Rebels of Mindanao Read Online Free PDF Page A

Philippine citizen working in her department, and the youngest. Maybe they just wanted to check her out, to see how she performed.
    Major Hayes had given her the iPod for her twenty-ninth birthday present last month, and Mrs. Hayes let her download some of her CD’s. They told her she could make good use of it on her Singapore trip. She could listen to the latest hip-hop tunes while she lounged around the hotel pool, they said, as if she would have any time for that.
    The flight reached cruising altitude and she rearranged the small foam rubber airline pillow under her head and sat back up straight in her economy seat, trying to get comfortable for the long flight.
    As her mind drifted, she remembered when she was just eighteen and traveled overseas for the first time, coming to the city she was flying away from today. It was good that she knew Singapore; the Americans needed someone who spoke the languages and knew her way around. It was a big opportunity for her to show her worth.
    She had left her village in Agusan del Sur in central Mindanao for Singapore to escape that Japanese madman. Mr. Ono was actually a great benefactor and probably thought of himself as a humanitarian, but he had been mad enough to cultivate a young Filipina girl, starting when she was barely twelve, thinking he could eventually take this young virgin with him to live in Japan. That was the madness part; everything else about him was gentleman. After she graduated she had sent him a letter, thanked him for having paid the church school’s tuition for her high school education, returned the support money he had sent to her, and left for Singapore to fulfill an
au pair
contract with a rich Chinese family whom she grew to know and love.
    The Japanese owed the Philippines billions in reparations for the rape and pillage of the islands during World War II. Now, almost sixty years later, who had won that war? Elaiza considered her educational advancement as part of the spoils of that lost war. Japanese businesses were sitting on the land, owned factories, controlled major sources of food and raw materials, and set low salaries for the men and women they employed. Not just the Japanese, of course, but also the Germans, the Dutch and even the World War II victorious Americans participated in the downward bidding.
    She dozed. Her neighbor, a bit too loudly waking her, asked, “Are you going home?”
    Reluctant to start a conversation, Elaiza simply answered, “Yes.”
    â€œMe too! I’ve been working for Toshiba for two years. I’m an electronics engineer. Going back home.” Her fellow traveler was a proud guy.
    â€œThat’s great. Welcome back.” She thought that would end it.
    But the engineer continued, “What did you do in Singapore? Were you a maid?”
    The assumption took her back. “No, I was on a business trip for my employer.”
    He was a religious person, and talked to her about God’s blessings, which gave them the opportunity to work overseas and to send money back to their families and churches.
    Elaiza and her engineer neighbor debated their country’s future while they ate the cold-plate lunch served to them some hours into the flight. She asked how he thought their country could break out of the vicious economic cycle. She thought but did not say that the church kept the people quiet, the “opium of the proletariat,” and it also kept them over-populating the islands, putting millions into the work force in the last decade, with little useful work available. Proving once again the validity of the law of supply and demand, wages were low and the majority of families had trouble affording food every day. The irony: Christian values that encouraged large families bred unemployed workers, and the hopeless and landless ones in the provinces tended to become Communists, joining district leaders who promised a shared title to the fertile fields of rice and fruit. She hardly