What a difference a year makes

It's been more than a year since I was in the Philippines. I think around this time, we were ending our time in Los Banos.

I've read back through this scant blog, happy with the fact that I was able to record some of my feelings and ideas, but also a little sad that when I came back to the States, I didn't have time to go back and process it (on the blog anyway, at least looking at the last entry).

Rereading my entries, I feel so lucky and privileged to have had those experiences, to have been in the program. Lucky, because I know many Filipino and Filipina Americans who would love to have gone a trip like mine; lucky, because, I think I may have been in the last TOS batch; lucky, because my job as a teacher allowed me to take the whole summer; lucky, because I have seen things that most of the people in my life have never and will never see.

As a writer, (I'm going to start calling myself that now...I'm in a program; I kind of have to now) I sometimes feel guilty about exploiting my own experiences. Which, is silly. Perhaps I should begin that sentence with, "as a recovering Catholic..." instead. Despite this guilt, this sort of sheepishness on my part...I feel like lucky that this experience gave me so much to write about.

I felt guilty for a good portion of the trip; guilty for my privilege, guilty for my dumb luck at having born out of poverty, in the US; guilty, when my parts of my family, living in shanties, and in very nice houses (my family's so big, it's like a microcosm of the people of the Philippines), all asked me in bewilderment, "So, you came here to study Tagalog? You came here and you paid for this? With your own money? How much?"... guilty, that I was a lucky one who grew up speaking the golden tongue with no accent and who paid to come back to learn to speak like them...

When we went to Payatas, to the houses of the "japayukis," to the many places where we met with the very poor, the marginalized, the ostracized parts and people of an already marginalized country and people...I felt guilty. Who were we to step into their homes to ask them questions about the ways they lived their lives? I felt like I was a visitor at the Zoo of Indigent People in Exotic Lands. I felt like an asshole.

Ate Susan said, in reply to these thoughts that I expressed to her as we left Payatas, that (and I'm paraphrasing here, because she said it much more eloquently) we were doing something for the people who let us into their homes. We were bearing witness to their lives; we were bearing witness to their existence. She said, people in the Philippines don't ask these people about their lives, they don't ask about their hopes and dreams and hardships. You are asking. You are listening. You will tell other people about it. You will tell other people about them.