Blogs are made by fools like me

"Carcasses" of diseased pine trees felled by city government lumberjacks from all around Baguio City
await wood processing at an improvised lumberyard in Dominican Hill. Many of these were teetering
precariously or leaning over power lines they needed to be cut for public safety considerations.

think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

     A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

     Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

     A tree that looks at God all day,

                   And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

                   A tree that may in Summer wear

                   A nest of robins in her hair;

                   Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

                   Who intimately lives with rain.

            Poems are made by fools like me,

            But only God can make a tree.

very time I read this poem by Joyce Kilmer, which first appeared in the August 1913 issue of Verse Magazine, there is this unexplainable feeling of melancholy that I get, The best way to describe it is to associate it with the color magenta.  And just as I only copied Joyce Kilmer's poem here, I'm also only borrowing the description of the color magenta from a dialogue by Blanche Deve

This old pine tree was marked for axing
by the government because some of its
branches interfere with power lines. Local
artists pleaded to be allowed to carve it
into a giant totem pole, after pruning off
the offending branches.

reaux from the hit 1980s television series The Golden Girls (played by actress Rue McClanahan). 

    When you "feel magenta" it's a feeling you can never describe: you're not sad so you're not blue; you're not mad so you're not red; you're not afraid, so you're not yellow; you're not jealous or envious so you're not green; you're not dead or grieving so you're not black. But you feel an anxious combination of all of these colors. You are feeling "magenta."  

    Magenta can be disquieting but it doesn't move you, and it doesn't afflict you with any sense of guilt for not moving. You end up doing nothing, and doing nothing changes nothing.

    I have been writing about Baguio's pine trees for twenty years now, since the 1980s as a writer for The Gold Ore.  It might even be  longer than that, if I count the years from high school, the name of  the school paper I edited was the Pine Tree in Baguio City High School.  My message is  always the same: we have to save and protect this precious dwindling resource before it's all gone. 

   The usual reaction I get from official circles and ordinary folk is always magenta--all empathy but nothing more.  People feel the loss, but not the urgency. They sense that something is not right,  but they are not outraged enough to lift a finger and do anything about it. Most of all they think I'm writing about an old and tired subject that, in the words of Macbeth, is just "a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

   It's not difficult to see why. Although there are notable exceptions, the decimation of the pine trees is not usually done by  a massive assault on the treeline in a full-scale logging operation.  The poaching is usually sporadic and widely-scattered--one tree here, another one a few kilometers away--not enough to attract attention and invite opposition. But the math is cumulative. If only one tree a day were surreptitiously cut, 365 trees  a year becomes a combined denuded area equivalent to one half hectare.  

The Tower of Peace park beside the Baguio
Lions Clubhouse was supposed to be the new
outdoor "Pine Trees of the World Museum"
but after all the hoopla of the opening 
ceremonies, the place quickly deteriorated into
a vandals paradise, instead.

    I used to believe that vigilance is the answer. But it only takes a couple of minutes to guide a chainsaw blade across the average one-meter diameter of a fully-grown Benguet pine. And the challenge is not really catching the poacher in the act, it's the not knowing where he will strike and when. There is simply no practical way to guard all the pine trees across all of the 57.5-square kilometer area of Baguio City.

  Tighter regulation and even stiffer penalties are not the answer, either. One can make all the arguments but at the end of the day, cutting a tree with a government permit makes no difference to the tree. Whether you cut a pine tree with criminal intent or with legal sanction and tender loving care, the tree is just as dead. 

   However, as rampant as illegal tree cutting (is there really another kind?) has been, the stubborn and hardy Benguet pine tree is not in any endangered species list.  If it was, it might even be a bit of good because that would finally sound the death knell for these trees urgenty enough to trigger a proactive response. But why wait for the peril to become intractable when it's possible to preempt the response?

   There is no mystery about this. In any conservation program to protect an endangered species, the scientific response is to increase its population, not just  prevent that population from dwindling. The Philippine Eagle Conservation Program, although still a work in progress, has nevertheless succeeded in pulling the Philippine eagle from the brink of extinction through its captive breeding program. Today, instead of spending time trying to capture wild eagles for relocation into confined bird sanctuaries, they have been going out to the forest to release captive-bred eagles back into the wild.  Coupled with widespread public education, and an aggressive program to protect the eagles natural habitat, the program has seen the raptor redeem its lost position as the apex predator in the forest food chain. The moral lesson is this: to protect a species, the key is making sure the birth rate outpaces the mortality rate.

Forcing the Benguet pine tree to gr.ow alongside non-
native species has the effect of thinning its crown.
This park was more verdant and lush with pine trees
when it was all the species allowed to grow there 

    To preserve the proud heritage of Baguio City's iconic pine tree, there must be an effort to produce more new trees and not just a vigilant watch over old existing ones.  Here is where the pine tree conservation program--so far a nonexistent program yet--could do better. Without letting up on the effort to catch and penalize illegal treecutters, there must be a  seedling process to produce pine tree saplings en masse and a year-round  mechanism to disperse them throughout the city for planting.  As simple as that sounds, the sad reality is Baguio City doesn't even have a seedling program, or a seedling farm.  You cannot count the handful of private seedling plots at the City Orchidarium because those are oriented to fill a limited commercial market for ornamental greenery.

