Pangalan: Ate/Guro/ Pilipino

maximum volume

BY KAYE GALLO

It didn’t take long to realize that what I wrote on my application essays were easier to put on paper than into practice.

“The teaching of language is the teaching of culture.”

But the Philippines is an archipelago, a country with more than seven thousand one hundred islands, with people speaking different mother tongues, and with adobo prepared in many, different ways.

My use of “kakatapos” although acceptable, reveal that Tagalog is not my first language. Often, my supervisor, a native Tagalog speaker, had to clarify that a particular way of preparing food, for example, is exclusive in the northern part of the Philippines, while I, from the Visayas, had to recall how my sister or mom cooks a Filipino dish. Once, a student asked me what food I miss most. “There’s this vegetable soup in Iloilo, clear soup with greens and squash, we call it, laswa...” I paused. Realizing it would mean differently to native Tagalog speakers, I looked at my supervisor smiling, all set to explain that “laswa” stressed differently means obscene.

“And while the country is as diverse as the languages we speak, we share deeply rooted values that make us Filipino.”

While we are known for our resiliency and hospitality, the Tagalog language classroom made me understand deeper the Filipinos’ sense of community— our social circles are our extension of who we are, sometimes, even what we will become. To create a semblance of community for the students, my supervisor is Ate Rhoda, I am Ate Kay. In other universities offering Tagalog/Filipino courses, there’s Tita Pia, Kuya Jason, Ate Irene,at a fellow Filipino FLTA is Kuya Joseph.

“One automatically becomes a cultural ambassador the moment one steps in a foreign land.”

I remembered sharing about the different superstitious beliefs in the Philippines - that, although they are regional, there’s always chicken involved and that sweeping the floor or taking a shower can be a blessing or a curse. One time, I explained what a balikbayan box is and why shelves are emptied of Spam when it’s nearing December.

I left the Philippines in August 2021 for the ten-month Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) grant at Northern Illinois University (NIU). It didn’t take long to realize that my program’s over and that I am back home.

At a time when it’s the start of the rainy season and evenings should be cooler, I stepped outside NAIA in the sweltering heat. In the middle of EDSA traffic, I think of my sister’s adobo and the adobo being advertised on the billboard, that I just addressed my driver “Kuya,” and that spam prices have skyrocketed.C