Road to redemption

Last June 16, 2008, I wrote in this blog about two Filipino women on the verge of deportation after coming to Canada to work as live-in caregivers. When they applied for permanent resident status after completing two years of their work contract, they were both refused.

The first woman, Juana, was denied her application for permanent residence when she was diagnosed with colon cancer that has already metastasized in her body. She was considered a burden on Canada’s social services and health programs. A couple who was deeply touched by Juana’s plight started a petition on the Internet requesting the government of Canada to open its heart and grant Juana’s dying wish to gain resident status. The petition caught fire with thousands signing up. Ultimately, the Canadian government gave in and allowed Juana and her husband to stay as permanent residents.

The other woman, Mylah, received an exclusion order, which in common parlance is a deportation order. An immigration officer found that she had contravened Canada’s immigration laws by continuing to remain in the country after her work permit expired and her application for permanent residence was refused. The immigration officer did not consider her special circumstances which were brought about by a simple mistake when she submitted a wrong application, a mistake that could have been corrected at the very first opportunity by the immigration officer who reviewed her applications.

I brought an application for judicial review before the Federal Court of Canada on behalf of Mylah, and the judge hearing the application last October 8, 2008, made an order in her favour, setting aside the exclusion order and remanding Mylah’s case to a new re-determination hearing so an immigration officer can consider if there were special circumstances that would justify not to issue a removal order.

Two recent cases I was personally involved in, both pro bono, as part of my efforts for redemption from the error of my ways. Back in 1998, and out of character, I committed an egregious blunder that wrought havoc to me professionally. Constantly troubled by that past incident, I decided not to continue with my law practice. My mind was not into it anymore. Instead, I have chosen to offer my time and services for free, helping people in need of legal assistance to the fullest extent possible and within the bounds of the law. I have since joined the Parish Social Ministry of Our Lady of Lourdes in Toronto where I volunteer every Friday afternoon helping and counselling people applying for refugee protection as well as new immigrants needing assistance in resettlement and reunification with their families.

Rising up again from a devastating fall from grace and restoring one’s spirit is not an easy task in a society that looks down on people who go astray. Oftentimes, one’s persecution seems like the yoke of a life sentence, with the road to redemption becoming longer and narrower each passing day. People seem unable to forgive easily. Your detractors do not tire in resurrecting your past, and your list of critics and enemies gets longer while your friends slowly distance themselves.

How I wish it were a mere religious sin. Perhaps through repentance and acceptance of my sins, God would have loved me back and that would have taken the burden of guilt off my back. Because we all believe in a loving God, it makes it less painful to own up to one’s sins. There is always the hope that God in His goodness will offer redemption and reconciliation.

In the real world, however, reconciliation does not come easy. If it were only up to God, then everything in this world would have been a piece of cake. Mortals as we are, we human beings are far less forgiving; we keep memories etched in permanence. Despite one’s efforts to repay the cost of the damage and rebuild one’s integrity, some people will always be tempted to continue casting stones. While some may be ready to forgive, there will always be others who would refuse to forget. This is a challenge I try to face each day as I go about my tasks humbly, knowing that the road to redemption is not planted with roses.

Therefore, in the black holes of my personal universe, I strive to shine, hoping my star will sparkle again as I reach out to others to find our common human ground, or at least the ability to work and live together. Every morning, I continue to rise up welcoming the new day with the fervent hope that even though the forgiveness I seek will never change the past, that it has enlarged the future.

Giving thanks

Like Americans and Canadians, immigrants to North America have all embraced Thanksgiving Day as a yearly traditional holiday where families gather over a sumptuous meal, often featuring turkey with all its trappings: stuffed or mashed potatoes with gravy, cranberry sauce, corn and pumpkin pie.

We were told that Thanksgiving Day is a form of harvest festival. Over the years, it has been celebrated more as a secular holiday although its original purpose was to show gratitude to the Creator for a bountiful harvest.

