Scouters and fathers

What happens to Boy Scout programs when a former all-boys’ school turns co-ed?

Simple. Xavier School Nuvali simply calls every-one — male or female — scouters.

But in a new development starting this year, Xavier decided to use the scouter program as an opportunity for fathers to bond with their sons and daughters at the fourth-grade level. I grumbled about having to get up extra early two Saturdays ago to drive to Nuvali and wondered why we had to be there from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

I had memories of nursery days when a dad’s day meant jumping around in potato sack races, and trying to get your three-year-old to dance on the stage by signaling like a monkey at the back of the room.

The day did turn out to be long and grueling, but it was quite pleasant, and gave me a lot to think about in terms of gender roles and parenting.

For starters, while we were waiting for activities to start, I heard a group of kids huddled together with rowdy cheering. The boy thing, I thought. I went closer and found two students arm-wrestling — a boy and a girl, and the girl was winning.

I was feeling good: I made a right decision getting my girls into this former male bastion. Boys will grow into men with early challenges from their girl classmates.

Boy stuff

I looked at the program, awed by the number of activities. Thankfully, Xavier preserved the dads’ dignity with somewhat more sedate teamwork activities, like tangram (putting floor puzzle pieces together to make a square), uranium (transporting “radioactive” balls without touching them) and dodgeball (which brought back memories of my own Xavier days when I couldn’t play any kind of ball games because I was so afraid of getting hit).

Yes, there were scouting activities, like orienteering or using a compass. The facilitators gave out manual compasses to the teams. My daughter looked at it with some scorn, asked for my cell phone and brought out the compass app, making me feel truly Jurassic.

We were given instructions, with compass bearings, to move from one base to another and at each station, the kids had to do something like give the scout salute. At one base they had to read something from a scout pledge. . . in Filipino, and when the kids had difficulty, I warned the fathers: You know, in a few years they’ll be taking the UP entrance exam and they better be good in Filipino. (We have had bright private school graduates not making it into UP because they had difficulties with Filipino!)

Then there was the ropes session. When I first saw it on the program my hands turned cold thinking they were going to torture us dads with some human relations exercise where you jump off a platform with a team mate to show that you trust the way he tied on your harness. I had memories of an international foundation I worked with years ago, where they would team up an Indian and a Pakistani to jump off together!

Thankfully, that wasn’t the ropes Xavier had in mind. It was much simpler: learning to tie knots, but that got my hands cold, too. I have some kind of dyslexia which prevents me from learning how to tie knots. I’m still notorious for untied shoelaces and for telling grocery clerks not to knot the wrappers and bags because I can’t untie them when I get home. For some reason my brain panics when it hears instructions with left over right — or was it right over left — complicated by loops and free ends and all that. In vet school I nearly flunked my surgery classes because I just couldn’t figure out the knots used for suturing wounds.

In so many words, I never got a scouting merit badge for knots, but it turned out my daughter’s brain was less knotty. She got most of the ties right, and I told her someday she could take me fishing, or rescue me from floodwaters.

Girl stuff

Scouting activities tend to be “male” like this knot-tying thing, but in Xavier’s scouter activity, they did come up with more “feminine” activities like designing a tote bag (you draw on sandpaper then iron in the drawing). I could see some of the dads feeling awkward about this girlie-girlie stuff and I was tempted to suggest, “Pare, let’s add sequins,” but I behaved myself.

The T-shirt silk-screening was fun, and I told my daughter someday I would show her how, during the days of the Marcos dictatorship, we produced underground newspapers using that process. (See? Not everything political has to be grim and determined.)

The dads valiantly survived some of these soft activities, but toward the end of the day we had a really tough exercise. First, we had to write out five dreams we had for our sons or daughters while our kids, separately, came up with three of their dreams. We would then meet and share our notes and agree on three.

Not surprisingly, there was almost no congruence in our dreams. My daughter’s dreams were a swimming pool in the house, learning to be a master baker and, oh — but I could have sang out Hallelujah — becoming a teacher.

My dreams for her were so lofty I’m embarrassed to put them down in my column, you know, stuff like growing up in a free Philippines. But we did agree to combine our dreams: her becoming a teacher who bakes. I explained we can’t have a pool on a teacher’s salary and she agreed, immediately pouncing on one of my dreams for her: a healthy life. (This is the daughter who’s had open-heart surgery.)

Then we were told to jot down these dreams and attach them to a “dreamcatcher” . . . which, hey, wait a minute, we had to make ourselves. I was so overwhelmed by envy seeing a young dad next to us coming up with a star design, but found comfort seeing him and everyone else struggling with the beads and feathers, which I thought would have looked better on the T-shirt or bag but. . . never mind. My daughter and I got away with a dreamcatcher which I described as minimalist.

Yes, there was bonding among the dads and uncles and kuyas and lolos. One class section was truly amazing — dads and kids presenting a synchronized energetic cheering sequence. I whispered to a fellow tatay: Can we just say our section has shy dads? We obliged in the end, joining our kids in a foot-thumping session.

No winners were declared, which was good because I thought everyone, every section was a winner.

To my fellow dads and “dad relievers” of Xavier Nuvali Class of 2025 (yes, I counted out the years to graduating senior high school), mabuhay mga tatay, mga tito, mga lolo, mga kuya!

mtan@inquirer.com.ph