I am pregnant at 18. What could be worse than that? Being pregnant at 15 or 14? No. Being the last to know.

One fine Saturday morning recently, I was awakened by my mother?s call. My phone said I had missed four earlier calls from her. She asked me how I was doing in school, and I mentioned happy events that had transpired, leaving the not-so-happy ones for last. She then asked me if school pressure and my recent conversion to vegetarianism were making me lose weight.

Now, my mother is the type who gives her daughter the freedom to learn things on her own. So her questions about school were too unusual for me to comprehend. Something must have pushed her to call me. Her last question about my losing weight was a prelude to breaking the biggest news of my life: I was pregnant. Without a boyfriend, that is.

I wondered if I was one of the first humans to have mutated on account of too much pollution and ultraviolet rays. But if that were the case, surely being able to reproduce asexually couldn?t be one of its effects, I thought.

Since I had gained weight during the summer vacation and took to wearing loose shirts and half-an-inch-above-the-knee shorts when going to market, people in our place assumed that I was pregnant. And to help confirm their worst suspicion, I was rarely seen strutting my stuff around town.

The news about my ?pregnancy? tore my heart. I was afraid it would put my future in peril. I castigated myself for acting so carelessly and letting my whims take over my better judgment, and thus getting pregnant at such a bad time.

To be pregnant at this time would mean that I have to stop school for a while. That would probably take the life out of me since I love going to school. School is where I see my dreams beginning to come true. Listening to lectures from professors who?ve been there and done that, wrote this and got that, makes me want all the more to be in their place some day, empowering young minds and fueling young ambitions.

Not going to school because of pregnancy would rob me of my only chance to secure a better life for myself and my family. I know it?s hard to find a job; not getting a degree would make it even harder. I cannot throw away everything my parents did to send me to a good university and all the part-time jobs I took to fund extra expenses. I know that the best thing for me to do is to earn my degree and not think about things that might distract me from achieving that goal.

Being pregnant at 18 without a job is not something I look forward to. Just thinking about the high cost of medical care if I want to have a healthy child is enough to deter me from doing something I deem irresponsible. If I intend to become a good mother, I will be doing myself and my future baby a favor by entering into that interesting stage only when I am ready and able to provide for my child.

But that is me carefully weighing the stakes involved in getting pregnant. Some people apparently think I am capable of acting foolishly.

Gossip like this one about me being pregnant shouldn?t be taken seriously, I know. But I can?t help but be affected not only because it concerns me but it is also reflective of a serious problem we have as a country and as a people.

One doesn?t have to check official statistics to know that jobs are difficult to come by. One can feel it. Since few jobs are available, people have more time to do other things, like gossip. If people were engaged in productive pursuits, they would have little time to spread unverified rumors. And then surely I would not have been worrying about this nasty ?news? being circulated in my barrio.

Maybe if their stomachs weren?t making funny noises on account of hunger, people wouldn?t have fabricated such gossip. Hunger does a lot of funny things to some people. Sometimes it makes them jump to wrong conclusions based on the flimsiest reasons, like a couple of pounds gained from sitting on the couch all day watching DVDs and eating so much nilupak. I suspect that people who feel miserable find comfort in seeing they are not alone in their misery. Maybe other people?s fall, even if imagined, is a great equalizer. Maybe this is why we love gossip so much.

Perhaps lack of education makes people prone to gossip. Education shapes people?s mind. A good education makes a good mind, but not necessarily a good person. However, a good education widens the range of inferences one can make from certain situations. Had some people asked me what was really going on, the gossip would have died instantly, for I would have answered honestly.

A place at the end of the road. That?s how a foreigner described our place many decades ago. Some things have changed since then, but most have remained. Our barrio no longer is the last place where the bus stops. However it remains underdeveloped. The people?s main sources of income are cash crops like coconuts, corn, bananas and cacao. Some households grow their food on their backyard.

To survive in such place is quite easy. If that were the only consideration, I might decide to raise my child there. We could live on vegetables and corn. But what if my baby gets sick? The closest the barrio gets to modern medicine is a trained health care personnel. Our health center sits pathetically at the heart of the barrio. The benches are the same benches I sat on when I learned to write my name. The structure looks like a wooden matchbox, with hints of cement holding tired boulders together.

When I was in grade school, it seemed to me that our barrio was the last place in this country to receive books. I had to share my dog-eared mathematics textbook with a partner and we took turns bringing it home. I do not know if the situation is still the same today.

Even though I love the place where I grew up, I cannot blindly praise everything in it. Going to a university away from my hometown opened my eyes to the fact that the kind of education being handed down to my place is not enough. It?s not enough to develop citizens who can reason well and weigh facts carefully and objectively. Aside from gossip, I believe that lack of education has other heavier consequences like the quality of participation in matters affecting the nation.

Since I cannot change the way people see things in our place, I have resolved to lose weight. This reminds me of what Sallie Tisdale wrote in an article entitled ?A Weight that Women Carry?: ?If I tell someone my weight, I change in their eyes: I become bigger or smaller, better or worse, depending on what that number, my weight, means to them.? Considering how my barrio mates think, if I go back there during the semestral break sporting a much leaner physique, they could very well say that I have been sniffing weeds or I have had my imaginary baby aborted.

How?s that for a comeback?

(Nina Rachelle T. Landicho, 19, is a BA Communication Research student at the University of the Philippines in Diliman.)