Stereotyping Mindanaoans

The center of the Philippines is believed to be Manila; hence the term Manila-centric. Even now, Manila remains to be the object of every promdi's great Philippine Dream. Many Manila-based (as opposed to Manila-born) people consider themselves "superior" to people outside of Metro Manila (promdi as in from the -prom di- provinces). While Metro Manila may have all the comforts and amenities of a highly urbanized city, they also pay the price for it - pollution, high crime rate, shabby living conditions, etc. As they say, one needs money to go around Manila. To a promdi, Manila is Metro Manila, not just Manila City. Hear this - Bai, punta akong Manila. O? Saan sa Manila? Sa Las Pinas!

(Manila-centric. How else can one explain why national TV newcasts feature live Metro Manila traffic footages and reports which are of no consequence to the rest of the Philippines and the world?)

When national competitions like the Palarong Pambansa or National Schools Press Conference (NSPC) are hosted by Mindanao cities and provinces, the first thing that comes to the minds of school administrators, parents, teacher-advisers, students is: Nge! Nakakatakot dun! Daming bombing, terorista, Muslim! (Yikes! It's frightening there! Lots of bombings, terrorists, Muslims!)

We can't entirely blame these people from having these stereotypes of Mindanao as the mainstream media seem to write about Mindanao only when something bad happens. For every feel-good news coverage of Manny Pacquiao, there would be three feel-bad news of Bad Boy Navarrete's extra-marital woes.

The local government units and government offices based in Mindanao have to assure these people that the hosts won't dare volunteer their places for these national competitions if they thought the safety of the participants will be jeopardized.

To those "brave" enough to venture outside of their comfort zones, Mindanao offers a lot of eye-openers and new discoveries and lessons. Metro Manilans are awed by the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables at prices they can only see in their dreams. In fact, one common illness experienced by participants in Mindanao is indigestion and loose bowel movement from binging on fruits and food. Try resisting fresh fish grilled over coals, not reaching for more servings of fragrant rice freshly harvested from the fields.

They discover that not ALL inhabitants of Mindanao are Muslims. There are Christians too and the Lumad (tribal people) as well. Many inhabitants are Ilocanos, Tagalogs, Visayans who flocked to Mindanao to better their lot. What the media label as War is actually a series of skirmishes between the military and rebels in the countryside far from the urban centers. True, bombings happen now and then, but these happened not only in Mindanao but also in Metro Manila and elsewhere in the country. In these terroristic times, no city, province or region is safe, at all.

Muslims are not the war freaks they were stereotyped to be. Nor are they the stab-you-in-the-back traitors. Every tribe, race and culture has its share of hotheads, trigger-happy gun-toters, and every variety of snake-in-the-grass traitors. Are there no war freaks and traitors among denizens of Luzon and Visayas? So you see, these are not monopolies of Mindanaoans. In stereotyping, it's the sweeping generalizations that hurt the most. As the Tagalogs say it, Huwag namang lalahatin. Some of my very good friends are Muslims and I have had the privilege of working with Muslim bosses and co-employees.

During their brief stay, the participants see, hear and feel for themselves the reality that their host place is not at all like the media present it to be. Their impressions of Mindanao change because of this realization.

There was one occasion when the Mindanao stereotype worked to our advantage. When I was asked to serve as head of delegation for the participants to the National Schools Press Conference (NSPC) at Rizal High School in Pasig in the 90s, we were met, not by the Filipino hospitality usually accorded guests, but by the haughty superior stance of a Metro Manilan. We were waitlisted at the Cebu airport the day before so we arrived at around 11 p.m. in Manila. We were led to our quarters on the top floor of one school building and told to register the next morning. The classroom teachers assigned to our quarters were so accommodating and immediately put all of us at ease.

At six the next morning, we were called to breakfast only to be blocked by a porcine Miss Piggy lookalike teacher in charge of our delegation's meals. She said, with her nose and chin up in the air, that we couldn't partake at the breakfast table because we were not registered yet. So I looked for the registration secretariat and was told by a janitor they would start registering at 8 a.m. yet. I went back to Miss Piggy and showed her the official list of participants and the cash for payment of the registration. NO WAY! she told me. And so I asked the rest to eat breakfast outside the school premises. I waited at the secretariat and when registration was opened for the day, I told them in a loud voice, WE went HUNGRY because the teacher in charge of the meals of the MINDANAO delegation wouldn't let us for being unregistered. WE did not COME ALL THE WAY from MINDANAO to gatecrash this conference and get free meals! If that TEACHER is still AROUND at LUNCHTIME TODAY, she will GO HOME HEADLESS!!!

