Bataan Philippine Refugee Processing Center - PRPC

BATAAN REVISITED -Venerable Abhinyana

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 22:08:00 +0000

Because I Care

THE SKY WAS OVERCAST as we left Manila— my two companions and I— on the morning of December 19th 1999 for what used to be the Bataan Refugee Camp— otherwise called PRPC or Philippines Refugee Processing Center (an odd name that always made me think of a food-canning factory; no wonder many refugees felt they were merely commodities or statistics on paper, without real identities!) They had offered to drive me out, and I had gratefully accepted. Being a Sunday, the traffic wasn’t so heavy, and it didn’t take us as long to escape from the vortex of the city as it would have done on other days; Manila is so congested that it is choking on its own emissions. It took us 3½ hours to get there, as parts of the road was still in bad shape from the damage caused by the cataclysmic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991.

When we arrived at the check-point, we were held up for some minutes while the guards checked with their superiors at the Administration Building. Satisfied we had a legitimate reason for visiting the Camp, we were finally allowed in "to visit the temples only"; we got the impression that there must be some secret activities going on there, though what they might have been, we didn’t discover and could only guess at.

Proceeding from the check-point, it was as if I had never been there before, as there were no refugee billets in sight, like there used to be, but only thick overgrowth, and many trees where I remembered none. I was somewhat confused, and gave the driver halting directions. We turned into a familiar road that led to the temple in Neighborhood Seven, but it was only with some difficulty that we were able to discern the temple-gateway through the tangled vegetation; in just a few short years, the jungle had taken over again completely.

Forcing a passage through the gateway, we could then see the Kwan Yin (Quan Am) image behind a clump of bamboo I had planted during my last visit in ’87; it had not been vandalized, but remained as it was when the Camp closed in ’94, its hand raised in perpetually blessing. A marble plaque stood beside it, engraved with the words: DON’T WORRY; IT WILL PASS— EVERYTHING DOES. My last gift to the Camp, I’d had this made and placed there to remind people to hold on and not give way to despair; my hope was that they might think of these words as Kwan Yin’s and draw consolation and courage therefrom.

Wary of snakes, we pushed through the weeds and brambles to the image, standing beside the dried-up pond wherein water-lilies used to bloom, and took some photos. Alas, I mused, the artist who had so skillfully crafted this image— his name was Do Ky, a humble and softly-spoken man— had died of a heart-attack in California some years after resettling there. When he was creating this image, I asked him not to put his name on it, and he agreed; I said it wasn’t necessary for people to know who made it, but just for it to be there, symbolizing hope; there were no names in the temple, except one on a stele that had been erected later in memory of a man who had died when he fell from the roof while working there.

On one side was the grove of mango-trees under which many a refugee had sought shelter from the hot sun, and on the other were the ruins of the temple we had established in ‘80-’81, and which was later named Chua Van Hanh; the roof had gone without a trace, probably to serve other purposes in the nearby town of Morong. All that remained were a few termite-riddled pillars that crumbled to the touch, and the Buddha-image— also created by Do Ky — gazing impassively on the desolation.

It would have taken too much of an effort to force our way through the weeds and thorns to where we might look out over the stream and forest behind the temple, so we didn’t even try. We did, however, uncover two cement seats I had set up, with the inscriptions on their tops still legible; one of them read: "The Law of Life is Change ….. " One seat had cracked in the middle, and a seed had germinated therein, giving rise to a flourishing tree. I had a vision of someone stumbling upon this place centuries in the future, long after it had been forgotten, and thinking they had discovered the remains of an ancient civilization.

We proceeded up through the Camp, passing the place where the Catholic Church had stood; this, too, had gone, but the image of Mary, atop a globe of the Earth, remained. The Camp hospital was there, closed but not overgrown. Next was the Administration Building, with some activity inside; what it is now used for, I was unable to ascertain. Then there was the ICMC building, where the basic-English education of the refugees had its nerve-center. Nearby, too, was the Camp Post Office, which I had nick-named the ‘Lost Office’ because of the large amounts of mail that used to go ‘missing’ there; there are always people to take advantage of any situation to enrich themselves, seemingly unable to put themselves into the positions of those they exploit; what they would not like others to do to them, they are quite willing to do to others.

Up then, past Freedom Plaza and the refugee-boats that had been brought from the coast nearby rotting away, those who had escaped from Vietnam in them long settled in other lands; one was little bigger than a rowing-boat, without cover; how brave or foolhardy were the people who had risked everything to cross the sea in that! Many thousands— how many, will never be known— perished in their quest. Life must have been so hard in their homeland for them to embark upon such a hazardous venture!

