Not my photograph, but I shared it on Facebook with this little-big note: “This is the one I said that is very terrifying – and very beautiful.” Not unlike the mushrooms of the atomic bombs that destroyed 2 Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Is Taal Volcano’s eruption PH’s coffee industry little-big atomic bomb?
Now, I dare you to see beauty in the 17 January news written by Melissa Luz Lopez of CNN Philippines: “Coffee Farms In Batangas, Cavite May Take 1.5 Years To Recover From Taal Eruption[1]”! Emphasizing the terrifying.
A pessimistic Rene Tongson, a Director of the Philippine Coffee Board, said coffee growers from Batangas and Cavite stand to lose around 5,000 metric tons of coffee and up to P1.2 billion based on the market price of roasted coffee.
An optimistic Secretary of Agriculture William Dar/Manong Willie said “coffee plantations can still be rejuvenated as branches can still be trimmed to generate new blooms.”
But Mr Tongson just kept seeing: “Taal's heavy ashfall blanketed coffee fields with thick ash just as the plants were beginning to bear flowers and berries.”
There are thousands of people who have volunteered their own kinds of assistances to the human survivors of Taal’s fury, but other than Manong Willie, no one that I have heard has volunteered to help rejuvenate the coffee trees now covered with volcanic ash.
Well, I Ilocano from Asingan, Pangasinan, am volunteering – see the photograph below? Above all the din, George Calvelo, photographer of much-beleaguered ABS-CBN, has come up with a beautiful picture as amidst the gray ash, red-hat, orange-shirt 57-year old cacao grower Koring shows the way out – rinsing ashfall from his coffee plants in Talisay, Batangas[2]:
See the magic on the left?
We all have troubles, but this time, it takes a humble, level-headed coffee grower of Talisay to show Batangueños how to think logically!
Emphasizing the beautiful. So, no, it will not take 1.5 years for coffee farms in Batangas and Cavite to recover – only 1.5 weeks to get the green out of the gray again.
Mr Tongson said:
Most of the leaves are actually covered with ashes… the coffee trees... cannot process photosynthesis...
So, Mr Tongson, follow the simple example of Koring!
Did I not say, “Color your world!”? Just wash off the ash and all the colors will show to cheer you up.
We all forgot water.
“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.”
― e.e. cummings
It's always our self we find in the sea.”
― e.e. cummings
We are in a sea of trouble right now, the water gray, not green, not blue. We are complaining about the water, not doing something about it!
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
― Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr Tongson, do not wait for justice to roll down like water – let us do ourselves justice and with our gray matter use water to wash off all the gray matter on those plants. Water out, gray out, green out. Then righteousness will roll down like a mighty stream!@517
[1]https://www.cnnphilippines.com/business/2020/1/17/Coffee-Batangas-Cavite-recovery-Taal.html?fbclid=IwAR24IKHwlAvWfAFw22COLYldFvDnL2ARji0-iXYdk1wpr2VPOwjn16vahEY
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