Thursday, January 18, 2007
Will be away for immersion tomorrow. I was assigned to Nagpayong, Pasig, one of the program’s urban poor sectors, and will live with one of the families there until Sunday morning. While most students travel far for their immersion sites, Nagpayong is roughly twenty minutes away from my own home. Regardless, the place is unfamiliar to me since I, a supposed life-long Pasigueña, have never actually been to Pasig proper, which I guess sounds pretty stupid. Where I live, although technically in Pasig, seems to be more on the outskirts of several cities—Pasig, Mandaluyong, Quezon City, Makati, even—and has never seemed to belong to any particular one. The Pasig I know is Mall Land, basically, and there’s not much else I can really say about it without coming off like capitalist scum. Which I am.
I have no qualms about my site, though. I’m not bothered at all by the “dismal” living conditions our immersion formator, in his spiel to what he obviously saw as a group of I-want-my-Frap-now-na prisses, prepped us about. Warned, more like it, which annoyed me a bit. But I don’t want to get into my own spiel about how this school requirement can’t help but be tinged with condescension oh look I just did. I’m perfectly fine with the thought of seeing human shit on the streets and sleeping on the floor and coming across cat-sized rats and working at a market and hearing people videoke all night and pumping water for the supposed horrors of the Urban Poor Sector Bath. During the orientation, these, apparently, were the issues we would have to face, and somehow, no matter how much the formator tried to scare the crap out of us with his stories, I was just sitting there, waiting for a catch that didn’t come.
This isn’t to say that I’ll breeze through the weekend. I most probably will be harrowed. I am not trying to make myself look like some big-headed, cold-hearted toughie (although god this post really is coming off that way). But the thing is, and I swear I mean this, the thought of getting harrowed doesn’t make me anxious. I feel more anxious of the fact that immersions are inevitably centered on that idea of feeling great discomfort, that the family I am going to live with will see me to some degree as a privileged kid out for some really difficult, near-traumatizing field research. That is what’s gnawing at me a little, the thought that my host family will see me as someone who sees their life as a source of trauma, and the weird wall that will arise from that. It is not fair to either of us.
Of course, that is also what fascinates me about the whole thing, that chance to feel and observe an inescapable tension. I think I just negated myself. I am scum. I will go pack now.
posted by marguerite @ 7:30 PM
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