Chinese New Year

To be fair, if I think Valentine’s Day is a materialistic celebration of love, Chinese New Year is about gluttony for food. I don’t want to sound like a killjoy because I do celebrate both like everyone else. 

But as a columnist, I read into meanings for my readers. It is curious how celebrations become so distant from its origins. According to tales and legends, the beginning of Chinese New Year is celebrated with the fight “against a mythical beast called the “Year.” The “Year” looks like an ox with a lion head and inhabits the sea. At the night of New Year’s Eve, the “Year” will come out to harm people, animals, and properties. How apt. Personally, adding another year to my age is an enemy I must fight with diet and exercise but to no avail. Then there is an even more difficult fight against wrinkles. No win even if you read Sun Tzu.

While we will be celebrating with love and food, there will be millions of our fellowmen who will not even have food to eat or a pillow to sleep on. 

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My daughter Veronica has added another feather to her cap. Is she still in Al-Jazeera or CNN or BBC? She had a glamorous career as the first Filipino to break into international broadcasting. But she has moved on and if you ask me, to something more substantial as a legacy. She flies around the world helping victims of trouble spots.

Today she is concerned with the Rohingya refugees who have been deprived of home, family and nationality. Food is needed but losing identity can be more painful and Veronica experienced it first-hand. 

She will coordinate worldwide publicity for them. Hundreds of them are being killed as if it were possible – to eliminate a race and a people.

She has recently traveled to Bangladesh to make arrangements for the job she readily took up. No glamor, no great pay or publicity. She just says,  “I am due back in Bangladesh on 24 February to assist in a high-level delegation of the Nobel Women’s Initiative. Three Nobel Laureates will be coming to visit the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar and will also meet Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina between 24 February and 2 March. The visit is being facilitated by the NGO Naripokkho.” 

What kind of work is she going to? If you are an ardent follower of Facebook and you are not limited by your interest in politics, Philippines or international, this is the story of her mission.

“More than 680,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh for safety. We continue to provide life-saving assistance to vulnerable families but our funding gaps remain wide.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees risk dangerous journeys to reach safety. The appeal asks for donations that will provide emergency shelter and life saving assistance to Rohingya families which have now become her family, as she moves back and forth anywhere in the world for help.

The letter came from Ottawa. My name is Ketty Nivyabandi and I work with Nobel Women’s Initiative, an organization founded by six female Nobel Peace Laureates to support and amplify the voices of women grassroots activists around the globe. 

Three of our Nobel Laureates – Shirin Ebadi, Mairead Maguire and Tawakkol Karman – are currently planning a high-level delegation to Bangladesh next month (Feb. 24-March 2) to meet and hear directly from Rohingya refugees – specifically, displaced women and girls. Through the visit, the laureates intend to bring the voices and needs of displaced Rohingya refugees to the international community, advocate for an appropriate response, and maintain international momentum on the crisis.

I am contacting you because we are looking for a media consultant on the ground to help us ensure the delegation has the maximum media impact possible, both with Bangladesh media and the international press covering the region. We understand you worked in the area recently, and given your remarkable profile and experience, wanted to see if you might be interested and available. Most of the consultancy would entail coordinating our media engagement (with both local and international press) and organizing a press conference which the laureates usually hold at the end of the delegation. We hope that the presence of the laureates will help re-center the Rohingya crisis in international news, particularly at this crucial time when repatriation looms. The delegation dates would be February 24 to March 2, with a two-day visit to the refugee camps close to Cox’s Bazar.

Miscellany:

JDV, ever the conciliator, spoke in Iran recently. He the founder of ICAPP, the International Conference of Asian Political Parties, will talk about the Silk Road here in the historic city of Tehran.

He thanked the Motalefeh Party, with the support of the Iranian Government, for sending invitations to 100 principal political parties in 39 countries in the Asian region which have keen interest and concerns on the Silk Road, as well as political parties and organizations from Latin America, Africa, and Europe – the Permanent Conference of Political Parties in Latin America and the Caribbean (COPPPAL), the Council of African Political Parties (CAPP), the European People’s Party (EPP), the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) among them.

Persia: One of the greatest and oldest civilizations in the world. We are happy to convene here in this storied land, which is one of the oldest civilizations in the world.

Persia, as Iran was known before 1935, was one of the greatest empires of the ancient world, dating back around 7,000 B.C. or more than 5,000 years ago.

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I will end this column with what I consider an important matter to the country – the Senate hearing of Christopher Go, assistant to President Duterte about the purchase of the frigates during the Aquino government.

I am glad Bong will defend himself before a public who already know of him. He is called the photo bomber because he always appears behind or in front of the president. It is to protect the President from harm if anyone attempts to hurt the best President we ever had. We are with you Bong. 

I will be there on Monday and so will many others. We will see a stark contrast between a person who is a good man and politicians/senators so bereft of the good for the country except what is in their vested interest.