CEBU, Philippines - First there was St. Theresa’s College in Cebu, which was run by Belgian nuns. My mother, who loved business, entrusted us children to the Belgian nuns. She enrolled me in kindergarten when I was four years old. The alternative was to leave me in the care of yayas and maids and Mama figured the nuns would do a better job of rearing us.
The Belgian nuns (Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) were strict disciplinarians. Early on we learned about rules and regulations and respecting authority and doing homework. We were also taught that we were privileged and had to give back to society, an idea that stayed with many of us.
We wore blue and white uniforms, starched stiff, with a blue ribbon at the collar, and with a school pin right smack in the center. The white blouse had long sleeves, and thinking about it makes me wonder how we survived the tropical heat, given we played hard before and after class hours and during recess. There was a playground with a merry-go-round and swings, and the campus had all sorts of interesting cubbies like the grotto area and a mysterious bamboo grove, more or less forbidden to us and which therefore became highly attractive.
The only stark memory I recall of kindergarten was my undoing my blue ribbon to fix it, and an irate nun flying at me; she scolded me and proceeded to fix my ribbon, a task I felt capable of doing. I was extremely offended at the assault.
St. Theresa’s College, Cebu was co-educational until Grade 4, but the boys were in one classroom, the girls in another. There were around 50 students in a classroom. I marvel at how those nuns and lay teachers controlled those squirming children, but they did. The primary reason was because the nuns didn’t hesitate getting rid of the “bad†kids. Now and then, we would hear of a student being expelled.
Class hours were from 8 to 11:30, with a lunch break until 2 p.m. Classes resumed at that time and ended at 4 p.m. We stayed in the same classroom, and the teachers were the ones who appeared and reappeared every 50 minutes or so. We had subjects like Science, Arithmetic, Reading, P.E. Social Studies, Tagalog, English, Religion, and Music. After school hours, there were extra-curricular activities such as Theater or Sodality (a religious group).
Even though the nuns and teachers were strict, they fostered a creative energy, which nurtured me early on. Theme writing, for example was a favorite of mine. We used to have theatrical performances too, which I loved. I recall playing Meg in a Little Women Class Theatrical program. And the nuns had all sorts of pageants, wherein the students could participate.
It used to be that the students graduated when they finished Grade 6; but at some point the nuns added a Grade 7 class. I was placed in the Grade 7 group because I was one of the youngest in my class. After finishing Grade 7, I went on to St. Theresa’s College San Marcelino in Manila. By this time there were some Filipina nuns aside from the Belgians. They were strict all the same, but I got excellent education at St. Theresa’s College.
Despite the rules and regulations we had to follow, somehow we were also shown the doors and opportunities of life. They had speakers address us, and that was probably where I got the idea that I would be a scientist, an idea which morphed into becoming a chemical engineer, an idea that was discarded, until I finally settled on what seemed the easiest (and appropriate) major in college for me, Communication Arts.
From St. Theresa’s College, I went to the University of the Philippines to try to be an engineer. The reason I considered being an engineer was because my father was a civil engineer. I wanted to be a chemical engineer. It had gotten into my head that I wanted to make perfume, an idea that sprung from my attempts as a child to make scents from our sweet-smelling jasmine flowers.
My mother should have known that my mind was not suited for engineering, but she liked the idea and she accompanied me to the University of the Philippines in Diliman to enroll. I did not think about it until later that my mother had strong attachment to the UP. She had attended it; and my father had been an engineering professor and Advisor of the Tau Alpha Fraternity at the UP. (I never quite appreciated the importance of the latter, but I would hear about his having been Advisor decades after he died, so it must have been significant.)
Since my SATs and high school grades were good, I was accepted without any problem. We lived in Malate, which was very far from Diliman, and so Mama placed me in a UP dorm, the Ilang-Ilang, if I recall right, where I shared a room with three or four other young women. The deal was that I would go home to Malate for the weekends. Since students at the UP wore “civilian†clothes, Mama had many clothes sewn for me, which made me feel like a kind of fashion model.
So there I was, a transplant from an all-girls school to a big university, and one of my main preoccupations was showing off a new dress every day. I am a bit ashamed to say I couldn’t hack university life. There were too many things going on. First, I was simply not cut out to be an engineer; second, the university was too large and too impersonal. By this, I mean the teachers didn’t even know me, something I was not used to. So I floated from class to class feeling off-kilter. There were a lot of boys and parties, but I had a difficult time juggling my social life with the academic. In the end, I did fine with all my courses except Math, which I zipped through Algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus in one semester. I could have died! During our finals, one classmate, a young man who had a crush on me and who knew I was a goner, pushed his test paper over so I could copy his work. Since I was raised by nuns, I never even considered cheating, and so I did not accept his offering. I got an Incomplete for Math. The teacher Ms. Brown later kindly explained to me that I deserved an “F†but she decided to give me an Incomplete instead. She said I could take a summer class and get caught up.
Fortunately after one semester I figured out I was not thriving in this environment and told my mother I wanted to return to an all-girls’ school. She enrolled me in Maryknoll College where I scanned the different majors and decided Communications Arts was the easiest. I did take that Math summer class, which was a breeze, since it was Math for liberal arts students.
I’ll end Part 1 here, dear Readers. Part 2 talks about my attendance at Maryknoll and UCLA.
BIO: Cecilia Manguerra Brainard was born and raised in Cebu. She is the award-winning author and editor nineteen books. Her website ishttp://www.ceciliabrainard.com. She has a blog at http://cbrainard.blogspot.com.