Sting will not perform at Mall of Asia

by RAPPLER.COM

Posted on 10/19/2012 8:35 PM | Updated 10/21/2012 10:07 AM

MANILA, Philippines (UPDATED) - Environmental activist and musician Sting has officially cancelled his Back to Bass Tour at the SM-Mall of Asia (SM MOA) Arena after fans raised concerns about SM's record moving trees in its Baguio City property.

The Philippine concert will push through but at the Araneta Coliseum, said his official website www.sting.com. "There is no change to the show date, which remains Sunday, December 9th, 2012," said the site.

Announcement at www.sting.com

In a press release, SM MOA said that lawyer Cheryl Daytec-Yangot, with the Baguio-based environmentalist group Project Save 182, wrote to Sting's agents calling on them to change the venue.

"I wrote a letter to Sting’s agents appealing that they abandon SM-Mall of Asia Arena as the venue for the musician’s December concert. Sting, a voice of the oppressed, cannot sing in the halls of the oppressor," Daytec-Yangot wrote on her Facebook.

Sting has been recognized and supported by fans for his environmental activism. In 1989, he and his wife Trudie Styler founded the Rainforest Foundation to support indigenous people in efforts to protect their environment and the world's rainforest.

In a press release SM MOA said, "The SM MOA Arena has nothing to do with the case in Baguio except for the fact that it is also under the same holding company as the Baguio branch. However, with this letter to Sting, it seems that the activists behind Project Save 182 are bent on taking down the SM brand in general."

The statement added, "With this successful move to stop Sting from holding the concert at SM MOA Arena, and referring to the venue as an 'oppressor', it is now looking more like the court battle has extended from saving trees, to ruining a corporate giant’s reputation completely."

Daytec-Yangot celebrated on her Facebook with the message below.

Those who already bought tickets for the MOA show can contact Ovation Productions at (02) 532-8883 and (02) 747-2143 for a refund.
Sting's official website explained that fans who already have reserved tickets will be able to swap their tickets for a comparable reserved ticket at the new venue. Tickets can be exchanged starting October 25, when a special window will be opened at the Ticketnet Office located at the Araneta Coliseum. Fans can exchange their tickets up to the date of the show but refunds will only be available up to Sunday, November 18 at SM Tickets. - Rappler.com

Sting stung by felled Baguio trees, drops venue of Manila concert

By Ces Rodriguez | Yahoo! Southeast Asia Newsroom – Fri, Oct 19, 2012

(UPDATE) Now it can be told: Sting is still a tree-hugger.

The artist is cancelling his Back to Bass Tour at the Mall of Asia Arena scheduled for Dec. 9, 2012 because the group that opposed SM Baguio’s plan to cut 182 trees to give way to a parking lot was credited to have successfully lobbied the known environmentalist from playing in the venue.

The official statement from MOA Arena said it “has exhausted all measures for the show to push through.” An accompanying press release stated that “The SM MOA Arena has nothing to do with the case in Baguio except for the fact that it is also under the same holding company as the Baguio branch.”

Meanwhile, Ovation Productions, producer of the artist’s “Back to Bass” concert, confirmed on Sting's official website that the new venue will be at Smart Araneta Coliseum.

The concert producer further announced that that those who already bought a reserved seat ticket can get another one, this time for the new venue, starting Thursday, Oct. 25.

Fans can exchange their tickets at the Big Dome’s Ticketnet Office. If needed due to the change of venue, refunds must be made at SM Tickets on or before Sunday, Nov. 18.

Online petition for Sting

Cheryl L. Daytec-Yangot, former legal counsel of the group Project Save 182 who filed a case against SM for its Baguio branch’s redevelopment plan, called and then wrote Sting’s representatives, to let them know the environmental issue with SM and to appeal to him to change the venue of his Manila concert.

Daytec-Yangot also directed them to an online petition created by Project Save 182’s Karlo Marko Altomonte. “Sting can't be saving rainforests and enabling SM to rape the environment at the same time!” the petition read.