    In 1993, the government launched an ambitious project that renamed the old Tower of Peace Park along Governor Pack Road as the "Pine Trees of the World Park."  The idea was to honor the one species of subtropical flora--the Benguet pine tree--that has brought fame, honor an instant recognition to Baguio City. It would be a living outdoor museum showcasing the Benguet pine tree, and to give it company other species of pine tree would be imported from all over the world and be resodded beside the local variety: ponderosa pines from the upper latitudes of North America and Canada, Norwegian folk pines from northern Europe, etc. To herald the project, a marker was unveiled by the entrance beside the Lions Clubhouse. It is all that stands for the whole project ever since. 

The lushest growths of pine trees can be found around the hilly
suburbs of Baguio where the species is allowed to thrive by its
own kind. Unfortunately, it is also in these places where they 
are most vulnerable to the weekend chainsaw gangs.

   In the first place, such an ambitious project was unnecessary, There is already a place that fits the purpose called the Baguio Botanical and Zoological Garden along Leonard Wood Rd. But even that facility has no decent tree seedling program dedicated especially to propagating the Benguet pine tree. 

In the second place, introducing a foreign species of any flora or fauna into a locality not its natural habitat is always frowned upon by scientists. To this day, Ifugao upland farmers ares till livid about the introduction of the golden kohol into their rice terraces by overeager agricultural technologists in the mid-80s. Promising a second source of income to farmers, the golden kohol was envisioned to provide bountiful harvests of highly-marketable crustacea during the fallow period between rice croppings. Instead the voracious shells consumed hectare upon hectare of rice farms all year round, while proving intractably resistant to any effort to exterminate them.

   In places where the Benguet pine tree is allowed to grow alone without any neighboring species, it seems to thrive well. But forced to grow side by side with other plant genuses, an inexplicable  phenomenon called "crown spacing" seems to impair the outward spread of the tree's upper limbs and branches.

Time is running out on Baguio's iconic
pine tree. Unless efforts are redoubled
to increase their number, and not just
to arrest their decline, soon it will be 
just another souvenir from the past,
and begin to slowly disappear like the
marapait (local sunflower).

  This phenomenon could still be observed today happening in Camp John Hay.  

    After the defeat of the RP-US Military Bases Agreement in the Senate on September 16, 1991, Baguio City prepared for the American departure from Camp John Hay. What would happen to the best-preserved nature enclave in Baguio now that the Americans are leaving? The question is not born of colonial mentality but of practical observation. Back in the day, when you entered Camp John Hay you saw a glimpse of what Baguio must have looked like at the turn of the century: verdant and fresh with thick stands of towering Benguet pine trees hemming in and around eighteen links of a world-class golf course.  The golfing is new, but the trees are hundred year-old straightbolds that have become extremely rare elsewhere in the city.

   When martial law was declared in September 1972, US military bases including Camp John Hay took heavy security precautions, and entering Camp John Hay became a limited privilege. Becoming this "forbidden fruit" destination wrapped Camp John Hay in a veil of mystique for tourists and locals alike. As a young Baguio boy in gradeschool I would hear urban legends of how going inside Camp John Hay was like going outside of the Philippines. 

   What bolstered that feeling of "like being in America" when you entered Camp John Hay was the fact throughout the entire camp,  there was only one species of tree visible everywhere--the Benguet pine tree.  Somebody compared it to pine forests in Minnesota to Maine, or southward to Georgia.

   Then came the conversion of Camp John Hay into a private golf course and residential subdivision in the years following 1992. One of the development parameters introduced by the private developer that won the lease over it was the diversification of foliage. They said having nothing but pine trees growing in Camp John Hay made the place boring and visually monotonous. They endeavored to introduce more lowland color to the treeline, theorizing that it made the place more welcoming to the lowland crowd, seeing familiar species of trees,

   Maybe so, but it robbed Camp John Hay--and ultimately Baguio City as a whole--of character and identity. More ominously, it signaled the decline of the pine tree as the icon of Baguio's landscape. Replacing it were several deciduous varities of broad-leafed trees. Incredible fast growers, a sapling today could be a fullly-grown 20-foot tall tree with a full crown in less than five years. It would take a Benguet pine tree 35 to 40 years to achieve the same growth.

A Delicate Species to Culture

   The Benguet pine tree is a very challenging species to culture. The only time an individual plant can tolerate being lose to another is when they are both saplings up to about a foot high, and only while their tender root systems are enclosed in individual plastic pouches. Sown into the ground at close quarters, saplings do not fare well sharing common soil if their radiuses are less than two meters apart. In the natural environment, thicker stands of pine tree naturally thin out as the trees soar towards the sky. By natural selection, weaker trees in between sturdier ones gradually die out, allowing mature trees greater airspace to expand their crowns.

    The Benguet pine is not a symmetrical tree, in the sense that its branches do not grow outward from the main trunk in a balanced way.  It's a common sight to see pine trees asymmetrically favoring one side, with larger branches generally  sweeping towards the windward side.  Strangely, however, cluster of trees tend to exhibit the same growth pattern, sometimes creating the impression that a group of trees were dancing in some cosmically-coordinated choreography.

