THE concept of “pasalubong” had always been present in the Filipino culture. Traveling to a strange place for the first time somehow requires bringing home a souvenir, a specialty food, or anything that would remind your family and friends that you have remembered them in your trip – that they, too, were part of the travel.
A few years after graduation, I had friends and colleagues at work who were able to travel abroad – either for work or for vacation with the family. My first postage stamps as a grown-up were from my officemate Anne when she went to a vacation to Singapore and made a side trip to Malaysia. I had stopped collecting stamps for a few years then and only remembered when she was already abroad. As I didn’t want to be much of an inconvenience who would ask her to carry heavy “pasalubong,” I told her a few postage stamps from Singapore and Malaysia would make me really happy – plus points if these are used.
I started collecting stamps when I was in Grade 2 or Grade 3. My father had been working abroad for a few years already and we constantly received letters from him. I read a book that mentioned stamp collecting as one of the hobbies that people back then have. Before, it wasn’t even considered an ancient pastime. The internet was still starting to boom and to be able to communicate to a distant loved one without fear of being overcharged while telling them everything, you need to write.
And so that’s exactly what we did with our father abroad. He first went to Brunei Darussalam to work as an engineer but it was only when he was assigned to Iran did I think of collecting the stamps. Since then I had collected stamps from India, Saudi Arabia, and later on Qatar and Kuwait when my aunt worked there and would send us letters as well.
By the time I graduated grade school, I had acquired more and more stamps that it reached almost 200 before I entered high school.
Now, as a grown-up who just recently went back to a hobby I learned to be fond of as a little kid, I now see it on a whole new different perspective. I have never been to a single country where my stamps once belonged to but somehow I had managed to keep copies of stamps from Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Canada, United States, Australia, and Laos, among others.
Collecting stamps given by family and friends from their trip or from the very love letters they sent make the entire essence of collecting more valuable. Through time, as technology takes over almost everything we do including communicating, the value of these almost obsolete things are becoming more and more valuable for the sentimental and those with high regard of the importance of memories and places.
Through time I have learned that these stamps I have collected, which may have started from a child’s curiosity and innate interest in things, may now branch out to something greater as a glimpse of the past as well as the personal and societal stories that come behind each stamp.