A fiesta out of a fiasco

Last March 17, snowy Sundsvall in Sweden became home to the summery spirit of our compatriots as 17 or so sojourner and emigrant Filipinos pulled off a bayanihan fiesta in a seeming consular fiasco.

Pancit (noodles), munggo guisado (mung bean soup), and itlog na maalat at kamatis (salted egg and tomato salad) are seldom served at the monthly consular outreach missions of the Philippine Embassy in Oslo. But that day was special: The aroma of Pinoy dishes greeted me along with the smiles of Filipino women and their Swedish spouses and mestizo children as I entered the venue. An airline mishandling of needed equipment or some such mishap had delayed the mission by half a day. But instead of grumbling over bad luck, the cheery few who had arrived early converged at the kitchen to produce a quick buffet.

The heroine of the hour was a Filipino woman who lived nearby (and who requested that she remain unnamed because, she said, “Anyone in my position will definitely do the same”). She emptied her fridge so that no one would go hungry during the half-day wait for the mission to start. She and a few other Filipino women cooked the various dishes and sliced fruits and vegetables, and also made coffee and juice. Someone brought in a large chocolate cake. All that fulsome food turned our budding frustration into a festive mood.

The place was abuzz, with everyone chatting with everyone else. We shared our varying (mostly happy) reasons for being presently in Sweden and traded similar past (sometimes unhappy) encounters with our embassy in Oslo. Some added others on Facebook. One whom I added, Aida Bengtsson, came to submit for processing the passport of her daughter, Angelica, who, I was impressed to learn, is part of our national women’s floorball team. We talked about maybe meeting again in Singapore later this year, when her daughter’s team visits there. Another remarkable fellow was a Swede who, without any formal language training, talked as if he had been speaking Filipino all his life.

Each of us came from different, far-flung corners of Sweden: Emilie Lindgren, from Davao, has been living somewhere north of Sundsvall for 15 years; Jarom Moreno, from Pangasin, was scheduled to travel 18 more hours back to Malmö, a city at the southern tip of Sweden. But we conversed with one another as longtime acquaintances would. So much so that while I traveled alone by taxi expecting to routinely have my passport renewed, I came out carpooling with a few new friends. Our heroine’s husband gladly drove us to the train station.

The Swedes present—mostly husbands and fathers of the applicants—all seemed utterly impressed. With or without their equipment, the mission officials could have come earlier to sort out preliminaries (they were already in a Sundsvall hotel since early morning). People of other nationalities would have bickered with these tardy officials when they arrived, a Swedish husband told me. But we Pinoys were polite and helpful when they did. Somehow, also, we all decided as a matter of course not to follow the scheduled order of our turns at the table and instead followed a more equitable logic: Some applicants had to catch the four or five o’clock train, so we let them go first; my carpool group had six o’clock train tickets, so we went second. It was Filipino fairmindedness at its finest. Aida Bengtsson’s husband Ronnie commented later (on a related picture I posted online) that he was “so thankful to be a part of the Filipino community. It’s amazing how the Filipinos living nearby arranged food, coffee, cakes and fruits [for] all of us while waiting.”

The bayanihan spirit I experienced at Sundsvall was a welcome contrast to the divisive politics crowding our national headlines. We need more anecdotes like this—spontaneous celebrations of common citizenship within or outside our shores—if we wish to overcome our present “us versus them” (i.e., populist) mindset. After all, at the heart of every democracy are narratives of inclusion: stories which show that each of us is related to every other in some special, heartfelt way as members of the same community. Here in Sweden, or back home in the Philippines.

Bryan Dennis Gabito Tiojanco, a JSD candidate at Yale Law School, graduated cum laude from the University of the Philippines College of Law. He will be a postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore Centre for Asian Legal Studies in the coming academic year.