   This peculiar growth behavior has helped to protect the species, too. Unlike the conventional ponderosa pine or Douglas fir which exhibit greater radial balance, growing in a cone shape with increasing height, the Benguet pine tree is not an ideal "Christmas tree" and is rarely harvested for that purpose.  Also, because its main trunk seldom attains a "straightbold" consistency, the pine tree is not an ideal lumber stock. When quartersawn at a lumber sawmill, the tree yields only very short lengths of wideboard most useful only for furniture woodwork rather than as structural elements in carpentry. When you talk of a house being "constructed of pine wood" you really mean that pine wood was used mostly for cladding.

    This makes it a greater challenge to undertake a massive pine tree planting program. The sapling mortality rate is exceedingly high--by most estimates only two to three saplings achieve maturity out of a hundred. The best chances of success  is when reforesting wider swaths of land, such as an entire hillside. Saturating the  

soil's bearing capacity by planting seedlings 2 to 3 meters apart, the rewards is five to ten years into the future when the planted area would be a new growth forest of pine trees 5 to 8 inches in diameter and about 12 feet tall.  In the urban setting this can be a tough challenge. A lot of changes in land use  can happen in five years, let alone ten.  Many tree-cutting permits sought by housing developers are, in fact, aimed at cutting pine trees that have just entered their first phase of forest growth being planted less than ten years ago.  

 NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Dissecting this Filipino obsession for playing the "Game of the Giants"

he average height for Filipino males is 5-foot 5-inches making us the veritable dwarfs of southeast Asia. Despite this, basketball is the most popular indoor sport in the country so much so that we boast of the only play-for-pay league in the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA).  Sure, the NBA is much bigger but no NBA player has ever been elected US Senator.  We have had two: Robert "Sonny" Jaworski and Freddie Webb.

   The world's undisputed Number One sport is football. That is, soccer--not the fully-armored American version, or the grunting exhibition of Neanderthal manhood those weird Australian blokes call rugby. Aside from the Olympic Summer Games, the World Cup of football is the only other quadrennial athletic competition that pits countries, not teams, against one another across international borders.

   China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei--all our Asian neighbors are football-crazy. And yet, the Philippines has no strong grassroots football program, no viable professional football league and no rockstar-grade football heroes.

   That has always befuddled me. Why would the Philippines--this whole nation of sub-six-footers with short stocky legs--insist on wanting to slamdunk a leather ball very few can grab hold with one hand,  into a ten-foot high ring even fewer could clamber up with two hands?

   Haven't we vertically-challenged Filipinos realized that we could be enormously more competitive kicking around a soccer ball that's always on the ground?

   Bespectacled all my life (I've worn prescription glasses since age 3), it was not my ambition to pay  basketball, never excelled in it nor did I even try.  Even when it was a compulsory sport in P.E. classes in Baguio City High School (BCHS) where I went to high school, I was always given the simplest play instruction by the high school coach: just keep running up and down the court, don't ever hold the ball. The team's pointguard, would often improve on that instruction. "If I get trapped by the defense  and I'm forced to pass the ball to you, call timeout immediately!"

   Other guys boasted of varsity team records for most points scored (the record was 38 points in one game by one player), most number of steals, shots blocked, assists, and so on. In four years at City High, I scored five points--two of them on freethrows in the dying minutes of a blown-out game my nerdy team was losing anyway. It's entirely possible I hold the worst record in the school's history.

   Speaking of schools, Baguio City is the educational capital of the north. As if it wasn't enough that every school and university in the city has a basketball court--very often two: one indoor and a second one al fresco--every barangay has one, too.  Second only to a barangay hall, the most common infrastructure project  in Baguio is the obligatory "barangay covered court."

I studied elementary here in Baguio Central School from 1970
to 1976 and played basketball baking in the hot sun in this 
decidedly uncovered court. Finally in 2013, DepEd decided
to construct a steel roof over it. Maybe a bit too late. Children
today don't really play active sports anymore. They prefer
to play virtual games on the computer.

   Under FIBA rules, the official regulation-size basketball court is 94-by-50 feet (28.7-by-15.2 meters). That makes a fullcourt 436.24 square meters. If you put together  the basketball courts of Baguio's 129 barangays, 9 colleges, 6 public school districts, and around 23 owned by private institutions (churches, YMCAs, company gyms, etc.) it would be an area as big as seven hectares (72,852 square meters).

   None of it is a waste of space, of course. These covered courts double as disaster evacuation centers, polling precincts, and public function venues including the most eagerly-anticipated for--your ubiquitous annual barangay fiesta "dance-for-all." 

   Garage sales, bingo games, political campaign rallies, graduations, rock concerts, beauty pageants, Christmas parties, funeral wakes, sunday masses, evangelism outreaches, child daycare centers, art exhibits, zumba workouts--the list of activities usually held in a covered basketball court is literally endless. I may have stumbled on the silent reason behind basketball's popularity, the secret of its community-binding power. 

   If you have a car that can take you anywhere you like, you will love to drive even if you never make it to the Indy 500.  Similarly, when you have a basketball court that allows you to do a thousand other things, then you might as well bounce that rubber ball while waiting for the opening ceremonies of the next event. Playing alongside Stephen Curry or Lebron James is just a delusion never happening, but you shouldn't care.  It is not the game itself that brings the community together, it's all the timeouts in between. Forget the score of the game, just live the dream for the moment. So you're 5-foot-3, never mind. The next time you pass by an ukay-ukay shop just pick up a jersey with the name "Bryant" or "Jordan" on it, get on the court and just start running, whether or not you can score.

