annamanila's

“In this season of love and kindness, think Cagayan de Oro”
My last night in Cagayan de Oro City last December 10 was a memorable one – and not only because it was raining furiously.
I arrived in CDO, as it is sometimes called, five days before to fair weather. The friendly cab driver, who took me from Lumbia airport to my hotel, however, said it had been raining intermittently all week. He also complained about the pre-holiday traffic...

The “mother and child” relationship has been celebrated and idealized so much in art and literature– and yes even in our minds – it almost sounds like a cliché. A mother is so highly revered she is almost deified: the “holiest thing alive” (Samuel Coleridge...

Fresh high school graduates are awash with thrills and jitters. Graduation is saying goodbye to the best friend, the barkada, the first love or the current squeeze or crush, the favorite teacher, the beloved campus of their youth. It is turning their...

A war baby, I was fed, while growing up, with stories about the difficult war years and the uneasy peace of the Japanese occupation.
It should have been easy for me to hate the Hapon but the ambivalent stories impressed upon me made it hard for me to indict them absolutely. Sure, I heard later accounts about “Japanese atrocities “ (why does that phrase sound almost like a cliché?...