~ The fun and funny moments in Toronto’s Filipino community will roll soon as peacocks in human form take center stage in a grand celebration of anything and everything. It’s “halo-halo” and “chopsuey” put together in a fiesta combination recipe prepared and cooked to near-perfection by peacocks and fundraisers to bleed the pockets of the community. The arty-farty and the hoity-toity will surely have a field day showing their wares, which include their blindly loyal proteges. Incidentally, being in Barcelona would make one cringe at the thought of seeing “the most beautiful . . . ” whatever in Toronto, because here, the women are truly beautiful, with or without their clothes on.
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“Wow..is there anything you can’t do?” ― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
BARCELONA – Even as I am in this beautiful city facing the Mediterranean Sea, my mind wonders occasionally in Toronto, Canada, my adopted hometown since four years ago.
It’s June, and spring is almost ready to give way to summer. For the next three months until August and even up to the first few weeks of fall, the Filipino community, in Toronto at least, wakes up to a string of events.
Many of these social gatherings are money-makers disguised in some pretty clever ways. Some organizers try to convince their events would benefit certain charities, or fund causes, real and imagined, and that they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Which is, of course, chicken manure.
The truth is these events give them an excuse to show off whatever they lack and try to compensate by presenting songs and dance numbers to temporarily forget problems and difficulties. In turn, the community is expected to expend monies saved from working two jobs for long hours.
It’s show time! The peacocks of the community will have grand moments to strut in the finest gowns decorated with all the cheap accoutrements from Dollarama. The pretenders will take center stage, bejeweled, coiffed, sashed and crowned, and blah-blah-blah with all the superlatives available in the dictionary to make paying patrons feel good, which is quite quite an amusing if not an ingenious way to unload the pocket.
With a little bit of drama, as for example, a child wasted by a disease, or a woman repeatedly abused and exploited, or an undocumented worker hiding in the shadows, or poor families needing a roof over their heads, etcetera, the community begins to melt and give what little they have.
To help the poor, the sick, the infirm, the disadvantaged, so they could live a life of comfort and be less wanting is a tired rationalization used successfully by the peacocks. It’s the same theme with different variations. Still, the community is not wanting in suckers.
Look at the people behind those events, the peacocks themselves. Their faces are always in the newspapers. Every year, they ask for help – money in the form of donations, or by buying tickets to their events.
But come to think of it, the people are actually buying for the peacocks the rewards of their own labor. The donor is hardly recognized but the peacocks reap all the commendations, the acclaim and the honors.
Transparency for the peacocks is a giant replica of a cheque being handed over to recipients in a moment captured in photographs adorning community newspapers. Again, it’s the same theme with different variations. Only the people in the outer fringes of the frame change; those in the middle are always the same.
Though this kind of transparency is a cheap publicity gimmick, the picture would seem adequate to satisfy the less-curious, and dampen enthusiastic calls for a more detailed accounting of monies raised. A curiosity for me is why the amounts in the huge cheque are not consistently denominated.
Sometimes the amount is in Canadian dollars, sometimes in Philippine pesos. Whatever the reason, my sense is that a six-figure amount in pesos looks prettier than four figures in dollar. It’s cosmetic, hardly noticeable while flipping newspaper pages.
Transparency in the sense of coming clean with all the money raised and accounting for every single penny spent, opening the books for public scrutiny, answering questions honestly and not evasively – that is the kind of clarity the community wants.
This check-giving publicity earns “pogi points” (a phrase coined by Balita colleague Mogi Mogado), which means adding a sterling, if not startling, quality to the reputation of those holding them. Soon, they declare themselves “philanthropist”, mocking those who’ve given from their pockets in true, sincere philanthropy.
The peacocks rob the community of the credit. The common folks who aspire for the stars climbing the social ladder are all of a sudden “philanthropists”, though far, far removed from the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates who have donated a staggering $1.9 billion to combat malaria and polio.
The community’s self-made “philanthropists” are photo opportunists that thrive in community newspapers. They are not as big or as reputable as they appear to be. They’re common folks like many of us – “isang kahig, isang tuka” as they say in Tagalog.
Oh, before I’m carried away again in this never-ending drama in the Filipino community, I believe I’ve found some of the most beautiful women on earth in Barcelona’s famed Sitges beach town. And if comparisons are to be made without attempting to denigrate any one or any group, these women here are simply beautiful.
Sans makeup and with practically nothing to hide, they are a sight to behold. All curves, no bulges except the natural mounds here and there, I see now why Paris, the Trojan prince, abducted Helen of Troy from husband Menelaus in that tragic love story in Greek mythology.
I wasn’t scouting for a Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships. Nether was I recruiting for a ballyhooed fashion show in Toronto, please. Nor was I looking for the most glamorous, the most sophisticated, the most revealing, the most intelligent but hardly intelligible or the most cultured woman in this big wide world.
I read somewhere that a “most beautiful” something had been found in Canada, the second largest country in the world after Russia. It beats the imagination how a small city like Barcelona would not stake a claim as having the most beautiful women in the whole wide world when in fact it does have them!
Well, the shows of the peacocks are on in Toronto. I shouldn’t have gone to Europe, I might say. But then there’s more to sate the mind there than wallow in the nauseating sight of a matron hallucinating that she was Helen.
