Pure Patience

It’s been a little less than a week since I arrived at Batangas Port. The things I carried were heavy. Three thick manuals on ESL, my trustee MacBook, three sets of clothes that I stretched to last me seven days and a gallon of wild honey from the Mangyans. The walk from the boat to the bus station was a good thirty-minute stretch of pier. Passengers seem like an exodus of sorts with their boxes, baggage with wheels and without, with children, a man had traveled with a chuaua, with goats, the commuters were all silently saying goodbye to the calm Batangas sea and bracing ourselves for the next journeys on land.

Up till now, I couldn’t get over the past seven days I spent in San Jose with Mangyan teachers raring to brace for another year teaching their Mangyan students at PAMANA KA, a school set up by five tribes in Mindoro Occidental with assistance from the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. They start school Septembers after the planting season.

I shared with them a communicative technique on teaching English as second language which was a more effective way to teach English to Mangyan students since as it is, English was the Mangyan’s fourth language. It was also better for me as teacher because the technique I used did not need to push the acquisition of the American culture thereby safe guarding the cultural heritage that the Mangyan were committed to develop and strengthen.

It was my second time to go there. We used the Mangyan Health Center at San Jose as our seminar area. The seminar hall was a kubo fit for 12 to 15 participants, very much like the small nipa huts that pansol resorts use for bakasyonistas to have their lunches and miriendas. But in our kubo, we had a blackboard and my Macbook, Mulder sat on bamboo slits that provided extra ventilation.

Less than ten meters in front of the kubo stairs was the Health Center open kitchen where our food was cooked using firewood. You could just imagine how our workshop looked like by ten am when the kitchen was getting ready to feed everybody in the health center.

Ice breakers were easy because we would just go out of the kubo and we would do energizers under a big tree beside the chickens, dogs and a pig pen. There were no mosquitoes in the seminar area, maybe due to the daily smoke from the open kitchen. If I were a mango tree, I would have been flowering by now.

And children were always around. The oldest child spectator of the training was seven years old while the youngest was just a few months old. They were always loitering about especially when it’s snack time. They earned their snacks since they became the students for the practicum session of the participants. It was such an exhilarating session looking at my participants teach the children that were most of the time half dressed and soiled all throughout the day from playing. The practicum ended and still the children were singing “heads, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes…”

The experience has been overwhelming till today because I haven’t snapped into the Matrix again just yet. The teachers that I taught were on an urgent mission to educate their tribes, empowering them to save the ancestral domain and their heritage from miners who were out to destroy ecosystems just to feed the needs of brutally industrial tribes. The teachers had to adapt the lesson plans towards the themes of the Sacred Planet so that they can protect the tribal heritage that illegal loggers with their cold big chain saws did not care about. The teachers had to overcome their weaknesses in their grammar and spelling so that the Mangyan future generations can still be heir to the pure spirits of the land their ancestors valued and revered. They had to protect their land and way of life, away from foreigners like me who ate at McDonalds, is electricity dependent, bought bottled water, stressed herself out just to accumulate wealth, employed ridiculous angst’s just to write a poem, and used the internet 20 hours a day.

If I were Hemingway I would have been drunk by now but I’m not and even if I do drink myself drunk this very moment, I still, would not be Hemingway. I would still be Jenny, a full bloodied Chinese, naturalized Filipino citizen who is willing to die for this country… almost died for this country.

Good thing I don’t have a car. The convenience of a car might just drive me further away from the Sacred Planet. But then again, I don’t need a car. I’ve been a telecommuter and a freelance writer for the past years. Why should I give up MRT LRT Services when its now gender segregated. So, should I give up my MacBook?, my cellphone?, my Hemingway collection, my ATM card, my Solingen cooking set? my Toy Poodle Poochie!!! Something breaks my heart and I cannot understand why I have this urge to cry. The moon is not full anymore and still I cannot shake off memories of San Jose from haunting me. Barang naba ito?

I am sure that a part of me wants to go back to San Jose and become full time missionary of sorts, help them out with mapping out the Ancestral Domain, I was, afterall and Engineer, while a part of me needed to make sure my own children do not get swallowed by the playstations and computer games alive. Wisdom whispers that there will be a time for everything and patience is a pure virtue. Meantime, I have to get back to the Matrix, meet stressful deadlines, continue being wife and mother and homekeeper, bring out the biodegradables during weekdays and non-biodegradables during weekends, watch the news and pretend it has something new to share, finish the novels half read, finish the books half written, and bear out the noise, pollution and insanity of the forest I docked into after a twelve hour boat ride from San Jose,
Mindoro Occidental where the last two Tamaraws struggle against its forthcoming extinction. So help me Sacred Planet!

August 2007