BUGS & BYTES,
In Bigger Prints

Table of Contents

 

Section I
PROLOGUE, EPILOGUE, IKLOG (O MANOK?)

1 The Egg

2 Hatsing! (Bless Me)

3 Arthropodic Wisdom

4 Dear Decision Maker

5 Letters To The World

6   A Pain In My Head

7 Something Happened On My Way To School
8   A Discourse on The Grand Laws of the Universe

9 Black or White

10 Bayanihan in Jeddah

11 Chair of The Interim Board

12 Breakaway Telephonic Existence

13 The 'R' in Mrs. Regis

14 One City, One School

15 Eggs Breaking

16 PESJ History

17 The Chicken Fence

18 Believing The Man

19   My Own Version of The Jolo-Caust

20 My Sister's Version

21 The Rifle Guitar

22   Cat Stevens Unplugged

23  Landing on D-Day

24 The Great O-O-Os of the Late 20th Century

25 He Kept On Stumbling Over Chickens And Eggs

26   The Renaissance of Tilapia Farming And The Likes

27   The Saga Continues

28   The Pigeons In Our Lives

29 The Essence of Education

30   A School Is A Home

31  Gentle Fire From The Qur'an

32  At The Threshold

33  A Brief Discourse On Dancing

34  Being First

35   At The Edge of Light-Blue Metallic

36   Grappling With The Colossus

 

Section II
BUGS & BYTES
In Bigger Prints

The Power To Be
Excerpts from B & B Vol. 1 # 1

Of Crabs & Men
Excerpts from B & B Vol. 2 # 2

PathWalks
Excerpts from B & B Vol. 2 # 2

An Inability To Understand
Excerpts from A Speech by Prince Charles,
B & B Vol. Vol. 3 # 1

'Educating Miriam'
Excerpts from A Case Study of A Philippine School,
B & B Vol 3 # 2

 

Section III
BABEL RISING

A millennial short story

 

A Glossary of Pilipino
(& Near-Pilipino) Terms
Wondering what iklog is?

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Prologue, Epilogue, Iklog (O Manok?)
Copyright © 1999 by Said Sadain, Jr.

26   The Renaissance of Tilapia Farming And The Likes

In the past, with the consulate and school cooped up like poultry in between the clotheslines of neighboring buildings, the community had to expensively rent into hotel and restaurant areas or private compound facilities, greatly hampering a Filipino renaissance. The 1996 location transfers however led from one social gathering to another and in no time, the Philippine consulate was hosting big Filipino community events, seminars, clinics, cooperatives, even literary, drama and other cultural shows in Jeddah.

It was as if a bad curse was lifted from the castle of Sleeping Beauty. To this day, the frenzied activities continue. It is now increasingly becoming difficult to reserve a weekend to use the consulate grounds for one purpose or another. Whatever reasonable activities could not be accommodated at the consulate are being held at the re-unified school facilities. There are now even talks about a larger Filipino community center.

Just recently, a very active Filipino civic organization called the OFWCC sponsored a well-attended K-2000 livelihood seminar on prawn and tilapia farming.

I did not attend it myself, but having attended one or another similar event in the past, this kind of gathering would typically schedule something to start in the early morning or early afternoon or early evening. One hour later it would formally start, while participants and attendees keep on trickling into the hall till the closing of the session in another four hours or so. During the camaraderie periods, prior, in between and after the sessions, nurses and doctors and engineers and artists and sports enthusiasts and what-have-you would have the chance to update themselves about their latest housing or transportation allowances or the non-payment of them, about the happenings of their children in the Philippines or here in the Kingdom, about the recent vice-squad raids in Balad, about the distressed workers at the Labor office, about who got terminated from job recently, about who arrived from vacation recently, about the hot issues from TFC’s Magandang Gabi Bayan. If you have been in one of these gatherings, you would certainly know that this is quite a nice but very nervous crowd.

To the planners and shakers in the Philippines, I say this to them: Stretch your imaginations far and wide, because out here in the driest deserts of Arabia, you have compatriots dreaming about tilapias and prawns happily frolicking in little ponds.

According to the prolific Rasheed Abou-Alsamh, a Saudi-American journalist writing about the seminar in his popular Manila Moods column of the Arab News Feb. 11, 1999 issue: "This is a good sign that more and more Pinoys are already becoming serious about starting a business of their own when they finally return home. These are the people who should get encouragement and assistance from the government because they would soon be employing fellow Filipinos. Of course their motive would be profit-driven (who is crazy to go into business with the aim of losing money?) but these people are willing to take the risk."

 

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