Growing up in the Philippines, we were taught in U.S. history class about the pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts, celebrating thanksgiving with Native American Indians after their first harvest in 1621. But as far as I could remember, we never had a similar traditional holiday although we have learned to say grace before meals and to be grateful for the blessings we have received. The Christmas holiday season and the New Year are traditionally times when we take stock of the things we have received and to give thanks to God, which is understandable since most tables in Filipino homes are full during the Christmas season, thus lending to the spirit of thanksgiving.

Giving thanks is a response to a blessing that has been received. It can be expressed in a simple gesture like a smile or bowing one’s head. It’s really no big deal because we say “thank you” almost every day more than once. It’s like saying “sorry,” it is so common that nobody really makes a big fuss about it.

But as a collective traditional national holiday, sometimes thanksgiving breeds hypocrisy. Who are being thankful, and for what? In the first place, you must have received a windfall, or you are really well-off to be thankful nowadays, if you wish to join those who celebrate thanksgiving annually. Otherwise, if you survive on a measly pay cheque and worry about how to bridge your household expenses to the next month, thanksgiving could be a constant painful reminder of how difficult living has become. Perhaps, even affluent families are now worrying more about their losses because of the U.S. financial crisis that is spreading like wildfire across the globe. Thus, the coming of Thanksgiving Day could be as equally distressing.

The reality is thanksgiving is for the most part only for the rich. For poor families, the starving children, the terminally sick, and the workers who have lost their jobs because of plant shutdowns, this is not the time to celebrate and be thankful. To join the thanking bandwagon is like being in self-denial, when pretense becomes a natural subterfuge for suffering. Being poor is uncool, so act rich and show the world how grateful you are.

Sometimes it is easier to live in make-believe. It has become more unbearable and demanding to continue to wallow in crisis. Take the case of the U.S. government. It has an almost ten trillion dollar-deficit, yet it acts as if it has plenty of dough to dole out to investment banks caught in the financial squeeze. So, it was easy to cough up more than $700 billion to Wall Street. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are draining the U.S. economy of more than 10 billion dollars per month, yet the military commanders continue to think that the U.S. army is invincible and it can continue to wage wars. More and more people in America are losing their jobs and homes, yet everything is more than perfect in Hollywood and in the films it produces. Reality has become a virtual fantasy.

If we want thanksgiving to be a meaningful celebration, perhaps we should also set aside a national day for grieving, not like the Lenten season or Yom Kippur or Ramadan for these are holy days prescribed by religion. We need a separate day to declare our collective grief over what’s happening to planet earth, or the unjust consequences of war, or how we have forgotten our oneness with humanity that we let so many go hungry or die from AIDS. For every blessing we are thankful for, we should also put aside time to grieve over every misfortune that falls on us. It’s an equalizing process; in the end, everything evens out.

The anthropologist Oscar Lewis first suggested the concept of a culture of poverty in his book Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. He followed up this book with an investigation of the urban poor in San Juan and New York that exposed sad tales of misery, brutality and cheapness of life. In his book, La Vida, Lewis asked, “What is the future of the culture of poverty?” He mentioned the efforts of planners and social workers in the United Sates to deal with hardcore poverty and the attempts to raise the level of living of these so-called families and to incorporate them into the middle class. That was in the early 1960s, yet the same problem still haunts the U.S. as it wrestles with its most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.

In the underdeveloped countries, where great masses of people live in poverty, Lewis said that the U.S. social-work solution is not feasible. Because of the magnitude of the problem, the people with a culture of poverty in these countries may seek a more revolutionary solution: by creating basic structural changes in society, by redistributing wealth, by organizing the poor and giving them a sense of belonging, of power and leadership.

There is this enduring great divide between the developed industrialized countries and the rest of the world which is engulfed in a culture of poverty. The citizens of North America cannot just ignore the plight of these people and those suffering in their midst, and continue to celebrate their annual Thanksgiving Day as if the world were a bountiful paradise.