Posts tagged with fraternity
One day every November, the resident fellows convene before dawn at Quezon Hall for an annual frat pictorial ala class picture on the occasion of our anniversary. It has to be taken before half past six in the morning because any later than that and the sun would be high enough to wash out the background. We barely made it on time this year. I’ve been taking the photographs ever since I joined early in 2007.
Last Friday, as part of the month-long series of activities that the resident fellows of Upsilon Sigma Phi prepared for the fraternity’s 90th Anniversary, we held a joint medical and legal mission and free lunch for the members of the UP Manininda, the union of food vendors in campus, and their families.
The Friday before that, we held a fun relay race at the Palma Hall parking lot where teams of three bested each other by clocking in the fastest time in accomplishing a relay of tasks and obstacles.
Congratulations to my batchmates who organized the activities!
The Upsilon Sigma Phi, the oldest Greek-letter fraternity in Asia, is on its 90th year this year, and the resident fellows are celebrating it with a series of events and projects. Hope to see you in one of our activities!
At this time of the year when the country remembers the horrors and the atrocities of the Martial Law years imposed 26 years ago, my fraternity, the Upsilon Sigma Phi, traditionally gets some flak for, well, being the fraternity of the late dictator, Ferdinand Marcos and some of his alleged cronies and allies, from Roberto Benedicto to Estelito Mendoza to name some.
The standard way of neutralizing the flak is to invoke the memory of the traditional political opposition that fought the dictatorship, from the likes of Salvador “Doy” Laurel, Joker Arroyo to Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr.
Rarely is it done any other way. Today, let me take the opportunity to complicate the apparent contradictions further to invoke the memory of communist martyrs Merardo Arce and Melito Glor, martyred rebels, fraternity brothers all the same, who integrated with the masses and took the armed means of liberation, and from whose honor the names of the Southern Mindanao Regional Operations and the Southern Tagalog commands of the New People’s Army are named after.
Cliche as it may sound, we must always look at our present conditions without disposing of the lessons of the past. At times when basic conditions of widespread poverty and oppression persist, our remembrance must transcend mere commemoration, to a realization that perhaps the same roots that bore the resistance of the Marcos years, has only entrenched itself further and as such, creates similar tragic conditions and creates the need to sustain the struggle for genuine change.
Last Thursday, some of my brods and I went to Tarlac City in Tarlac to join the provincial government’s commemoration ceremony of Ninoy Aquino’s 25th death anniversary. We left UP pretty early and arrived at the province around nine in the morning. Before proceeding to the provincial capitol, we also passed by the municipal hall in Concepcion, Aquino’s hometown, and where he was once Mayor. At around ten, we arrived at Tarlac City to meet the governor, Victor Yap, who is another brod. The commemoration ceremony was held and I was even asked to give a spontaneous speech in front of all the elected provincial officials and employees. We went back to UP a little past lunch time.
That night, we held a memorial at the theater of College of Law, also in honor of Ninoy Aquino.
If the project I was handling with the frat wasn’t in honor of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr.’s 25th death anniversary, I would have begged off from the very beginning. All the stress and the qualms are nothing, after all, to the late senator’s martyrdom.
law student, leftist, national democratic, film school graduate, photography hobbyist