The petition got 378 signatures.

‘Do something for us’

In her letter, Daytec-Yangot said, “Sting is a well-loved musician among human rights advocates and believers all over the world including the Philippines. This is foremost because he speaks the voice of the marginalized and disadvantaged.”

She continued, “A lot of times, it was because of him that stifled voices were amplified. This happened each time he exposed injustice, iniquity, and inequity in his songs. The world's oppressed classes owe Sting so much. And now, in behalf of the disadvantaged, we ask him to do something for them again.”

She also reminded Sting of something he once said: “If you really want to define civilization it should be a culture that doesn't destroy its environment. If you burn down the kitchen one day and expect to eat the next, it is not even intelligent, let alone civilized."

Daytec-Yangot added: “Your words become empty if you perform in SM-MOA, Mr. Sting!”

On Friday, Oct. 19, she announced on Facebook that Sting had dropped Arena as a venue and wrote: “Yes, efforts worked, it seems. Take note- there was that online petition first which Karlo Marko Altomonte initiated. It was followed by the PS182 US-based members and friend Pedro Jacobo's efforts to contact Sting and his agents here. These were followed up with more calls. In the end, Sting listened to the voice of the oppressed. He did it in regard to his concert in Kyrgyztan before. Let us support Sting always.” With reports from Maridol Ranoa-Bismark

ON THE STING CONCERT

Sting the environmentalist drops MOA Arena as concert venue

Agence France-Presse, InterAksyon.com · Saturday, October 20, 2012 · 3:03 am

Sting. (AFP)

MANILA — Rock superstar Sting, a known environmentalist, has forced organizers to move his planned one-night concert at the SM Mall of Asia Arena to another venue in response to a lobby by local environmental activists.

The Manila leg of the British singer’s “Back to Bass Tour” on December 9 will now be hosted by Smart Araneta Coliseum, said his official website.

Earlier in the day, the local concert promoters informed the MOA Arena that Sting had called off his show there, Arena general manager Arnel Gonzales said.

Sting announced his decision after learning that pine trees growing outside SM Baguio, which is owned by the same holding company that owns the MOA Arena, were being removed for an expansion program, Gonzales added.

“Somebody misled the Englishman In New York over the venue,” Gonzales told AFP, referring to one of the British-born star’s hit songs.

Gonzales said that while Arena and SM Baguio are sister companies, the concert venue had nothing to do with the trees’ transfer.

Environmentalists had sued SM Baguio earlier this year to stop the uprooting and relocation of 182 old trees, mostly pines, growing at its property.

The case sparked calls for a boycott of the SM chain, controlled by the family of the country’s richest man, billionaire developer Henry Sy.

The mall chain said it had secured permits to remove the trees, but the transfer of all 182 trees to a government lot had not been completed due to the civil suit, which remains on trial.
“It’s something that we did not expect,” Gonzales said of the cancellation of the Arena concert.
Sting, former frontman of The Police, founded the Rainforest Foundation in 1989 with wife Trudie Styler.

In a statement issued to local media, SM MOA Arena lamented that Sting was influenced by a letter sent to his agents by Cheryl Daytec-Yangot, a former lawyer for the group Project Save 182.
“With this letter to Sting, it seems that the activists behind Project Save 182 are bent on taking down the SM brand in general,” the SM MOA Arena said in an accompanying press release.

“Sting, a voice of the oppressed, cannot sing in the halls of the oppressor,” Daytec-Yangot related telling Sting’s agents on her Facebook account. After her successful lobby, she remarked: “I love you, Sting! With every breath I take!…”

According to Sting’s website, fans who have already bought tickets for the MOA Arena show can exchange them for the new venue starting Thursday, October 25 at a special window at the Ticketnet Office located at the Smart Araneta Coliseum.

