Sanctuary on fractured floors

My teachers told us we were the “pag-asa ng bayan” (hope of the country) before we even knew how to commute. I carried that cliché like a lucky charm. As the eldest—the family’s first investment—I grew up with the weight of my two siblings’ futures weighing heavily on my shoulders. I was raised to believe that if I just worked hard and did well, the system would eventually meet me halfway.

Years later, I stand in a classroom where nearly 50 students share a handful of chairs. The air is thick with the smell of floor wax and the humid sweat of young bodies pressed together in the afternoon heat. A single ceiling fan turns slowly above us, doing little to move the air. These are the children I was told to look at whenever people spoke about hope.

I did not always see the country this way.

I still remember certain afternoons of my childhood, fascinated by the theater of powerful political speeches. While other kids were outside playing, I sat on our bare cement floor in front of our bulky television. I never bothered to get a mat; I liked the cold, hard feel of the floor against my knees as I leaned toward the screen. It was a constant battle for the remote. My younger siblings whined to switch to the anime channel, but I fought them off to keep the speeches on.

Reception was never easy in our neighborhood. I can still picture my father standing outside, gripping the metal antenna and adjusting it inch by inch while I shouted from the living room whenever the “snow” on the screen cleared. When the flickering image finally steadied, I would sit back with a notebook balanced on my knees and jot down key points from the State of the Nation Address as if they were Gospel. To my young mind, being a nation-builder meant standing in those halls, bathed in yellow limelight. I looked up to those officials, believing their voices were the blueprints for my own life.

Then I grew up, and the reception finally cleared—only to reveal a much grimmer picture.

I began seeing the same familiar faces on election posters—glossy, high-definition smiles plastered on every concrete wall. There was more care put into the graphic design of a politician’s name than into the infrastructure of the school where I stood. Even the chalkboards, the very canvas of their education, were warped and bubbling, damaged by the heavy rains that the leaking roof could no longer keep out. Underneath my desk, the concrete floor was fractured and chipped, its cracks mirroring the systemic neglect that had been allowed to fester for decades. It was a bitter irony: their faces printed in letters larger than the budget for the chairs my students had to fight over.

There were nights when the long list of bills I had to pay as a breadwinner felt lighter than the quiet disgust I felt for the system. I wanted to quit, to exit, to find a life that did not involve fighting for scraps.

But I stayed.

And in staying, I found myself performing a difficult balancing act. Looking at my students’ bright, expectant faces, it agonizes me to pretend that doing good alone can fix a broken country. After giving instructions for a written activity, a student stayed behind and asked me quietly: “Ma’am, if we do everything right, will things really get better?”

He was fiddling with the frayed edge of her notebook, her eyes searching mine for a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep.

Sometimes my voice cracks in the middle of a lesson as I try to convince them that integrity is not old-fashioned—that they still hold power over their own character even when they have little power over their circumstances. Part of me knows the world waiting for them outside the school gate will not always reward their effort or their goodness.

Inside those four walls, I trade the cold hardness of that childhood floor for a softer patience. Here, fairness still matters. It is where my students can speak without fear, where their efforts are recognized, and where their dreams are not yet for sale. It is far from perfect, but somewhere along the way, it became a sanctuary I feel responsible for protecting.

Now, I live my cliché.

It means showing up every morning carrying my students’ hopes in one hand and a stack of corrected papers in the other. It means listening to their quiet stories, encouraging the shy ones to find their voice, and reminding them that their character still belongs to them even when the world feels stacked against them.

It is a daily struggle not to surrender to cynicism, but I have chosen to pass down the “pag-asa” heritage anyway—one lesson, one student, and one small sanctuary of hope at a time.

I am finally learning what it means to build a nation, tending to the hope I’ve planted in the child seated in front of me—even when the signal is not always clear.

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Maryan Te-Cabante, 29, is a public school teacher, finding purpose in the mundane and sneaking essay drafts into her phone notes.