Sustainable, Sort Of
Out with the (visible) supercars and in with the solar-powered vineyards. Here’s how to brag about your lifestyle—the 2021 way
Being sustainable doesn’t mean having to take the shine off your gilded lifestyle, make fewer extravagant purchases or even travel the globe any less. With so much scrutiny these days, ensure your environmental virtue-signalling stays on point and greenwash your consumerist indiscretions by adopting a new kind of status symbol—one that makes you impervious to criticism.
TREE BROKERS
As millennials swooned over potted houseplants during lockdown, the true horticultural connoisseurs set their sights on entire trees. Up sprouted an entire industry of tree brokers, promising to furnish clients’ estates with “trophy trees” from anywhere in the world. Just point your finger at that perfectly balanced, mature monkey puzzle tree you saw on your travels around South America and it won’t be long before it shows up on the back of a lorry. Tree-planting is all the rage among billionaires, don’t you know?
HEALTH MUTT
Plant-based eating has boomed in recent years and leading a vegan lifestyle is an excellent way to smokescreen less sustainable habits like international jet-setting and weekends spent indulging in Colombia’s finest exports. However, the latest in-thing is keeping pets that don’t eat animal products. Racing champion Lewis Hamilton’s bulldog Roscoe has been vegan for more than two years, for example, and singer Moby is among a group of prominent vegans lobbying for all dogs in Los Angeles animal shelters to be fed a vegan diet. There’s evidence that dogs—natural scavengers—can thrive as vegans, but cats, who have evolved as carnivores, miss out on necessary nutrients without meat. Who cares if your Tibetan mastiff was bred in Mongolia, lives in its own airconditioned wing of the mansion, has flown around the world several times on your private jet and has its own limo … it’s vegan! You’re doing your bit.
A TOAST TO YOU
Owning a sustainable vineyard is a new way to tout your eco credentials while still making money, occupying an enviable position within a luxury industry, and getting other people to do most of the hard work. Just bounce around a few words like “regenerative”, “biodynamic” and “permaculture” and that eco-halo is yours. Head to your luxury real estate auctioneers to find organic and solar-powered vineyards for sale across southern France and Italy.
IT’S NOT A HOLIDAY, HONEST
Posting pictures from the top deck of a floating city isn’t the best look as the world burns. Recognising that even high-networth individuals may be acquiring a scrap of conscience in the era of Greta Thunberg, the travel industry has come up with a novel way of marketing round-the-world cruises. Selling tickets for “expeditions” simultaneously inflates guests’ sense of self-importance while legitimising one of the world’s most polluting industries. So what if there’s little basis for research? One seafaring excursion planned for next year—US$113K per ticket—is marketed as the “first expedition world cruise in history”. Asking how these explorers will be contributing to the advancement the world’s scientific understanding would be nitpicking, of course. Instead, the journey is billed as “the first designed to host the pioneers of beauty, guests who want to see the world raw and unfiltered, unafraid of its purest form”. Intrepid!
NOTHING TO SEE HERE
Privacy is the ultimate privilege, and you can now either pay to have your home blocked on Google Street View or buy a property within a gated community that comes with that level of secrecy. If people can’t see your multiple pools, fire pit, exotic-animal zoo and enormous fleet of supercars, then they practically don’t exist and you can’t be criticised for them. When in doubt, scribble it out.
The idea was just to do simple volunteer work: recruit student volunteers and visit hospitals once a week. But opportunities began to open, and donations started to come in. “Oh dear, we must account for these,” reacted Girlie Garcia (now Lorenzo), co-founder of Kythe, the erstwhile volunteer group-turned-full blown non-profit.
She asked her father, the late Atty Ramon P Garcia of the Philippine Stock Exchange and Meralco, for guidance. “He told me to run it like a corporation but maintain the heart of a NGO,” she recalled.
