Living along the highway.

After having gone through my first week in community medicine, the first thing that I can say is that living in the barrios may not be as bad as I was afraid it would be, after all. The family I was assigned to live with is the prototype of your typical Filipino family—extremely warm and hospitable. In the words of Lola, the grandmother who lives with the family, “Ay, parang sarili a!,” which she and Tita Susan, the mother and

BHW

, like to tell me and Ryanne from time to time to remind us that we were welcome in their household and to therefore not feel like outsiders.

 

And the Estoya family has indeed made sure that Ryanne and I did not feel like outsiders. They eat their meals with us, and allow us to watch television with them at night after dinner—believe, me, I’d never watched so many telenovelas and game shows in my life. On a similar note, they also allow us to help out with the family chores, such as doing the dishes.

 

I admit that the fact that the Estoyas have running water and a functional flushing toilet in a clean in-house bathroom has a little to do with my now more positive outlook on living in the barrio. It was, after all, one of my biggest apprehensions prior to this rotation. The Estoya family is relatively well-off, owning a relatively big house, with their own vegetable plantation, lambanog distillery, goat herd, carabao and pig, and even their own little piece of beach just 15 trekking minutes away.

 

Perhaps the biggest realization I made after my first week in the community is the fact that I have been living a relatively sheltered life. It brings me back to this time when I was in college, when I had to do field work for my Field Psychology class. My group then decided to study this group of girls who sold hair accessories on campus, and we consequently had to go to visit them every week in the squatters’ area they lived in. On the first time they took us there, I was literally taken aback. You see, I’d been going past that area along

Tandang Sora Road

for as long as I could remember, and even though I’d always known that squatters lived there, I didn’t realize how extensive and wide-reaching their community was. It was like one big maze, what with complex intersecting alleys running through diminutive shanties going up to as much as 4 stories high, with as much as 4 big families living in them.

 

One week in a little barrio in San Jaun, Batangas made me realize that I had been living all of my life along the highway, so to speak. The little enclave that the Estoya family lives in goes far back into the woods, off the highway. Much like the squatter community I had to go into back in college, it is the sort of place I wouldn’t know existed if I hadn’t been required to enter it. That is to say, I’d always known it was there, and from television, I’d always known what it looked like. But to actually go in there, and live there, and attempt to immerse yourself in there—that brings an entirely new perspective to just how cloistered I’d been all my life, thinking that I was living in a big world.

 

That big world, in fact, has just turned into one major highway. You drive fast and rush to keep up with everyone else who’s on that road with you, because in that big world, you cannot afford to be late and to be left behind. On the periphery, you see these off-roads and dirt roads, and you think you know where they lead. But in truth, you don’t really know. Until you stop and turn into these off-roads, and stay long enough, you won’t really know how much bigger the world really is off the major highway.

 

That’s basically it. Four days in the barrio, and I’m already loving it there. Everyone’s so friendly—despite being a new face in a place where everyone knows each other, I have learned not to be surprised when someone I’d never seen in my life before waves at me and says, “Magandang umaga ho, Doktora!” Yes, everyone, and I mean everyone there, knows each other. Once, Ryanne and I went to the palengke, located in the bayan far from the barangay we live in, to buy stuff for dinner. To get back home, we decided to take the jeep. There, the fellow passengers, who knew we were visiting doctors without us having introduced ourselves, asked us where we would be getting off. Even before Ryanne finished explaining that we wanted to get off just beyond the bridge past the barangay center, they already said, “A, kina Ka Larry!” Ka Larry, or Tito Larry, by the way, is the head of the Estoya family.

 

Needless to say, everything’s so laidback and relaxed. And despite the incredible heat—I think I’ve gotten more tanned here just by walking and sitting around than after staying in Boracay for one week—you just have to love the fresh air, and the beautiful trees, and the picturesque nipa houses with their lovely gardens and wooden fences. (The Estoya home, however, is a cement house).

 

I am looking forward to the remaining 5 weeks of my community medicine rotation, and somehow I think I’m going to be saddened once it’s over. As Lola also likes to tell me and Ryanne, “Mawiwili kayo rine e!” It’s true, indeed. Just four days in the barrio, at ako e nawiwili nga naman.