Padiriwang ng Buon ng Wika

You may remember my experiences with the National Nutrition Month observances and the fruit and vegetable headdress. I finally lost my cool and sent off a snotty note to a teacher when she sent home a request for school supplies on the evening before they were needed. I enclosed a copy of my headdress experience and asked that the teacher share it with her colleagues so that they could enjoy it as well. Apparently it got some attention because a month before the actual event we got a notice, actually four separate notices, that the kids would need costumes for Pagdiriwang ng Buon ng Wika.
Between my rudimentary Tagalog and a quick reference to my Tagalog-English dictionary I interpreted this as Celebration of Language Month. That means that August was Language Month and they were celebrating it, as it turned out, on August 31. Each notice listed the traditional Filipino clothing that the kids would need. Jhulana needed a kimona and bakya. Bakya are wooden sandals but I wasn’t clear how a Japanese robe got to be a native Filipino costume. Miguel and Shin needed red pajamas and camisa de chino. Camisa is, I think, Spanish for shirt and here refers to an undershirt worn under the barong Tagalog, the traditional transparent shirt worn on formal occasions. (The barong Tagalog is infinitely superior to Western formal wear during hot weather. President Clinton wore one here for some conclave of Asian leaders and my opinion of him dropped even lower, if that were possible, when he didn’t adopt it as the official dress in Washington, D.C. during the terrible heat of August.) I wasn’t sure about the ‘de chino’ part or the red pajamas. The weirdest requirement was for Kyotaro, in kindergarten. He needed a camisa de chino, a pair of black cycling shorts and a bahag. A bahag, I was told, is a loin cloth, and that sounded congruent with native costumes. I was unclear as to how an undershirt became part of native Filipino dress but the black cycling shorts were an absolute enigma.
Each of the kids’ notes included a requirement for kakaing Pinoy, Filipino cooking.
Somehow there appeared one pair of red pants made of some flimsy material and what I was told was a camisa de chino, both in Shintaro’s size. These must have been artifacts of some previous similar ceremony but mercifully I must have been off in the US when that occurred.
I planned to buy the remaining costume components at a department store but after the fiasco with the headdress I wasn’t going to go into this without further information. First, in an effort to avoid the misunderstandings of the previous national month celebration I went to school about two weeks before the event to learn more about these requirements. I left knowing little more than I did when I arrived, despite the efforts of several young ladies to explain what the items were, but with the information that they were available at considerably lower cost at a nearby market, which had its market day on Monday. And, I was told, Monday was a holiday, which would be a perfect time to take the kids to get the costumes properly fitted.
Eventually I learned that the holiday Monday was not the following Monday but Monday the 30th of August, National Heroes Day, the day before the celebration. With my history, I wasn’t about to wait until the day before the event to buy the costumes. We, meaning me and the four kids, drove 40km/25 miles, about an hour each way, to the nearest mall and spent a frustrating number of hours going up and down escalators between various children’s departments and the cultural section. I found the red pajamas, which are red pants made of some flimsy material, exactly as the pair I already had for Shintaro. They all came with a red bandanna sewed to them. A disproportionate amount of time was spent on escalators going from one department to another, looking for a red bandanna to go with Shintaro’s pants. Eventually I had a flash of inspiration and bought another pair of pants just to get the bandanna sewed to it. The bakya were just sandals with wooden soles and Jhulana picked out a little pair in yellow, her favorite color. The kimona, I learned from the extraordinarily patient sales girls in the cultural department, is nothing like a kimono but is, rather, a lacey little transparent piece that goes over the shoulders and bodice of a dress called, I think, a saya. Whatever the dress is called, I bought one of those too.
The bahag or loin cloth, was nothing like I had envisioned. I was thinking of a simple piece of soft cloth about three feet long and a few inches wide. What I was shown was a rough blanket about six or eight feet long and at least two feet wide. I had the sales girl show me how to put it on Kyotaro. Miguel did not help matters by repeatedly referring to it, with an inordinate amount of laughter, as a diaper. Kyo became very quiet when it was in place. It was incredibly bulky in the back where it was looped over to provide some cover for his butt. Which reminds me, the enigma of the cycling shorts was revealed: they were to provide some security for his pride in case the bahag went south during the ceremony. As it turned out, the idea proved to be not without merit. But I’m getting ahead of the story. The final pieces in this collection of fine jewels were the camisa de chino and cycling shorts for Kyotaro. The shorts were no great problem although I wonder how many Filipino four-year-olds wear Spandex when they ride their tricycles. The smallest piece we could find was none too small for him. We finally found a camisa de chino of appropriate size for him in the Infants Clothing department. This only deepened Kyo’s dour attitude toward his costume. I had some reservations myself. We walked out of the store poorer by about P2,500, about $55, not counting the considerable cost of feeding the four of them at KFC.
On Junko’s advice I appropriated the boys’ costumes while Jhulana carefully hung up her saya and kimona on her clothes rack. I did have the kids try on the costumes one last time on Sunday, two days before the celebration. I noticed that when the bahag was being installed, Kyotaro’s normally sunny disposition turned decidedly cloudy, especially when Miguel, despite threats of dire consequences, managed to slip in a couple of “diaper” comments.
Junko saved the day when she returned from Manila on Monday evening with several packages of Filipino sweets to comply with the kakaing Pinoy edict.
