Stench of Translucent Drop
September 24, 2007
“Dili namo gusto na ma- experience ninyo ang among na experience sa una”. I overheard father uttering these words while conversing with my younger sister. I nodded without saying a word. My father used to work in a farm. As early as eight years old father had an experience of what it is like living in the rural. Farming is their primary source of income. Sometimes the money they gained from the day’s harvest won’t even sustain the food they have to eat for a day that’s why Papa’s siblings find other means just to have something to eat for the whole family. When the clock strikes 11:00 am he hurries to the farm, 6 kilometers away from the school to harvest banana, plant coffee and weave “amakan” . The money he gained through selling the bananas serveds as his allowance and shared it to grandfather for their daily expenses. Grandmother usually spent most of her time at home taking care of her younger children. My mother also suffered during her childhood days. At the age of six, grandfather trained her to help her aunts in the rice field to plant and harvest. She knew how to cook rice at that early stage. Grandfather worked as a tailor and as a preacher while my grandmother stayed at home to look after her children. My parents who both came from a poor family experienced how is it to live in a rural area where they don’t even own the land they work for. They are just workers. They work to have something to eat and spend for their schooling. The land that they work for, aren’t owned by them. They are government’s property and they are considered poor, pathetic workers, in short, slaves. Through their quest to have a better life they took the challenge to find other means of living in Gensan. After years of striving, mother graduated having a Degree in education and father, after years of hardship being a working student obtain a degree in custom administration. I don’t agree with the saying that, “people are judged through the way they dress, the food they eat, etc.” My parents raised me properly, they gave me the things I want and need. My siblings experienced the same way. When I was younger, I remembered that after Sunday mass my family always spent lunch at Jollibee, we ate the foods that we like and mother and father always gave us what we wanted. They brought us to the park and as early as 6 we already defined the word happiness. Yes, I consider my family as oppressed but we have had enough of that status. Before, we are really oppressed but now we’re not really oppressed. Oppressed in the sense that we don’t own any land, we work for the government- we work for the people who sustain our needs, I admit that I did not experience a pinch of what it feels to study in a private school, I don’t have branded clothes not until the time that I saved money just to buy one- just to experience the feeling of wearing levis. I don’t get the reason why many people who belong in the upper class society scorn the less fortunate people. Is it because that’s how their parents orient them or they just really don’t want to belong in such society. Now, I broadened my horizon when I set foot in U.P. Again, another public school ruled by the Government. Sometimes I call my school as the University of the Poor (UP) maybe because it is what reality shows. I even signed an application form for the less fortunate individuals just to somehow lessen the bills that I have to pay in school. But what went out was I belonged under the Bracket 9 which they call the bracket of the RICH PEOPLE. I told myself, “nag apply pa ko!” It wasn’t really the bracket of the rich people it is the bracket where one doesn’t need assistance to aid her in her schooling. Once you belong in that bracket, it means that your family can sustain the needs of its members. Maybe they based it on the ITR of my Mother, why? Don’t they realize that a salary of a teacher couldn’t still aid the need of its family members? As a Creative Writing student, I seek for what is right. I go for what is good. We are the creators our own life. It’s just that we are ruled by the more powerful beings in the society that if we think of it over and over again, we the oppressed are forever be chained. I know by myself that I consider my family to belong in the middle class society but basing it to what my father,mother, grandfathers and grandmothers social status, we or I will forever be oppressed.
So Happy Together =) ~BA English ’05-’06~
March 31, 2007
Over The Desensitized Pages
March 31, 2007
Touch me not !
