Revisiting Dapitan
By Antonio Montalvan II
Inquirer News Service

NOVELTY, not depth. I have always thought that seems to be the mark of today's young. A friend from UP days, Tom Talledo, recently sent me this text message: "Ours is the time of fantastic voyage but crass destination; of megamalls but petty concerns; of fast food but slow digestion; of post-modern texts but primitive intentions."

Teaching the young is a difficult task where one gets tangled in relentless competition with popular media for their attention. And, definitely, the latter is more beguiling to this present generation. The classroom has probably become the most boring spot on earth.

It was with that thought in mind that I, together with 65 students, decided to embark on a weekend trip to Dapitan City, the place of exile of our national hero, Jose Rizal. This was no first time for me. I had gone to Dapitan twice in the past.
I must admit, though, that I had this ambivalent feeling toward the national hero. Rizal the man was a tapestry of multiple talents and I have had no problem with that. But I find myself insecure with the Rizal who wanted only reforms in the social and political system. Of course, we know that Rizal's greatness was shown not just in his being a reformist but also in his martyrdom, the event that sparked the Philippine revolution.

But more than my ambivalence was the coldness and apathy of my students toward Rizal. I am being polite, in fact. Not a few of them had demanded in class that the government abolish Rizal as a college subject. Not only were they fed up with him; they thought Rizal had no more significance in this exciting hi-tech, borderless world.

The trip to Dapitan took all of eight hours, too long for a restless generation, although certainly made much more convenient by the smooth highways of Misamis Occidental and Zamboanga del Norte. Then there was the 15-minute ferry crossing across the scenic and narrow Panguil Bay. At that point, I knew that the trip had started to captivate my class, whose idea of joie de vivre certainly did not include Rizal.

When we reached Dapitan, there was no more mistaking that the tide had turned in favor of the national hero. Dapitan is all about Rizal. The whole city (tiny as it is) is a living Rizaliana. Street names are consistently Rizal's: Noli me Tangere, Leonor Rivera, Mi Retiro, Crisostomo Ibarra. One student excitedly pointed out that there was even a small bakery named Rizal Bakeshop. This was too unbelievable coming from a disinterested generation.

Along the way to Dapitan, they kept asking if this or that city we passed by had a Gaisano, SM, or Jollibee. It suddenly didn't matter to them that in Dapitan there was not even a single Internet cafe.

It had dawned on them -- not unlike a bolt of lightning, perhaps -- that in Dapitan, Rizal was a hero and to denigrate him there, a town where there simply was unabashed pride for him, was simply not advisable. And we were not even at the Talisay shrine just as yet. But the cameras had started to click at Santa Cruz beach, where Rizal first set foot in Dapitan one dark evening, his path lighted only by a farol de combate; and then at the town plaza where his relief map of Mindanao was; and at the spot in the St. James Church where he stood each Sunday to hear Mass. Across the plaza was the site of what used to be the Casa Real where Rizal first stayed in the company of town comandante Ricardo Carnicero. All these were, at that point, overwhelming for this unbelieving bunch of young people.

The Talisay shrine naturally became a feast for them. "Leonor is the prettiest of them all," noted one student after viewing the collection of photographs of Rizal's girlfriends inside the museum. And how they madly scrambled for souvenirs -- anything they could bring back home to show they had been to the Rizal shrine.

By this time, Rizal was no more than a national hero to them; he had become the human being who once trod the paths of the idyllic retreat called Talisay. No one minded the fact that the houses in the Rizal estate were all replicas. Who cares, they thought. The old women Rizalistas, who tended the grounds of the shrine and offered healing rubs to tourists and guests, were ambushed by a barrage of questions. Among them: "Where was the Rizal baby buried?" "Over there under the calachuchi trees," said one Rizalista, although I had already told the students what Ambeth Ocampo had said-that to this day the location of the skeletal remains of Rizal's baby inside the estate has not been found. But never mind, the whole experience was in itself a discovery for them.

I do not have to say that at the end of the field trip, my class had become a Rizal Admiration Society. They learned their lesson. And now they do not wish Rizal to be abolished as a college subject.

Too often educators are indifferent to the classroom that lies beyond the walls of our schools. Too often we do not see that it is the learning more than the classroom, the persons more than the statistics, that count.

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Last Saturday, Oct. 9, was her birthday. Her circle of closest friends, mostly her first cousins whom she had grown up with in the tightly knit community of her youth -- and whom we fondly called the "Golden Girls" -- are all dead now. She has outlived them all. My mother, Mercedes Roa Montalvan, has just turned 88 years old.

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