The morning of the great event dawned cloudy and blustery, after a rainy night. The costuming went surprisingly well and Miguel, Jhulana and Shintaro were ready when their tricycle arrived at 6:30 AM. The driver was surprised that Kyotaro was not going with them since, he said, Kyo was to be at school at 7:30, half an hour earlier than usual. I told him that I would drop Kyo off on my way in to town to get some chicken feed and visit the internet shop and the three putted off to school with their kakaing Pinoy plus their usual baon, provisions, for snacks.
I managed to get Kyo’s bahag in place with minimal ado, reversing the procedure so that the most prominent outcropping was in front where it would not interfere with his ability to sit down. As it turned out, this was another example of unnecessary preparaton for a non-event.
I led him into his classroom right at 7:30. There were a variety of sizes of children, from the nursery classes up to the kindergarteners, milling about in an equal number of variations on the costumes. Kyo was not reassured by the costumes of the others and I noticed that many of the kids were clinging to their parent and some were patently teary-eyed. I opted to delay my errands until the ceremony began. The kids were instructed to line up with their respective classmates. Parents continued to drift in with their kids in various stages of costuming. After standing in line for about 45 minutes, the little kids filed out back to the basketball court between the elementary and high school buildings. Some parents and kids were still arriving as the kids were filing out. Once on the court, the kids waited for another 45 minutes or so while the rest of the classes took their places. Somewhere in this waiting period I noticed dark thunderheads moving towards us. I wondered briefly about the arrangements for rain because there was no indoor space large enough to accommodate the entire student body. After another 30 minutes the clouds, which had propitiously remained until then, dispersed and the sun suddenly began beating down with its full tropical intensity. Umbrellas immediately sprouted like psychedelic mushrooms after a rain and the little kids were moved closer to the building to huddle in whatever shade it provided. Fortunately there was a breeze, which made the sun tolerable.
All of the students were eventually situated and after an unexplained delay in which nothing seemed to be happening on stage, two high school students, who seemed to function as the Masters of Ceremony made some brief introductory remarks, which was followed by the obligatory interminable prayer, the National Anthem with recorded band music played at maximum distortion volume over the sound system, remarks by some thin lady, vaguely familiar, in a severely tailored jacket and skirt, and remarks by the school principal. Since this was Pagdiriwang ng Buon ng Wika everything was in Filipino so most of the content was lost to me. What a shame. Then there was a longish talk by an older man, who seemed to be talking about the importance of language, a favorite topic of mine but one apparently lost on the students who had been standing in line for the previous two hours.
Eventually the nursery level kids came on stage, the boys in black pants and barong Tagalog and the girls in miniature long gowns called, I think, terno, and did a traditional courting dance which involved the boys kneeling on the floor while the girls walked around. Actually, things are a bit of a blur because there were several groups of young kids who danced or some of whom danced while the others stood picking their noses and looking around between sporadic efforts to follow along. One reason that the dances tended to merge together was that all of the music was very similar, with a definite Italian influence, being primarily mandolin, an instrument I had not previously known to be one of the native Filipino instruments. Some high school kids performed a long skit based, I think, on a Filipino folk tale about an eagle, a fish, a monkey, a snake and a couple of other animals that I can’t recall, each of which had to go through the same procedure , whatever it was, before the moral could be told. One of the less tedious dances, by older grade schoolers, was a native warrior dance performed to contemporary, up-tempo music. One of the more memorable performances involved a young lady, perhaps in her early teens, who had to be led from the stage when she became emotionally distraught after a bad start to her singing. There was one small group of dancers, all young girls, who stood out because they were well rehearsed, moving more or less synchronously in identical costumes.
At some time during all this, Kyotaro had abandoned his classmates and came to be with me. Twice I took him to the toilet, which was an education in the challenges of performing necessary personal hygiene while wearing a bahag. Each time I redid the thing it became less stable and I feared for its durability while Kyo was on stage. Fortunately that became a moot point when there was a sudden, brief, very light smattering of rain and everyone took advantage of the situation and herded the youngest students inside. Kyo immediately found his school bag and ate his snacks. Then we took our cue from the other parents and left, which apparently was the backup provision for rain, which had already stopped.
I’m guessing that I spent about P3,500/$80, a considerable sum here, and at least 10 hours of my time including driving, shopping and ancillary activities plus another 4 hours of waiting at the school. At least some of the parents made the costumes themselves or had them made. I’ll never know how much time the kids spent in preparation for their performances instead of receiving instruction on academics. I’m pretty sure that we spent more than most but I wonder about the total number of man-hours wasted by parents, teachers and students in preparation for the celebration of National Language Month.
In my experience this ceremony was typical of most Filipino celebrations in that it was overly and inappropriately formal, poorly organized and overlong but mostly because it was entirely unjustified, a waste of time, energy and money. Whatever the total of time wasted, it was less than it would have been and I am grateful that the weather gave us an excuse, however transparent, to bolt the ill-conceived ceremony. Perhaps I lack the attitude necessary to be a proper Filipino.
Mindful of Jhulana’s experience with the celebration of National Nutrition Month (Her ‘nutritious snack’ was taffy.) I asked Miguel, the only one who spent that whole day at school, what traditional Filipino food he got. He told me, “hamburgers in banana leaves.”