Following the road onwards, it was hard to imagine that 18,000 people at a time had lived here; their billets had gone without trace, bulldozed, I was told, some years back. The Camp had been divided into ten neighborhoods, each neighborhood having thirty buildings, with ten billets each, and each billet accommodated six people or more; there they cooked, ate, slept, studied, worried, argued, fought, played, sang, loved, planned, prayed, dreamed, and made do with what they had. During the time I spent there, over 100,000 people from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos passed through, most spending about six months there, but some getting stuck and having to wait much longer; there were others, too, who never left the Camp, but were resettled, sooner than they expected or wanted, in what came to be known as Neighborhood 11: the cemetery.

The temple at the top end of the Camp, near Neighborhood Two, was in better shape than the other one; at least, the roof was still on, but the fibro-cement walls, on which the Cambodians had painted scenes from the life of the Buddha, had been smashed; some fragments remained, hanging on the framework. This temple, more than the lower one, bore the marks of my hands, as I had done a lot of work on it myself, and constructed it more sturdily; the octagonal window-frames, that I had decorated with bodhi-leaves, were still there. The main painting of the Buddha behind the altar had been partly-destroyed and wore campaign-posters of some politician; one of the Buddha-images had been decapitated.

I searched in vain for the hut I had built and lived in, but was unable to find even the cement floor. I looked, too, for two coconut trees that had grown from nuts left over from some festival we had in 1980, expecting them to be quite tall now, but they had also gone. The Bodhi-tree, however, which I had brought as a tiny sapling plucked from a wall in a temple on the island of Cebu in 1979, and planted in the Camp in 1980, was now big and tall; this tree had been inexplicably cut down by a crazy monk shortly after I had left the Camp, and resulted in the Cambodians taking over the temple from the Vietnamese, but had regrown and was in the process of wrapping itself around and absorbing a small shrine the Cambodians had erected against it.

A Buddha-image— the one made by the Vietnamese when they established the first temple there in 1980, shortly after the Camp opened— sat in a shed at one side of the temple, together with a larger-than-life image made by the Cambodians later.

Around the trees in what had been the temple-compound were the stones we had positioned there to serve as seats that termites couldn’t eat; it was hard to imagine that this area had once been clean and neat.

I walked up to the crest of the hill behind the temple, hoping to look down on where the Camp had been, but this was not possible owing to the trees and shrubbery that enshrouded everything. It did not, however, prevent memories from flooding back into my mind. I ‘saw’ many old faces there, and thought of their stories, each of them unique; I wonder where they all are now.

Four years of my life I spent in this Camp, watching people come and go, some with little more than the clothes they were wearing. Some few I have seen again in places like the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Australia; they have changed the world wherever they went, and in turn have been changed.

Life goes on, flows on, like a river, often with no sense of direction, not knowing where it came from, where it is, nor where it is going. We think we are in control of our lives, but are not, and even small things, unexpected and sudden, can change us considerably. If we learned to look at life as an adventure, instead of clinging to it with fearful self-concern, we could enjoy it much more than we do. If, too, we would give up the idea or desire that everything should be nice, and tried to see the good in it instead, we would learn more than we do. There is white in the black, always. I met people in that Camp (and in other Camps), who were quite happy there; not all of them were sad. I also met people later on, in the lands where they had resettled, who told me that they would like to be back in the Refugee Camps, where life was simple and uncomplicated.

My thanks to the kind people who drove me out on my trip of reminiscence to Bataan, and my Best Wishes to all the refugees who passed through that Camp on their way to other lands; they became part of my life just as I became part of theirs.

The long journey home

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 14:12:00 +0000

Daughter of Cambodian refugees seeks father’s grave in Philippines
By David Blair

Monday, November 4, 2013
(Published in print: Tuesday, November 5, 2013)

http://www.ledgertranscript.com/home/9128705-95/the-long-journey-home

It was in early July this year that Lina and I heard from Gaylord, a friend now living in Virginia who we knew from our time in the Philippine Refugee Processing Center. Gaylord worked for many years with Southeast Asian refugees, not only in the refugee center but in the first asylum camp in Galang, Indonesia. He left the refugee center in 1988, but not before becoming one of my family’s dearest friends.

Gaylord has posted many photos of the refugee center on the web. A young Khmer, or Cambodian, woman looking for someone who knew the camp found him on the web and contacted him in June; Belinda had an urgent request.

Her family fled Cambodia in the summer of 1986. They arrive in the Philippines not long after. Her father died on Nov. 24, 1986, while still in transit at the refugee center, leaving her mother and two brothers. Belinda was just conceived. He was buried in a small cemetery at the camp. The family continued on to Long Beach, Calif., in December, and Belinda was born on June 15, 1987.

She writes: “Growing up, my mother seldom spoke of my father. But when she would, all she would say to my brothers and I was, ‘You are exactly like your father — quick and smart’ or ‘You have long and beautiful fingers and toes — just like your father’s. She rarely spoke of details surrounding his death or her time at the camp in the Philippines.”

