| Mildred |
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| Written by lesleyda | ||
| Wednesday, 29 August 2007 | ||
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I thought that it would be nice to start
a topic to pay a tribute to the teachers of Nabua High. I thought of
this because my husband recently wrote something in his blog about a
teacher of his when he was in Nabua High. I thought it would be nice to
share with you.
TO MILDRED. She was a small woman with short, curly brown hair, thick eyebrows and a button nose. She looked almost ordinary, save for her unusually fair skin which was quite a rarity in such a blistering place like Nabua. Hers was the type that turned pink after only a minute or two under the sun. Indeed her skin tone was perhaps her only remarkable physical feature, often highlighted by the usual bright red lipstick she used to paint her thin lips. If not for this, she’d be invisible. Mildred was in her early forties when I met her in 1992. She was one of over a hundred teachers in Nabua National High School, the public school where I graduated from. She taught Social Studies, although she never became my teacher because that year, the school administration decided to assign her to one of the last sections of senior students. Somewhere between Section N and Section Q. I still imagine Mildred, sharp as she was, thinking to herself that what the school administrators had been giving her almost every year wasn’t an assignment, but more like a sentence. It was like her punishment for not being “good enough” for their standards to handle the “good” students from Section A to Section D. But I know Mildred wasn’t the type to complain or mind any of these things. In fact, I think she didn’t care. Nothing seemed to worry her. Nothing seemed to faze her. She was one of the most laid back people I have ever met. She was also full of energy. She walked way faster than most people her age with those tiny set of legs and always spoke with great enthusiasm. She was a happy little woman, like many little women I know. Mildred must have done something extra awful the preceding school year that she was also given the extra burden of handling NAHISGO from 1992-1993. NAHISGO was Nabua National High School’s student government. It’s an “institution” that was probably as old as the school itself – a relic even back in the day. Useless, irrelevant, yet kept. Like an old tradition, it was there simply because it had been there for who knows how long. As far as teachers like Mildred was concerned, being the adviser of a pseudo-political student organization with a cheesy name in a small town somewhere in the middle of the Bicol region was like handling a cheerleading team for a school that had no athletics program. NAHISGO was without any real purpose. The campaigning, the voting, the canvassing – all of it were merely a practice of futility. Very much like the real elections in our country which we, ironically, tried desperately to emulate. The school administrators knew this all too well that was why this rather empty task (but a task nonetheless) had always been reserved for people like Mildred. The job was like looking after a heavily tranquilized child. They expected nothing more than to let the year go by without incident just as it did the previous years. It didn’t take a lot of brain to do that. Or so they thought. Mildred took her new assignment to heart. Perhaps she felt that it was the most exciting thing to happen to her rather dull academic life and she’ll be damned if she wasn’t going to make the most of it. That’s why when we were introduced after I won NAHISGO's "presidency," (via landslide, may I add), I liked her instantly. She had in her what most people her age and condition have already lost or forgotten: Life, and a lot of it. Around the middle of the school year in November, we, the student government, got invited to attend a leadership conference in Baguio City. Mildred was ecstatic. She was like a kid who got the present she wanted for Christmas and then some. When she broke the news, she seemed more excited than I was and I had never even been to the place my whole life. She kept saying, “We’re going! We’re going!” like I didn’t believe her, but of course I did. But the more she said it, it began to sound more like a promise than an actual plan. It was probably because she knew that she had a better chance of winning a beauty pageant than the school administrators allowing such travesty to happen. And she was right. When she presented the idea to them, she was told that the school had no money for that kind of extracurricular activity. Under ordinary circumstances, that would’ve been the end of it. Nabua had always been, and still is, a place where you don’t question authority for fear of spending eternity in hell – yes, that hell. And no other institution besides our own homes breeds this kind of wisdom as effectively as our schools. But Mildred had been misjudged and underestimated long enough to put up with that kind of crap. She decided she wouldn’t take no for an answer and fought for us with everything she got. We wrote a petition while she fronted and pleaded our case. It was a battle that raged on for days and resulted to a great deal of unfamiliar tension between Mildred and the gods of the administration building. But Mildred was relentless and never gave up. I used to imagine what Mildred said or did when she tried to convince her superiors to let us go. She probably argued that it was an opportunity that many of us may never have the chance to get again. She had seen too many kids fail and too many broken dreams in more than two decades of teaching in the province, and knew that no one was immune to disappointment – not even the kids from Section A to Section D. Perhaps she contended that this trip was an experience we can take with us forever; something we can keep and no one could