On Jan. 27, 2025, the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day the United Nations General Assembly set aside to remember the victims of the Holocaust. The U.N. chose that date because it marked the day in 1945 when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau from the clutches of the Nazi. Auschwitz-Birkenau, located in Poland, was the largest complex of concentration camps Nazi Germany set up to carry out what it called the “Final Solution” of exterminating Europe’s Jews. I had a chance to visit Auschwitz in 2023, and I am sharing some thoughts and photographs from that trip.
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I was headed for Berlin in October 2023 to take part in the World Health Summit, and when I got there, I told the German friend who invited me that I was visiting Krakow after the event.
“Krakow?” she asked. She immediately knew what my ultimate destination would be. “Are you going to Auschwitz?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “It’s not often I get the chance to come to Europe, and I didn’t want to just breeze in and out of Germany.”
I had hoped to make full use of the trip and visit one other country, preferably some place meaningful, and when I was looking at the map, I contemplated either Prague or Poland. Eventually, I decided on Auschwitz via Krakow, because I wanted to see first-hand what the Holocaust was about.
The Eraserheads held a well-attended reunion concert Dec. 22, bringing to mind my own memories of the band and their songs. More specifically, one song.
I know of the Eraserheads and listen to their music because my children do, and not because I’m a fan. Let’s just say I’m a listener whose taste in music could be eclectic. But there’s this one particular song of theirs that’s sort of seared into my memory.
I was producing a newscast sometime in the mid 1990s. It was the height of the Eraserheads popularity. Suddenly we received a story from the Senate that Senator Vicente (Tito) Sotto wanted one of the group’s songs, Alapaap (Cloud), banned. We’re not talking here of digital storage devices or computing services which wouldn’t appear till decades later but of those white things floating above us in the atmosphere.
It’s the season for Christmas parties, reunions and get-togethers and also a season for hyperacidity due to the ingestion of caffeine, wines and spirits. Hyperacidity also due to stress, as we struggle to fulfil various commitments before yearend.
Hyperacidity sufferers like me are glad there’s Tums, an antacid med, two bottles of which I recently received from a loved one. How I wish I had discovered it years ago, during the countless attacks I’ve had. Actually, it’s almost predictable and inevitable. After days of (over) drinking coffee or soda, I’d be sure to get hyperacidity spasms. And then I’d stay away from these liquids and once the coast seems clear, I’d fall back into the habit and then get spasms again.
I’m taking this opportunity to post a story about a hyperacidity attack I had sometime in October 2019. I wrote down what I remembered and filed it away in my computer. I’m publishing those notes here.
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The stress and tensions of the past weeks, months, and maybe even years seemed to finally choose to surface in the form of excruciating stomach spasms that left me tossing and turning while stifling my screams and moans, in mid-air.
I just returned from a trip to Bali, my second this year, and my third in all. To be honest, it felt like an obligation, something I was forced into because my officemates wanted to travel and needed me to meet the minimum number of persons required for a promo price (super low airfare + accommodation + tour) offered by the travel agency.
Although they were planning the trip with much excitement, to me it felt like yet another expense that I could have skipped. Also, Bali again. They could have chosen another destination, but I let them decide since we didn’t have an office R & R this year, and Bali was the choice. And as it turned out, one of them had never left the country before and this was her chance.
In the interest of peace and harmony, I agreed. But what really changed my mind and mindset was a TED Talk by Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith I listened to just days before we left, in which she enumerates the different kinds of rest exhausted people need to be able to recharge and restore their energies.
Thanks to the talk, my view of that trip changed from one of being an expected hassle to one that would genuinely restore my depleted energies. True enough, the trip provided creative rest, connecting me with art and nature, and allowing me to behold places with childlike wonder and awe. And yes, despite it being my third visit to Bali, there was a lot more to see, especially since the first two visits were mostly work-related. This third one was devoted solely to sightseeing. We watched the traditional Balinese dances, visited temples, viewed Balinese architecture and sculpture, and sampled the cuisine.
It’s the Christmas season and time to talk about gifts.
I admire people who have their recipient lists and gifts ready as early as July. I’m not one of them, obviously. For many Christmases, my job and the pressures of raising a family denied me the luxury of surplus time and income needed to do advanced shopping. But I know friends who have perfected the practice. Technology and smartphones automated it, with apps now letting you create the list, keep track of past gifts given, note what your recipients like and how much of your budget you’re likely to burn.
I’m thinking about this, because every year, the question has been what meaningful gift to give family and friends, and for Christmas 2021, someone provided an answer: the gift of self in the form of a book. It was an anthology of newspaper columns written by someone I once knew and worked with. He self-published and asked friends if they wanted a copy. I raised a virtual hand.
B and I went to Starbucks because I needed a change of setting so I can write and meet deadlines. In the big table where I sat, there was a man talking to his computer, apparently in a zoom meeting, so noisy I could not hear myself think. So we decided to transfer to another table.
