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Kids Korea

Text and Photos by Cecille Santillan-Visto

WHEN TRAVELING with kids overseas, there are three main factors to consider — enough interesting sites to visit and stimulating activities to indulge in; the convenience of getting around; and safety. But as children live in the same fast-paced technological world as adults do, high-speed Internet connection may well be the fourth consideration.

Tomorrow, according to today’s youth

By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman

A better tomorrow should start at home. In the Philippines, many young Filipino designers, students, and environmentalists are into recycling and upcycling (the process of turning trash into treasure) and consciously creating livable spaces for tomorrow.

Record producer’s music A-Z: Madagascan royalty to dead racehorses

LONDON — A is for “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” a jazz classic partly written by a Madagascan royal; G is for “Greenville,” a Lucinda Williams country putdown redolent of 20th-century Russian Acmeist poetry.

What to see this week

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Crows Explode

THE THIRD FILM in a series based on Hiroshi Takahashi’s Crows manga series from the 1990s, Crows Explodes begins one month after the action of Crows Zero II ends. New fights begin to see who will climb to the top at Suzuran High School. Meanwhile, a battle against nearby Kurosaki Industrial High School begins. Directed by Toshiaki Toyoda (the first two films were directed by Takashi Miike), it stars Masahiro Higashide and Taichi Saotome. The Japan Times’ Mark Schilling writes: “like so many commercial films based on long-running manga, Crows Explode crams in as many characters from the original as possible… As well liked as they are by fans, the subplots involving them at times contribute more distracting static than narrative depth, while their back stories remain sketchy to non-fans.”
MTRCB Rating: R-13

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Everyday I Love You
A STAR CINEMA film directed by Mae Czarina Cruz and starring Liza Soberano, Gerald Anderson, Enrique Gil, this film has a very While You Were Sleeping-esque plot — a young woman waiting for the love of her life to wake up from a coma, meets another man she ends up falling for.
MTRCB Rating: G

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Revenge Of The Green Dragons
TWO BROTHERS who survive the New York of the 1980s by joining Chinatown gang The Green Dragons, quickly rise up the ranks. An ill-fated love affair pits brother against brother, and looking for revenge on the gang who made him who he is. Directed by Andrew Loo, the film stars Ray Liotta, Justin Chon, Shuya Chang, and Harry Shum, Jr. “This crime drama wants to be a Chinese-American Goodfellas, but it ends up just looking bad,” writes Jordan Hoffman of the New York Daily News.
MTRCB Rating: R-18

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The Professional (a.k.a. Momentum)
A PROFESSIONAL thief on a routine heist quickly finds herself mixed up in a government conspiracy and entangled in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with a master assassin and his team of killers. Directed by Stephen Campanelli, it stars Olga Kurylenko, Morgan Freeman, and James Purefoy. “Momentum is a spectacularly generic action-thriller that, despite its sleekly shot and edited mayhem, lands with a giant thud,” writes Gary Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times.
MTRCB Rating: R-16

 


Crocs rest with one eye open for threats: Australian researchers

SYDNEY — Saltwater crocodiles can rest with one eye open to watch for threats, Australian scientists said last week, with further research likely to show half of the mammal’s brain could be conscious even while asleep.

The scientists found that crocodiles — like birds, their closest living relatives — engaged in “unilateral eye closure” during hostile situations.

“Birds like to sleep like humans, with both eyes closed, but when they feel threatened they’ll have one eye open and they’ll orientate that eye towards the threat,” lead author Michael Kelly of La Trobe University told AFP.

“And the crocodiles were behaving in this way as well.

So most of the time when they were resting, they’ll have both eyes closed, but then when we present them with a threat, they would open one eye and they’ll keep that eye orientated towards the threat.”

The study, which was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, was conducted using three young saltwater crocodiles placed in separate tanks and observed individually over 12 months last year.

Mr. Kelly said further research was needed to monitor crocodiles’ brain waves to see if the creatures also sleep with half of their brain shut down — called “uni-hemispheric sleep.”

The study that could eventually reveal that the human behavior of sleeping with the brain totally unconscious is rare in the animal kingdom.

Birds and some marine mammals can control whether they have both halves of their brains or just one half shut down when they are sleeping, with the open eye connected to the grey matter that is awake.

“I think this could possibly change the way humans think about sleep… which is a complete shutdown of the brain, where we’re unaware of our surroundings,” Mr. Kelly said.

“So if we did find that the crocodiles and other reptiles that we know engage in unilateral eye closure are actually sleeping uni-hemispherically also, what that might suggest is that the way humans sleep is an evolutionary novelty rather than the other way around.”

Saltwater crocodiles, which can grow up to seven meters (23 feet) long and weigh more than a ton, are mostly found in northern Australia. They are also native to India, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and some other Pacific islands. — AFP

Your weekend guide (October 30)

EVENTS

Media Sync Production and the Korean Cultural Center present the K-Pop Fest 2015 on Oct. 31, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Marriott Grand Ballroom Manila, featuring Korean pop group Teen Top.

