MALAYBALAY CITY (MindaNews / 23 February) – Sometimes people do find connections with inanimate things, objects that have become an extension of their experience and existence.

In that part of my early youth as a human rights worker one of those things was the cork board that hung on the wall of our office, a space barely 25 square meters wide but held the anguished stories of individuals who were denied of [their] basic humanity in the name of national security during the martial law regime.

Never mind the paper flowers and other colorful attachments to it, that cork board was anything but a décor. It summarized the human rights situation in the province that was my initial area of coverage as documenter – Misamis Oriental (including Cagayan de Oro City).

Looking back, how I wished that board showed instead the team standing in the NBA or the PBA. But, no, the headings of the stats and the numbers across them were of the sanguinary kind – massacre, “salvaging” (summary execution), torture, enforced disappearance, arbitrary arrest and detention. The list was longer.

As a documenter, it was my task to update the figures on the board. I could memorize not just the numbers but also the names behind them, the way they were killed, tortured, abused. As for the political detainees, I could recite their cases, the dates of their arrest, the courts and judges, their lawyers.

What else?

But such a routine, along with the almost daily grind of interviewing victims and witnesses, tended to make me numb. Or maybe it was my mind telling me to detach from the incidents – no matter how brutal – as a coping mechanism.

After the 1986 Edsa People Power Revolt that toppled the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., there was a drastic drop in the number of human rights violations in Misamis Oriental and all over the country. For a long while I almost had nothing to do, and I sort of missed the adrenalin rush of those unlamented days.

Things, however, got bad again after the collapse of the short-lived ceasefire between the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front. The old cork board again felt my hand.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. H. Marcos C. Mordeno can be reached at boymords@mindanews.com.)