The closest empty table was still full of the dirty cups and saucers of the previous occupants, it was overflowing! The Starbucks guy started clearing the table. While trying to set my bag down, I accidentally tapped one of the glasses which was half filled with something like frapuccino and it fell, the contents spilled, and drops of frapuccino landed on my legs.
So I was muttering to myself what a bad, unpleasant experience this was. The Starbucks guy gave me tissues but i already cleaned my legs with wipes. We sat instead in the next table and i proceeded to work.
Who would have thought that in the year 2022 A.C (after Covid or more precisely, after Covid vaccine), I would join the big global convulsion of people breaking free from the chains of indoor-boundedness, rushing out everywhere in what has been called revenge travel?
Who would have thought that I would be flying to three continents in a span of four months? Sure, the first one being work-related was more or less a foregone conclusion. The next one was a planned vacation that teetered between being a go and no-go. And the last was a surprise invitation that would allow me to combine work and play. But because of Covid, and the possibility of surges in the places of origin and destination and the consequent health restrictions, I treated all of these trips like hazy visions that might or might not be there, like images in the horizon on an overcast day. All of a sudden the images were high-definition clear and upon me, and now, months later, already behind me.
I wrote this biography of the veteran broadcaster Tina Monzon Palma after she was selected to receive the prestigious Gawad Plaridel Award given to an exemplary media practitioner. This piece was published in the souvenir program for the event produced by the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication, and later in the academic publication, the Plaridel Journal. The piece leads off with events that happened exactly 32 years ago today, Dec 1, 1989.In the photo are Tina Monzon Palma with UP executives on the stage as she receives the UP Gawad Plaridel. Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News
It was the ringing of the telephone that awakened me at around 1:00 a.m. of Friday, Dec. 1, 1989. My boss, Tina Monzon Palma, was calling.
“Come to work. There’s a coup,” she said and hung up. No hello, no goodbye, no further instructions. I was then a television reporter for GMA-7 and I did as I was told, no questions asked.
Minutes later, I was at the GMA-7 newsroom which was then just a bungalow in the network’s compound on EDSA in Quezon City. A small group had gathered, composed mostly of those who Tina could reach by landline, since mobile phones did not yet exist and some of the staff’s walkie-talkie units were turned off and being charged for the night.
She gave senior reporter Jimmy Gil and myself keys to the news vehicles and asked us to drive them out of the compound to safety, in case the station was attacked. And then we were back at the newsroom, listening to her telling us how we were going to cover the story.
The story was the attempt by rebel solders to seize power in December 1989, the bloodiest challenge to the leadership of Corazon Aquino, the country’s first female president. That coup tested Tina’s capabilities as well. TMP, as she was addressed, was then 39 years old and senior vice president of GMA-7 News, the first female to hold that position and at that time the only woman at the helm of a national TV news division in the Philippines.
Tina’s responsibility was to help secure the broadcast facilities of GMA-7 against a possible attack by rebel soldiers. But she also wanted to make sure the network stayed on the air to broadcast stories about the coup, to the consternation of Malacañang and military officials who chastised her for giving rebel soldiers precious airtime.
Looking back to those days, she said she felt the public deserved to know who the government’s enemy was, although government itself disagreed and its officials kept pestering her to cease broadcast. Tina remembers having the audacity to tell them, “You do your job, and I will do my job.”
“I was reckless and fearless,” she told a group of University of the Philippines professors in June 2017, “not because I was courageous or wanted to make a name for myself, but because nobody could really affect the way you do your job.”
It didn’t seem like it at that time but Tina Monzon Palma was making television history. She proved that a woman could lead a TV news department competently through the most difficult times and that she could engage the powers that be in a battle of wills over what could and could not be broadcast. She eventually backed down as national security concerns prevailed, but she was paving the way for more women to assert themselves in leadership roles in broadcast news in the years to come.
For three days this week, I felt like a traveler again, despite having journeyed no farther than 12 kilometers from my home to a place so achingly familiar to me and some family members.
The purpose of the trip was a face-to-face live-in workshop of the kind that had been part and parcel of my work pre-pandemic. After being cooped up at home for almost two years, seeing no one other than mostly relatives, and learning to regard physical contact with others as unhealthy, taking part in a once-normal workshop seemed like a novelty, a culture surprise (not shock). And because it meant checking into a hotel for two nights, I had to pack my bags and take on the role of traveler.
Long before external hard drives, digital cameras and smartphones, there was the Onoffree album.
Those of us of a certain age, time, and place might remember it– the holder of memorable photographs developed from precious film, pictures neatly arranged on a page covered with plastic and bound together in thick cover. Onoffree albums were conversation pieces brought out when friends and relatives visited.
I mention Onoffree Albums as a reminder of a time before digital when people took photographs very thoughtfully. There were after all only 12 or 24 shots in a roll of film (I believe the 36 shots came later). Subjects were well chosen; they posed and portrayed happy scenes.
On the road 