“Reserved seat tickets have been carefully reassigned so that fans that had a reserved ticket at the MOAA will receive a comparable reserved ticket in the new venue,” the website said.
Fans who wish to refund their tickets must do so at SM Tickets no later than Sunday, November 18.

By Ces RodriguezOctober 19, 2012 8:58 AMYahoo Southeast Asia Newsroom

The official statement from MOA Arena said it “has exhausted all measures for the show to push through.” An accompanying press release stated that “The SM MOA Arena has nothing to do with the case in Baguio except for the fact that it is also under the same holding company as the Baguio branch.”

Meanwhile, Ovation Productions, producer of the artist’s “Back to Bass” concert, confirmed onSting's official website that the new venue will be at Smart Araneta Coliseum.

The concert producer further announced that that those who already bought a reserved seat ticket can get another one, this time for the new venue, starting Thursday, Oct. 25.

Fans can exchange their tickets at the Big Dome’s Ticketnet Office. If needed due to the change of venue, refunds must be made at SM Tickets on or before Sunday, Nov. 18.

Online petition for Sting

Cheryl L. Daytec-Yangot, former legal counsel of the group Project Save 182 who filed a case against SM for its Baguio branch’s redevelopment plan, called and then wrote Sting’s representatives, to let them know the environmental issue with SM and to appeal to him to change the venue of his Manila concert.

Daytec-Yangot also directed them to an online petition created by Project Save 182’s Karlo Marko Altomonte. “Sting can't be saving rainforests and enabling SM to rape the environment at the same time!” the petition read.

The petition got 378 signatures.

‘Do something for us’

In her letter, Daytec-Yangot said, “Sting is a well-loved musician among human rights advocates and believers all over the world including the Philippines. This is foremost because he speaks the voice of the marginalized and disadvantaged.”

She continued, “A lot of times, it was because of him that stifled voices were amplified. This happened each time he exposed injustice, iniquity, and inequity in his songs. The world's oppressed classes owe Sting so much. And now, in behalf of the disadvantaged, we ask him to do something for them again.”

She also reminded Sting of something he once said: “If you really want to define civilization it should be a culture that doesn't destroy its environment. If you burn down the kitchen one day and expect to eat the next, it is not even intelligent, let alone civilized."

Daytec-Yangot added: “Your words become empty if you perform in SM-MOA, Mr. Sting!”

On Friday, Oct. 19, she announced on Facebook that Sting had dropped Arena as a venue and wrote: “Yes, efforts worked, it seems. Take note- there was that online petition first which Karlo Marko Altomonte initiated. It was followed by the PS182 US-based members and friend Pedro Jacobo's efforts to contact Sting and his agents here. These were followed up with more calls. In the end, Sting listened to the voice of the oppressed. He did it in regard to his concert in Kyrgyztan before. Let us support Sting always.” With reports from Maridol Ranoa-Bismark

MY FATHER WOULD NOT EAT SWEET POTATOES

by Cheryl Chyt L. Daytec-Yañgot

My father was a World War II baby. As the last child in his family of 7 children, he knew no hardship. He never went hungry. Then war broke out. His family and the rest of the people in their indigenous community had to flee from their homes to save their lives. Life became hard and harsh. Rice was scarce. But camote (sweet potato) was easy to cultivate. And so they spent a few years as virtual war refugees in a place called Ogawi (in Besao, Mt. Province) eating camote to survive.

I never saw my father eat the rootcrop. When I was in high school, he told me stories of the horrors of war he experienced as a child. To his young mind, the greatest horror next to the bombs exploding was eating camote all the time. "I have eaten more camote than an average man can eat for his lifetime," he said. I understood then why he would not eat it regardless of how it was prepared.

