Sunday, June 29, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: After the storm By Erma M. Cuizon
ONE thought strikes you when you watch on TV the people pained by the tragedy of the sinking of mv Princess of the Stars---the fright and shock of being finally unable to touch loved ones. It’s a terrible feeling, worse when you can’t even imagine where your loved ones are---floating in the water in some lonely parts of the sea or stuck in a watery grave under the upturned ship.
What comes to mind is a story told to us by a friend of Mother who said she was in school in Manila as a young girl just before World War II. She and her Visayan boyfriend took a boat (the last commercial boat that left Manila before the war, she said) to be able to come home fast to Cebu because the Japanese were starting to enter Manila. But the boat was bombed. In the panic that followed, she lost touch of her friend as she was pushed into a lifeboat where everyone else wanted to get on. She never saw him alive again, she’d weep.
I always took this story as true even if that friend of mother’s would recall in her later years the sad incident like it was a small memory in a vast plain inexplicable to one like her who was already old and forgetful.
Sorrow over loss of lives cuts into our own mortality, especially to us as a people of touch, to whom touch is part of living.
Once, an American Corps volunteer assigned in Cebu at first complained about the way Filipinos sit in jeepneys. A woman commuter would hail the vehicle to stop, come up to look for an open space, then drop her weight against those in her sides without an “Excuse me!”---almost arm to arm. The American would then pull herself up to give way to her “neighbor” and doesn’t sit back at all, if it means touching people seated in her sides. Meanwhile, her new neighbor sits beside her trustingly, happy to be beside an American tourist.
In our touch culture---even in tragedy---many of the bereaved will survive, as long as there are still others to love and to touch. That’s probably one of the reasons why we, as a people, carry on in the worse of times. We express ourselves in touch---in joy and pain. Watch pictures of the relatives and loved ones of those missing as a result of the sinking of mv Princess. They’re touching each other, connecting to help assuage the pain.
There’s such a thing as the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami. It’s a study under the school of medicine. And those in research have come up with a classification of people---as belonging to “low-touch” and “high-touch” cultures.
The Filipino people have a high-touch culture. We stand close to each other while talking, and hold hands with friends while strolling in quieter streets where no one is in a hurry. This is a complete no-no to some other nationalities.
You would expect the French or Italian to be countries with a high-touch culture, too.
The research watched people in cafes for some minutes or almost an hour at a time, say, in a Parisian café where two people dining touched 110 times in 30 minutes while in Miami, Florida a couple touched only twice within the same period of minutes.
The touch rate is also slim in New Zealand, Australia and Britain.
More times, Parisian children touched their friends while only 3 percent of the time American children touched each other.
The condition of being “touch-starved” could be related to the high rate of depression and suicide cases in low-touch countries, says researchers of the Touch institute. On my first day in Australia during a vacation, the first story I read from that day’s morning paper was about a boy of 7 who committed suicide.
In fact, touch is now being used in “mental health treatment.”
Italy, with a very high-touch culture, has the lowest rate of suicides among developed countries.
The sense of touch has something to do with trust. You keep off from anything you don’t trust. In very difficult times, like facing a new life after the storm, the Filipino relates in touch and trusts in God’s ways.
