Something like this must have happened when I came across the plight of one Dionisio Ulep of Camiling, Tarlac, who’s suffering from end-stage renal disease. The 42-year-old former driver for a security agency has been in and out of the National Kidney Institute for two years now. He’s supposed to have dialysis twice a week, but in practice has had his blood cleaned only when he could afford it; the dialysis and the medicines cost a staggering P45,000 a month. He should have a fighting chance with a kidney transplant, but that’ll cost him a near-impossible P360,000. Dionisio’s wife Florita worked as a DH in Hong Kong but had to come home to take care of her husband, and whatever she saved ran out a long time ago. They’ve already approached and received some help from the government, which has a fixed amount to give people in Dionisio’s straits – after which you go back to the end of a long line.
I took an interest in Mr. Ulep’s case because, first, I have a soft spot for people whose kids want to go to school, but can’t afford to; Dionisio’s three children (18, 14, and 12) have had to stop schooling. To put it bluntly, this family may simply be too poor to save their father – and dialysis, whether for rich or poor, seems inevitably a downhill slide. But it’s doubly tragic when everyone else’s life gets ravaged or held hostage by poverty and disease (and in this country, poverty can be a terminal disease). Education was the only way up and out for these children (as it was for me, thus the sympathy).
Second, this case reads like one of those terrible but engrossing domestic dramas that just get worse and more complicated by the week. Dionisio has five siblings, any one of whom could conceivably donate the kidney he needs. But they’re just as poor as he is, and they’re understandably wary of being sidelined for too long during recuperation; even more basic than that, they can’t even afford to get their tissue typed, which reportedly costs a crushing P24,000.
Dionisio Ulep, in other words, needs money and compassion beyond anything he ever imagined he would require simply to keep breathing, let alone support a family. If you can help, please make a direct deposit to the account of Florita Ulep, BPI Baclaran, Account No. 0375-1338-22 (which, last time she looked, had nothing but the minimum maintaining balance), or call their neighbor Ligaya Fajardo at 942-7730. We’re taking Florita in as a live-out housekeeper, so you can e-mail me as well if there’s anything you can do for them.
It’s called the "blog" – I know, it’s an ugly word, short for "Web log," the Web being the World Wide Web, or that corner of the Internet where people can stake out their private spaces and then go public with the press of a "Return" key.
I came across this phenomenon the roundabout way – and here’s to disprove any suggestions of selflessness that my previous paragraphs may have created – during one of my periodic trawlings of the Web in search of anything and everything related to, you guessed right, "Butch Dalisay." (Don’t you ever get that urge to see what others out there are saying about you? It’s terrible, but the Web and search engines like Google make it hard to resist. And once you get started, you keep going back.) Some links my search produced led to blogs, which turned out to be rather copious on-line journals maintained by people with long waking hours and sturdy digits – and, let’s not forget, a healthy dose of shamelessness, which is what you need if you’re resolved to plaster your angst all over the Internet. Some literary talent helps, not to mention something more interesting to say than the fact that you stubbed your toe or popped your zit. Here’s a typical entry from the blog of Dumaguete-based Ian Casocot, who won second prize for the short story in English in last year’s Palancas:
Thursday, June 06, 2002
Going Places
LARENA, SIQUIJOR. Looking back, one finds time – and summer – to have been just too fast to consider deeply. Now it is June. Summer, I remember, had suddenly descended on Dumaguete without invitation or warning. Just an everywhereness of heat – "humidity," someone corrects me – which would follow anyone into even the most promising of air-conditioned places. So, in the past few months, we traveled to "escape" the sun, and the clinging familiarity of Dumaguete. We left for the vacationing strangers their awe of the Boulevard, the sweeping green of the acacia trees, and the quaintness of our streets and shopping places. There were other places to go, people of art to be with – and across the narrow sea, there was Siquijor, always, beckoning with a summer appeal bordering almost on witchcraft.
It was somewhere in the middle of March, Holy Friday. The morning Rico Yan died. We do not think much of the dead heartthrob, dismissing the news first as tired gossip – a set-up for the upcoming April Fool’s Day. Yet there it was, ABS-CBN’s Christine Banluta – who was on the trip with us, renting a cottage with us – on the phone with Sharon Cuneta, getting the news bit by bit. "Too bad," we all said, not without a bit of sadness, but there was too much sky in front of us to bear bad news with proper grief.
According to Jeremy Wagstaff, writing for the Far Eastern Economic Review, "Weblogs are where the real action is. They are the creation of individuals, usually musings on national, local or personal events, links to interesting articles, a few lines of comment or discussion collected and presented by one person. Weblogs are a milestone in the short history of the Internet.
"They first appeared in 1997, according to Rebecca Blood in her excellent history of the Weblog form’s development. By early 1999 it was shortened to ‘blog.’ Blogs took off with the advent of Web-based programs to set up and maintain sites without fiddling around with lots of formatting. The most popular of these is Blogger which maintains 350,000 blogs, according to Evan Williams, chief executive of Blogger and something of a legend in the blogging community…. Of those 350,000 blogs, 20 percent were published in the last month. Williams says new users are signing up at an average of 1,300 a day."
That’s a lot of people looking to share, preserve, and perhaps perpetuate their lives in digital ink. Will the blog replace the dog-eared diary? Perhaps not, according to another blogger who turned out to be a grandmother:
A couple that works for a university somewhere in the U.S. has hired a group of young children, around 8 - 12 years old, to choose 10,000 children’s books to convert to on-line. The kids seemed more excited about getting out of school than the goal of the project, and I’m not sure they’re even aware of the implications of the project. The story switched to the couple’s home one evening. Their young daughter asked her father to read her to sleep. Dad trotted off to find his laptop, and he and his daughter snuggled under the covers to "read" a story. When he’d finished the story, his daughter asked him to read another, and he began to search his laptop. His daughter said, "No, Daddy, I want a real book." I suppose that someday children won’t even know what a real book is, but I’m awfully glad my two-year-old grandson does. He loves his pop-up pictures, and he loves turning the pages. I wouldn’t trade his Crayola scribbles on those pages for anything. I realize there are people "out there" who can imagine all kinds of clever technical devices to entertain children, and I hope there’s enough batteries to keep them all running. As for the evening that I crawl into my grandson’s bed with a laptop. Not in my lifetime.
We’re looking for stories dealing with romantic love that have, of course, to be well written, but which also have a great impact – in other words, they should take our breath away, and make us wish that we had written them. They may challenge our notions of "love," they may involve other than traditional man-woman relationships, they may not have happy endings (I’m hoping that at least a few will), but they will go beyond lust and desire to engage the heart and the mind.
You can give me your own shortlists if you like (see my e-mail address below) as far as the older stories are concerned, and you can send Sarge your unpublished stories at logika@info.com.ph. We’re looking at a publication date some time mid-year, so we probably will take suggestions and submissions only until mid-February (hey, that’s Valentine’s Day!). This book – for which Krip Yuson and Jimmy Abad are editing a parallel collection of Filipino love poems – will form part of the low-priced Jubilee Student Edition series of the UP Press, which aims to bring the best of Philippine literature within the reach of ordinary students and teachers.