Antonio Enriquez's name

This is going to be short, but not the least sweet!

Just the other day - that it's still clear in my mind - a distressed friend of mine had this story to tell:

She said she had brought her teen-aged son, who was bent with chest pain and rocking cough, to Iligan City Hospital, late morning last month. As she narrated to me her horrible experience at the Iligan City Hospital, she became livid with anger:

"I asked the attending X-Ray technician, who seemed camatose before his office door, why he wasn't 'moving' to prepare my son for X-Ray, seeing my son suffering before his eyes." - Here, I saw her turn more livid - "You know what was his reply? ... 'You've to buy first an X-Ray film...just outside our gate. The hospital has no X-Ray film, ma'am.'"

No X-Ray film!

... Hearing this, I too turned livid. How was it possible for a city, enriched with so many factories, and with hydro-electrical power supplying nearby towns, be so penniless/way cuarta she can't afford a sheet of X-Ray film?

Then I quickly realized the culprit, who has made Iligan City Hospital so destitude: Porky Napoles (full participation of some of our congressmen and senators) fattening herself with the pork barrel, from which a tiny-winy part should have gone to the hospital.

Iligan City Hospital certainly would have a mount of of X-Rays in stock, as high as her rafters,for Iligan folks and give it out for free!

Shame!

Ay, and to think it is our money (taxes) - Porky and not a few 'honorables' themselves have been salivating on the pork's cholesterol fat.

Greed ... thus, they denied the sick child's urgent need for a single sheet of X-Ray, for a few pesos, and the delay to get a laboratory result, could have endangered the teen-aged child's life, and as well as other child's in the future!

CopyrightCon Most Vile-Help Appeal: Philippine PEN International and UMPHIL: member of both.

My historical novel 'The Revolt of Gueremon Tenorio' and short stories were posted in Zamboanga.com-webmaster.zamboanga.com, 2006. This vile deed was done without my permission and webmaster has been selling the novel 'in my behalf',' and filling his pocket what I had sweated and blooded for years. Not a centavo came my way nor a coin jiggled in my pocket since over half a decade ago. I need your help t stop this villain, and to stop him from farther coning other writers. Buen salud, Tony Enriquez

NoteNOTE: Clipping was still a bit damp, so we miss a word. Is it ‘courageous’?

Enriquez Collection: Lapuyan Subanon Giant Phingi. Drawing Estarte

The Waterlogged Files #02

“Death Squads Cross the Pacific”

New York Times, Monday, November 19, 1984. Not one but three treacherous murders: first Benigno Aquino, then Alexander Orgullo, now Cesar Climaco. It maybe that each crime came as a shock to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. But for these and other killings, no one has been punished. It’s as if Central American’s death-squads were taking distant root.

Death squads are an especially ugly instrument of terror. Recruited by security forces, the killers pretend to operate on their own. Thus government can disavow the marauders yet by protecting them still intimate opponents.

Is that what’s happening in the Philippines? When Mr. Aquino was killed at Manila airport in August 1983, the President blamed a lone Communist gunman. His own inquiry has now found otherwise and accused high military officers. The promise of swift, impartial trials is not yet kept.

The latest victims, too, are prominent critics of Mr. Marcos. Mr. Orcullo, the regional secretary of an opposition party in Mindanao, was shot on Oct. 19 by men in military fatigues. His family suspects gunmen belonging to a paramilitary group trained by the army. There have been no arrests.

Last Tuesday, in what Mr. Marcos calls “a major blow’ against decency, a __ (unreadable) mayor in the same province was shot by a single gunman. Mayor Cesar Climaco is not an obscure victim. When martial law was imposed in 1972, he vowed not to cut his hair until it was lifted. Nine years later, when Mr. Marcos yielded a bit, Mayor Climaco cut his locks accordingly, to shoulder length. He was known for such flair but also for effective campaigns against crime.

President Marcos has ordered yet another high-level inquiry. But the United States, bound to the Philippines by history and strategic interest, needs to do more than join in the hand-wringing. El Salvador makes the point: “When the Reagan Administration finally passed a blunt warning to its military, the death-squad killings dropped off dramatically.

