Friday, Christmas Day, early riser, about 4:00 in the morning. Last night's "Noche Buena" celebration with a meal consisting of the typical Filipino food: of lechon (roasted pig, but only head with an apple at the mouth), brown rice, pancit canton, pinapaitan, maja blanca, rice cake, dinardaraan, iced tea, etc. The boys finished off half-consumed bottles of lady's drink like Margarita, moscato, left from a previous celebration.
We were only six partaking off the huge meal: Dianne, the Julian boys--Jeric, Junjun- Whitney, the Vietnamese girl friend of JJ, Estelita and Peter, that's me. Anib worked in the night shift in a hospital in Hemet. Filipino-Vietnamese Leo, a friend of the Julian boys, arrived half an hour later.
We put on red-white Christmas caps and a Nikon timer camera took our pictures.
We left then in the sala, these young kids who have a lot of life before them. A horror feature movie was playing on the wide television screen close to the wall.
They were animated as we went upstairs to sleep.
It will be a long night for them.
****
The rich of the brown Philippine earth did not amass their mind-boggling wealth through hard work. They did not inherit their lands, their mansions, their flashy cars and other amenities that differentiate them from the majority poor people, some of who eat once or twice a day. They are political businessmen, an easy job by just dipping their fingers on the people's cookie jar.
Some filch from international donations to victims of disastrous typhoons like Yolanda that flattened as it did, with enormous destruction and death, the Visayan provinces of Samar and Leyte and Negros including Palawan.
(The nerve of Dinky Soliman who allowed sacks of donated rice to rote in some warehouses and buried them.)
What do they know about the integrity of the soul, these denizens that inhabit Christian Philippines?
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