On Destiny

Mirriam T. Carreon 

Destiny. True Love. Soulmates.

Almost every night, the members of Gurong Pahinungód batch six would gather round outside the Pahinungód-Diliman office ruminating about the above topics as we passed around the communal bottle and little packets of junk food and nuts. As the night wore on and the drink worked off, the conversation may become alternately louder and drowsier, but the arguments remain strong and solid, although admittedly without any clear resolutions made. But getting answers was not the main point of the almost-daily get-together; what is important was that we did get together. Even if I myself rarely had the chance to join these gin rounds, I was happy that I even knew these people, that I was one of them. And I believe, with that fact, destiny played a hand.

Rewind to more than a year earlier. I was going down the 2nd floor AS stairs when I came across a poster for the Gurong Pahinungód program. I reached to get one of the green pamphlets available, and during the short walk from the AS lobby to the CASAA, I made a decision: I will sign up and join.

As I think about it now, I realize that it was very uncharacteristic of me to suddenly decide to become a GP volunteer. First of all, I had absolutely no previous affiliations with the Pahinungód, nor any volunteer organization for that matter. My life had mainly been running a pretty steady academic track; books and reports had kept me busy all throughout college, with the occasional barkada gimiks sprinkled in to keep my life from getting too boring. I even became a member of some school organizations to which I did apportion a lot of my time and energy, but my efforts were primarily due to one motivation: organizational association would look good on my resume. So that was that—and to simplify, my life was just all about me. I never had volunteer experience. I honestly never felt the drive to help other people. And donating my discarded clothes, books and toys every Christmas season was my most substantial form of social service.

I was actually about to continue along that direction. After graduation, I had planned to take up a master’s degree in Anthropology. It was not exactly that I was passionate about my course; it was simply working on the principle of inertia, wherein continuing my education seemed to be the easiest and most natural thing to do. But then, just at the beginning of my last semester for my undergrad course, something happened which my 19-year old self deemed to be the supreme tragedy—my boyfriend broke up with me because he fell in love with another girl. After that, I kept seeing them together all over the campus, all over each other, and I thought I just had to get away... to another island, preferably. And that was the backdrop for the day I read that green Pahinungód pamphlet.

Fast-forward a little bit. In a short span of time, I was accepted as Gurong Pahinungód volunteer (thankfully, despite of my lack of experience). I underwent the first half of the required Education units and then deployed to Katidtuan High School in North Cotabato to teach second and third-year English and second-year Social Studies. There I was, armed with a degree in Anthropology, a few units in Education, and the poorest motivation for volunteering, and during the first few weeks, I was a discouraged wreck. I had prepared the first few days’ worth of lessons in English and filled these with poems and stories that I had loved in high school, along with what I thought to be fun and creative motivational activities. But it didn’t take me long to realize that even my third year students could barely put together a passable grammatical English sentence, let alone appreciate a Shakesperian sonnet. But with that initial miscalculation, I learned to discard all my assumptions and forget saying “Ano ba ‘yan, bakit naman ganon?” For the meantime, I had to stop blaming their previous educational experience and the Philippine educational system in general, and start working with what I had—them.

I loved teaching my students. Most resided in Katidtuan and some in the nearby towns, with a few enduring about 30-45 minutes walk to school and another 30 minutes back home everyday. My GP partner, Fran, and I made it a point early on that we would make the long walk to school worth it for them. I could still visualize Fran conducting her Physics class with her and the students holding up umbrellas, because the thatched nipa roofing of the open classroom could barely keep out the pouring rain. She was the only teacher who persisted in continuing the classes because she didn’t want her students to go home without her teaching them something. Even with their delayed dismissal, miraculously, none of the students ever complained.

We found out that it was quite easy to please our students. They had been used to copying notes from the blackboard full of notes copied from a textbook, so they were quite surprised when there came two young (-looking) teachers concocting games and activities for virtually every lesson. For an English lesson on the rules of the subject-verb agreement, I had all of my students pretending they were lawyers, and they had to determine the grammatical validity of a particular sentence using the “laws” of SV agreement. For another lesson, my students had to pretend that they were detectives searching for written clues filled with prepositional phrases.

The list goes on and on. I had never been filled with so many ideas, and that was probably because I had never been so inspired. I do admit, however, that I had let them graduate from their English classes without having yet learned to write even the most basic paragraph without at least three revisions, but as an English teacher, I wanted them to feel that they are not stupid just because they cannot. With every lesson on adjectives and adverbs, there was always incorporation of values; and with values, we are not just talking about “po” and “opo” or the importance of practicing hygiene and all that, but the basic value of having self-respect, dignity, and the courage to stand up for one’s own right.

With that appealing situationer I had just supplied, there is no denying that there was still certainly the (tremendous) share of head and heartaches I experienced throughout my ten-month stay in Katidtuan. I navigated through the usual cases of wayward students, discouraging lesson results, frustrating school regulations and petty faculty quarrels. There was even a case of abuse of several boyscouts by a scout handler we thought as trustworthy (no, that handler is noT a GP). It is still an incident that I never think of without a disgusted grimace: firstly because of the gravity of the situation; secondly because we never expected it; and thirdly because it seems like we cannot do anything substantial about it. That was the feeling I felt so many times in Katidtuan—uselessness and powerlessness to handle a situation I had responsibility over.

There were certainly bad times when I stopped and asked myself, “What am I doing here anyway, trying to teach these kids?” But then I look at my students and there they are, sitting on their rickety, heavily vandalized, tetanus-inducing chairs, their shoes scruffy and slightly dusty with the daily effort of attending classes, looking up at me and trusting everything that I am saying, and I think, “Mirriam, why just now?”.

Destiny. I often reflected upon the events of my life that led me to my Katidtuan experience. If the ROTC had not started including females, then my ex-boyfriend would never have met his new girlfriend (he was an ROTC officer, and yes, she was a freshman cadette). If my boyfriend hadn’t met his new girlfriend then he would never have broken up with me (I think). If he hadn’t broken up with me, I would never have even considered leaving Metro Manila and signing up for Pahinungód at all. And if I had never seen that green pamphlet…

I’d like to think that things in my life so far had prepared me to be of service to others. I also like to think that I would continue on this journey throughout my entire life, God-willing. So however lousy my motivations were at first, I am still very thankful that I got started on volunteerism in the first place. The hand of destiny, after all, could take many forms, even lousy ones.

One of destiny’s forms for the initiation of the Pahinungód was a newspaper article entitled, “Has U.P. Lost Its Soul?” The question some may ask now is, well, “Has U.P. now regained its soul?” That question may be too complex and politically embedded for an ordinary person like me to answer. But one fact rings true, and it is this: because of the Pahinungód and my students in Katidtuan High School, I have found my own.

Mirriam is a volunteer of Gurong Pahinungod Program in UP Diliman. She belonged to the sixth batch of Gurong Pahinungod.