Tuesday, July 01, 2008 Obenieta: There’s home like nothing By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
ALL it really takes to go against the current is to stay in one’s country.
Especially when there’s a horde of us who opt to jump ship and stay above water in foreign shores, particularly where there’s nothing sweeter to the ears than the siren song—no matter how treacherous—about milk and honey.
Mythology be damned. Reality demands, after all, that us Pinoys in the US or elsewhere in the tide of diaspora must dredge up as much inner reserves we could muster up to our gills. Grow fins or have scales for second skin, as far as necessity goes. Not only for our own survival by the swells of our sweat, but also to keep the economy afloat with the inflow of our remittances back home. In this harbor, yes, where every drifter’s heart often ends up, well, a flotsam. Which is not so dire a metaphor compared to a corpse, bloated beyond recognition and washed ashore from a shipwreck.
A driftwood of a heart, come to think of it, can still be used as kindling to keep the psychic pot boiling.
Reality check, however, often comes like hot water splashed in one’s face, As when an expatriate friend of mine returned to Cebu recently for his annual vacation, and came back here in the States with a familiar refrain. “Keeping Cebu and the Philippines in my heart will never be the problem,” he affirmed. “The problem is that they’re too much in my heart. Of more urgent concern is how to keep my sense of humor… when the more I visit, the more they have become a subject unfit for polite conversation.”
What he said pretty much summed up another immigrant friend’s observation out of his recent homecoming. It would be great, he supposed, to steer clear momentarily from all that chilly talk about recession in America and to bask in the warmth of being a native again even if only for a month. What he told me, however, convinced me he ought to be a cynic’s pet columnist instead. Being polite, however, demanded that no details from his vacation be uttered out loud like a curse. No need of that, of course, as long as I keep my nose online with the news from the home front, thank you.
Then again, the good news can still be clutched like straw in the ocean of one’s estrangement. Thus proved a Cebuana teacher, one of the legions of educators fishing for deliverance in the rough waters of American schools. Lourdes Gana-Gonzales is the only Filipino, along with other awardees from 18 countries, honored by the Visiting International Faculty (VIF) program “to transform students’ and teachers’ lives through international exchange.”
As reported, Gonzales has been instrumental for American students who never heard about the Philippines to learn “about Cebuano culture and way of life” in our archipelago and what lovely people we are. Yes, regardless of most of our politicians and policymakers.
In this age of globalization, it’s noteworthy that one of our own has done more than her fair share—against the odds of displacement and discrimination—to turn, at least in her classroom, the tide of ignorance that reflect, according to Orville Schell, dean of journalism school at the University of California in Berkeley, the prevalent culture of cluelessness: “Americans are ever more involved in the world and ever less knowledgeable about it.”
If it’s any comfort to us who often see ripples of doom from a distance, here looms as well in America such ignorance—a continent in itself that condenses everything else beyond America’s borders into nothing—finding a home.