Camote is on my list of "yummy" foods. I was pleasantly surprised to discover sweet potatoes being sold in the Rainbow Supermart in Minneapolis, Minnesota where I am living right now. Today I had two of them for breakfast. I boiled and put a lot of melted cheese over them. They go great with hot chocolate drink (with milk). Two days ago, I excitedly told my sister about my food find and we talked about how Dad would not eat sweet potatoes. I suggested sheepishly that Dad, who now has Alzheimer's and has forgotten a lot of things including his children's names, be fed the rootcrop. If he eats it, that is a good thing; if he does not because he will remember World War II as he witnessed it during his tender years, it will be even better. It means he will have recovered his memory.

I still have to hear from Dinah. Meantime, let me share a poem I wrote years ago about Dad's aversion to camote.

Why My Father Does Not Eat Camote

Like clockwork, the green fields transmogrified
Into harvest shining like gold same time each year
Bowls were filled to need (Greed was unthinkable)
Then came trespassers whose ways were strange
Bombs scattered terror; freedom ran to the fringes
Rice fields primed for plenitude became fallows

Routine was shattered; hunger, once a myth, reigned
But resilience can perforate the most solid rock
Inside the parched earth too petrified to nourish life
Camote flourished, a rush of flood drowning despair
They who were listlessly drifting to the end of days
Retraced their gaits, eager to live, to look ahead.

They ate camote
for breakfast
for lunch
for supper
Until the bombs stopped

Out of the caves, an uncircumcised lad emerged a man
Desperate to forget the horrors dripping from war’s fangs
But they are always, always playing even in his aged mind.
/September 2000

NUPL ON THE APPOINTMENT OF THE NEW CHIEF JUSTICE

NUPL STATEMENT:

CJ Sereno Should Move the People to Seek Succor From the Court

A day after Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno took her oath of office as the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, human rights lawyers and law students from the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) reiterate the challenge for her to be independent, impartial and pro-people.

The challenge is doubly pounded on CJ Sereno. Also perceived as a favoured presidential appointee, it is not unexpected for some quarters to cast doubt and to question her judicious resolve to institute the reforms she promised to protect and promote the Constitution and the so-called rule of law, and put life and meaning to the basic principles of check and balances and the separation of powers.

The new Chief Justice should have and maintain the people’s trust. She has to face up to the immense challenge to be truly independent and impartial and prove that she is really her own woman.

Being the one of the youngest and the first woman to be appointed to the highest position in the country’s judicial branch, CJ Sereno’s catapulted ascendancy to the post is both highly significant and historical. She should seize this moment and her quite long term of office to concretely bring genuine reforms to the judiciary. These reforms must indispensably include those which will benefit the ordinary folk who have less in life.

We as officers of the court shall hail the new Chief as befits her stature and position but we shall temper our expectations and let her decisions and actions speak for themselves.

We hope CJ Sereno will have the vision and use her position and inimitable chance to move the people to seek succor from a Court that should give them a fair shake and that will put the mighty and the powerful in place.

Else, it would be an unspeakable tragedy of its own if she squanders this defining moment. She must be conscious that the people and history would judge her accordingly in this light. ###

Reference: Atty. Edre U. Olalia, NUPL Secretary General, 09175113373

REMEMBERING ONE OF ARROYO'S STATE OF THE NATION ADDRESSES

(As Pres Aquino delivers his SONA today, I am reposting this article I wrote after Arroyo's 2008 SONA.)

THE REAL STATE OF THE NATION

on Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Just as we expected, The Queen delivered a canard about her Queendom. Life is dandy, the future is rosy, she is a brave Queen, she has been slaying dragons derailing the progress of her Queendom and still managed to make it a paradise for her subjects.

Hounded by a very low credibility problem, she presented to the Filipino nation a handful of people who used to be thirsty until their cups were filled from spouts coming from the spring she created. There were those people who found jobs after receiving training. There were peasants whose station in life rose a few inches higher with loans. If you ask me, dragging those people to the halls of Congress was a pathetic attempt at proving the popularity of her programs. It was too hard-sell. And it did not work because now the masses are asking why she chose to bestow food on the tables of only a few.

