Tales from the dorm

A week prior to my first day as a UP freshman, I had my suitcase ready as my parents accompanied me to Kalayaan Residence Hall.  We were about to enter when another set of parents arrived with their son.  My mother’s eyes doubled in size just as her jaw dropped in disbelief, while my dad shook his head in dismay.  They couldn’t allow me — their only daughter — to be in a coed dormitory!  Nightmarish visions of my going home to Bacolod, pregnant and without a husband and still an undergraduate, clouded their thoughts as they ushered me back into the taxi we had just vacated.

So I spent my first year at my aunt’s home in Makati, the nearest family we had in relation to UP Diliman, and traveled every day to school. I had to catch the 6 a.m. bus on Ayala Avenue to make it to my 7 a.m. science class on time. 

In my sophomore year there were several girls-only dorms on campus: Sampaguita, Ylang-ylang, Sanggumay, and Kamia which was where I finally stayed.  If my class started at 7 a.m. I could wake up at 6:45 with enough time to wash, change and jog to my class in Palma Hall just across the dorm.  It also allowed me to become more independent; being in charge of my own life for the first time in 16 years was liberating, empowering and exhilarating.

Basement room number 40, or B-40, was my dorm room and some graffiti can attest to my stay there (unless it has been repainted and refurnished). My first roommates were ate Lolit who wrote for the Collegian and mostly slept with her books.  She was a biology pre-med student who studied all the time and is now with the UP Open University.  Another was Pia, whom I immediately took a liking to.  We loved discussing school politics well into the night as well as the latest campus gossip.  She and I sang Ernie’s Rubber Duckie song in the showers. Then there was JP, who was my college buddy and paranormal activity partner.  We tried the OBE (out of body experience) in our room.  We also tried to sneak in beer to share with our new roommates from the province, Joan and Cheryl, whom we tried to “urbanize.”  I don’t think we were that successful but we did get them pretty drunk a couple of times.  One of them even slept in her closet in a spark of drunken inspiration, waking up the next day with a headache and a stiff neck.

Then there was the PA system that delivered announcements when someone was visiting you.  I used to go upstairs to the sala as soon as it was announced that Miss Sarah Jane Paez had a visitor.  It would most likely be Benjie Paras who was a crush of mine at that time.

However, the most rewarding announcement that came from that PA system was when Manang called out at around 9:30 p.m. with this famous line, “Putok nandito na.” Putok is a kind of bread, freshly baked, and delivered to the dorm every evening.  All of us who would hear it would jump for joy — yes, sustenance has arrived!  Everyone would make an exodus from their rooms to the reception area to buy the delicious bread with butter and a bottle of Coke to keep us awake for a few more hours of studying or project writing.

JP and I ate our putoks outside our room as this was promptly followed by a couple of cigarettes.  We didn’t want our non-smoking roommates to suffer cancer from second-hand smoking, lest they come back in the after-life to haunt us. 

Speaking of haunting, there were several paranormal events that occurred in Kamia’s basement when I lived there.   First, there was this ghost of a man who sat by the common table in the basement area.  Many dormers who saw him agreed that he was reading something and that he wore an angry expression, perhaps annoyed that we were noisy and distracted him from his reading. Whether that was the Katipunan’s manifesto or the newspaper of his day, we weren’t really sure.  How could a man, even if he was a ghost, be in an all-girls dormitory?  A brief investigation answered my question:  During the war, Kamia served as a hospital for the Japanese regime and  rumor had it that the basement was used as an interrogation facility.  Creepy!

Kamia was also considered one of the more active and vocal dorms in UP.  It is after all home of the “Kamia-nistas,” a tribute to the brave women who gave their time and effort to help give voice to sectors of our society who are unable to do so. “Kamia-nistas” were often branded as komunistas or communists, and many of these women were members of socio-civic organizations in the university.

We were there to rally against the US military bases in our country.  We helped collect food and medicine to help the victims of the huge earthquake that hit Baguio, even had an early-morning jogging session, waking up the other dormitories to make a stand against an incoming dorm fee and board fee hike...with a banner that read: “Kami-ay naiinis, sa dorm/board fee increase!”

I consider my time at the dorm as another classroom where I learned life lessons in pakikisama, pakikipagkapwa and pakiki-isa.   Learning the value of give-and-take, cooperation and mutual respect made me a better person, able to deal with a variety of personalities and characters that I meet or work with.   I learned to budget my allowance so it would last till the end of the week, when I’d receive my next baon from my parents.  When that didn’t work so well, I learned a few tricks to earn some cash, like teaching English to the students at International Center, the dorm for foreign students like Koreans, Iranians, Jordanians, etc. 

When I left Manila to work in the United Arab Emirates, I was housed in a building that was like a dorm where I shared a room with a fellow Filipina worker.  It made me remember the fun days I spent at Kamia.  Certainly, living on my own had given me skills in self-discipline and survival as well as a lot of interesting and funny stories that I can share with my grandchildren in the years to come.

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