Primary School Days

First day of school was my first experience to be separated from my mother and family, and so I did not want my mother to leave me behind. I cried and cried until I had forced my mother to stay outside to wait for me. It worked out well because after my short stay in school, I went with her to buy some school supplies. We went to a very small store just around the corner from the school and we bought a bag that was made out of buri leaves. A buri tree looks like a coconut tree, except that the buri was much shorter and its leaves much larger. My bag was quite large for a thin boy like me, and its content was only a white pad Grade 1 pupils used with one solitary pencil.

School was not amusing to me in the beginning because I was not used with stranger children and teachers who acted like my mom, and I did have trouble early on including calling a teacher stupid and I got pinched in the ear. My classmates laughed when my teacher pinched me and I got angry. Many days after that I gathered a few friends and this emboldened me not to go to school and instead we went to a creek to catch fish. Then when I learned that birds were more fun to catch we would go to a far away rice fields and there set traps for quails. In the evening I would time myself to go home for my mother to think that I was in school whole day. My mother would question why I had mud all over my knees and I would answer her that I fell into a mud going back home. Later on, however, my mother found out that I had not been in school and she asked me why. I told her that the teacher pinched me in the ear and that I hated school. My mother was very upset that the teacher did that to me and she attacked the teacher trying to also pinch her by the ear. That thing settled after exchanging apologies and I went back to school. I had a barely passing grade in Grade 1 and Grade 2 but in Grade 3 I hit the first honor role. My mother had the chance to pin a ribbon on me and the same teacher that pinched my ear congratulated my mother for having a very bright son.

In my Grade 3 years I got exposed to singing and got a duet number with a female classmate and we sang the song, "Tell My Why?" We went all around different schools singing the same songs as we vied for trophies with other equally very great singers and we would always come out first. During this time, picking up some fame in my school, several of my boy classmates became kind of jealous of me and went pushing me around. It was during this time that I learned how to fight back and obtain extra ordinary temper that I carried on for many years. Many times I would tell the boys that I would fight with whoever wanted to fight with me and to wait for me outside after school, and, so it was, they would wait for me and the boy that wanted to fight me would first hit my face. I did learn to bear the pains and the stars that would come out of my eyes when I'd get hit. I also learned how to fight and learn not to cry. Underneath the school was a space that not very many ventured, because it was narrow and wet, but my enemy and I would go there, as if it was our special place, just to hit each other. We would come out there with bruises on our faces. My brothers would just laught at my bruises taunting me to learn a better way to fight. And I did, including being sleek and treacherous. There were times that I would get my hand filled with sand and slammed it to my opponents face, thus blinding him for a long moment. I was gifted in brain when it came to the academics, but I was not gifted in bodily shape for I was skinny and lanky. But I was brave.

My mother and father decided to move to another town for business and at this time we lived in a bigger city where there were lots of small buses, jeepneys, and bicycles. I was 8 years old when we lived in Mahayag. Still, Mahayag, was one of the smallest towns of Zamboanga del Sur, but much larger than Sicpao. Mahayag was the place where I got introduced to civilization, so to speak. There were roads where motor vehicles plied and I ventured into these places. Beside our house was a blacksmith shop that manufactured bolos, and plows. Times passed by and I stayed there just watching the man pound on the very hot and red metal to form it into a plow. There were times that I would push the blower to fan the firewood which burned the raw irons. I began experiencing to be alone during this time. And somehow I had felt what independence was like.

One day, my father arrived from a long journey and he brought with him a big brownish box. I did not know what it was, but when my dad had it all wired up I could hear people talking from inside it. I had never seen a radio all my life until I was 8 years old and so I asked my mother where the people at. "Are they inside the box?" I asked my mother. But my mother was also ignorant. She did not know for sure how to answer me. Yet she saw my father hooked up on a wire a piece of nail that he buried into the ground. She told me that the people were not in the box but they all were under the ground. Perturbed, I examined the ground near the nail and still I could not figure out how people could be heard from a box when in fact they were coming under the ground.