This is a country with more or less 89M people. If she improved the lives of half of the population, we would have given her a pat on the back. But if benefits from her harvests trickled down to only a minute segment of the masses, she ought to cover her face in shame. Her very poor neighbors in Malacanang did not have a share in the pie she claims to have cooked for the masses. If you cannot see the poverty right over your fence, how can you see poverty in the countryside? She is a failure and worse, she does not enjoy a shred of public trust as the latest surveys show. She inflicted her illegitimate reign on the masses for too long. It is way past the time to face the music. This is not Japan so it is too much to expect her to resort to "hara-kiri." She should start looking toward the direction of the exit instead of concocting the elixir that will extend her stay in Malacanang beyond 2010. That is what leaders with moral compunction do. But let us not forget that she commandeered her way to the most sought-after swivel chair in the country employing means way beyond Niccholo Machiavelli's imagination. Morality is not her cup of tea.

We do not need counter-statistics to show the real state of the nation. Simply pay a short visit to any field office of the National Statistics Office or the Department of Foreign Affairs. There you can witness unusually thick crowds of people queuing to obtain passports or copies of their birth certificates, a requirement for passport issuance. Before The Queen usurped the throne with a telephone call, crowds in those offices were not as multitudinous. The smell of despair was not as pungent. The atmosphere was not as funereal.

What do the queues tell us about the state of the nation? They tell us that more people are now pushed to the edge and are ready to embrace what family-oriented Filipinos would shun doing - leave their families, even infant children in so many cases, for jobs abroad. Otherwise, the alternative is hunger. And those people in the crowd are not even assured of jobs overseas. Their faces are those of desperation, hands clutching a delicate thread of hope.

You can also tell the state of the nation from the multitude that flocked during the most recent Feast of the Black Nazarene. This year's Quiapo horde was unprecedented. Obviously, the masses are already at their wits' end and they have to hang on to faith - faith in redemption from hunger via contact with a 400-year wood from Spain. Under The Queen's reign, not only votes in presidential elections and money from the public coffers are stolen. Even perspective has been robbed from the masses by the starvation she fostered.

Really, there is no need to go into statistics to have a deep grasp of the state of the nation. Numbers have a way of confusing the issues and eventually masking ineptitude, inequities, and the reality of poverty. But let me take The Queen on the economic growth she gloated about. Sure, there was an increase in the gross national product. But this is why she has more to account to the masses for. In spite of this growth, food became more inaccessible for them. Which means that the growth benefited only the usual ones- the feudal lords, the multinational companies, the national bourgeois- who make up a very small number but control the nation's wealth. The Queen's reign only widened the already wide gap between the wretched and the over-blest. In other words, she only exacerbated the root of poverty in the Queendom.

And who is she to profess a bleeding heart for the poor? She spent P300M in public money for a junket to America to have an audience with the frontrunners in the US presidential elections (Obama, realizing perhaps that he is just a presidential candidate, did not accommodate her into his hectic schedule) while the country was being ravaged by Typhoon Frank. By golly, she was already selling the Philippines even if she was not sure who the buyer should be. And when she came back, she did not spend P300M to aid the typhoon victims.

The state of the nation is that it is a nation mired in despair with an illegitimate Queen who is the errand girl of the oligarchs, the slave of the bourgeois, the clerk of neoliberalism. This country needs her like it needs a hole in the head. She reminds me of Scar who stole Simba's throne in the movie "The Lion King."

Fairy tales are fine but only innocent children and retards believe them.

But again, it was an innocent child who saw a naked emperor in his "new clothes."