   Come to think of it, my high school coach's instruction to me actually makes sense. Now.

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

COVID-19 quarantine sharpens Baguio's focus

s a political observer I worried seriously for Baguio City Mayor Benjie Magalong when he announced in the second week of March that he was cancelling the Panagbenga Flower Festival and the Cordillera Administrative Region Athletic Association (CARAA) sports meet--two of the most anticipated events in Baguio City in 2020. He also suspended indefinitely the widely popular ukay-ukay Night Market on Harrison Road and even iced a newly-launched weekend experiment in transforming Session Road into an all-pedestrian premonader's haven on Sundays. 

   "Whaaat is he doing," I thought, "trying to win some kind of most unpopular mayor title?" Those are four of the most elaborately-prepared city programs that have become iconic of Baguio City. Cancelling the Panagbenga alone rises  to the scale of scrapping New Year's eve--like it could be done. Athletes competing in the CARAA have not only paced their training all year to peak at the precise time of the meet opening--they have even run some of the preliminary heats already when the shocking announcement came. 

   Saying that I struggled to give Mayor Magalong the benefit of all my doubt is an understatement. I seriously considered formally conveying my unsolicited cautionary advice to him: "this is political suicide, Your Honor."

Images of a ghost-town like Baguio such as this will become
iconic of the period in its history when a mayor's strong
leadership was able to coax 100% voluntary compliance
with extremely harsh health and safety protocols.   

  I'm glad I didn't. In my entire life, I have never been so happy to be wrong.

   By this week's end, THIRTY MILLION PEOPLE on Planet Earth will have been infected by the coronavirus. Close to ONE MILLION PEOPLE would have died from the disease. These are World Health Organization (WHO) figures, confirmed by Johns Hopkins University.

   Do the math. One death in thirty people is a fatality rate of 3.3 percent. Baguio's resident population in 2020 is 372,680. If we ever hit that fatality rate, we need to dig 12,298 graves if we can find an area eight hectares wide. Burnham Park is only five hectares.  We need TWO Burnham Parks. 

   Back in March, the metrics of "superspreader" events were not even known yet. The mayor issued his order on March 9, 2020. The NBA in the US issued their order to suspend the basketball season only on March 11--two days later. The city of New York did not even go into full lockdown until March 18--more than one week later.   New York, particularly, is a sobering comparison. A city of 18,804,000 residents, some 453,000 of them contracted COVID-19--an infection rate of 2.4 percent. If 2.4 percent of Baguio's residents were infected by the coronavirus, 8,944 of us would be on ventilators right now. 

   Out of the 18,804,000 population of New York, 32,682 have died of COVID-19 or a mortality-to-population rate of 0.1738-percent.  If 0.1738-percent of Baguio's population died of COVID-19, we would be burying  6,477 people. But that's a misleading statistic. Why would you count the number of people who died against the number of people who did not even get the disease? You should count  how many of those who did get the disease died from it. 

Even after quarantine lockdown restrictions were slowly relaxed,
Baguio residents continue to toe the line and give their city's
political leadership total cooperation with living under the terms
of the "new normal" lifestyle: social distancing and face masks. 

In New York, out of the 453,000 who contracted coronavirus, 32,682 of them died or a more meaningful mortality-to-infection rate of 7.2-percent.  If Baguio did nothing to fight COVID-19 and the whole city was infected, 26,832 would need embalming--or not. We probably have no choice but to cremate that many cadavers---three times the number of registered voters in Irisan Barangay. If we had needed eight hectares to bury 12,298 dead with the low death rate assumption of 3.3 percent, we need double that--or sixteen hectares to dispose of all the dearly-departed at a 7.3 percent mortality rate.

   To make a long story short, if you "low-ball" it, 12,298 Baguio residents would be dead. On the other hand, if you "high-ball" it 26,832 would be gone if the pandemic were to end today. If it persists for a few more months--maybe even years--all bets are off. If might be easier to count the living.

  So, no--Mayor Benjie Magalong did not commit political suicide when he made what I thought were crappy decisions last March. In fact, if  he had not made them, he would have committed genocide.

   I like to rub the exaggeration pedal-to-the-metal, so to speak. Donald Trump once claimed that he could go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and he would still not lose a single vote. Maybe, but if he shot ten people I doubt it.

   Benjie Magalong could set up a 50-caliber machinegun in Malcolm Square and use up eight ammo boxes of 1,200 rounds each cutting down as many pedestrian as he can and he would still have killed LESS people than in the mildest COVID mortality scenario. 

   It is totally absurd, of course, but the fact is if he only spared one ammo box, he would still have saved 1,200 lives that would have died from COVID-19. That ridiculously makes him a "hero" of a magnitude not even Donald Trump can match.

CONTACT TRACING CZAR

   Baguio City Mayor Benjie Magalong has been named the country's contact-tracing czar because of the city's  tremendous success in limiting the spread of coronavirus, He was able to devise a way to  break not just the linear  transmission chain but to disrupt the fission-like expansion of the transmission web.  He did this by adopting a reverse approach to containing an infection spread, by looking at viral transmission not as a function of population but of geographic area.

