A rocking visionary

Barring typhoons and other acts of God, Gang Badoy blocks off Wednesdays for the cause closest to her heart. With a volunteer at the wheel and two more beside her, we barrel down the SLEX, running late for her creative writing workshop for inmates in Muntinlupa. She gathers our ID’s at the main gate of this maximum-security prison and leads the way to two security checks with a 14-megawatt smile. Past the last door, Little Miss Sunshine proceeds to wave at inmates like long-lost friends down the main prison walkway. Escorted by a young man convicted for his role in a famous frat rumble, Gang walks into a classroom where bookshelves groan under the weight of books donated by her friends and sympathizers. The class is waiting. “Sorry to be late. I make too many appointments," she says. How can they not forgive Gang? Besides the books and lessons, she’s brought them rock bands. Once she even brought video cameras to a concert and did a documentary of a special moment in their prison life. Last week a visiting expat cyber engineer took them on a virtual tour of the Netherlands. Still savoring that, they sat expecting the new whiff of the outside world Gang was bringing to their routine of un-freedom.

Introducing her guest of the day (me), she engages the class in a conversation on writing before getting to the meat of the lesson: “I was thinking about freedom and movement. My space is different from yours but freedom is not defined by space. Freedom is how we use our time," she says. “Everyone’s a storyteller. When the ancients mapped the sky and gave names to groups of stars, they changed the view of the sky. The stars in our personal sky are fixed but we can change how we view them." Everyone listens raptly as Gang moves to the coup de grace: “I really like the Tagalog word for ‘conversion’ –balik loob. No need for change. We just return to our good side. In this class, we want to learn to forgive ourselves." Then she invites me to ask what they’re learning in her class. “Poetry and creativity," says one. “Imagination," says another. “She’s a bridge," declares a third. “She’s the best thing that happened to us," says a fourth. “Gang teaches us how to love," was the fifth fervent declaration. With that, a roomful of inmates turns radiant with fellow feeling. How did Gang come to this? Born a four-pound preemie, she started life as a special child to Judge Anacleto Badoy and the English literature teacher Pura Tianco. Baptized “Therese," they nicknamed her “Gang"- short for “palangga," Ilonggo for “beloved", the indulged youngest of ten siblings. She grew into “an inattentive, irreverent student" curious about the world but bored stiff in classrooms. She went from “St. Scho for grade school, Assumption for high school and UP Diliman for Industrial Engineering but wound up in art history." Meanwhile only rock ‘n roll pumped blood in the veins of a child born two decades after Bill Haley. But Gang was too bright not to discover alternative learning. She learned about apartheid from the Beatles’ song ‘Blackbird.’ She first heard of desaparecidos in ‘They Dance Alone,’ Sting’s elegy for the widows of Chile. Bono with his spiritual protest lyrics became a third guru. Oh, she belonged under their banner! Gravitating to media after college, she landed an ABS-CBN assignment to interview a hundred Filipinos in America for the Philippine Centennial Celebration in ’98. Exciting at first, eighteen interviews with Fil Ams considered successes saw her attention wandering to “ordinary Filipinos" struggling for survival. The network wasn’t interested in such stories. So she quit and lived on odd jobs until a lucky break at WTHR-NBC’s Eyewitness News in Indianapolis. Starting as an intern, she worked her way up to desk editor. That took care of her work visa. In six years she had a condo, a BMW and an Italian fiancé. But still restless, she woke up terrified one morning. “Is this it?" she asked. “Go back to Day One of your arrival," advised her long-standing best friend, the young Jesuit priest Joey Fermin. Gang returned to the first entry in her travel diary and read: “I’m leaving RP so I can come back braver." But what did palangga have to be brave for? An older brother handed her the next piece of her puzzle, “Magaling ka sana pero wala kang schedule," a brilliant, aimless drifter. She had to admit: The only time she ever “got schedule" was when faced with the challenge of teamwork and “manning a post" as a member of the UP Diliman varsity volleyball team who went on to the National Youth Team. At 33, Gang was back to a Philippines in an uproar over ‘Hello, Garci.’ Gravitating to the first protest rally in Makati, she bumped into old friends and wound up in a huddle on how to spread the word. Before long, they applauded her idea of “small wake-up rallies" in schools. This veteran of boring campus symposia knew just how to reach the sheltered, indifferent young – rock ‘em! A born leader had found her constituency. Rock Ed was born in July 2005 – a 10-year program to “rock society through alternative education with the help of celebrities, musicians, poets, artists, entrepreneurs, writers et al" in a weekly radio program anchored by Gang and poet Lourd de Veyra. With her stellar gift of attracting kindred spirits, Rock Ed’s success turned Gang into a youth icon whose theme mutated to “Rock the Rehas" for prisons and “Rock the Riles" concerts to raise public awareness in MRT stations. It’s all a harvest of her certitude in the “revolutionary energy of rock." Directing the youthful passion of young Filipinos to the UN vision of full human development in the Millennium Goals is what it’s all about for her today. But run by volunteer power, Rock Ed began expanding to the provinces only this year. Meanwhile, she’s set to phase out by 2015, handing over its directorship to young Pepe Diokno, a prizewinning filmmaker and grandson of the late Ka Pepe. "We’ve planted the seeds. It’s the turn of the young, " she says at 39. Last March she married Jay Capati, a Fil Am cyber techie happy to let his bride follow her vision. They’ve organized an events management outfit to continue funding Rock Ed as she proceeds with “manning my post," whatever it next turns out to be. - HS, GMANews.TV (Disclosure: Gang Badoy hosted an election show for youth called E-gig on this web site)