Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo
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We go the movies every once in a while, have parties and festivals, and cheer ourselves hoarse at NCAA games.
Over the past few months, however, we have been witness to a storm, a mighty social storm, that has somewhat intruded into our sheltered lives. On our TV screens, we’ve watched how protest rallies have turned into riots, street battles, and melees. We’ve seen how soldiers and policemen have beaten up demonstrators, and fired their guns and killed or maimed scores of people—protesters and onlookers alike. We’ve seen how demonstrators have hurled stones and rocks, Molotov cocktails and pillboxes against the police and military. Shocked and aghast, we’ve joined the civic-minded sectors of society in condemning the violence of both sides and calling for sobriety. But this is as far as we’ve gone.
Soul-searching, I’ve asked myself why protesters risk their lives in the face of police brutality and why they have resorted to violence themselves. I believe that they are trying to open our eyes to the world outside our sheltered existence. Their anger and fury have been directed against an unjust social order in which an elite few controls the country’s wealth and power, while the overwhelming majority of our countrymen and women wallow in poverty and misery, and in which the gap between the rich and the poor, instead of narrowing, has become a gaping chasm. In resorting to drastic means, the protesters seek to shatter the apathy and inertia in Philippine society and impel structural change. The stones, Molotovs, and pillboxes have to be seen in their proper perspective. We cannot expect the struggle against the institutionalized violence of social injustice to be entirely peaceful.
We cannot just stand aside and watch the storm. As Filipinos concerned for our country and the well-being of all our people, we have to take part in dismantling the structures of oppression in order to bring about a truly just social order and to prevent a cataclysm. Let us be part of the winds of change.
My speech was received with prolonged and hearty applause. Beaming, I returned to my seat. I wondered later if what I said would have any real impact on my fellow graduates. I didn’t realize what a profound impact those events would have on my own life.
NOTES
1 The convention, members of which were soon to be elected, was being convoked to revise the 1935 Philippine Constitution, approved when the Philippines was still a U.S. colony.
2 Recently renamed Don Chino Roces Bridge after a leader of the protests against Marcos.
3 Even worse was what I had heard of Smokey Mountain, the huge slum in Tondo built on a mountain of garbage, where tens of thousands made their living by scavenging in the dump. The reports of rotting garbage emitting acrid or even poisonous fumes and sometimes catching fire made me shudder and think of it as the most terrible place in the world to live.
Nothing Like Having Two Good Legs
6
DAVID RYAN F. QUIMPO
SOME MEMORIES OF my early childhood now appear like images in a dream: fragmented, incoherent, and blurred. Yet they remain. I see mentally ill patients dressed in dirty white muslin, walking aimlessly or lying on the pavement as my yaya (nanny) carries me over what appears to be a cement footbridge. In the next image, I am in an operating room, but this one, unlike others, has two operating tables. I am on one table. A nurse thinks I am fast asleep, but I can see what the doctors are doing at the adjacent table. Using a shiny stainless steel saw, a surgeon amputates a patient’s left leg.
In yet another image, I am seated on a bed. An attendant has just removed the cement cast on my feet with a rotating electric saw. Dr. Inocentes, my orthopedic surgeon, comes in and examines my foot. With his fingers, he firmly grips what looks like a button on my ankle. He mutters something about me being brave and then pulls the button. The button holds in place a string that goes through a hole in the bone, and passes through the other side—at my foot’s sole—to another button he has just severed.
It was only much later, in my early adolescent years, that I managed to piece together and comprehend these images. As a seven-month-old baby, I contracted poliomyelitis. My parents decided to move the family from Iloilo to Manila where the country’s only orthopedic hospital was located.
The National Orthopedic Hospital (NOH) was located inside the National Mental Hospital in Mandaluyong before it acquired its own premises on Banawe Street in Quezon City in 1963. My first three orthopedic operations were completed at the old site, while the next two were at the Banawe Street address. It must have been in Mandaluyong where I had the traumatic experience of witnessing an amputation. The scarcity of public funds at the time probably explains why the NOH had to maintain two operating tables in one surgical room.
As a result of polio, my body was paralyzed from my neck to my feet. Mom told me that for a time doctors were considering using the iron lung machine on me. The Emerson iron lung machine used in the mid-1900s helped polio victims whose breathing muscles were paralyzed. The patient’s whole body, from neck to feet, was placed in a large cylindrical steel drum where the action of breathing was mimicked by altering the pressure inside the drum. Luckily, it was not necessary for me to use the machine as I regained my capacity to breathe. Through a series of operations and years of therapy, my upper body recovered completely, even as large groups of muscles and nerves on my legs and feet remained dysfunctional. To stand up and walk, I needed metal braces on both legs as well as crutches on both arms.
Ryan, age five, holds a sheet of Easter Seal commemorative postage stamps for the year of the handicapped, to present to First Lady Leonila Garcia at Malacañang Palace (1959).
I was too young to remember these events or to know their significance. However, I do recall another image. I was on a beautiful, sunlit lawn with tiny butterflies flitting about. Mom ushered me through the garden and into a building. March 25, 1960, was a nice day when, at the age of five, I hobbled into the Music Room of Malacañang, the presidential palace, my arms and legs propped up with crutches and braces. To highlight the plight of an estimated 1.6-million handicapped persons in the Philippines, the government was issuing commemorative postage stamps called “Easter Seals.” I was chosen to present the first “Easter Seals” to the First Lady, Leonila Garcia, the wife of President Carlos P. Garcia.
One would think that the pain and hardship of multiple surgical operations, plus post-polio treatment, would have traumatized my childhood years. Surprisingly, it was not physical pain that affected me the most. Rather, it was the abnormal social life of a person with a marked disability that had a greater impact. When I was in the fifth grade, at age 11, I wrote a short speech for a conference of orthopedic specialists. I said:
Last year, I had my fourth operation and my schooling had to be stopped. My doctor says that next year, I shall have my fifth operation. I am getting pretty tired of operations. They are painful and I always cry. . . . In school, I find it hard to go up and down the stairs. While my classmates have fun at games, I sit around and watch from my desk. How I wish I were like them. . . . When I walk, some people stop and stare. Unkind children tease and make fun of me. I don’t mind too much now. My parents love me and I am happy. I am thankful that I’m alive. But there is nothing like having two good legs.
I was a boy with an inferiority complex, plagued with self-doubt. Will I get passing grades? Will I be truly accepted by my classmates? Will I ever date a girl?
My parents sacrificed a lot for their children. In my case, Dad and Mom took on the heavy burden of ensuring that I got the needed therapy, surgery, and care. Besides attending to my medical and material needs, Mom did her best to care for my emotional needs. When she saw me with friends or classmates, she would maintain a comfortable distance, knowing that I was trying to assert a degree of independence. When it was time to abandon shorts for long pants, she sewed special trousers for me. The fashion then was tight-fitting, but because I wore metal leg braces attached to special shoes, I had great difficulty putting on and removing my pants. My mother’s solution was to sew hidden zippers on the insides of both side lengths of the pants. Those pants succeeded in hiding my braces and gave me a semblance of being just like the other boys.