Belinda continues, “When I was around 8 or 9, I remember overhearing one of those conversations between my mom and one of her adult girl friends. My mother told her friend, ‘I wouldn’t even know how to go back to the Philippines and find that cemetery — it’s so foreign and we don’t speak the language.’ Being my optimistic young self and naive, I thought to myself, ‘Why not?’ I kept this idea in my head and voiced my opinion to my aunts and uncles and brothers throughout my teenage years and of course, they thought I was crazy!”

Now, 27 years after her father’s death, Belinda wanted to travel from her home in California to the Philippines to find the grave, exhume his bones and have them cremated, then bring his ashes back to the United States. In May, she booked a flight to Manila with no idea how she would find the grave. Then she began to look for help in this quest. This is why she contacted Gaylord.

Gaylord forwarded her message to us, and Lina took over. She knew the location of the cemetery, but it was not certain that Belinda would be able to find the grave if she was able to gain access to the camp. Belinda was to arrive in Manila on July 25 and the camp, or more correctly, the Bataan Technology Park that took over the land where refugee center once stood, was to close down on July 31, terminating its employees and closing its gates.

Even assuming Belinda could get permission to enter the area and find the grave, there were many permits needed from local government: to exhume the body, to cremate the bones, to bring the ashes out of the country. All these things would have to be arranged in a very short period of time. Lina knew the procedure, as she’d helped other families through the process in the period before the camp closed in 1994, but she didn’t underestimate the difficulty of pulling this off before the deadline. Belinda was arriving at the site two days before the camp closure.

Lina was on the phone, email and Facebook right away, talking with friends in Morong below the camp. Ramil was the first person Lina connected to. He helped her contact Espie, the financial analyst at the Technology Park, who was key in negotiating access to the cemetery. Espie’s husband, Abet, handled all the paperwork on the outside. Lina worked closely with them and stayed in touch with Belinda as best she could.

On July 29, Belinda sent us this message, using “Ate” to address and/or name respected female

friends: “Hi Ate Lina, We found it. It’s been an amazing day. Still unreal! Such a beautiful sight. It was not easy to see or find but it all worked out perfectly. I met Kuya Ramil and Ate Monette and Ate Espie at the BTPI today. I’ll tell you details later, but it was incredible to find dad’s tombstone still intact and legible. I asked Ate Espie to help me start the process for excavation because I’d like to be able to take his remains, cremate and take him home with me. She told me it could take weeks to months.”

It did not take months, or even weeks. Magically the right doors opened, permissions were given, and on Aug. 3, Belinda’s father was exhumed and cremated. Belinda returned to the U.S. on Aug. 15. She wrote recently: “Yes, I carried my father’s ashes home safe and sound! My brothers, and I plan to spread his ashes in the ocean on his death anniversary, on Nov. 23.

Yes, you may write the story! .... In fact, I plan to create an online blog just as Gaylord did so others can learn how I did what I did and hopefully inspire others to do the same.”

Belinda’s father began his long journey when he fled Cambodia with his family in 1986. He and his wife and two sons arrived in the refugee center full of hope for a brighter future, as well as grieving the loss of their homeland. An unexpected grief was added when he died and his wife traveled without him to the U.S., where she gave birth to Belinda.

Now 30 years later, Belinda has returned to help her father complete his journey, and her journey has become woven with ours.

David Blair of Harrisville is the
cofounder and former executive director of the Mariposa Museum & World Culture Center in Peterborough. He writes about his travels and life the Philippines.

PRPC Maps

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 21:46:00 +0000

PRPC Maps, from " ICMC Orientation Packet for Local Hire Album.
Courtesy of Emmanuel Jesus Villanueva

A tribute to our friend and teacher

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 04:38:00 +0000

A tribute to Gaylord from John Duffy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 30 May 2015 16:16:00 +0000

I received word that Gaylord Barr passed peacefully this morning at home in the company of family and beloved friends. If you knew him, you knew Gaylord as a kind, generous, compassionate, and beautiful soul. When he listened to you, and he was always willing to listen, he made you feel you were the only person in the room, the only possible person on the planet. And his dry wit could leave you laughing so hard your sides hurt.

But those words do not capture Gaylord's passion for justice and his lifelong indignation at injustice. Wherever he lived, in Morocco, Indonesia, the Philippines, Roanoke, he was on the side of the less powerful, the refugees and immigrants. So many loved him, and he loved them back.

I will miss my friend but forever be thankful for the time we shared, and for all he taught me. Horseman, pass by.

Photographs by Gaylord Barr - PRPC in the 1980s - Collection Set 29

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 20:30:00 +0000

"I took the photos to remember the look of the camp. What the photos can't express is what the PRPC felt like...the amazing mix of languages, backgrounds, and cultures, the old hatreds and loyalties, the night sounds from the forest, the steam rising from the earth after a sudden downpour, the sound of students repeating an English phrase, the sound of prayers from a temple at sunset..."
(Gaylord)

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