My most meaningful Christmas
For my first job out of college, I volunteered to teach English to high school students in a remote barrio in Surigao del Sur. Barrio Diatagon (it was still called a barrio then) was host to the Lianga Bay Logging Company, a US-owned enterprise that harvested logs from the lush forests of Surigao and shipped them out, God-knows-where, perhaps to the Pacific Northwest of the United States where its mother company was located. Although the officers of the company lived in a closed camp, on dry land in sturdy wooden houses with flushing toilets, most of the residents of Diatagon lived in the barrio which was built on a swamp outside the camp. In that small settlement where the school was located, we used boardwalks to keep our shoes dry.
The school was a wooden two-storey structure with four classrooms for every year of high school it offered, a library cum teachers’ room, and a chapel. An outhouse stood some distance from the building. The school yard was covered with bark shaved from logs before they were loaded onto cargo ships that stopped in the bay regularly. When it rained, the bark was water-logged and slippery.
My students and I went to school mainly on foot from home to school and back, or sometimes, I would catch a ride with my uncle, a company executive, on his way home from the office.
My students were hardly literate in English but my subjects were English grammar and literature, which were both required by the Department of Education. So we soldiered on, my students and I, trying to make something of the alien curriculum. Making them understand the rules of grammar caused us both a lot of grief. “Da prag jams,” wrote one student on the board using a singular noun. “Da horse jump,” wrote another, for plural. And for singular, “Da hor jumps.”
I used the word “lizard” in a sentence and the class replied almost in unison, “Ma’am, it’s lisud” which is Visayan for difficult.
For our literature class, I ended up telling them the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I could forget about making them read Homer when they could hardly navigate through simple sentences in the English language.
But I had my successes. When the school announced a declamation contest, the class chose Ruben, the most distracted and distracting student in my class. I chose Invictus by William Ernest Henley, a short but powerful piece that was easy enough to memorize. Ruben and I worked long hours preparing for the contest. First I had to make him stop clowning and accept the assignment given him. Then I explained to him, line by line, what the poem meant. As the contest date approached, I began to see in him a determination to perform well. I saw Ruben metamorphose from class clown to the master of his fate, the captain of his soul.
Late in the year, the principal suggested that I direct a play in English, with the members of the faculty as the featured actors. I no longer remember the title of the play but it was a huge success in that rural logging town where the main forms of entertainment were gambling and drinking sessions. What I consider my success was Nilo, one of the older boys in my class who didn’t fit in. I gave him a walk-on part with just a line or two that he performed with precision and aplomb.
After we wrapped up the play, I was getting ready to go home for the holidays, but the parish priest and my uncle conspired to keep me in Diatagon a while longer. The play, they said, would be presented in the company gym on Christmas Eve, followed by a Nativity tableau that I was also to direct, as part of the festivities. I was upset. It was not fair that I could not be home for Christmas.
But I immediately got busy finding the right combination of blue and red fabrics for Mary’s garments to be worn by the prettiest girl in school, and assigning roles to other students for the tableau. And, being in a small community where everyone went to Simbang Gabi, my uncle dragged me out of bed at dawn to complete for the only time in my life, the nine dawn Masses leading to Christmas.
That Christmas, in the little town of Diatagon where the barrio people lived poorly on swampy ground, where my students grappled with lessons in a language they could barely understand, where nothing was familiar and every day brought a new challenge, I spent my first and only Christmas away from home. That was 49 years ago and it remains my most meaningful Christmas in memory.
May we be blessed with the joy and peace of Christmas at this time of great challenge to our country and people.
