A day at the fair

I was coming out of a mall toward the parking lot when I stopped to observe a five-year-old boy looking at his reflection in the mall’s mirror walls. His mother was busy organizing their shopping bags while he had his back turned to her. At first, he started to make faces in the mirror, then he started flapping his arms, then stomping his feet and swinging his hips. Pretty soon, he was only a foot away from his reflection and by this time, he was already fully engaged in a sort of hip-hop-cum-martial art dance involving the entire body in a frenzied race to see if his reflection fully echoed his intentions without missing a beat. His eyes were transfixed in his mirrored image as if discovering the wonder of light’s reflection for the first time. No one else around seemed to have noticed his "private" discovery of the nature of light and how it can make us see copies of ourselves. I was silently excited for him because he discovered something for himself for the first time; he engaged himself in a moment of "creation." It was a creative act when he discovered an aspect of Nature and entered into it to form an experience he would layer on to a lifetime of learning. Newton and Einstein may have been the great theorists on the nature of light, but at that moment that kid started to appreciate the same aspect of Nature and observe it with a keen sense of exploration and pleasure, even without knowing how the grand scientific masters thought; he again validated the theory on light, as those who have come before him. He did not care whether everyone else around him seemed to already know the power of a mirror wall; he had to discover it for himself and run the "private experiment" in his mind. Days later, I saw this creative act repeated 42 times at one time in a more formal sense. It was at a school science fair of all the Antipolo schools.

There was no officious name-calling of Mr. Chairman or the honorable lady or gentleman from so-and-so district to remind themselves of their worth. At the science fair, kids aged 11 to 17 knew exactly why they were there. They stood at the side of their "discoveries" – the girls with perfectly ironed uniforms and neatly combed hair and the boys who attempted to mask their nervousness with generous slops of hair gel. They were all so eager to tell the judges what they had in mind when they thought of their "experiments." In each booth I visited, I sat down and told them to set aside their scripts and to tell me what fascinated them about their experiments, in their own words. Science fairs seldom see a Marie Curie or a Thomas Edison to blow our minds about how he or she discovered something in Nature and made something useful from it. I somehow already predicted that I would see a group that would try to make soap from some fruit, owing to some anti-microbial claim of the said fruit. I also knew I would see market waste recycled into practical stuff like particle boards or briquettes. I also knew I would taste the many unusual foods from otherwise food ingredients, unknown yet to science or at least, yet "unfriendly" to culinary art.

In the end, I was both touched and saddened by the prime motivation of most of the student-investigators. Touched because deep in their science learning is hope that science could deliver them from the stench and sting of poverty that hover in their lives. The kids who thought of deriving insecticides from toxins of certain plants told me that they thought of it because they were tired of living with mosquitoes and the death and sickness these have brought their neighbors and friends. A little girl who lived in a mountainous terrain said most of them there had lice and so she took on her grandmother’s advice to use atis seeds, ground them, and add to regular shampoo to kill the parasites. The ones who recycled wastes into useful materials said that they were tired of seeing chicken feathers and corn husks from the nearby market find their way into their school grounds and so they decided to pound, dry and bind them to make into cork-like material to use as posting boards. One even made shoe polish from ipil-ipil seeds, saying it had frustrated her that they could not afford commercial shoe polish so she thought of inventing one. As I listen to the kids with their eyes aglow and their hands in all-out gestures, stringing their hopes to their science so that science can be placed in the service of their lives, I began to hear in my head, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous love sonnet, but this time, as an ode to science, instead of to romance:

"I love thee with a passion put to use

In my old griefs, with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seem to lose

With my lost saints…"

But "usefulness" is not the judge of the value of science. If science were purely driven by our desire to emerge out of our societal problems, we miss out on the more fundamental pleasure of the scientific quest, which is to find things out, to pursue our curiosity, whether or not it will solve a problem or simply amuse our playful intellect. I asked each and every student responsible for his/her experiment what his/her science interest is, and 99 percent of the time, it was far from the subject of his/her investigatory project. I reminded them that science is still science even if one cannot demonstrate the usefulness of an experiment or an invention. Jacob Bronowski, who wrote the monumental The Ascent of Man which was the basis of a BBC special almost three decades ago, reminded us in his book Science and Human Values that indeed, issues of their time inhabited the scientists’ minds as much as scientists inhabited their times. Newton had woven a gravitational theory that strung the laws of heaven and earth at a time when a map of the stars was crucial at that age of exploration and yes, Michael Faraday delved into the basis for power generation when a source of power was the pressing issue of his time. But it was their personal sense of curiosity and adventure, the uncountable sparks within the human spirit that fueled the toil of their minds, not the prospect of intellectual patents or royalties.

So the kids, who investigated the microbial properties of banana to be used in soap, should connect with Louis Pasteur; how his habit of looking at everything through a magnifying glass got him disinvited from a lot of dinner parties but how this habit changed the way we lived and treated diseases because he proved, without doubt, the existence of "germs."  Those who chose to investigate the insect-repelling qualities of plant toxins should know about the botanists who staked out their careers and lives in wild environments to study not only the uses of plants but their evolutionary roles and behavior. For those who made charcoal briquettes out of cashew shells, paper and fiber waste, and the like, they should recognize that they received the torch from the first human who rubbed sticks and stones together for the first time to set the world on fire. A friend of mine, Jolo, 13, was not part of the science fair but he is so in love with spiders, identifying and comparing them that he even conducts experiments on spider IQ. He is one shining example of seething curiosity, the same spirit that drove Carl Linnaeus to come up with a scientific system of naming organisms that is useful up to now. (Carl Linnaeus was known to name weeds after his "less favored" colleagues. If Jolo chances upon a new species of spider to name, I think I have a few name suggestions after those excellencies, honorable ladies and gentlemen of a peculiar mammalian trade called politics.)

Old folk say that Antipolo has changed a lot that even its famous natural spot, the Hinulugang Taktak, has dried up. I first visited Antipolo when I was three and came home with a yellow embroidered hat and a jar of cashew nuts. Thirty-six years later, I come down from a visit to Antipolo hills with a more grounded sense of what science means to kids up there and from what I have witnessed, not everything has dried up. There are signs of life, everywhere.

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