Lorenzo started Kythe in 1992 together with fellow student Icar Castro. They were both taking up their master’s degree in psychology at the Ateneo de Manila and through their coursework, experienced their first interaction with paediatric cancer patients. They visited hospitals and spent time with these children, which did a lot of good not only for the patients but their families as well. They named their group Kythe, a Scottish word that means “to manifest oneself thru simple sharing and togetherness”, which they picked up from an article of Fr Joseph Galdon, SJ. “Later on, we came across a book about it which says that angels communicate thru kything, no words needed,” Lorenzo adds.
By next year in 2022, 30 years would have passed. Time has shaped Kythe into a well-run, established foundation composed of trained professionals providing psychosocial support to over 18,000 children with cancer and other chronic illnesses and their families. Through the years, it can count 1,200 (and growing) volunteers and eight affiliate hospitals (soon to be nine).
Kythe is the only foundation in the Philippines that offers the American programme, Child Life Services (CLS), and is certified by the Association of Child Life Specialists in the US. The programme, Lorenzo explains, can be encapsulated in the acronym PETALS: Play with the children, Educate them about their medical condition, Tend to the emotional needs of their family, Assist the child during medical procedures especially if it is an
invasive one, Lend financial and medical support, Support parental involvement to empower the parents.
Lorenzo was the first to earn a certification after completing her Child Life internships at the University of California San Francisco Hospital. Two followed in her footsteps: Dr Angie Siebert-Fernandez and Ninin Sumpaico-Jose.
Clocking 17 years of service now in Kythe, having started when she was still in college, Jose is considered the longest-staying staff. Currently taking up her doctorate at De La Salle University, she was certified as a CLS in 2017 after over a year of online schooling. “You could say I have been lucky to have found out early on what I wanted to do in life,” Jose says about her first and only job so far. Not that she hasn’t received other job offers. “I never seriously entertained other opportunities that came my way although I did consider those which can bring in Kythe into the schedule,” she explains.
Lorenzo does not see Kythe as the end of the line for professionals like Jose. In fact, she believes the career path is going to be brighter because of the passage of the National Integrated Cancer Control Act (NICCA), principally authored by former Sen JV Ejercito, which requires government and private hospitals to provide psycho-social child life services if they have paediatric cancer patients. “We are expecting a demand for training of hospital personnel in the CLS programme. Today, we are the only certified group to do this in the country. There may be other groups certified soon but Kythe can already lay claim to 30 years of experience,” she says.
Kythe has also received requests from foreign students to train with them, an activity it has started to do before the pandemic hit. Lorenzo sees this resuming once the situation is deemed safe.
Because of this expected increase in local demand for CLS trainers, recruitment is top priority now for Lorenzo. “We have to increase our pool of trainers,” she says, as she searches in schools and among practicing psychologists.
In the hospitals, Kythe trains clinical psychologists, nurses, social workers, midwives and other organic personnel which may be assigned by management to go into training. “These medical institutions, Lorenzo says, are just more than glad for their staff to learn CLS. “When a child can comply with medical procedures, he gets well faster and is discharged earlier; and the room can be used again for the next patient. In the lab, instead of spending say an hour for a procedure because the child is crying, Kythe prepares the child to stay still; and so, the hospitals can service more patients. CLS addresses basic economics,” she elaborates.
Preparing the child, Lorenzo adds, involves the use of metaphors. “For an X-ray procedure, we liken it to taking a picture so the child must stay still. For a chemo, we created a character, Kapitan Chemo, who is shaped like a syringe, who is there to help and not to hurt. Of course, we do not say chemo will not hurt but we tell the children it will not hurt as much if they keep their hands steady,” she explains.
Anyone who has undergone a Kythe experience will be touched, for sure. The award-winning director Brillante Mendoza, for one, got to know the children and did a film about them. To immerse himself he visited the children in the hospitals quite often and even did a puppet show for them.
“Once you get to know Kythe, you will fall in love with Kythe,” Lorenzo quotes a volunteer. Beautifully put, with living proof in the staff and volunteers who have stayed on and on to make life more bearable and death more beautiful for these young angels.