take away no matter what happened in our lives. After several days of waiting in suspense, we got word that the school administration gave us the green light. So whatever Mildred said must have been really good. (Later I learned that it was something like, it was about time the budget for the student government to be put in good use – the students’ use.) And so in December of 1992, Mildred took me to my first trip to what had become one of my favorite places in this world. And to me, her reason for doing so will always be more about her fulfilling a promise she made to a bunch of kids she was delegated to take care of than her genuine desire to enhance our “leadership skills.” A few weeks before our high school graduation in 1993, Mildred came to me in her usual frantic self and declared that she had requested that I be given a leadership award during the graduation ceremony for being the student government president. This would’ve been fine except the school never gave out such an award – especially during the graduation ceremony – and she knew it. I can think of no other explanation for this except Mildred probably found out that I won’t be getting anything on graduation day besides the fake diplomas the school ceremoniously handed out. I wasn’t valedictorian. I wasn’t salutatorian. I wasn’t an honorable mention. I wasn’t anything but an ordinary senior student finally getting out of high school, and she felt sorry for me. It's oddly disconcerting that even now, many people still think that if I didn’t go somewhere else during my 3rd year in high school, Mildred didn’t have to lobby for my award. They believe that I would have beaten the hell out of so and so for this and that academic achievement. But I don’t think so. If I had stayed in Nabua High all the way, my life would’ve been only a little less colorful, but not different. Not in that magnitude anyway. I’d still be the same kid who didn’t care about my grades, or others', and the quarterly Top Ten and shall, therefore, end up in the exact same situation. I stopped being a good student back in Grade 5, but that’s another story. Mildred didn’t know this of course. Nevertheless, I asked her not to do such a thing because among a hundred other reasons, it was embarrassing. I told her I was OK. Sensing my dire reluctance, she tried to comfort me by saying they’d probably not allow it anyway. I was confident they wouldn’t because it was just absolutely ridiculous. After a few days, Mildred came back to me with a bad news and a good news. The bad news, she said, was that the school can’t give me the leadership award because it wasn’t on their budget. They weren’t going to buy a medal for it because it wasn’t a legitimate academic award. The good news was, Mildred continued, that she went to Iriga City that morning and purchased a medal for me, so, problem solved and everything had been arranged. So on graduation day, a special award was announced. My Nanay, in one of her best outfits, walked with me towards the stage and proudly put the medal Mildred bought around my neck. Nanay was one happy woman that day. She must’ve thought her grandson had not been that bad of a bust after all. I got a medal on graduation day! She didn’t know why or how or what for, but for her and my mother in the Middle East, it was enough to feel that everything thus far had been worth it. Mildred made it all happen for 25 pesos and 30 minutes of her time. This story had been in my mind for years, but I never got to put it all together because of one problem: I forgot, or perhaps never knew, that Mildred was Mildred’s name. I only remembered her as Mrs. Sergio. I thought it would be a grave injustice if I wrote anything like this and failed to mention her real name. So when I went back to the Philippines last year, finding it out was in my to-do list, as well as paying her a visit and telling her this story myself. While in Nabua, I visited my aunt Eleanor who taught and still teaches in my old high school, and in the middle of my stories of my adventures here in the United States, I asked if she still remembered who the NAHISGO adviser was during my time. It took her a surprisingly long time to figure out who I was referring to, and when she did, she blurted Mildred’s name out loud like it suddenly popped out from deep beneath her memories. She asked me why I wanted to know. Understandable. My question was pretty odd considering the circumstances. I could’ve asked or talked about a million other things other than that. I just told my aunt that I remembered Mrs. Sergio recently and had been kicking myself since for not being able to make out her name. She replied with a satisfied “oh” and went on to tell me that Mildred had already passed away. A few years after my graduation, Mildred quit teaching and went overseas to work. After only a few months, she came back home ill and apparently never recovered. The whole story, of course, was longer and much sadder than this. But what I find most heart-wrenching was that Mildred practically died more recently as an ex-OFW rather than an ex-educator. My ex-educator. I couldn’t hold myself back from trying to figure out what on earth was in Mildred’s mind when she decided to go Bagong Bayani at 50. I know, I know. In the face of painful disbelief, we do tend to ask some very stupid questions. Of course, Mildred did it for her family. And why would she not? How could she not? If she can stick her neck out and jeopardize her career for kids she didn’t even know and buy one of them a medal for graduation day, what can Mildred not do for the people she loved? (According to my aunt, NNHS continued what Mildred had started. Every year since 1993, the school gave out a "Leadership Award" for the student government president during the graduation ceremonies. To her knowledge however, mine was the only medal Mildred bought.)
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