Dare You to Fly
abueno@theguidon.com
Whenever I write stories, I am always fascinated by the persons I write about. Just one Sunday this month, my good friend and I went on a trip to Payatas to make a video about the community’s women who are involved with Rags2Riches (R2R). R2R is a social entrepreneurship venture where the women weave rags to be made into world-class bags, wallets, and the like.
The women were more than willing to be recorded for our video. They were enthusiastic to share how before, they earned only P1 for every rag. Now they earn P17 per rag. As one woman told us, the profit they now earn contributes so much to their daily expenses.
Not all of Payatas’ women are with R2R, however. As we went around the community, a more sizeable number of women were stuck at home, either taking care of their children or simply doing something else.
We interviewed these women, too, and asked why they are not involved. Some said they were too busy taking care of children; some said they weren’t able to join because of some reason or another.
More than the act of writing a story or thinking about a potential story, hearing the stories of the people behind the stories is most important. These people tell deeper, more compelling, and more complicated stories than what we read on the paper or see in television. It may even be that the media have only scratched the surface of these people’s stories, and compromised their representation in society.
One of the most crucial lessons I’ve learned in class is the idea of the ‘Other’—more specifically, and in my case, the Other in the media. Howie Severino, in a lecture in the Ateneo in 2007, said the Other refers to the marginalized. It can also refer to any group who is not given enough or proper space and representation in the media.
I have struggled with the Other as a student journalist, and more so, as a person. There are many instances when one can easily overlook the Other: in editing articles for the sake of it, in not balancing sources, in failing to engage your audience. For this, I heavily apologize.
There are other ways one can take the Other for granted: in choosing to ignore calls for participation in national issues, in telling ourselves, “I’m not affected, anyway!” and in disregarding all we’ve learned here, in school, about being man-for-Others.
We ignore, deny, and let the Other remain another other in our daily lives, thus perpetuating this vicious cycle of compassion fatigue, apathy, and sense of hopelessness whenever faced with those marginalized—whether personally or through the media. I would be a hypocrite, and would be wasting your time reading, if I did not say I am one such person who ignores, denies, and lets the Other remain another.
Yet there comes a point when the Other is thrust into your face, when you can no longer deny it, when it explodes into your consciousness. During that visit to Payatas, where the bad smell sinks into your clothes and then becomes indistinguishable from other smells, the women showed me that they were not an-Other. And the same goes for the farmers, the human rights victims, the street children in Katipunan, and many others we notice, but do not truly see.
It’s always a struggle whenever the Other calls us to go out of ourselves, to witness them as they are, to be engaged with what they are. It is a difficult struggle—but one always worth taking.