MAITA GOMEZ, 64

by: Cheryl L. Daytec

So you were on your way to the huge hippodrome

You moved with the grace of a swan

Twenty million people waited for the wave

of your dainty hands on black-and -white TVs

That was what you were supposed to do

Alas, you rolled down the car window

The stench of existence deterged of freedom

pervaded the air

You looked straight into the eyes of a child

hawking her tender flesh to wrinkled strangers

not quite comprehending her tragedy

You saw her haggard mother

holding with one thin hand a boil-infected baby

letting go of hope with the other

You saw her jobless father burn his self-deprecation

with a bottle of cheap alcohol

Hungry peasants carried full harvests to lay down

At the feet of an indolent landlord chewing cigar

There were millions of them

There were just a few of you

The soft bed, the flashy cars, the banquets,

The promises of fame: their glitter was illusion

Subdued by the sudden flash of enlightenment

It was a time when opulence was a badge of shame

-an era when hope was heresy to the wretched

Freedom was a word inside the lexicon

devoid of form outside of it

a rhetoric of tyranny to mask injustice

a birthright without duty-bearer

calling for vanguards to unchain it

You heard the call the moment you knew

One cannot fully enjoy a world

that despoils the laughter of others

So you turned the car around

Slipping out of your gown

You dropped

the circlet of fame around your head

the rogue lipstick into the garbage bin

It was war; you picked up a gun and rushed

to the battlefields - a soldier of the people

Power started to lose balance

when you and comrades cast arrows into apathy

creating a hole through which sunshine could pass

to grace that young girl’s pallid life

to give her mother strength to collect hope

to put color on her father’s waxen face

You never put down the freedom torch

You made more torches

passing them on to the toiling masses

They found their way out of the darkness

of apathy and victimhood

To the light of consciousness

To the parliament of the streets

To the corners of the countryside

To the slums, to the prisons

Confronting the throne

Crumbling the cornerstone of injustice

Winning victories for the oppressed class

There are virtues more solid than beauty

-Love for the unloved, love for the masses

Sacrifice for society’s dregs

Choosing them all,

You turned your back on a crown of beauty,

the fancy dresses, the limelight

and became more beautiful

Now, from where the struggle goes on

We watch you ride into the sunset

Beautifully

as only you could/chytdaytec 14jul2012

MAITA GOMEZ: THE REBEL WITH A LOT OF CAUSES

Maita and I delivered lectures in the University of the Philippines-Baguio in 2011.

The following article by Filomeno Sta. Ana III is a beautiful piece on Maita Gomez, the woman who should have been known more for being a revolutionary/activist than for being a beauty queen. She should have read this. Sadly, she passed on to the next life yesterday.

After winning a beauty title, Maita could have chosen a comfortable life. She could have become a product endorser, a movie star, a rich man's mistress, or anything that would have assured her a life of comfort and plenty. But she chose a different path, a radically different one, the one less traveled. She resolved to live among the masses and to fight for freedom and justice especially during the dark years of the Marcos dictatorship. Surely, it was not an easy life. It was sacrifice. Yet she chose that.

Up to her last days, she was living her life for others. She was very active in exposing the lies of the mining industry and big business.

Ride on to the sunset, Maita. You will always be remembered.

Maita Gomez, lovely soul: Rebel-intellectual will always be a beauty queen

13-Jul-12, 2:39 PM | Filomeno Sta. Ana III, Special to InterAksyon.com

Maita Gomez in Paris, 2011.

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The online news portal of TV5

(Editor’s note: Filomeno Sta. Ana III wrote this piece on Maita sometime in March 2011, but it went unpublished. Sta. Ana shares it now with InterAksyon.com readers so they can, he says, get to know more about Maita Gomez, "always described as the beauty queen turned revolutionary." He adds: "She was more than that, and there was no contradiction in her being a fashion model/beauty queen and being an activist.")

Friends or acquaintances, those born in the 1950s and 1960s, remember Maita as the fashion model and beauty queen turned revolutionary. And Maita has been described and stereotyped in that manner through the years, elevating her to the status of a living legend or heroine. Maita feels uncomfortable being described as such. It is not that she is embarrassed about her colorful past. Neither does she want friends to forget her transition from high society to living a dangerous life. It is just that the stereotype is restrictive and can even be a liability.