The secretariat, without my asking, deducted the cost of breakfast from our registration fees and profusely apologized for such treatment. I told them, YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELVES! You pride yourselves for originating Filipino hospitality. When you go to Mindanao, you act like first class citizens entitled to all and everything you desire, but when we Mindanaoans come here, and just because we are promdis, you treat us like shit!

Suffice it to say, Miss Piggy was nowhere to be found from the time the snacks were served for that day until the time we packed up to go back to Mindanao several days later.

Compartmentalized thinking can kill!

When Manny Pacquiao declared his intention to run for Congressman of the first district of South Cotabato and General Santos City, he met such an intense opposition to it. Some of his well-meaning friends did so because they knew better - that Manny was being manipulated by some quarters to do so. However, my take on the majority of those opposed it did so because of their compartmentalized thinking. They love Manny as a boxer and therefore he should remain a boxer. In fact, Manny was criticized for excelling in billiards and going into commercial breeding of fighting cocks. Now with the poll winners declared, Manny is back in boxing and everything's well again with the world. Or so it seems...

I ran into trouble with a nosy neighbor recently. After spending five years of bearing children, she finally got ligated and now has plenty of time in her hands. Bored after taking care of her kids' meals, changes of diaper, milk formulas, bathing and putting them to bed, she has turned her eyes on me, particularly my garden which remains lushly green in spite of the heatwave and El Nino. Whenever I ask some teeners to cut the grass in my garden and trim the branches of the Chinese bamboo, Dama de Noche and Ilang-ilang, she would find a way to talk to them to tell me that I ought to cut down my trees because she considers them an eyesore. I told the teeners to tell her that she should add more hollow blocks to the wall dividing her house from mine so she won't see my plants and trees. Her yard boasts of a wide bermuda grass lawn and no plant taller than these grasses. The trouble is she has already compartmentalized me in her mind as a slob, lazy and too poor to hire a gardener to maintain my yard. She imagines my yard as a breeding ground of snakes and other creepy crawlies which might harm her and her kids. She forgets that her house was built on and near a dry creek riddled with warrens of mice and snakes.

In our University, we have a summer program called College Bound Program, an affirmative action program meant for incoming freshmen who come from the cultural communities and those who are products of poor barangay high schools. It aims to prepare them in English and Math so that when they start their freshman year, they are as able and competent to tackle these subjects with the rest of the freshmen. Some teachers refuse to teach in this program because they have compartmentalized the students under this program as slow learners and underachievers. The fact is some products of this program graduated with honors.

One major reason why I left my former school employer was that no matter what I did, I could never attain its mission statement: to develop the entire person of each of my students. How could I if I was not even treated as a whole person by the administrators? I taught business subjects because it was my field of specialization as a management major in college. But I was also a self-taught writer and journalist. I was a fairly good emcee and singer.

During my employment at that school, my feature articles and stories got published in national magazines and newspapers. I was told by the ranking and promotion committee that these outputs weren't given any point at all because their subjects were not related to my field of specialization. [Memo to me: Stop writing! Concentrate on just being a good management teacher!] From that time on, I turned down those who woud invite me to emcee or render an intermission number during school programs by claiming that emceeing and singing were not in my field of specialization. So they should get English/Filipino/Music teachers to do so.

During the March 1988 solar eclipse seen in General Santos City, I self-published a brochure Everything You Wanted to Know about Eclipses. The college dean told me it was a waste of time and money because it wasn't directly related to my field of specialization. So I told her jokingly, So Ma'am, you want me to change its title to How to Manage a Solar Eclipse or A Feasibility Study of Solar Eclipses so I could claim that it's directly related to my field of specialization?

A year earlier, the school invited resource speakers from De La Salle University to conduct a seminar-workshop on The Art of Questioning in our school. Classes were not suspended; not all teachers were required to attend it, only the Education teachers. So the school spent thousands of pesos for the speakers' airfare, room and board and honoraria to teach Education teachers the art of questioning which they already knew as part of their college education. The rest of the faculty had to wait for those who attended to do an echo seminar. Shouldn't the seminar be for those teachers with no Education units who could really benefit from it? Why should they be given an echo seminar when they could have attended the same seminar conducted on campus?

Akin to stereotyping, compartmentalized thinking has been long declared by social psychologists as responsible for closing the minds of people and distorting their vision of reality. By conveniently putting people in neat categorized boxes, we seem to see order in the world as we know it. In reality, stereotyping and compartmentalized thinking kill whatever creativity, skill, and initiative people around us inherently have. I dread to see the day when and if these deadly duo will get a stranglehold on us.