Ed de la Torre, balik-blogger

ONE OF the joys of blogging is EB, also known as eyeball: where complete strangers brought together by the ever growing blogosphere suddenly decide to meet up in the flesh.

This morning, I actually went through a reverse variant of EB, and the excitement, though hidden, is no less captivating: it is accidentally discovering an unknown blog of somebody you know.

An email from Edicio "Ed" de la Torre, who headed TESDA during the time of President Estrada and is now a kindred spirit in the Synergeia Foundation, greeted me. Ed is an active participant in our egroup, but I felt there was something odd in the message he sent in reply to Nene Guevara's email. When I took a closer look, it was this line in his email signature:

Weblog: http//edicio. wordpress. com

Curiously unhyperlinked, I immediately cut-and-pasted it into the address box of my Firefox browser, but it did not work; instead of bringing me to his weblog, Firefox took me to Wikipedia's entry on "http." After checking and fixing the URL twice (guess what I had to do?), I finally got it right.

And I liked best the following paragraphs from his second entry:

After I was released from prison in 1986, I would be introduced in conferences with a triple XXX: ex-prisoner, ex-priest, ex-rebel.

I must explain that I was ordained a Catholic priest in 1968. After a short stint of teaching in the seminary, I got deeply involved in the struggle of farmers for land reform, and linked up with students who were getting radicalized. When martial law was imposed in the Philippines in 1972, many of us joined the illegalized left-led resistance. I was arrested and imprisoned twice. Wasn’t very good at fighting in the underground. Didn’t learn about that in the seminary!

I look forward to more thoughtful entries from this balik-blogger.