I recall for example that I recommended Maita to be a resource person on the economics of mining for a public affairs broadcast. Maita knows this field well; she’s the current coordinator of Bantay Kita, a non-governmental organization whose mission is to have transparency of contracts and revenues in the extractive industries. The show’s producer thought I wasn’t serious about my recommendation. She said: “But she’s a beauty queen,” suggesting that Maita’s image as a beauty queen is what the audience will pick up, not why mining is harming development.

The stereotyping is likewise unfair to Maita, for it conceals her other qualities. Singling out her past—her being a beauty queen and an amazon sidetracks us from appreciating that she’s a hardworking professional; that she’s good at performing simultaneous tasks; that she has the uncanny ability to produce the resources to make both ends meet; that she is generous to a fault even to strangers (she’d buy all the remaining sampaguita garlands peddled by syndicated street children so they could retire early from the night’s work); that she has a pusong mamon; and above all, that she’s a protective daughter, mother and lola.

Maita has received awards for her beauty and for her activism, yet she’s nonchalant about this. But one honor that Maita will greatly value is being recognized as a good and outstanding mom. She’s a caring, loving mom. She encourages her children to be independent and treats them as herbarkada. When her children are in trouble, she prays for them and even asks friends like my wife Mae to offer novenas for them.

But when any of her children are wronged or mistreated, the motherly Maita is transformed into a fighter. Her being a fighter is thus essentially about fighting injustice and subjugation. She has fought for her daughter and her sons in the same manner that she has fought for the Filipino masses.

Maita’s life as a celebrated fashion model and her life as an armed underground activist were not contradictory at all. Her experience as a fashion model prepared her for the sacrifices and rigor of revolutionary life. After all, being a fashion model entailed long hours of work, perseverance, and tenacity. For Maita, it was not at all glamorous.

Some of Maita’s old friends observe that the pre-activist Maita they knew was no different from the radicalized Maita. Yael, whom Maita fondly treats as her niece, thinks that Maita is at heart an Assumptionista. That is, a convent-bred woman disposed to virtue, innocence, compassion, and charity. It just happens that these traits can make dedicated revolutionaries.

And so, we can see a continuum in Maita’s life as a colegiala and a society-page celebrity on the one hand and her life as a rebel and now as a civil society advocate.

In our recent trip to Paris (this piece was written in March last year), that continuum played out. Maita was serious about our participation in a conference on the extractive industries. She woke up early to register and to attend pre-conference briefings. She reprimanded me for not joining her in the meetings as I opted to visit Auvers-Sur-Oise. She phoned me, and asked me to immediately return to Paris.

But on another occasion, she got bored with a plenary session and proposed to me that we go to Montmarte. And at Montmarte, she bought an attractive painting, though I discouraged her because of the cost, which she intended to give to her son. Not armed with enough cash, she had to withdraw money from the ATM, making her poorer by several hundred euros.

Maita is galante, even when she doesn’t have money. In Paris, she did not hesitate to spend. On my birthday, she and another friend, Rina, treated me to a splendid dinner at a high-end Parisian bistro.

But the best moment of the trip was about her encounter with a young and hip African musician donning loose, multi-colored trousers. They met while smoking outside the hotel premises. The man initiated the conversation, obviously interested in Maita. He even managed to get Maita’s room number, leading to his next question: “Would you like to have sex with me?”

Maita’s quick retort: “Hey, I could be your grandma.” Not disheartened, the musician said, “I like older women, and I honestly thought you are in your 30s.” That of course flattered the senior citizen Maita. Pressing on, the musician said, “you’ll like me because a young man doesn’t get tired having sex.”

To end the conversation, Maita curtly told the dude to back off because at her age, she no longer enjoys sex.

Be that as it may, the story only shows that in the eyes of the young generation, and even among strangers, Maita remains a beauty queen.