"Where will you stand up tomorrow?" I asked a friend of mine today in an e-mail.  I'll be in Delhi, he e-mailed back. "What about you?" Well, I'll be in the office, I replied. I'll be waiting for updates from national coalitions, writing breaking news reports, updating the web site and sending links to the media and to all who would care to know about how the various Stand Up and Speak Out events across Asia are turning out.

Up until I wrote this e-mail, I have not given any thought as to how I will be able to stand up or if I will be able to stand up at all given that I have work to do that requires me to stay inside the office. I simply did not think about it. I did not have a plan. What I thought about are the items in my ‘to do' list. What I have is a media plan. And I was only being flippant when I tossed the where-will-you-stand-up question to my friend. 

I got lost in the rush of preparations for this historic mobilization and found myself all at sea, floating among the flotsam and jetsam of email exchanges, urgent meetings and multitasking. It dawned on me that tomorrow millions of people will make history, even break a Guinness world record, while I hunch over my laptop.

I decided standing up does not become immaterial when one is part of the preparations. I decided standing up on October 17 is a decision one has to make for reasons political as well as personal.

I have my reasons. One of them is the boy who tried to sell me a candle and a prayer while I was visiting a cathedral during a trip in Cebu City. He was small, maybe about three years old, when his grubby fingers tugged at my shirt. Our eyes met but only for a split second. He was pushed aside when a throng of older children and grand mothers, all wielding candles, swooped down on me. I heard him wail before I saw him, hugging a nearby lamp post, inconsolable.  I have never felt so ashamed. I felt shame for feeling sorry for him, and shame for appearing stupid in front of people whose eyes closed in on me and who must have thought I should know better than to be ambushed by a bunch of hustlers.      

One of them is the emaciated, half-blind woman who knocked on my office one day asking if she can have one mattress for her family. We were distributing old, dirty mattresses, hand-me-down from a university, to people whose homes were buried under volcanic debris. The lot was intended for a group of beneficiaries when she walked in that day.  I was to tell her that but before I could open my mouth, she knelt in front of me, begging. They have nothing, she said, her six children are huddled inside a makeshift hut, all of them sick with diarrhea, and her husband, a fisher, has been missing at sea.

Tomorrow I will slip out of the office for a few minutes to stand up and be counted. I will stand up side by side with others to demand that change come soon to the sleeping bodies that crowd sidewalks in many parts of Asia, to the millions of families living with hunger and the stench of garbage and decay, to the women and children whose lives hang precariously on a balance that for them tomorrow is another lifetime. 

But I will stand up especially for the boy who learned to walk on a cathedral's grounds, amid the stench of burning candles and the hum produced by people praying in concert, and who, as soon as he was able to walk, got into the urgent business of trying to survive. I will stand up especially for the half-blind woman whose six children, starving and ill, waited for her at home one day and all she brought home was an old mattress.#   

lani villanueva