Tili-tili

Crosshatching

My younger brother, Charlo, a lawyer and teacher, recently ran for Provincial Board member under the administration party in Surigao del Norte and lost. It was his first attempt for a political position.

It wasn’t, however, his first attempt at public service. Of us siblings, my brother is the people person, the organizer type. In high school, he was a youth leader, heading organizations like the Columbian Squires and a local fraternity.

A consistent honor student, my brother became a State scholar when he took up history in the Mindanao State University in Marawi City, where he became a member of the student publication, various activist organizations and the campus ministry.

It was in MSU, that he was also radicalized and became a left-wing activist. It was there, in the Islamic community of Marawi that he became friends with Moro activists, some of whom later joined the armed struggle of various secessionist groups or left to “study” in Pakistan or Afghanistan during those years before the September 11 attacks in America.

He learned to speak Maranao and started to study Bahasa. As a historian, he focused on Mindanao history, particularly during the American period.

Having graduated with Summa Cum Laude, he joined the faculty and taught in MSU for a while before deciding to study Law in the University of the Philippines in Diliman.

In UP, he became even more active but less so in political groups. He organized a group of Surigaonon students that aimed at giving back to the society that sponsored their education, starting in their own hometown, Surigao del Norte. One of their activities was the “Crayons for Peace” campaign meant for urban poor kids in Surigao. Back in the late ‘90s, Surigao remained a hotspot of communist insurgency.

While studying in Manila, my brother and his kababayans would ask their friends and classmates to donate used or brand-new crayons. They also designed a coloring book for children and asked their friends to help contribute to its printing by means of simple photocopying. Then during school breaks, when they went home to Surigao, they would distribute these crayons and coloring books to children in poor communities.

It was a simple gesture of the Iskolar ng Bayan giving back to society for the privilege of State-sponsored education. While I and my elder brother had a short stint in private school during our primary years, my brother has always been a product of public school education from grade school to law school. Perhaps, it was this privilege that gave him that sense of indebtedness and civic-mindedness.

Although he spent most of his time in Manila, he remained active in organizing Surigaonons there, these time no longer limited to UP alumni, and with the same homeward orientation. He organized a literary group of Surigaonon writers who write in their dialect. They post their work in a group page on Facebook and hold regular poetry readings and academic discussions on language in different venues, usually schools, in Surigao.

With his academic background as a history professor, my brother helps to promote Surigaonon heritage. Heritage preservation would have been one of his programs if he was elected. With his wife who has been working in various climate-change advocacy organizations, my brother also planned to contribute to legislations and projects that would help protect the environment in the province of Surigao del Norte.

We talked about the need for disaster preparedness in the barangay level, teaching residents basic survival and prepping skills. He planned to go around communities to give free legal advice to the poor, to be an “abugado nan barangay.”

In spite of all these good intentions, which I never doubted, I remained a hesitant supporter. In fact, I initially advised him against running, warning him that the toxic world of politics may not be good for him in the long run. I told him to be wary of people who flatter him now and goad him into running for some of them will end up using him. It’s an instrumentalist world out there, I said.

When it appeared that he could not be dissuaded, I advised him not to just let his party take care of the campaign funding and never engage in vote buying. As expected, this proved not to be a very good advice, certainly not a pragmatic one. It cost my brother his political ambition.
Vote buying or the act of giving out cash to influence voters during the elections is so rampant in Surigao that it already seemed normal for people.

The city suddenly takes the ambience of a fiesta as everywhere you see people lining up with big smiles on their faces to get their share of tili-tili (drizzle), as cash for votes is called locally.

It used to be that tili-tili was conducted discreetly, with campaign staff of politicians personally going house-to-house to distribute money. Now, it’s out in the open as residents merrily head to the nearest party representative to get their share.

People in Surigao should no longer call it tili-tili. This act of corruption has been so normalized that it’s not enough to just describe it as slight drizzle. For me it’s a torrential rain of dirty money.