Painting by Tiffany Aldridge
News room was crowded and popping as usual. Before I started asking questions of this new guest we had named Benito, I saw a man playing a drum. Drumming in my mind automatically reminds me of the root of music with indigenous people. I know this because as a graduate out of the Africana studies department I studied music relating to Africa. I learned people in Africa used the drum as a means of communication and expression without words, and sometimes the women would dance and move to touch the earth mentally and physically.
The guest known as Benito had already attracted everybody spiritually when I saw him playing on his drum. When it was his turn to talk about his story he talked about being a first generation Filipino-American in 1950. HIs last name was senator, and his family destined him to become a lawyer. He expressed how he learned how to meditate because he was always forced to stare at the wall when he got in trouble in school. Then when he didn't own up to his parents dreams in 1971 he decided to do dance theatre at SFSU with an emphasis in creative arts.
He came from doing gigs around the bay area to working for the San Francisco Unified School District working with children that have been diagnosed with ADD. He has worked at Philip Burton high school since 1999. He expressed how he is the only one who can get to the kids because of his skills with a drum. The hardest kids that supposedly never listen light up when Benito has a drum circle every week, and invites everybody. Even if you are in a wheelchair or if you are deaf, he wants everybody to come to the drum circle. The other teachers are amazed because all of the children behave (even the one's they usually cannot control). Benito came outside the box. He is bringing children back to the indigenous way of healing and fun. He said the children got heart and everyone has to release in a positive voice. He feels he is the spokesperson for people who cannot speak. He feels that he could leave (die) right now and still be blessed. He loves to use his drum to make a connection. Not rainy whether or anything else will ever make him stop.
Despite this story the real experience he wanted to talk about was how he got attacked by skin heads. There were a couple of white men in a car, and they stopped for him. Not knowing these people were racist they ran him over as soon as he walked the crosswalk. He flew out into the street, and to this day he doesn't know what happened until he woke up in the hospital. He couldn't move and now after hella physical therapy, he wakes up around four o'clock in the morning straightening out his spine, because he refused to get surgery after the incident.
Last but not least he was really at news room to advocate for his housing. So, this article became three stories in one. What I admired about Benito was that he did not talk about his tragic experience of getting forced to leave his home, but he talked about his experience with children and the drum.
Under the Ellis Act, Benito has been given an eviction notice. POOR magazine is filing a law suit against his landlords and he is thankful. He said he does not have a second plan on where to live but he was still smiling no matter what. At the end of this magical story about him he lead a drum circle with a prayer and closed the whole news room down. People were touched by his drum and his beat, along with his ability to talk to Mother Earth.