Biking in ‘barong’

The stereotypical absent-minded professor, I constantly drive my younger associates crazy when I forget dress protocols. They remind me about having missed a shirt button, untied shoelaces or, worse, wearing jeans with barong.

Last Saturday I attended the inauguration of a new senior high school building for Xavier in San Juan. I went in a polo barong, feeling underdressed compared to many guests in fine jusi and piña barong, but feeling overdressed with the Class of 1967 (I think it was 1967) who went in reconstructed grade school uniforms, no, not short pants though.

I had tried to beg off from the building inauguration because I already promised another group of Xavier graduates—now students in UP Diliman—that I’d be at their inauguration of an important new project. But Fr. Ari Dy, the Xavier principal, asked that I give at least an hour in San Juan, then I could go off to UP.

I did leave the building inauguration quietly, drove to UP and got there only a bit late. On my way to UP I got a call from ABS-CBN requesting an interview about UP Diliman students who supposedly were sleeping out in the streets because they couldn’t get dorm rooms. That claim was of course political drama, militant students taking pictures of their protest vigil and then claiming in social media that they were dormless students.

Bike sharing

I agreed to the TV interview, requesting they go to Kalayaan, a dorm for freshmen, so they could cover the launch of the new project: a bike sharing program. I got to Kalayaan’s TV room, where a group of students were getting a lecture on bike safety. I could sense the TV crew wasn’t too excited; protest rallies make better media fodder. But they took the footage anyway and used it Monday when I had to guest again on ANC to talk about the dorms.

I wasn’t just excited but thrilled with the event in Kalayaan. Some years back the UP Mountaineering Society, together with running priest Fr. Robert Reyes, had a project called Padyak, where they loaned bicycles to students for one semester at a time. The project died out, unfortunately.

A few months ago, three engineering students—Miggy Laperal, Cyrill Chan and Luis Sia—went to see me in my office to introduce their organization, UP Start, which is into social entrepreneurship, thinking up ways to apply science and technology to meet social needs. Their first venture into social entrepreneurship was going to be a Bike Share project.

Shortly before they left, Miggy and Cyrill mentioned they were from Xavier, my high school alma mater.

Now we are seeing the project finally taking off, described on their Facebook site as combining “wireless technology and biking freedom to develop the next generation of public transportation.” On their own, the students raised money to buy and refurbish 30 bikes from Japan surplus stores.

More bikes will follow. This first phase is meant to be a feasibility study, with students getting lectures on bike safety and maintenance, and keeping a log of their use of the bikes. Down the road, UP Start wants to put up a system where students can pick up and return bikes at several stops in the campus with electronic equipment. Initially there was talk about using the UP ID card to swipe and take out or return a bike.

The students who got bikes were mostly freshmen and were raring to go. The bikes will certainly be useful, given that UP is a huge campus with classes dispersed across almost 500 hectares. Students take the ikot (jeepney shuttle) to get around . . . or run to get to their classes. The bikes give a new alternative.

I was asked to give a few words and I told the students, almost all from dorms, that they were pioneers. Someday, they could tell their children they helped to get biking going in UP Diliman, and that was part of a vision for a greener UP. I explained how we were moving toward a car-less academic oval in the campus main core. The oval is already car-less on weekends but joggers say the pollution levels from weekday vehicular emissions linger through the weekend. Using the bikes would be healthier not just for bikers but for everyone working or studying in the campus.

Then the organizers asked if I could join them on a bike run—to test the bikes. I hesitated, partly because I was exhausted and partly because it had been some time since I used a bike.

Besides, I thought, I was not dressed for biking.

But I decided—why not?—qualifying I’d join the students only for a few minutes, to start the bike run going.

A new name

I ended up biking with the team for half an hour, going around the Diliman campus.

“Chansy, Chansy,” students would call out, apparently amused by the biker in barong. It brought back memories from a few years back when, one day, I decided to use one of my kids’ bikes and got them screaming and cheering from the house’s balcony, “Dada, dada.”

I had described that experience as riding the wind and had that sense again in Diliman. Coasting along on the bike was an opportunity to get to know some of the freshmen, and the organizers. Riding the wind meant being proud, too, of the ones who thought up the Bike Share project, young people who had combined their Jesuit “a man for others” upbringing with UP’s boldness of vision.

The organizers apparently got a kick from seeing me bike and asked if I’d bike some more in the future.

I said, sure, who knows, maybe I’d even use a bike to occasionally get to work, or to do surprise visits to offices. I studied in the Netherlands, where there are more bikes than cars. The Dutch are proud of their bike-friendly streets and tell stories about public officials, even the prime minister according to one story, biking to work … in coat and tie.

The prospects of a UP chancellor biking to work, in barong, thrilled Start Up no end. “It’s important,” one of them told me, referring to the need to model behavior.

“You’d be Chansy Bike Tan,” one of them joked.

“No,” I responded, “I’d be Bike Tanned.” Just last month at our general commencement exercises I ended up almost with a sunburn after nearly two hours under the sun. After the ceremony, some people quipped about my being Chancellor Tanned.

Visit UP Bike Share on Facebook to see Bike Tanned biking in barong, with students in nice red bikes. You’ll hear more about the project in the months ahead.

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