In the heart of Central Luzon

We were back in Central Luzon recently for the sixth edition of Taboan: The Philippine Writers Festival. I say “back” because we held this same event just two years ago in Clark, Pampanga, and now we were meeting in Subic and closing out in Clark. Taboan — the Visayan word for “marketplace” — brings together writers from all over the archipelago every February in celebration of National Arts month, under the auspices of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), and it had been scheduled to be held in Zamboanga this year, but a recent outbreak of violence in that city urged a change of venue.

Predictably, this year’s festival was hardly festive, given the series of crippling calamities that the country went through last year. Indeed, “disaster” was very much on the writers’ minds, and the conference program reflected this, with medical anthropologist and incoming UP Diliman Chancellor Mike Tan delivering the keynote on “Winds and Waves, Wars and Words” and National Artists Virgilio Almario and Bienvenido Lumbera weighing in on “Panitikan sa Panahon ng Delubyo: The Literature of Disaster.” Crisis and conflict continued to pervade the plenary the next day with the poet-therapist Vim Nadera and poet-priest Fr. Albert Alejo dealing with writing and personal loss, leaving hardly a dry eye in the room.

But the writers weren’t merely commiserating with each other. Mike Tan provoked a range of responses when he decried the overvaluation of “resiliency” to describe the seemingly infinite capacity of Filipinos for pain and punishment. There was, Mike warned, such a thing as “poverty porn” that wallowed and even profited from the gratuitous depiction of suffering and privation, thereby commodifying emotions such as fear, envy, and disgust.

But thankfully not everything about Taboan 2014 was so ponderous and taxing, and the restful environs of Subic and Clark proved once again why these places deserve their transformation from trouble-ridden outposts of American military might in the Pacific to prime investment and vacation spots, a favorite of Pinoy weekenders. I was glad to see that Subic was moving along nicely, with an impressive new mall rising along its main avenue and a popular seafood restaurant sprucing up its beachfront, obviously in anticipation of better business.

We moved to Clark for the last day of the festival, and while I also noted much new construction in the former base-turned-freeport, I would soon learn that not all was well in this the beating heart of Central Luzon. And that’s what I’d like to devote the rest of this column to, because while I don’t come from the region and am as casual a visitor to the place as anyone else, I feel invested as a Filipino in the growth of the Clark-Subic corridor, the vastness of whose green fields and blue skies always offers a relief from Manila’s infernal congestion.

I had breakfast at the smart new Widus Hotel in Clark with Taboan’s festival director, UP San Fernando professor Dr. Juliet Mallari, who also happens to be one of Pampanga’s most fervent rah-rah girls and an informal adviser to Pampanga congressman and PBA coach Roseller “Yeng” Guiao. We were talking about the nearby Clark International Airport, which I told Juliet I had been happy to use twice, on flights to Davao and Kuala Lumpur; flying out of roomy Clark, I said, was a painless experience compared to slogging through the traffic on C-5 or EDSA just to get to the airport in Manila, especially now that a shuttle bus service connects Clark’s airport to major malls in Quezon City.

I would learn from Juliet that the vision was basically sound and bright: a third new terminal and a new runway were being planned for Clark so that it could take the wide-bodied Boeing 747-8 and Airbus A380, and the airport would be connected to Manila by a high-speed train.

But these plans have stalled, with the funds needed nowhere in sight, and the Aquino administration reportedly failing or refusing to commit itself to Clark’s full development. Juliet also brought me up to speed on more immediate problems within the Clark Freeport Zone, such as the lack of an adequate and reliable power supply and the lack of transportation within the airport and freeport, especially after 5.

In December last year, a series of roundtable discussions was held involving representatives from business, the government, education, and the public at large, focused on the prospects and problems faced by Clark International Airport. This January, about 300 people met again at the Clark Stakeholders’ Summit to review these issues and press for the necessary reforms.

I later asked Dr. Mallari for a copy of that summit’s report, and read from it that “We are unhappy about the shortcomings facing the development of tourism and business in the wake of Clark’s limited operations. We know that if some of these can be resolved, the development of Region III in particular and the economic welfare of the country in general would proceed at a much faster rate. What businesses want is an upgrade in the status of Clark. A word from the country’ Chief Executive is all that is needed to make things fall into place.”

That presidential commitment is reportedly all that’s needed for major investors like Manny Pangilinan to go into public-private sector joint project for the Clark Airport Express Railway. That, plus the release of P7.2 billion that the DOTC committed to the building of the new budget terminal.

Yeng Guiao — better known to basketball fans as the Rain or Shine coach — likens Clark “to a basketball player who has very limited playing time, who is warming the bench but is ready to play.” That player, he says “has been practicing daily, has developed the physique and stamina required to play, and has greatly improved his skills. He is of course eager to contribute to the team’s success. All he needs now is the chance to prove his worth and the chance to shine. I hope that chance is given to Clark.”

Well said, Mr. Congressman-Coach. It occurred to me that we had been talking about disaster all week, and here was a place that had risen bravely out of Pinatubo’s ashen swath. What a pity it would be if human neglect and politics were to achieve what an exploding volcano could not.

I’d like to thank our local hosts in Taboan as well as the friends we made and met from the region, including teacher and environmentalist Cecile Yumul who emceed the Taboan plenary sessions, and artist Josie Dizon Henson, who gave me copies of her books, including a biography of her father, the gifted painter Vicente Alvarez, about whom I’ll write more one of these days.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com. and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.