The United States’ influence in Manila is almost as great. A blunt warning about America’s deepening concern stop the bloodletting.

Next: The Waterlogged Files #03: “Philippine Opposition Leader Assassinated”

Jambangan: the “Garden of Flowers” never was!

My compoblano and I were talking about the original name of Zamboanga or its root. So,  to him, a media practitioner himself, whom I’d known for years, I said,

“Zamboanga, as a ‘garden of flowers’ never existed. So, why call it ‘city of flowers?’”

He  said, “Verdad—?What you said?”

In Chabacano, I replied, “Si, es verdad –it’s true.”

He said, “How? Why don’t you write about it?”

I said, “I will.”

So I — kind of thinking it as a challenge — wrote:

I only heard that Zamboanga, the ciudad where I was born and initialized to manhood in its bars and dancing halls, was the progeny of the Indonesian word “jambangan,” when I was already in high school, in the early ‘50s. Before that never! The common word was “sambuan,” meaning the long pole Samals used to fasten their sailing-canoes to as anchor, when they go down to barter in the old port town of Masinloc.  Samboangan, as spelled on the map of Murillo Velarde sketch of Fort Pilar, published in 1734, was the unchallenged name then; it definitely wasn’t “Jambangan”; as early (or late) as in the 18^th century. And a historical novel I later wrote had “Samboangan,” with “S” instead of “Z” and an affix “an” in its title: Samboangan: the Cult of War , UP Press, 2006.

Back to “Jambangan.” In his book, Roots of Zamboanga Hermosa,             ex-Jesuit Father Hilario Lim y Atilano wrote, “To dispose of this myth, once and for all, let us set the record straight.”

Faithfully, I followed his track, untrodden until then, but fairly a good path. None of the Subanon “apostoles,” he claimed there, like the Italians Sanctini and Paliola, who spoke Subanon like natives do, ever mentioned jambangan, the “garden of flowers,” nor Combes in his book, who wrote of almost everything he saw. While on a mission with the Subanons, he wrote of fishes that ate the slime of the huge tree and excreted ambergris (ME ambregris, fr. MF ambre gris, gray); the school of tiny fish which metamorphosized into shape of huge monsters to fool their predators; of pearl divers who cleared their eyes with blood of white cocks before diving to the floor of the sea. He wrote of fruits, vegetables, and minerals but never once scribbled of the garden of flowers in the forest of Zamboanga.

Majul and de la Costa had ransacked the archives of the world, but did not find the mythical jambangan of flowers, as referrence to Zamboanga’s root name.

In Blair & Roberson, 55 volumes, Zamboanga is spelled 18 different ways (two are missing, according to Fr. Lim: “San Buagan” and “Samboungam”), no one historian ever spelled it jambangan to refer it to the myth or legend.

Then there was this story told to me by the late Adolfo Navarro, known faithfully as “Cabonegro,” then retired Zamboanga City tourism commissioner. He had authenticated our interview by signing on every page. This to me, “wraps it up” — excuse the mundane expression. The story he told me went something like this:

A couple of Indonesian guests came to Zamboanga, and while the late Mayor Cesar Climco and Adolfo Navarro were entertaining the Indonesians, the latter mentioned about the familiarity of the word Zamboanga to their Indonesian word “jambangan.” Mr. Navarro recalled the four of them were standing there under the veranda looking out  toward the sea. “The word ‘jambangan’ to us in our language means ‘flowers,’ they said. Immediately, Mayor Climaco, an energetic and quick-witted person, who was then anxiously promoting Zamboanga for tourism, picked it up as a monicker to promote Zamboanga. “Jambangan” then was found everywhere: Jambangan coffee shop, Jambangan restaurant, Jambangan hotel, Jambangan everywhere—until it ended up as the pretentious ancient and original derivative of “Zamboanga” — because of its multitudinous usages and repetitions.  A couple of years later, I met an Indonesian woman, wife of a protestant minister, who said the word “jambangan” doesn’t even mean flowers, rather it is the ‘vase in which we put  flowers...a flower vase.’”              

So, compoblano, take this as a reply to your “how,” but don’t throw the flower vase.

                                                             -End-