laging hinahanap

Right at this moment I’m listening to this Pilipino rapper named Gloc 9. I got turned on to him through the youth I’m working with at Bahay Kalinga. In case I never mentioned it, part of the program entails volunteer work at an NGO. What is peculiar is that Bahay Kalinga is run by the municipality, and hence is an obvious government entity. Anyway, other than that, the running joke about Bahay Kalinga is that its name should be changed to Bahay Kalungan (jailhouse). This is because the Bahay (home) that these youth live in (ages ranging from 6 to 18) has three locked rooms. One is the “play” room. The second is for the younger kids (6-12) and the rest of the older youth are crammed into the third room. This probably would not be a big deal, but the fact that there are about eight in the younger kids room and over twenty in the other room is disturbing. They younger kids have scabies that they keep passing on to each other, even though we bought medicine, we’re not sure it’s being applied properly. There is also a severe lack of clothes, as they repeatedly wear the same t-shirt everyday, and some of the younger kids do not have underwear. To make matters worse, because these youth were abandoned, in trouble with the law, or both, the law maintains that they cannot ever leave Bahay Kalinga unless a family member signs them out and a judge approves it. Unlike in the states, 18 is not the magic number here for juvenile detention, and instead of being let free, they are transferred to adult prison, which quaintly enough, is next door. Anyway, other than the saturation of hopelessness that permeates our work, the brief hours every weekday we spend their seems to lift their spirits somehow. Monday marks our last day where our program coordinators want to have our respective NGOs (in essence the people we “helped”) to perform for them and have a “send-off” for us (as if we actually need gratification). Still, although this performance was planned more for the program coordinators to enjoy a spectacle performed by those less fortunate and for the coordinators to witness their “benevolence” reflected back to them, this performance still provides a space for the youth who are continuously silenced or ignored, to express themselves and provides a moment of what my professor back home considers “play” in communication, a possible instant that subverts and overturns the intention of the dominant or hegemonic order. It is at this performance that some of the youth (no doubt inspired by Filipinos’ love of dance crews) will dance to Gloc 9’s “Huwag Kang Matakot Sumayaw.” At first I thought Gloc 9 was a jokey pop dance type rapper (you know like Will Smith) but he’s actually really good. Although he has the same nasally tone and similar flow as Eminem, (and the similarity is really uncanny) throughout his album “Diploma” he’s able to move through different beats, different syncopation, and different topics fairly easily. You can tell he’s comfortable with each line and really works at his craft. In addition for the most part, the whole album is in Tagalog. The only problem are the beat production, where it’s usually the cheesy karaoke style tone of instruments.

Anyway I started this blog entry to write about our trip to Kawit, home of Heneral Emilio Aguinaldo. There surprisingly were not that many visitors, and although the house was amazing, the curator didn’t provide much knowledge other than what could be found in a textbook. Even the giftshop had hardly any Aguinaldo or historic things for sale, and instead had the usual tourist things (coconut shells carved into animals, random bootlegged CDs, and a lot of fashion disaster hats). Below are some (a lot!) of pictures of our excursion. Two facts of interest: 1) there were a bunch of “secret” passages throughout the house. 2) His bowling alley was awesome and totally reminded me of the last scene in There Will Be Blood. Something tells me Aguinaldo was probably capable of the same thing that Daniel Day Lewis’s character was capable of as well.