    Other contract tracers around the world would follow one person and find out who that person had interacted with, say within the last 24 or 48 hours. If that person had interacted with two people, then the tracing steam was split and chased down these other two.  This means the tracing team was always one step behind, and was getting thinned out with every cycle of infection-transmission down the line.

   Mayor Magalong used a different strategy, which I describe as kind of  "hamletting concept" for lack of a better term. He was not interested in just one   infected person or who he interacted with in the last 24 or 48 hours. He wanted to know where he lived. Then his teams would literally draw on a map a large-enough radius, called the "hot zone." Then they set about interviewing not only that one infected person but any number of his neighbors to find out who had come in or gone out of the hot zone within the incubation period of the virus.  As households were cleared one by one of any possible contact, the radius of the hot zone was gradually narrowed until eventually it zoomed in on the one house where that infected person lived. 

    In other words, Mayor Magalong's team would start outside the hot zone and close in, instead of starting from one point and moving infinitely outward as the web of transmission grew colder by the day.  He also devised a very efficient handoff mechanism so that if one tracer team on the east side of the city determined that a possible infection contact had crossed over to the west side of the city, the details were forwarded to a team already in place on the west side. Teams stayed put in areas where they were assigned, where they knew every household, every point of ingress or egress, and where they knew practically every resident and his travel history. Most importantly, all contract tracing data were encoded into a database which printed out infection density charts in realtime.  If infection had spilled out of one barangay because of smartaleck violators (the so-called "pasaways") Mayor Magalong locked down 2 or 3 more barangays surrounding it or shared a common point of ingress or egress with it.

  Downtown, he required business establishments to log in all visits by customers, suppliers, staff--no body was exempted. He observed foot traffic and came to some amazing observations. He discovered that several infections in scattered barangays with no cross-traffic was due to a factor nobody could have seen: the infected residents had all passed though a narrow congested sidewalk in Mabini Street, where social distancing was all but impossible.  He quickly split the pedestrian traffic flow into one-way ascending, one-way descending on opposite sides of the street. Almost instantly, the infection spreadout associated with the area suddenly dropped.  In fact, he had already instituted the same system along Session Road earlier and wondered why the effect was minimal, until he realized that all the sidestreets need to be split-laned too, including Assumption Road and General Luna.

TOUGHER CHALLENGE THAN SERVING WARRANTS

   Mayor Magalong was the former head of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG). During that stint, he had developed a remarkably efficient strategy of locating persons mingling among the general population  over many years of forming elite "tracker teams" on the hunt for wanted fugitives.

   But contract-tracing  COVID-19 stretched his ingenuity to the limit. There's a huge difference between serving an arrest warrant and trying to catch a submolecular virus.  When you're looking for a fugitive,  you know a lot of basic information about his appearance and other physical traits that even if the person were to employ some form of disguise, he can only deviate so much from his basic appearance. CIDG tracker teams were equipped with up to five levels of cartographic variations, they hardly bother with less essential traits. A fugitive can't change his height or weight, only is face, hair and voice. Still, those are only three elements. 

   When Mayor Magalong set out to track down COVID infected persons, he knew it could be anybody with a million faces for a possibility. The virus has a million disguises--but just like the fugitives the CIDG hunted down, its modus operandi was well-known. The virus droplets could be aerosolized but strictly speaking it was not airborne.  The virus does not fly.  If it did, not even an N-95 mask can protect anybody, we would all need self-contained breathing systems and full biohazard suits. So the city went convent-strict with face masks not so much so you can't inhale the virus, but so you can't cough it out.

    I discovered this first hand in town when I briefly peeled off my face mask to drink from a water bottle. Although the three policemen near me eyed me warily with raised eyebrows, they did not make a move right away. But when I let out a few stifled coughs after poorly swallowing the water, those three cops were instantly around me. They were not going to arrest me, they hardly even accosted me. One of them explained that they quickly formed a three-man wall around me so that the wind would not carry my aerosolized cough droplets. No wonder it is them who were clad in full white coveralls and industrial gas masks during the height of the ECQ.  And that's the most prominent element of the Magalong plan: high enforcement visibility  and marshall saturation. I have never seen downtown Baguio crawling with so many cops since martial law. And they were not shy or silent, either. Megaphone in hand, they recited points of the city safety protocols like they were going through the five sorrowful mysteries of the rosary. I was impressed.

   The system Mayor Magalong designed, which is now being copied all over the country and even abroad, was a product of science and common sense--but that is an oversimplification. The system has so many fine adjustments and situation-specific variables, I dioubt if it can be completely and accurately replicated outside of Baguio City. It has multiple components, including methodology, data collection forms, database design, training programs, demographic studies, mapping studies, triage protocols---people who thought they could invite him for a one-day or even one-week seminar and be able to understand and implement a similar system are bound to be disappointed. The concept needs an indispensable element: Mayor Magalong.

