Old dogs, new tricks

How will future generations remember the plunder that was lying in plain sight all these years at the Department of Public Works and Highways? Inflation may have increased theft values from millions to billions, but in scale and brazenness, the late president Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and Imelda Marcos were amateurs compared to Janet Lim Napoles, Pharmally, Sara Duterte, and the remorseless crooks enabled at the DPWH by politicians. We can set “Les Misérables” in the contemporary Philippines; playing cara y cruz in public, or stealing a mango, can land you in jail, while the proverbial wheels of justice grind slowly on those tried for plunder and murder.

All these were revealed after Sarah Discaya flaunted her wealth before two “veteran journalists,” who painted hers as a rags-to-riches lifestyle story, rather than an investigative piece on corruption in flood control projects. Remember, the first time she voted in a Philippine election was to cast a ballot in her name. Imagine if she got elected Pasig mayor, replacing the reformist Vico Sotto. Plunder would continue unabated. A pity that Pasig is an exception; look at places where a Chinese citizen and Philippine offshore gaming operator coddler like Alice Guo got elected.

In my undergraduate history classes, students are first assigned to write a short personal essay on food from their childhood. In the process of describing the food they either liked or hated, they uncover memories of the sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes of food. Food is linked to a childhood memory, a place, or a person. What began as a simple assignment becomes one of memory and reflection.

Their second assignment requires more than sitting down and remembering. They are asked to dig up the newspapers on the day they were born and describe what the Philippines was like then. Philippine Daily Inquirer issues online are the first primary sources consulted. Then the Inquirer issues are compared and contrasted with a second newspaper of their choice, Philippine Star, Manila Bulletin, Manila Times, Manila Standard, and would you believe, even the Baguio Midland Courier, available from the Rizal Library in microfilm. In these newspapers, some of them learn that their parents can be the most unreliable source of information. Memory being faulty with details, parents err on the weather, peso-dollar rate, and even the Philippine president at the time. With newspapers on hand, students find familiar names in politics and showbiz; the stories are the same: kidnapping, robbery, murder, fire, corruption in government, communist insurgency, secession in the South, etc. The only things that seem to change are cell phones and waistlines, but everything seems to remain the same 18 to 20 years hence. It is a sobering, some would say, depressing assignment, but then history does not repeat itself. History is about hope that the world may change for the better someday.

Their third assignment requires them to transcribe, translate, and analyze a 19th-century notarial document. An exercise that, fortunately, cannot be completed with artificial intelligence. Most of them write in block letters, cursive isn’t mandatory as before, so reading the document was difficult on many levels. Many words they could make out, some were illegible and were left blank, because orthography, spelling, and grammar differ from those in our time. What we would write today as “ako’y” would appear as “aco’i” or “walang” would be “ualang” a century ago. Instead of pesos and centavos, they had “reales.” Even names were unfamiliar: Diosdado, Saturnina, Escolastico, Doroteo. These sounded like showbiz personalities of my childhood that were in Spanish, like Doro de los Ojos, Sylvia la Torre, Pilita Corrales, and Bella Flores. Then there were Pinoy names like Pugo, Tugo, Patsy, Chuchi, Bayani Casimiro, and Dely Atay-Atayan. Characters made memorable by Dolphy in drag: Pacifica Falayfay and Fefita Fofonggay.

Paleography taught them that old Tagalog is not read with the eyes, but is easier when read aloud in a group and transcribed. Blanks in the text were figured out through context clues or just by looking at the incomplete sentence. Going out of their comfort zones, I think they learned to look beyond the internet for information; they consulted their Filipino teachers and left with a sense of how a historian does his work.

Finally, they are shown the two-volume analytical index of what Filipino historians refer to as “Blair & Robertson.” This 55-volume compilation of documents translated from Spanish, German, and Italian provides the primary sources for Philippine history. Some students came to me asking what all the numbers in the index meant. Pauleen Cheng wrote about Cafugao, a Cagayan chief, and his nephew Tuliao, who resisted Christianity. In 1640, they traveled from Abuluh to Manila to lodge a complaint. During the trip, they were persuaded to convert, and they returned devout, and an example to their people. A simple report by a freshman student who taught the old and jaded professor something new and obscure. History has been described as a foreign country; it looks different, but when taught well, it instills hope and teaches old dogs new tricks.

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Comments are welcome at ambeth.ocampo@inquirer.net