88-41347
(Note: The following is an article that the author wrote for the UPLB Centennial Yearbook.)
The tangerine armchairs at the Animal Science Lecture Hall A were indicative of colorful things that awaited my future in UP Los Ba˜ños. In this room — on Aug. 15, 1987, a cloudless Saturday afternoon, if my neurons haven’t atrophied yet — I was about to take my UPCAT. I did not prepare for it; worse, I was running a fever when I took the exam. I was only armed with two tablets of Medicol, a piece of boiled plantain, four pieces of Cheesewhiz pandesal, two tetra packs of Magnolia Chocolait and the tenacious spirit to somehow ace the entrance test.
I just had the resolute will to pass the exam. Otherwise, I would not be able to study college. My farming family, based in Gulod, Cabuyao, Laguna, was poor. If I would make it to UP Los Baños, half of the problem of going to college would be solved. Somebody told my mother I could apply for GIA (Grants-In-Aid) if I would pass the examination. Given that my parents had nothing except for their dream that I would make it to the county’s premiere university, I was somehow turbo-propped to pass the exam. My mother prayed I would make it while I preyed on the solid scholastic knowledge I gained from high school.
On that eventful day, after the test booklets were given to the examinees, the examiner/proctor introduced himself: Prof. Noel K. Torreta (who became my adviser later on in my practicum manuscript). The test permits were counterchecked. Mine bore the numbers 41347. The wind abandoned us that afternoon. The many trees around were still, like defanged phantoms in broad daylight. Inside the testing center, the whirring of Jurassic industrial fans was ominous of how hard the exam was. But from time to time, the graffiti on my armrest — one of them read: “There are only 2 universities in the Philippines, UP and others” — upped my hope to make it to UP. And yes, I made it.
It was in April 1988 when a neighbor, a sophomore at UPLB, told me that I passed the UPCAT. My mother and the rest of my family were ecstatic. I had a jamboree in my mind as my heart did a cartwheel. It was clear to me that day that my ticket to the world had been handed to me.
In May that year, I enrolled as a beaming 16-year-old bona fide freshman in the country’s foremost educational institution, paying only P35.50 for 18 units because I got accepted in the GIA program. I still paid the same amount when GIA became STFAP (Socialized Tuition and Financial Assistance Program) in 1989. I enjoyed my being Bracket 2 (with P1,500 monthly stipend and P1,500 book allowance every sem), even if it meant being a student assistant at the Registrar’s Office as “payment” for the “remunerations” I received every sem from the university. When I enrolled that year, UPLB also gave me another identity I could never forget for the rest of my life — my student number: 88-41347. It was the number I put in my bluebook instead of my name when I had quizzes or exams. And at the end of the sem, whether I got a 1.0 or 3.0 in this or that subject, it was the number I would see, together with other student numbers, typewritten on a bond paper, posted outside the room of this or that instructor. With my own student number, I felt unique as I thought the university had just given me — let me risk repeating myself here — my own ticket to dreamland.
But before UP presented itself as my ticket to the world, it proved first as my passport to learning the ropes of academic excellence. It became my badge to meeting interesting people inside the campus, around the university.
Let me digress back to the very first day I enrolled at UPLB. While queuing up for registration at the Admi (short for the Administration Building), just a stone’s throw away from the mosaic-ed gate of the campus and the Carabao Park, I met several student-volunteers for the NSOP (New Students Orientation Program). One of them was a guy named Teddy Casiño, who, if my memory serves me right, became my semi-regular breakfast-mate at Sausage House near the Raymundo Gate. (Who would have thought that I would run into him again one day at the House of Representatives while I was pinching in as a House reporter?)
Memorable, too, was my first day in campus, June 6, 1988, the birthday of my mother, the enabler of my dreams and my number one fan. That day was devoted to campus tour, familiarizing ourselves with the buildings — PhySci, BioSci, Humanities, Animal, SU, Men’s, Women’s, Forestry, IRRI, CDEM, Agro, Baker, CEAT, including a structure called “TBA.” My fellow Com Arts majors (Block 58) and I enjoyed our campus tour with NSOP volunteer named Pipoy Linatoc, a very charismatic student leader under the LAKAS student political group, a force to reckon with in campus those days.
Soon after, I realized I had been aligning myself with the LAKAS group whose standard bearer that time at the USC was Rudy Corro. PANDAYAN was its counter political party. And in my three and a half years in campus (modesty aside, I finished ahead of time. I was only 19 then), and even beyond that, it was always, always LAKAS that won the USC landslide.
I must admit it was LAKAS who channeled stiff my political antennae. My political awakening happened when I was barely 11 years old, the time when Ninoy Aquino was assassinated on Aug. 21, 1983. My “soft” association with “hardcore” tibak students aroused my political leanings. So I joined rallies in Mendiola, commiserated with labor union members at picket lines in factories in Calamba and Cabuyao, participated in noise barrage. Once, my friends and I were so carried away in our noise barrage in the campus in 1989 that we even burned the manila papers posted on big bulletin boards in the Humanities building. Before we could set the place ablaze, we took off our shirts and used them to put out the fire. We vowed never to do it again. The following month, the Old CAS Building was gutted by fire, going up in smoke, too, was the prized multi-million-peso microscope among other endemic zoological species in bottles with formalin. My friends and I were not responsible for the arson. But the faulty electrical wiring was.
Talk about rallies, anyway, I always joined them to douse fire with my own brand of humor. I was leading the chanting on a megaphone: “Quisumbing, kisay! Quisumbing, kisay!” at the Department of Education, Culture and Sports building. When I noticed that no one was following me, only then did I realize that the chant should have been “Quisumbing, resign! Quisumbing, resign.”
Still on the megaphone, along Mendiola Bridge, while running, the chant should be: “Iskolar ng bayan, ngayon ay lumalaban.” My gay friends and I were chanting: “Iskolar ng bayan, ngayo’y naglalandian!” In a hot situation like lightning rallies in Mendiola, humor always found its way. And it always came in handy when we were all dripping wet, not only with sweat, but also with water from the sewers after being watered down by the dispersal group tightly clawing Malacanang, cyclone wire after cyclone wire.
UP Los Baños introduced me, too, to an academic organization that also helped me discover who I was: the UPLB Com Arts Society. I joined it during the first sem of my first year. Since then, my love for the Soc has never diminished. My “brods” and “sisses” at the Com Arts Soc, the young once and the young ones, are intrinsic part of my completion as a writer. The young once helped me decide that I should major in Writing. The young ones now help me get inspired by them reading my prose and reflecting on it.
More than the gleaming academic eruditions, UPLB —the system, the people, the culture — taught me to be who I am, to weave my dreams and to accomplish my ambitions. And to this institution, again, I take my humble bow.
(For your new beginnings, please e-mail me at bumbaki@yahoo.com. Have a blessed Sunday!)