   Recently, I launched my own YouTube channel and I did a short video on the COVID-19 pandemic in Baguio, from another perspective. You can view that video by clicking the image link below:

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Sometimes it's better to just leave some historical places untouched

he prayer garden of Saint Martin de Porres was an outdoor chapel on a small plateau by the side of the road as you enter the Dominican Hill heritage park. Built on top of the highest mountain within the city proper, it had a commanding view of the city and a sweeping vista of the northwestern side of Baguio facing San Fernando bay (La Union). Although appropriate for the purpose, it was rarely used to hold masses or other Roman Catholic sacraments. Nevertheless, it was a favorite venue for other solemn ceremonies--outdoor weddings, ordinations, formal dedications and such. It was a little-known tourist attraction because it was not a staple item in many city tour itineraries. The most likely reason is its "sister shrine" the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes on adjacent Mirador Hill sucked much more of the tourists' curiosity. Besides that, one has to admit, in a contest of drawing power between the universally-venerated Mother of Jesus  and some obscure person of color who loved dogs, "Mama Mary" wins hands down

God's Ten Commandments--the summarized version of
it, at least--adorns one face of an A-frame building that
now stands where St. Martin's prayer garden used to
be. Said to be the largest "tablet" of its kind, it's actually
just a mural painting, so it's claim to fame may not be
too secure.

    I had no particular interest in Saint Martin de Porres until work crews demolished the garden honoring him sometime in 2010. In its place, an odd structure was erected that later lay claim to being the "biggest Ten Commandments tablet" in the country. I was instantly skeptical  of the claim, because as "tablets" go this was no single piece monolith made of granite on which written characters were carved. This was just a mural in latex paint brushed onto an exterior wall. This wall belongs to a building that is not even large, by any stretch.  There must be thousands of buildings with wider mural space to offer. So even if its claim was arguably true in the beginning, it won't take a dedicated artist with two brushes and two large gallons of black and white paint a gargantuan effort to retake the title. As a matter of fact, it will take only minutes for a computer plotter to print an even more awesome  likeness of Moses' tablet collection on tarpaulin. Hang it over that wall by the corners and you'll have the biggest foldable Ten Commandments poster in the city.

   As a young boy growing up in Baguio in the 60s and 70s, I would always wind up in this prayer garden with a few other little boys my age.  Usually, it's at the end of a daylong "hunting trip" for small birds which we shot with our home-made rubberband slingshots--called palsi-it.  I know it's not politically-correct to brag about such exploits today. But in my defense, no endemic bird populations were yet endangered in 1967. Add to this I must have been a cross-eyed little twerp back then because in reunion chats with friends 50 years later none of them seems to remember me ever hitting prey. I might have clipped one or two on the wing but not badly enough to ground the little critters who always managed to flay away. 

Not quite Rembrandt but this early oil
rendition of the likeness of Saint Martin
de Porres could have you claiming he
must have Filipino blood. But in fact, 
he's from Lima, Peru--the bastard son of 
a Spanish nobleman and a black woman
who was a freed slave.

   Lack of success in bird hunting was, in fact, one of the main reasons why "summiting"  Dominican Hill and making it onto Saint Martin's prayer garden was consolatory. You had no bird in hand, but you can fill your stomach with wild red berries from heavily fruit-laden shrubs around the garden. On a precarious ledge a few steps off the escarpment to the west also grew some succulent masaplora (passion fruit) trees that must have been planted there by the Dominican seminarians. I can't think of anyone with little faith who would amble down that precarious escarpment just to plant alnos and masaplora . They must know that  one small slip of the foot and they'll end up in Crystal Cave a thousand feet below. 

  Full to our stomachs on wild red berries, we would stretch out on the many outdoor pews in front of Saint Martin's statue, gazing up  to the skies counting as many animal cloud shapes as we could recognize. It was a healing time, too, as we took stock of how many  little cuts we had  on our bare hands and legs, bushwhacking through thickets of talahib or runo--a local woody shrub with long bladelike leaves. A few crushed leaves of bitter marapait (local wild sunflower) was a little boy's first-aid kit. The juicy poultice applied to open cuts stung really bad but, believe it or not, instantly stopped any bleeding. Are you paying attention, Pfizer Laboratories? 

   So I felt a little sad for Saint Martin as I watched the transformation of his garden. I felt sorry for myself too for waiting this long to even get curious about who he was and what he did in life.  Apparently, Saint Martin de Porres (1579-1639) was a Peruvian lay brother of the Dominican order. He was the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a woman who was a freed slave of African-Native American descent.

Although not among the superstars
in the pantheon of Vatican saints,  
St. Martin de Porres is nontheless
popular in Latin and North America,
earning a panel in the glass-stained
windows of St. Dominic's Church in
Washgington,

   Being a person of color and illegitimate, he was prohibited by Peruvian law from being ordained. He was admitted  to the Dominican order as a donado (unpaid househelper) for the simple honorific of being allowed to wear the long robes of a Dominican monk. But his status remained as a slave, which he embraced with humility and charity. During a long season of hardship when the monastery had no more money to buy food to feed its hungry monks, he pleaded with the head monk "please sell me" during the height of the Peruvian slave trade.  

   The supreme offer of self-sacrifice so touched the other monks that they decided to defy Peruvian law and made him take his priestly vows discreetly. This forced his personal ministry underground as he embarked on a daily struggle to keep a low profile in a cat-and-mouse game with church and government hierarchy. 

