Dumaguete

Welcome to The Red Tree House.

[suspenseful music] Teresita Basa was born in nineteen twenty-nine in the city of Dumaguete, Philippines to parents Pedro and Socorro Basa, successful business owners who doted on their only child.

Growing up, it is said Teresita was smart and had a passion for music from the time she was young.

Teresita loved playing the piano and listening to her parents' vinyl records, and it started a lifelong obsession with music.

In nineteen sixty-five, Teresita was forced to move back to the Philippines after her work visa expired.

Edward visited from time to time, but ultimately, the relationship ended when Teresita's father Pedro discovered Edward at a local brothel.

For the next few years, Teresita taught piano in Dumaguete, though eventually she returned to the United States.

In nineteen seventy-one, when Teresita was forty-two years old, she moved to Chicago, Illinois with the help of the consulate and found an apartment on Mozart Street.

Monitoring stations exist across the country and data is published on the web and social media.

The Air Quality Index, AQI, used by EMB to measure air quality, is a tool used by regulatory bodies to relate air pollutant concentrations to health-based ambient air quality standards and communicating the information through color coding, as explained by War on Waste Negros Oriental and Gaia in their report on air quality monitoring in Dumaguete City, twenty twenty-five.

There are six levels of air quality, from green, meaning good, to yellow, fair, to different levels of horror, orange, red, purple and brown.

Brown means that the AQI value has crossed the three hundred one micrograms per cubic meter, microgram slash M three, of air threshold.

Wow.

And we have offices in San Diego, and Tijuana, and Portland, Oregon, and Sioux Falls, Bangalore, uh, Dumaguete, which is in the Philippines.

We've got offices all over the place, uh, which serves us pretty well because we're absolutely not an RTO company.

We're very much like a work from home kind of company.

It did not end there.

In November of 2023, the modern successor to that same office, now called the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, responded to a specific pastoral question from Bishop Julito Cortes of Dumaguete in the Philippines, who had written to Rome concerned about the rising number of the faithful in his diocese enrolled in Masonic lodges.

Approved personally by Pope Francis, the Dicastery's answer was direct.

Active membership in Freemasonry by a member of the faithful is forbidden because of the irreconcilability between Catholic doctrine and Freemasonry.

who is a painter.

Some of her paintings appear in pieces throughout that grainy video, as well as images of her home studio and her garden in Dumaguete City in the Philippines.

And in that garden, you see these terracotta statues, which were most of which were produced by Maria's uncle, also an artist and ceramicist, which takes us back to that clay as material, artistic material, and then the finished product on view there.

So the way that Maria engages with video, but also a lot of other material, has these connections to personal life, to lived experience.

But I'm actually coming from the Philippines at the moment.

I'm actually in Dumaguete which is one of the islands.

Oh my god, I have to tell you though, I woke up yesterday in a panic because I look at my phone and there's an alert so...

The phone, it's making this weird noise it's never made before.