Dwellers, settlers

People have been asking how I’m doing after a month in my new job, and I have to say it’s been full of surprises.  I’ve been visiting offices left and right, getting a feel of the lay of the land, and in the process I’m discovering all kinds of programs and institutions, facilities and technologies, that I never even knew existed in the Philippines, much less in the University of the Philippines.

What’s been most rewarding, though, is discovering the wealth of human resources we have, and I am referring not just to brilliant minds but also to the dedication and commitment of people working under the most difficult of conditions.

As an anthropologist, too, I’m discovering facets of our culture, some of which are both amusing and touching, and that’s what I thought I’d share with you today by way of three stories/anecdotes.

The first relates to life in a new home. I’ve had to move into a house provided by the university, given that I can’t afford to lose time driving to and from work.  The house is maintained by the university but has not been used for some time, so there have been all kinds of problems there.  The first week I moved in, a water heater burned out, fortunately not while I was using it.  Two refrigerators also stopped functioning.

The water heater was returned to the supplier, and we had to call in a technician from outside to look at the refrigerators after our maintenance crew gave up.  I came home one evening elated to find the refrigerators working, but by the next morning one had conked out again.

I told my secretary about the problem and she sighed. “Sir,” she said, explaining in Filipino, “the repairmen really had a hard time.  They said they checked everything and couldn’t figure out what was wrong.  It worked, and didn’t work.”

She paused and then added, almost in a whisper, “Sir, may nakatira kasi sa bahay.”

People living in the house?  I immediately thought of informal settlers—we have 70,000 of them right now inside UP Diliman—and that maybe my secretary meant they were plugging into the house’s electrical lines and causing problems.

She laughed and said, no, no, not informal settlers, but ibang nakatira, other dwellers.

Then it hit me.  She was referring to the unseen, the dili ingon nato, if I might use the Cebuano term, the not-like-ours.  They’re not necessarily malignant, usually just playful, more like the poltergeists in western folklore.

My executive assistant chimed in and pointed out my problems with my office computer. Yes, I did have problems, too, with getting the computer to turn off, and to shut down.

But I scoffed at their explanations, saying: “It’s the electrical lines in the house and in the office.”

Talk to them

By now other members of the staff were listening in, nodding their heads, but more in agreement with the explanation involving the unseen dwellers.  One of them looked out of the office window, out to the large trees that surround the building.  I love those large trees for their calming effect, but I had to remind myself that for many Filipinos, large trees, large old trees, elicit feelings of dread, even terror.

“You have to talk with them,” my secretary said.

The scientist in me was reacting: Here I am in a campus where we have state-of-the-art technologies.  I have just visited the Marine Science Institute where they have equipment that can read the genetic structures and capture 3-D microscopic images of organisms—and here we are talking about the unseen!

A few days later, when I shared the stories of the unseen with some professors, they all laughed. But then each of them—these are people with PhDs—had their own stories of dwellers as well, from duwende-like creatures to ghosts of departed colleagues. As a college dean, I was also being asked, constantly, if I had run into the ghosts of previous deans.

I’d joke about deans who just couldn’t let go of their colleges, knowing, too, that the names invoked were of men who were quite dominating, and whose memories had lingered on for years, transformed into ghosts, still patrolling the corridors at night to make sure all was well.

But let’s get back to the unseen dwellers of my new home and office at UP.  When my staff told me I had to talk to these friends, I threw up my arms in exasperation: “I have to talk with the student activists.  I have to talk with difficult professors.  I have to talk with the informal settlers.  And now I’m being asked to talk to the unseen!”

So, if you visit the Diliman campus one of these days and see me walking through our wooded areas, you’ll know what I’m doing.

‘Tawas’ and Batman

Let’s move on now to my second story.  I think it was in my second week in my new job when I visited the Campus Maintenance Office (CMO), which has to take care of more than 160 buildings, excluding residential areas.

For such large responsibilities we don’t have too many staff members, or too much equipment. I visited the motor pool, where we had all these ancient vehicles parked.  Turned out that whenever some college or office people have a vehicle that’s about to go into a coma, they donate it to the CMO, hoping that the vehicle would find some use.

I found a mechanic working on one of these vehicles.  He was on his back, under the car, and I called out to him, asking if there was hope for it.  He peeked out and answered, quite seriously, “Ipapatawas ko na sana. Mukhang nausug.”

What he said is difficult to translate, but basically, he was comparing the vehicle to a child with a mystical illness, and he now needed tawas, which is a traditional way of healing with a spiritual component.  In so many words, he was saying that the car could no longer be “treated” through the usual means and now required maybe a version of faith healing.

We all laughed, knowing he meant it as a joke. But it was also a way of saying that we at UP work with great limitations and yet these guys at CMO try to make the best of what they have.

It hit me, this vehicle with usug—an example of life in UP.  The problems are formidable, but people valiantly look for ways—in Filipino, naghahanap ng paraan.

I wanted to crack another joke: “Bahala na si Batman,” a popular expression which means “Let’s leave it to Batman”—our own irreverent way of saying that maybe here, even divine intervention isn’t going to work out.

Watch out for the next episode of life in and with UP.  And no, I kept myself from saying “Bahala na si Batman” because I do feel there’s hope.

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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph