Life abroad without Yaya

MANILA, Philippines - I sat with 22-year-old Miko Alejandro at a barbecue at my brother’s house last night and caught up with him on his college life away from home. Miko is a golf scholar at the New Mexico State University in the US and is several months shy of graduation. He is a multi-awarded golfer on the US college circuit and has been named most outstanding men’s golfer in his senior season. Home for the holidays, he spoke about what he truly misses.

 “Family — always the family,” he said. “My family is here so in the beginning that was the hardest thing.” The pangs of homesickness are fewer now, and less intense but, he admits, “It used to be really bad.” He heaved a sigh then and grew pensive, shifting his gaze to the floor. I felt the weight of what he must have gone through in those initial years of adjustment. It has been four years away, so naturally, time has taken the edge off the loneliness; but it doesn’t mean it isn’t there anymore.

 “The loneliness there can get to you,” he explained. “Here, there’s always something happening.  Almost every night you get calls or texts saying where the action is and when you get home there’s food, your room is fixed. You’re spoiled here. But there, you do everything.”  He wasn’t whining when he told me this — far from it. He actually looked amused, as far as I could gather from his tone and the grin on his face, a grin to that seemed to communicate: Hey, I lived to tell.

 All of a sudden, the Miko I had known some 15 years ago was no longer there, and as I watched him dance the night away, I saw a grown-up letting loose via the salsa.

 I remember being away at college. Self-sufficiency is a learned skill. My Pinoy male friends — either at school with me or in the neighboring colleges — operated on a curious system with regard to housework. It was called the tiisan system: whoever got grossed out first, cleaned up the place. If you cracked, you became the maid or manservant. You can imagine the state of those Pinoy males’ dorm rooms and apartments: dirty dishes stacked sky high in the sink, orange gloops of canned spaghetti sauce caked and fossilized on a few; bits of black gunk hanging over the edge of some; and globs of deep green mossy substance sprouting on others. Spoons and forks with missing or bent tines littered the kitchen counter, some eaten by rust, the rest just screaming to be scrubbed clean.

 Asked how they managed to live in such filth, the boys simply said: “Easy, just pretend it’s not there.”

 I asked one of them what they did for eating utensils come mealtime, which happens three times a day, give or take, for normal human beings. He ran into his bedroom to retrieve something: a pack of disposable utensils that he kept under lock and key.

 I asked him, “Why don’t you just chuck out all that Chernobyl nuclear fallout stuff in your sink to eliminate the gross factor in this sty?”

 “Too much trouble,” he answered. “If it bothers you so much, you do it.” He thought he could con me into it. I didn’t bite, though.

 “You couldn’t pay me to do that,” I said, and that was that. Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to that mountain of dishes. Hmmm…

 My sister-in-law, Marlyn, who earned her master’s degree at a Boston university, tells of a male friend who was studying nearby. He apparently kept a clean place and was diligent about chores. Housekeeping wasn’t his problem — budget was. So although he washed his dishes after every use, he soaped only the top part to save on detergent, arguing that since he didn’t have the habit of stacking his dishes, the unused side stayed untouched. Sort of makes sense, I told her.

 A friend, Jon, who shared a house with a male cousin who happened to be endowed with thick facial hair, complained to me, “You should see our sink after he shaves. There are these little black specks all over that look like… like… iron shavings. It takes one second to turn that faucet on and douse the sink with water to wash them away. But no, it’s too much trouble. So, guess who cleans up?”

 One time, I was visiting a friend’s apartment. I remember it was a sunny day at the tail end of winter and sunlight streamed through the glass doors of his living room illuminating even the darkest corners. I noticed as I sat down these little clumps of white fuzz, which looked like balls of cotton candy — something like dandelions — intertwined with strands of hair or carpet fiber. Most of them were on the floor, while some were freely floating around. “Eeew,” I screamed. “You have dust bunnies everywhere! Do you not vacuum?”

 “So that’s what they’re called,” was all he said.

 I was discussing this away-from-home-for-college phenomenon with another friend who lived in Belgium for a while. He was more resourceful than most when it came to food procurement. He said, “It was simple for me. There was this place near work — very near, just down my building and I had their poulet roti (roast chicken) all the time for lunch and dinner. Breakfast was easy because girls who slept over always made me breakfast. Well, except for the Nordic ones. The Asians and the Hispanics always did — it’s in our culture.” Men will think him smart; women, cheap, I’m pretty sure.

 Housekeeping and cooking are always a pain for busy students on a perennial paper chase. But nothing can be more painful — literally and figuratively — than when one gets sick abroad. Being temporarily incapacitated by something as benign as the flu is like the end of the world for anyone who is alone and who has no way of even going to the drug store for ibuprofen or whipping up something edible. This is when homesickness strikes the hardest because it is coupled with self-pity. This is when a slide show of the caring mom, the solicitous yaya, and loyal family driver flashes through the mind of the infirm student. This is when the urge to book a one-way ticket home is at its most potent.

Then there are the more serious issues. My daughter, Isabel’s best friend Luis, is away at boarding school and he told her of facing discrimination there. It happens, I told my daughter, who sounded very concerned.  He’s out in the real world now. She said that Luis stands up for himself each time he’s confronted with it. Of course, I said again, Luis has always struck me as the type to do just that.

 Still, those who do live to tell, like Miko and Luis, are all the better for it. The sum total of one’s stay away from family — and from all that is comfortable and familiar — whether for college or as an OFW, is invaluable.

 When the subject of choice of future partner comes up among my daughters, I always say, “I will love whomever you love, regardless of race, creed, or color. But, oh, just one small thing: he must have lived abroad, away from family.”

 My daughters look at me strangely when I say this. I know they think I’ve lost my marbles, but I’m certain they will understand what I mean the day they, themselves, leave home for college.

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Thank you for your letters. You may reach me at cecilelilles@yahoo.com.