   Back in the day, no person of color is permitted to rise in fame. This proved difficult in his case because he made performing healing miracles so commonplace. He brought his healing outreaches to underprivileged communities who, having no money to give him, could not keep their mouths shut with thousands of eyewitness testimonies of his miraculous works. In time, even jealous white monks shed all pretenses of godliness and openly resisted his rise to prominence, calling him nothing but a celebrated black dog  (I often wondered why there was a black dog standing beside his statue!). 

The thing with not having a very active
historical and cultural conservation body is
that it becomes too easy to lose historical
landmarks out of sheer ignorance of their
significance and relevant to the community.
Erecting modern architectural monstrosities
is easy, but recovering lost priceless heritage
is almost impossible.   

   You can say Saint Martin is the earliest voice of Black Lives Matter. He fearlessly broke quarantine rules during the Black Plague to care for colored communities. People of color showing symptoms of the bubonic plague  were often  corralled in  medical concentration camps denied all forms of medication that were reserved for the white population. 

   It is said that Saint Martin endlessly went in and out those heavily-sealed human containments with some obvious divine intervention because locked iron gates flung open on his approach. The plague took a heavy casualty toll on whites just as it is said that hardly anyone succumbed to the pandemic in the rejected communities that Saint Martin visited. 

   To believe the accounts of his many other miracles--such as being engulfed in flames during prayer, bilocation or being in two places simultaneously--for some agnostics may be a bridge too far.  But that a man named Martin de Porres actually lived is factual history. And after a long deliberative process in the cloistered innards of the Vatican, he was finally beatified  in 1837 by Pope Gregory XVI and canonized as a saint on May 6, 1962 by Pope John XXIII.  Interestingly, this beatification is recognized not just by the Roman Catholic church but also by the Lutheran Church and the Anglican Communion.  He is assigned the feast day of November 3--my own father's birthday. 

We lay on these stone pews in St. Martin's prayer garden
after we had gorged on wild red berries that grew around
the yard. Sadly these pews are gone. The garden iself
is gone.

   How uncanny it is, I thought, that in this day of simmering racial unrest and another viral plague, the memorial statue is gone of a man who symbolized triumph over both social and physiological adversities. It's enough to make one  pause and ask how much has really changed since the 16th century? Racism is still tearing at the seams of our society, and an intractable virus is still ravaging our bodies.  

    If the Prayer Garden of Saint Martin de Porres had still been around today, it's straight where I'm headed to medidate and ponder some more. And to look if any of those wild berries were still around...

Note: Recently, I launched a YouTube channel and I featured some of this material in a short video, which you can watch by clicking the image link below:

 

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Pandemic births city's motorbike errand industry

otorcycle dealers have a reason to be happy with the prevailing corona virus pandemic. After years of  sluggish sales, suddenly scooters and motorcycles are all the rage in Baguio City these days. Two-wheeled personal transport is just what the doctor ordered--no, not that doctor--only the one that goes with the figure of speech.  

   For  a very long time Baguio City has not been the most friendly environment for motorcycles. They're not allowed to pass through Session Road except after 7:00 p.m. Whenever the police set up roadside checkpoints to enforce a night curfew, cars are generally waved through but for some reason all motorcycles are always flagged down for inspection.

    What's to inspect in a vehicle that has no roof, doors, hood or trunk? The usual explanation is, to serve as a deterrent in the wake of the increased frequency of crimes committed by perpetrators "riding-in-tandem"  on motorcycles. This makes no sense at all. 

Two large SBARRO pizza's each one the size of a 
laundry basin? No problem, Baguio's "pizza cowboys"
will stack 'em, rack 'em, tie them down and deliver 
them  to your front door steaming hot.

   A car can seat more passengers  and its luggage compartment can carry a bigger payload of contraband--even a dead body. If a motorcycle can transport two criminal cohorts, a car can transport the whole crew of an organized crime syndicate. How come the police never describe criminals aboard  getaway cars as "driving-in-band?"

    In a common scenario when a car is parked illegally, only its license plate is detached and confiscated. In the worst scenario involving a motorcycle, the whole thing is hauled off into the back of a paddy wagon and impounded at the police yard.

   Until just recently, there were no exclusive parking zones for motorcycles. Motorcycle theft was rampant and because these little machines were easy to take apart, one's chances of recovering a stolen motorcycle before it vanished in a chop-shop is close to zero. On the other hand,  if you choose to park it in the safety of a popular shopping mall's guarded indoor carpark, the parking rate is the same as for a full-sized SUV despite the lopsided difference in tonnage, rationale unknown.

   These are only a handful of the many annoyances of owning a motorcycle in Baguio City. Add to this the finger-numbing experience of riding an open-type of vehicle in the city's nippy climate and you can understand why anybody who rides them must be totally enamored with the thing.

Serving in the season of COVID, these intrepid
motorcycle riders are strict compliers with safety
protocols too. Fresh back from a successful delivery
one of them gets his temperature taken before
reloading for his next delivery.

   This is why motorcycle sales have been in the doldrums for years. The only redeeming factor keeping the market alive, if barely, is the rock-bottom prices for these. In 2019 the average cost of the standard 125-cc street motorcycle is P45,000. There are more expensive cellphones than that. Besides being cheap to acquire, they are also cheap to maintain. Able to squeeze as much as 30 kilometers per liter, an average fulltank of 15 liters can get you to Vigan, Ilocos Sur from Baguio and back three times. 

