “contemplating your navel,” as the old phrase puts it. While doing so with my navel, I had my girl friend snatched under my watch by an action-oriented engineer while I was focused more on reading and reciting to her the poems of Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Baudelaire  and Rimbaud, for instance, all my favorites in my younger years.

Enough of poetry, I said. I was 19 and for three months, in fact the whole summer term, I refused to touch any book. I joined eventually a college fraternity and lost myself in action, which I interpreted at the time as learning how to drink Tanduay, serenading girls on midnight at the women’s dorm for which we were chased away by the dorm matron and carrying street signs and parading them around the campus while singing the national anthem!

We ended up explaining things at college security and later at the student counsellor’s office where we were given severe tongue lashing. So much for mindless action! The by to maturity is actually to learn to balance life-affirming romanticism with restrained action as the classicists would have it. The reluctant, indecisive Macbeth prepared us to appreciate the contrasts in the character of the intellectual and the man of action, portrayed as lover of life, in the popular movie turned into film, Zorba The Greek, by Nikos Kazantsakis, during the Sixties.

The onset of Marxism-inspired nationalist movement on the campus ended our flirtation with agnosticism and the lively debate on whether God exists or not with intense discussions on the real history of the Filipino people. The evils of Feudalism, Bureaucrat-Capitalism and Imperialism were laid bare in debates and became the subject of protests and discussions on the campus. Even Art could be judged based on class analysis. You could be accused of being burgis as against the prevailing proletarian politics of the period.

The whole campus became a cauldron of revolutionary politics and art. You have to decide whether to join the Left and if you do so, you need to decide to which faction you would like to belong. An exciting time indeed, but we were growing old fast without getting anywhere in our initial goal of getting a college degree and ended up being editor nonetheless of the alumni paper. My qualification was that I was editor of the college paper for two years, founded the first literary paper, Tangent, and won the much-coveted Creative Writer of the Year Award bestowed by UP Los Banos itself.

Two years of serving as alumni paper editor , we were advised to leave the campus to escape military spies and assume the post of literature teacher in a provincial high school, a job we thoroughly enjoyed because we were given the assignment to teach in both the upper section and the lowest section. I realized that no matter how we screamed about the isms in the State-run university and in the parliaments of the street, a large portion of the student population in public schools, mostly children of the Proletariat, remained largely insulated from the burning issues of the day which could affect their future.

I had a year of that exciting experience and left for Manila to look for a job that would bring me nearer the hospital where my Sister was brought for treatment. With the help of a friend, I landed a job as editor of a company publication. Metro Manila was in turmoil during that period leading to the declaration of Martial Law. I was just in the periphery opting to be adviser to a group of UP students who, while subscribing to the national democratic platform based on the struggle against the triad isms, preferred to use moderate language in their protests.

I was happy with this task among persons sympathetic with the left but choosing to be incognito and engaging in support activities such as running a handicraft shop with part of the proceeds going to  some cultural groups aligned with the protest movement.  Then prior to the declaration of martial law, in 1971, the writ of habeas corpus was suspended which provided a legal basis for the arrest of individuals suspected of being in the underground. My girl friend was among those arrested and jailed during this period. I was advised by my friends to lie low with my DG (discussion group) activities and to make arrangements that I could do my job outside the office in putting out the monthly company publication.

I was advised by friends from the underground to get lost first, resign from my job and started the risky business of hopping from one safe house to another. I spent time in convents, remote islets, garage and stock rooms of offices owned by close friends. Some journalist friends would assign me articles to write while in hiding and got paid for it. This helped tide me over those months jokingly termed NPA days, the acronym meaning No Permanent Address. It was getting to be difficult to be mobile in what was termed “white areas” or places in the city with relative concentration of State institutions and the military.

I was again advised to get lost, but this time to join an armed unit in the Sierra Madre but my task would be to handle discussions on Philippine history. We were all young and it was quite an ordeal having to survive in a small hut with basic provisions procured from the town. Somehow we discovered the weaknesses of having us to be here in the midst of a Revolution for which we were not prepared to participate in terms of warfare or of simple livelihood skills. We saw very clearly during this time the Revolution was bound to fail.

I eventually fell sick and had to move out of this safe area in the mountain. Back to a life of moving from place to place but, finally, the military caught up with me and had to spend three months in solitary confinement in a camp not far away from Manila. I was instructed to go back to my old job at the Green Revolution  office at Nayong Pilipino where my movement was restricted. Only my Grandmother, Mother and Sister were allowed to visit me. I slept on the floor of the Green Revolution cottage and succeeded later to have a temporary house using what used to be the exhibition booth of a province at the Nayong Pilipino complex. I stayed here for eight years!

The most important thing which happened to me while in virtual confinement at the Nayong Pilipino was my being part of the UNICEF-assisted Country Programming for Children , the first exercise done in the country to formulate a four-year child-focused program with the involvement of the Government, NGOs, the private sector and faith-based organizations. Through this exercise, I happened to know young people from NEDA and UNICEF and we became members of the Technical Working Group for what is known as CPC 1.

At this point, I recall what Steve Jobs said in a famous commencement address, that you could only connect the dots at hindsight, that you could only establish the logic of having been in some past events when you look back and see how previous engagements relate to what you do at the moment.

Our establishing the UNICEF-assisted Ilaw International Center in Bool, Tagbilaran City in 1983 could not have been possible without my Green Revolution experience in restricted task environment, my getting involved in CPC 1, and our contributions to determining how community participation could be articulated in a planning process in each program or project. The methodology of having local government-community participation spelled in detail in a social preparation process would not have been possible without our involvement with all efforts by the Church, the NGOs and the Left in defining such a process. Our being recruited to serve as community development specialist in a UNDP project in 12 atoll countries would not have been possible without UNICEF investing in my education which brought me to the Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development and the University of Bradford with focus on participatory rural development.

Our work in the country’s 8 poorest provinces under the Area-Based Child Survival and Development (ABCSD) of UNICEF seemed on hindsight as a precursor of what I would be called upon to do among disadvantaged households and communities in 14 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Under several UNDP-UNOPS projects.  My experiences in all these projects seemed to be a logical development which led to the formulation of the Poverty Database and Monitoring System (PDMS), a pro-poor targeting system and software developed over a ten-year period by our NGO, Bohol Local Development Foundation, with technical assistance from a British IT expert, Tony Irving, and several IT counterparts from Bohol. Without the advance versions developed, there would be nothing to replicate in Timor Leste under Habitat for Humanity International and  in several countries, such as India, Bangladesh and Bhutan under an EU-funded program.

As I approach my 74th year, I look back and wonder if the past actions I took were all part of deliberate  plans or, as in the case of earlier misadvantures, something that resulted from just following what my heart dictated, a series of emotional involvements that just happened to be consistent in their objectives and seemingly preconceived strategies. Two weeks ago, we were meeting with potential donors to the FARM It Works Balay Kahayag (FITWBK) drug rehab center which our NGO helped establish in Bohol, and I was asked by the representative how could we relate our mission for poverty reduction and sustainable development to the current advocacy of helping rehabilitate drug abuse victims.

I could only mumble a reply aware of what Steve Jobs said of being able to connect the dots only after events happened. It will probably take another 74 years for me to answer that question. Meanwhile, I dare you to l look back and connect the dots in your life, an exciting way to celebrate life during one’s birthday. #

NMP/01 April 2016/2.53 p.m.






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