Each One Teach One (Or More)

Two wheel chairs–the one quite traditional, and the other more like a cart–take up most of the sala of the small wooden house. No matter: this is a minor inconvenience for the bedridden Antonio, disabled by a spinal fracture seven years ago, for today is Saturday and Fernando has come to teach him electronics and handicrafts.

Saturday is Fernando’s only free day–other than Sunday, which he gives to God. Saturday is the day he devotes to teaching someone more disabled than himself. Antonio’s spinal fracture has left him paralyzed and in bed, and unaccustomed to his lot, since he was already an adult when the tree fell on him in the forest during a storm.

Fernando Opinion, on the other hand, was crippled by polio when he was five or six, leaving his legs atrophied and useless, and one arm withered and weak. He never went to school, and cannot remember any other shape or other bodily form for himself. He is what he is.

But he was born smart, with an exceptional mechanical intelligence, an ability to see how things work, and an instinct for building and fixing things. So as a young man sitting around his cousin’s welding shop in Roxas, Palawan, he suddenly saw a way by which he could help himself: he built himself a wheelchair. And then he made his way to Puerto Princesa to join his sister Virgie and her children. "Tito Nanding", his niece Elsie calls him. She is a beautiful 14-year-old, one of Virgie’s six children, for whom Fernando is truly a father figure, a friend, a giver of advice and encouragement.

Virgie herself knows how to repair electrical equipment, and together she and Fernando run the shop which carries her name and is just past Puerto Princesa’s airport. The family lives comfortably enough in the shop. The work area is in the front, facing the street: multicolored fan blades hang neatly from the ceiling, while plastic and metal joints and switches, all neatly sorted, fill the wooden shelves. A couple of blenders lie gathering dust on one shelf, apparently forgotten by their owners.

But there is no such neglect among family members. All the children are in school, and when the older ones told their uncle Nanding that there were to be basic literacy classes for out of school youth in Gregorio Oquendo Memorial School, he decided to enroll. This was a special program set up by the very forward looking school principal, Teodoro Javarez, and taught at that time by a Mrs. De Guzman, a balikbayan from Canada. Fernando came out valedictorian.

And a funny thing happened in the out of school youth class: one of the students, the small man in the wheelchair, so impressed the teacher and the principal with his diligence and his abilities, that he was asked to join the teaching staff! So at this point Fernando, who never had the opportunity to study as a child, teaches electronics and handicrafts to a class of out-of-school youth, who are also his classmates in morning English classes.

We found Fernando in the principal’s office one afternoon, handling registration for the electronics class, which starts this month, looking very comfortable as he negotiated his way around the office in his chair. While we chatted, another niece, nine-year-old Junie, came in and whispered something in his ear. He answered in a low voice, and she went away smiling.

The principal told us what an asset Fernando was, and how both teachers and students looked up to him as a role model for overcoming difficulties. "Yes," says Fernando, "when they complain that something is hard to do, I tell them that if I can do it with one hand, they can surely learn to do it with two!"

Fernando has also gotten himself further special training. He finished an electronics course run by TESDA, and also did a course in Peanut Processing. His latest technological advance is finishing a course in Cell Phone Repair offered by the Puerto Princesa School of Arts and Trades (PPSAT).

Shortly after he arrived in Puerto Princesa City, Fernando met Dr. Jose Antonio Socrates and his wife Cecile. Doc Soc is an orthopedic surgeon and Cecile had set up an orthopedic rehab unit called Bahatala (Bahay Hawak Tayo Lakad). Actually the Socrates couple had met Fernando earlier when one of the physical therapists they have fielded in the countryside referred him for medical help when he had pneumonia. They were fascinated by him, especially by the fact that he had made his own wheel chair, and an innovative and functional one at that.

Once he was settled in Puerto, they helped him out with materials for the TESDA course and then arranged for him to go to Manila to do a special one-month course in metalwork for wheelchair building and maintenance in Tahanan Walang Hagdanan in Cainta. When he returned they helped him make a better chair for himself in the Bahatala workshop in which they do repairs for wheelchairs and reconstruction of chairs for special needs, prosthetic limbs, etc.

It was Cecile who asked Fernando if he could teach electronics and handicrafts to the bedridden Antonio de la Torre, for she could see that Antonio badly needed to have tasks to do, to be productive. Fernando agreed at once, and when Cecile asked him how he would manage to get there, he simply said he would find a way.

Puerto Princesa is a sprawling city, though, and the way would be too long for Fernando in his hand-powered chair, but he has found tricycle drivers who will load both him and the chair, and he gets there. His Saturday visits are the high point of the week for Antonio–but he is busy everyday with his very marketable handicrafts. The two men have become fast friends.

At the end of the morning Fernando goes his own way. To a stranger he may look like a lonely figure, this small man, propelling himself along the dusty city streets in the low-slung wheelchair. But close up you see the face of a contented man, a man who knows himself and is at peace. Follow him around for a day and you see a very rich and well integrated life: he has self-accomplished mobility, good and useful work to do in both repairs and teaching, his own self-improvement schemes and his own outreach, friends, and a loving family. He is whole in a way that no physical disability can change.