Bong O. Wenceslao
Wenceslao’s road to the journalism profession was circuitous. While still with Southwestern University’s campus publication The Quill, he was offered a reporter’s slot in the Visayan Herald (now defunct). He worked part-time in dyLA.
But a bigger concern drew away Bong, as colleagues call him: the fight against the Marcos dictatorship.
Some seven years later, he was back, more serious about resuming his journalism career at dyLA. But as writing was his real passion, he left broadcasting to be a reporter at The Freeman. In 1997, he joined Sun.Star Cebu.
As a journalist, he believes he is no longer out to radically change the world but merely to make a difference through his writing. His columns reflect his causes: freedom, nationalism, justice. Twice, he was awarded best in column writing by the Cebu Archdiocesan Mass Media Awards.
Columns
A ‘lie’ and the Inayawan dumpsite
I DON’T know how White Road in Barangay Inayawan got its name. But I am not surprised because in neighboring Laray, a village in Talisay City, is a community called Greenfields. Color-coding is therefore not new in the place.
Vehicles for mountain barangays
IT always follows. Energize a barangay and the market for appliances expands. Build good roads along populated areas and vendors of motor vehicles like motorcycles and four-wheeled contraptions rejoice. That’s the logic behind the bias of industrialized countries for funding support for infra projects in poorer nations. It’s good for their business.
Embarrassed Rama
WE all have gone through some embarrassing moments in ourlives. A woman joins a beauty pageant, gets all the praises for her beauty and the way she carries herself on stage until she reaches the Q and A part and finally opens her mouth to speak. She stammers, gropes for words and ends up firing a non-answer to the question asked. Her world crumbles.
Flooding and foot-dragging
WHAT we get from watching footage of devastation on television is at best vicarious.
You watch with dread scenes in portions of Metro Manila showing brown water menacingly surround man-made structures, forcing people to move to higher floors or the rooftops--but being actually there is more dreadful.
Our church
THE old Chong Hua Hospital wasn’t a cluster of buildings in two separate compounds but was rather a single structure within a limited area just a stone’s throw away from the house that my family rented in Waling-Waling St. I was a frequent “visitor” there in my younger years when I had to regularly endure severe bouts of asthma that prompted hospitalization. The hospital became a “suki” even after we transferred to nearby Sitio Kawayan in Barangay Sambag 2.
The old and the new
WE USED to relish engaging in a clash of ideas, intellectual jousts we call it, when we were younger. Every time an idea or a theory was raised, we pounced on it, using whatever philosophy or principle we learned in college and in our readings. Consuming us for a time were the various aspects of the theory of contradiction or the “unity of the opposites.” Like the conflict between the old and the new.
RH bill: some questions
WHAT’S your stand on the controversial reproductive health (RH) bill?
That was obviously the question of the weekend after the Catholic Church flexed its muscle Saturday by holding major protest actions in Cebu, the Edsa Shrine in Quezon City and other parts of the country.
Deaths from hazing
BEVERLY R. was what one may call “crush ng bayan” in the small engineering department of Southwestern University (SWU) where I spent my early years in college. She was fair, pretty and “mahinhin,” but was also a member of a sorority attached to a middling fraternity actively recruiting members in the department. That was enough attraction for some of us to open ourselves to the possibility of joining the fraternity.
Kabayan and public perception
I AGREE. President Noynoy Aquino was impolite and grating when he chose to deliver his tirade against Kabayan Noli de Castro during the 25th anniversary celebration of“TV Patrol.” Platforms were available to him other than the ABS-CBN stage to attack de Castro. He is, after all, the president of this republic with all the government’s information machinery at his disposal.
Banawa-Englis dream shot down
I USED to describe the location Guadalupe proper and Banawa as being near the hemline of a chunk of the Cebu City hinterlands. On their western and northwestern parts stand a portion of that mountain range visible from the port area. In the old days, when desolate rough roads and footpaths were the only paths going up, the bluish terrain looked brooding and mysterious.