Families considering themselves Mahirap

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Rating the ease of doing business in the Philippines

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Philippine imports’ performance, August 2015

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Measuring the Megacity

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Philippine economic performance under different administrations

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[PHOTO ESSAY] Trafficked in the Land of the Free

Trafficked in the
Land of the Free

by Santiago J. Arnaiz

Eleonor Ramos couldn’t sleep at all that night.
The sound of sirens was keeping her up.
Somewhere outside, a police car was approaching.
Cold sweat dripping down her neck, she sat motionless.
They were coming for her. She knew it.

In another part of the room sat a pair of eviction letters. Her employers
were supposed to have paid the rent. They docked her wages $150 for
it every two weeks. The sirens grew louder. It had been three days
since the water and electricity had been cut, and all the food in the
refrigerator had spoiled.

Ramos shifted slowly, careful not to make a noise. Against the wall,
she could see the subtle rise and fall of her husband’s silhouette, lying
prone on the bed bug-ridden mattress they shared. She couldn’t see
his face, but she knew he was awake. Their two co-workers in the
room next door must have been awake, too. None of them slept. How
could they, with the constant fear of arrest and deportation hanging
over them. She held her breath, afraid to make a sound.

The sirens passed.

She waited for the silence to set in again before letting out a sob.
Ramos thought of her three children waiting for her back in the
Philippines, how she had promised to visit them every year. She
thought about the crippling debt that waited for her as well – how,
after more than six months working for her current employers, she
and her husband were barely making enough money to survive, much
less pay it back. They had sacrificed so much to get here, to this
dingy apartment they shared with two strangers.

“Sometimes, you can’t help but be pushed to tears thinking
about what you’ve experienced.”

The Ramoses were working for a group called HCMS, a
staffing company that had them cleaning a hotel in Bossier
City, Louisiana.

Their employers had hidden the fact that they failed to
renew their workers’ required work visas. But even after the
Ramoses found out, there was nothing they could do. In the
eyes of the law, they were illegally employed and shouldn’t
have been working in America.
But if they stopped working, their employers had threatened
to have them arrested and deported.
They were trapped.

In 2009, she came to America in the hopes of finding work as a seasonal laborer. Following her husband Ferdinand, who left for America in 2007, she had planned to stay in the United States for no more than three years, working wherever she could to make enough money to get her children back home through school.

She and her husband had applied through the H2B visa program, a program designed for temporary workers doing seasonal, non-agricultural jobs in the U.S. At the time, their only focus was getting to America and providing their family a better life.

They had no idea they had just sold themselves into the modern slave trade.

Eleonor Ramos is a full-time nanny, employed by a family in Brooklyn.

It’s a scenario that plays out every day around the world.
According to a report published in 2012 by the International
Labor Organization, there were a recorded 18.7 million victims
of human trafficking in the world who, like the Ramoses, were
trapped in jobs from which they could not leave.

According to Song Kim, a lawyer with the Asian American Legal
Defense Fund, migrant workers like the Ramoses are especially
vulnerable to abusive employers.

“As soon as they come to the U.S., now they’re isolated,” Kim said. “They
don’t have any social contacts. They don’t speak the language. They don’t
know anything about the laws. And so they are now primed to be exploited.”

“Sometimes we’d bump into
police and we’d be terrified,”
Ramos said.

“We were terrified that we’d be
approached by police and end
up in jail.”

Today, nearly a decade since their journey began,
Eleonor and Ferdinand Ramos have found a measure
of peace living in Woodside, a Queens neighborhood
home to a stretch of Filipino establishments called
Little Manila. After escaping their traffickers and flying
to New York City, the Ramoses began the arduous
process of securing legal status in the U.S.

On Oct 29, 2015, after a year of filing and
investigations, poring over receipts and
documents she had meticulously
organized over the years, Eleonor Ramos
was finally granted a T-Visa, awarding
her, her husband and their children
permission to live and work in America.

Trina and Troy, the couple’s two youngest children, live with
them in Woodside, studying at The International High School at
LaGuardia Community College. Their eldest, Trixia, just finished
her university studies in the Philippines earlier this month.

Ramos went home to attend the graduation, saying she had
already missed so many of her children’s milestones, trading
those memories with them for a chance of a better future for
them.

On April 18, Trixia Ramos
flew with her mother back
to New York – their family
reunited and living
together for the first time
in almost ten years.

At home, the Ramos family was welcomed back by
friends from Damayan, a grassroots community
group of Filipino migrant workers. Like Eleonor and
Ferdinand, these women were all survivors of
labor trafficking.

Since 2011, Damayan has helped over three
dozen trafficking survivors escape their dire
situations, find legal and social services and
reunite with their families. As big an
accomplishment as that is, it’s still an ongoing
struggle. According to Rose Alovera, a board
member at Damayan, the association handles
anywhere from 30 to 40 trafficking cases at any
given time.

Despite all she’s suffered, Ramos said that had she
known the actual risks she was facing back in 2009,
she would have still chosen to find work in America.

“I needed to work,” she said. “I needed to provide for
my family.”

But, knowing what she knows now, she’d be more
careful and more vigilant.

“I wouldn’t make the same mistakes.”

“I’d be more bold in fighting for my rights,” she said.
“Now that I have more experience, I know the rules
involved in going to work abroad.”