There's No Place Like Home

This is a repost from my old Friendster blog.

Last April (2010), our team was invited to train teachers in Iloilo, the place where I grew up (Did I?). I was the youngest among the group, so most of the time I had to stay when only few trainers were invited. For some Divine reason, that time some of my colleagues could not go, so I thought that maybe it was high time to go home. 

To make the story short, I found myself toting my traveling bag under the heat of the scorching sun in Pototan, a small town 30 kilometers south of Iloilo City, and 8 kilometers or thereabouts from our barangay. I was accompanied by my nephew who fetched me from the venue of our training seminar. We found a parked jeepney bound to the Palanguia, and waited almost an hour sweating, sighing, and talking to other passengers until the jeepney was full and was ready to go. 

We traveled 8 kilometers in a miscellany of asphalt and rough roads sniffing fresh air and sometimes dust. I spent the entire trip looking at the roadside conjuring wisps of the remaining images from my memory, trying to see if the things I remember were still there. Many things have changed, and many of which I remembered did not exist anymore.

After reaching my cousin’s house, my nephew took the tricycle to fetch me home. We needed another one and a half kilometers of rough road travel – the road that I walked in my 6 elementary school years every day from home to school and vice versa. 

When I arrived at our barangay, I moved from house to house, shaking hands with former neighbors like a candidate, embracing kins, patting backs, saying “How are you?” pretending to recognize them all and then later asking my nephew “Who was that?” when we were far. I tried to talk spontaneously in the native tongue asking and answering questions. I realized that my Ilonggo was not impeccable, but still excellent – enough to converse despite the fact that I have not spoken the language for seventeen years.

I visited my classmates, teachers, and my friends. I was reunited with my arch-academic rivals, and we talked and laughed about the good-old-quarrelsome days when we were young in our battle for academic supremacy. We talked about the good things. I told our valedictorian that we should catch up and really be close friends now, since I supposed that we took the academic competition “seriously”. 

Sshhh…. The truth is you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Haha… Just kidding.

At the airport, on my way back to Manila 

Sitting comfortably in the plane, I took a lingering stare outside the airport, wondering when I would be back again. It was time to leave, and it was also the time that I realized how I missed home. It’s been ages since I left Iloilo – seventeen long years – without ever visiting. 

I followed the slithering beads of rain on the window with my index finger and muttering unconsciously:

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.