THEY don’t necessarily go together, although today’s political scene certainly has them looking like a tightly intertwined tandem. But it’s actually energy and all sorts of toxic substances that i Report will be tackling for the rest of September and the whole month of October. So while many people keeping track of the latest political scandal these days could end up seeing red, we will be thinking green — at least much of the time, anyway.
by Isa Lorenzo
THEY COME with or without wings, ultra-thin or maxi, regular, extra long, or g-string. One can also have them unscented, but some brands tout scents like lavender and baby powder. There are sanitary napkins with green tea, while others boast of additives such as aloe vera and vitamin E. Recently, a Chinese company launched a sanitary pad that it says contains anions, which purportedly decrease bacteria and even gradually eliminate dysmenorrhea.
by Cheryl Chan
VANCOUVER — For him, she is his little girl, his princess, the apple of his eye. For her, he is the most important man in her life, a disciplinarian, tough but soft
Father and daughter relationships are difficult to characterize. For every father who deserves the “best dad in the world” award, there is a deadbeat, absent, or abusive father.
by Jaileen F. Jimeno
MORE BAD news: the workplace is not the only area where the babied male is not doing so well. Marriage and parenting consultant Dr. Maribel Sison-Dionisio says the preferential treatment boys receive at home while they are growing up is one major cause of marriage breakdowns. She says that since many boys were not raised with a balance between play and discipline, the lack of discipline is brought into their relationships as adults. “In marriages, many men are found to be irresponsible,” she says, adding that the tendency to go easy on boys is now “backfiring.”
by Jaileen F. Jimeno
AS A young girl, Mercy Abad would be woken up every day before dawn, primarily because she had a long list of chores to go through. But decades later, what she remembers in particular is that while she and her two younger sisters were busy doing their assigned tasks, their brothers remained snug in bed, fast asleep. And when the boys woke up, “it was my job to fix their beds,” recalls Abad, adding that in most homes then, boys and men were “waited on hand and foot.”
by Solita C. Monsod
WE’VE COME a long way, baby — or have we?
Consider: There is still no country in the world where women have the same range of choices that their male counterparts do, the same “capability to do and to be,” as Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen puts it. Focusing on opportunities rather than capabilities, neither is there any country in the world where women share economic and political power equally with men.
by Jaileen F. Jimeno
BENJAMIN DE Leon, who once headed the Commission on Population (Popcom) in the 1970s and is now president of the Forum for Family Planning and Development, points to the irony of the country’s population policy going haywire during the term of two female presidents: Corazon Aquino and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
by Jaileen F. Jimeno
DATU PAGLAS, MAGUINDANAO — Prayers echo from the minaret of a mosque through a vast banana plantation. Owned by a company called La Frutera, the 1,000-hectare land used to be a “killing field.” At the time, men in the area wound up either as members of secessionist groups or in the middle of a “rido” or clan war.
by Jaileen F. Jimeno
UBAY, BOHOL — Antonia Quirino sits with a dazed look on top of the stairs of her bamboo house amid a large swath of cornfield. She speaks laconically, as if every word is a labor. Filth surrounds her; debris of past meals remain on the dirty kitchen and table, the clotheslines display tiny clothes too grimy and stained to be considered ready for wear. Nearby, a few of her children sleep the day away.
by Fides Lim
FRAIL BUT feisty still at 95, the diminutive doctora is proof positive of her own prescription for longevity: “Leave the dining table a little less full, a little hungry, and you will live longer.”
The black bouffant wig nods on her tiny, spare frame as she ticks off a simple diet mostly of fish and vegetables with little rice, plus a fondness for cheese. Yet there is more to this admittedly “lazy eater” who eats, she says, “because it’s there.”
Fe del Mundo, doyenne of Filipino doctors, is a woman of many firsts, whose many accomplishments have changed the lives of millions of people.
