ONE OF the more intriguing parts of P-Noy’s second State of the Nation Address (Sona) came towards the end, when he exhorted his “bosses” to stop the habit of pulling down their fellow Filipinos and instead acknowledge the efforts of other Filipinos who do good.
“Before you go home after classes,” he suggested, “approach your teacher who chose to invest in your future instead of prioritizing her own convenience; tell her ‘Thank you.”’ And then he added: “To my teacher, Thank You Mrs. Escasa,” while a rather blurry picture of a white-haired woman flashed on our TV screens.
I was well and truly intrigued. Who was Mrs. Escasa, and why should our President single her out from among all the teachers in his life for mention in an important speech like the Sona? Presidential Spokesman Edwin Lacierda, asked why the President mentioned Mrs. Escasa, said it was because “he wanted to thank teachers … and he remembered Mrs. Escasa who taught him Filipino.”
Turns out that this was not the first time Mrs. Escasa found herself in a speech by P-Noy. Earlier this year, as the commencement speaker at the graduation ceremonies of Ateneo de Manila University, his alma mater, the President cited his Filipino teacher, who would tell all her classes to “please do not bastardize” our national language, and to speak in unadulterated and dignified Filipino instead of the current ragtag “Taglish” which the President even parodied.
So when I tell Mrs. Nenita Escasa in a phone interview that P-Noy often attributes his fluency in Filipino to her, she simply replies: “Of course!”
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NOW 81 years old and retired from the Ateneo after almost 30 years of teaching, Escasa wonders why the President should remember her after all these years. “He was my student for only three units (out of a required nine units) in Filipino,” she recalls, “and we didn’t have any real personal dealings outside of class.”
But she does remember Noynoy as a “good student,” adding that “I marveled at his ability to stick to his studies considering that the rest of his family was in exile in the US.” He was her student at the height of martial law, during which the late Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. was in detention until he and the rest of the family were allowed to leave so that Ninoy could undergo a heart operation and then take up a fellowship in Harvard. For some reason, Noynoy chose to stay behind, perhaps so he could finish his course at the Ateneo.
The only time they exchanged anything personal, recounts Escasa, was when, chatting with a group of students that included Noynoy, she asked after his dad. “And I remember he said that Ninoy was allowed to talk to foreign reporters but the reporters told them that they could not promise to publish these interviews.”
“He was not pretentious at all,” she remembers her student. “I told myself that maybe it was because he came from matandang yaman (old rich),” noting how she has had her share of “mayabang (poseur)” students, although for the most part the Ateneans who took her classes were “most courteous.”
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FUNNILY enough, Escasa says her own parents raised them speaking English at home (“You know how it was; they were so colonial”). But as they were growing up, her mother, who hailed from Bulacan, the heart of Tagalog country, noticed “how we were no longer using po or opo (Tagalog honorifics showing respect)” and thus decided to instill Tagalog or Filipino in her offspring.
But Nenita Escasa herself graduated from the University of Sto. Tomas with a BA in English, major in Journalism. After some years as a “stay-at-home” wife, she went back to school at the Ateneo, with her husband’s encouragement, to acquire a master’s degree in literature in English.
It was National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera who recruited her to teach English at the Ateneo, but after the declaration of martial law, Lumbera along with Nicanor Tiongson and Virgilio Almario, who formed the nucleus of Ateneo’s Filipino department, had to go into hiding. Jesuit Fr. Bert Ampil, then president of the university, roamed the halls of the various departments looking for teachers who could take up the slack left by the three Filipino teachers, and this was how Escasa ended up teaching Filipino.
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She continued to handle classes in English and Filipino at the Ateneo, but when asked which she enjoyed more, Escasa answers right off the bat, in Filipino: “Siyempre Filipino. Wika natin yan, tumatama sa damdamin (Of course Filipino. That’s our language, it hits us where our feelings lie).”
In 1991, Escasa lost her husband Alfeo, a chemical engineer who spent his career in management. These days she shares her home with two bachelor sons, Danny and Ariel. Another son, Manuel, lives in Biñan, Laguna, with his wife and seven children. Her two daughters have “flown the coop”: Ma. Raquel who lives in Sydney with her three children; and the youngest who lives in Canterbury, England, and has seven children.
Frequent visits abroad, usually in May, are the reason Escasa says she has not voted for many years and did not vote for her student last year. But still, she says, she is “highly gratified and very appreciative” at the attention a former student has paid her. “Here is a student of mine who is very fluent in Filipino and credits me for it. That is so fulfilling!”
Her wish for P-Noy, she says, is that “he will be able to accomplish what he set out to do.” In particular, she hopes P-Noy will help “those children we see in TV documentaries who have to walk for kilometers and cross creeks and rivers just to get to school. I hope he does something about making education accessible to even the poorest children, for who knows, we may be wasting the talents of future geniuses just because they are poor.”