‘What I'm fighting for today is an extension of what I fought for before’
SHE CROUCHED in the foxhole that she and loyal Berto had dug with their bare hands, breathing heavily as she tried to fit her eight-month pregnant body sideways into its shallow hold. Above the roar of gunfire, she could hear the invading soldiers shout out the name that had come to be identified with her.
At near sundown, Berto, a former soldier from Mindanao who had defected to the New People's Army (NPA) and sort of acted as her security, crept up to her from his own foxhole. "We have to leave." She nodded. She knew it was only a matter of time before the soldiers discovered them. Berto said, "I'll cover you as you make your way up the hill." He had just fired two shots when a barrage of mortar fire rained down on them. Before her eyes, she saw her trusted aide dissolve into a mass of blood.
It was over in a matter of seconds. As the jubilant soldiers led her down the hill, some CAFGU (Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Unit) members began grabbing at her long hair and snipping off some strands. They had captured the famed Kumander Liway and every lock was worthy of an amulet.
Today the long tresses are gone. Yet the memories remain, even if Ma. Cecilia Flores Oebanda, 46, has come a long way since that fateful day in September 1982, when the military overran her guerrilla camp in an eight-hour gunbattle in the mountainous interior of Hinobaan, part of the chain of six towns in Negros Occidental called CHICKS, where poverty and insurgency had long fed on each other.
At her air-conditioned office, a long shelf displays a collection of plaques and pictures that portray a new life. Occupying pride of place is a big frame that reads "Anti-Slavery Award, 2005." Last November 29, Oebanda received the award from Anti-Slavery International in London for the pioneering work of the Visayan Forum among the Philippines' modern-day slaves — the domestic helpers who are forced to work in Filipino households for little or no pay and are constantly at the mercy of their employers.
Oebanda is the president, executive director, and moving spirit behind the Visayan Forum. Set up in 1990 by former political prisoners and activists from the Visayas, the NGO evolved from discussing the plight of the four million Visayans in Metro Manila to focusing on internal migrants from the Visayan region and elsewhere, many of whom are female and employed as maids.
Instead of organizing poor peasants and indigenous tribes that once filled up her days, Oebanda now devotes her time and energy to making visible a sector whose lowly, scattered, and hidden plight has kept them from the public eye. She is especially proud of the formation in 1995 of Sumapi, the first domestic workers' association in the Philippines.
The rise of NGOs, fuelled largely by activists who were in the anti-Marcos movement, is one of the major developments in the post-EDSA era. Like other activists formerly in the underground who have directed their energies to NGOs, Oebanda sees this route as a valid way of working for social reforms.
"I see my work as an instrument of social transformation," she says. "I think protecting the domestic workers, teaching them their rights, providing them empowerment in terms of recognizing their worth in society through their economic contributions, somehow, it's part of the social transformation we fight for today to achieve in our country, but at another level, another approach. What I'm fighting for today, I see as an extension of what I fought for before."
Linkback:
https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=54704.0