Fortunately, many motorcycle dealerships were already pre-positioned in Baguio City even before the market boomed. The motorcycle industry's "Big Three" --Yamaha, Suzuki and Honda--all had exclusive distributors within Baguio, La Trinidad or the surrounding suburbs. 

   Enter Coronavirus pandemic. When the first round of Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) went into effect back in March, all public transportation ground to a halt. Suddenly, motorcycles were the only viable alternative transportation especially for those who had no choice but to go out and about.    The authorities forbade travelling in closed vehicles except in severely reduced capacities. This made motorcycles--the only transportation without passenger containment--the logical solution to moving law enforcement, medical first responders and other frontliners around. 

  Soon it became apparent that if you would only deputize a small motley crew of motorcycle riders to ferry materials around, then the circulation and distribution of all basic goods is essentially restored even with the general population quarantined at home.

   At first it only involved  the obvious help already available--pizza delivery boys, mail or package couriers and such. Then it became obvious that food being the quintessential, indeed most existential need had to be the first subject of massive, sustained and repetitive distribution.

   Two companies had only recently set up operations in Baguio to test the market for call-up door-to-door food delivery, Grab Food and Food Panda.  After a touch-and-go and shaky opening season pre-COVID, both exploded in an overnight success. The surge in phoned-in food orders swelled in such volume those two companies were no longer bringing snacks to the doorsteps . They were practically engaged in disaster-proportion food relief operations more efficiently than even the government could muster.  Who would have thought?  

No one disputes the City government's
antagonistic policy towards motorcycles
and bicycles. Besides being bereft of any
science behind it, the policy is ANTI-POOR
most of all. Little did the policy-makers 
suspect that in the pandemic era, this 
persecuted mode of transportation would 
become the city's disaster redeemers. Now
let's watch if the policy shifts.

   Unfortunately, it did little to improve people's nutrition overall since they specialized in pizza and other fastfood delivery only for the most part. After all, it had required a complicated arrangement with fastfood outlets to take care of payment remittance, especially in this day and age of G-cash and credit cards. Ordinary restaurants with more diverse menus, as well as most general merchandise stores, were not set up for it.       Fastfood franchises had the jump on them but even so to this day orders are still strictly cash-on-delivery (COD) and in the exact amount, too--"keep the change." Riders have no guaranteed ability to break up large bills.  In the other end, cashless transaction is the only choice between the fastfood company and the bike courier because of the large amounts and huge volume of transactions involved.  Therefore, although invisible throughout, banks were right in the middle of these transactions.  

   A way needed to be found to cut out the middle man. Enterprising rider groups in the city hastily put together other new variants of the service. This time it involved the consumer himself directly outsourcing the running of pick-up errands.  This transformed the  motorcycle rider into an independent self-employed service contractor. With no boss to mind, working anytime and any number of hours he picked, he also gets to keep the whole proceeds of his labor.  Best of all--at least for now--he pays no taxes. 

   From the economic standpoint, it was the ultimate leveling of the playing field, an empowerment of the powerless. An ertswile-unemployed motorcyclist simply had to post his mobile phone number on Facebook and other social media, people called him up and asked him to pick up a bottle of aspirin at Mercury Drug and paid him up front when the aspirin is delivered. It worked for as long as the drug was obtainable over-the-counter without a prescription and it didn't cost way too much for the minimally-capitalized  motorcyclist to cover in advance.  It was that neat and simple, no need to download any apps, set up complicated remittance accounts--most of the people subscribing to this meatball operation's services didn't even bother to ask for receipts.

  After this, sky literally was the limit. Food, hardware, medicine, a jerry can of gas, packages of all sizes and shapes, perhaps a replacement for a busted and  critically-needed USB phone charger, a sack of dog food for pampered Fifi--the list of possibilities was endless. If Mohammed cannot come to the mountain, the mountain can come to Mohammed, indeed--thanks to this formerly vilified intrepid community of two-wheeled messengers. Now, they hardly even deliver just messages alone but haul anything else that could fit in their topboxes or be strapped to it with bungee cords.

   On second thought, even real doctors are happy about the whole thing, not just the doctor of metaphors. The arrangement limited the opportunities for crowd-spreading coronavirus. Plus the motorcylce riders always wore full-faced helmets that were more impregnable than any N-95 mask.  With the lowering of the community quarantine to more permissive levels,  the once illegal "riding-in-tandem" now saves the day for those who simply cannot work from home and must go to an office or other work place. Motorcycle cabs--angkas they are called--is now a fast-growing subsector of the mass transportation industry. 

For the motorcycle rider--remember he works for no one but himself and gets to keep the whole profits from his labor--ferrying goods and people today probably pays off better now than acting as accomplice to a petty crime. Criminals must be having a tough time booking a ride these days. In this way, the motorcycle errand industry is helping lower the crime rate as well.  

From being labeled undeservedly as the grand annoyance of the transportation community, these motorcyclists now keep the entire city safe from COVID-19, well-fed, well-supplied, well-mobilized and even well away from being victimized by crime. 

   So I say the government does owe these long-persecuted motorcyclists an apology. (all photos copyright 2020 Joel R. Dizon) 

RECENTLY, I also l started my own YouTube channel and I made a short video about Baguio City's  COVID-19 pandemic experience. You can view that video by clicking the image link below:

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON