Punch the sky!

Posted October 07, 2009 00:29:00

Michael Tan opinion@inquirer.com.ph

Philippine Daily Inquirer

I hope you caught Anna Maria Gonzales’ comprehensive, full-page article, “Reminders from little brother Ondoy,” which appeared in last Sunday’s Inquirer and which shows how lack of urban planning and environmental protection brought about the disastrous floods. If you missed it, you can still read it on the Internet.

I am going to take a break from Ondoy and typhoons, but promise to get back to this topic. For today, I want to catch up with an important day we missed last week: Oct. 1 was the International Day of Older Persons. (Don’t you just love the way words are chosen these days? “Older persons” means the elderly, which seems to have some negative connotations even if it shouldn’t.)

This UN-declared international day is meant to remind us of the needs of older persons, especially involving health. When it comes to the elderly’s health needs, the most neglected one is exercise.

I was reminded of this, ironically, during a preschool event that I attended last month. The Learning Connection had a “Grandparents’ Day” activity and I had to attend. No, not as a grandparent. I had to take my mother, who is the lola, to attend the special program but realized, after I brought her to the room, that it was better if I stayed with her. I’m part of the sandwich generation which has to raise young children while at the same time having to care for elderly parents.

The program started with the school director, Teacher Hazel, opening the program with a little warning: that the Angkong and Ama (the school has many ethnic Chinese kids, so Teacher Hazel used the Hokkien Chinese terms for grandfather and grandmother) were not going to be a passive audience.

To explain what kind of participation was expected from the grandparents, Teacher Mitch was asked to demonstrate. There were reactions of amusement and excitement, as well as mirth and mild horror, when the grandparents were requested to dance, not the ballroom type but the hard rock disco variety. If this had been a Filipino-Filipino (as opposed to Chinese-Filipino) audience, I don’t think there would have been second thoughts about dancing, but the ethnic Chinese are, let me be polite, a bit more inhibited about moving the body, especially the older people.

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