Verisimilitude
When I was a freshman in college, I remember hearing about a senior who posted about her immersion experience on Facebook. It was a lengthy and detailed account of being generally disgusted and outraged with her exposure to the Aetas. Since I, then an eager beaver freshman, was excited for my own immersion, I had the urge to see what she had written. It came to no surprise that her entry was what other people would stereotype as “Atenista”—cue in words like maarte, elitist and mayabang.
A few months ago, I finally had my own immersion. Although I did not have to wake up at 4:30 AM to take a two-hour bus ride or to take a 30-minute trek up the mountain, my immersion was still quite the experience. I realized that even if I really wanted to go farming or go up the mountains to live with my own nanay and tatay, Ateneo nevertheless puts an effort to ensure that whatever and wherever immersion area you are assigned to, you’ll still come home with something definitely better than a bag of rude and insensitive comments.
Spending two and a half days in MYRC, a juvenile center for delinquent children, was quite a breeze considering that we stayed out. I just had to take two train rides every morning, plus a short walk from the station to the center. Although we avoided using our cellphones to call mommy and daddy, it was still nothing like a three-day stay up in the mountains.
Nevertheless, although a lot of people may think that sitting down and talking to a child delinquent for about four hours and spending the rest of the seven-hour stay participating in group dynamics isn’t a lot of hard work, those who had experienced immersion in MYRC may beg to differ. I learned more things about how Philippine society works from the four hours a day I spent talking to my partner than from regularly reading the newspaper.
I never knew that street robbers pay the MMDA and the city police “insurance” just so they can be left committing crimes in peace; or that the Philippines’ social services cannot process papers because they are being held off by the hearing court or public judges; or that in a robbery scene, more Filipinos would pretend that nothing is happening than actually help out.
What I got from sitting down for four hours is something I could retell over and over again to emphasize how unprincipled our society has become. It’s ironic to find out about these things from the kids who committed crimes themselves, but it’s touching to see that most of them remain hopeful about their future despite spending every day in laborious tasks to end their vicious cycle in “rehabilitation.”
I never would have thought that these would be part of what I would discover after my immersion. I thought I would come in, sit down, and ask about their lives—that’s all. Yet during the commutes back home, the silence that would surround the train served as a constant reminder not only of how tiring immersion is, but of the issues that always seem to be concealed from the eyes and ears of society.
With the immersion program, Ateneo has once again proven to me that it gives back more than what it promises.
