Manila "Marianne's Coming of Age" Book - Marianne L'Heureux

The elementary school I attended in Manila, San Jose Abad Santos, was part of Philippine Women’s University, just down the street from the school. The University invited the students at my school to dance the Tinkling dance at the June 12th Independence Day celebration. 

The Tinkling is a traditional Philippine folk dance which involves two people tapping and sliding bamboo poles on the ground and against each other, in coordination with

dancers who step over and in between the poles. The boys and girls in my class had been practicing the Tinkling throughout the school year; we were nervous performing before a big audience, however. The First Lady of the Philippines was to attend on July 12th we were told.

The school generously provided our dance costumes styled after the Davao region in Mindanao, the southern Philippines. For us girls, we wore a long sleeve green satin top, a wide sash madras plaid sash over the left shoulder and down past the hips, and a long matching madras plaid pleated wraparound skirt. Hair was worn up and a string of white

carved beads were strung around the hair. The boys wore a matching green satin long sleeved shirt, long black pants, and a woven tribal sash. The Tinkling dance is danced barefoot.

At the celebration we performed the dance in groups of four in the big courtyard at the university; hundreds of people were in attendance. In my group I was one of the two dancers designated stepping over and in the bamboo poles in time with the music. Being barefoot, it was a challenge.

San Jose Abad Santos school was a diversified school. My classmates were Hindi (from India) and Muslim (from Mindanao in the southern Philippines). The only two foreigners in the class were me and a young blond Swedish girl named Amelia who was a year older than me. I was friends with Amelia and with a Hindi girl named Sarika. We girls wore white dresses with red ties for our uniforms; the boys wore white shirts, long pants and a red tie.

The classrooms and grounds of the elementary school were rustic. Classes were held in converted airplane hangars left over from the Second World War and furnished with old wooden student desks and chairs. It was a rough environment for children, the bathrooms were inadequate, but we children made the best of it though. The school curriculum focused on Filipino history going back to the Negritos, the first inhabitants of the Philippines. The Portuguese explorer Magellan arrived in 1521, the Spanish arrived in 1565, and the Philippines became independent from Spain in 1898. Having been occupied by Japan during World War II, the Philippines became a republic in 1946 with the Treaty of Manila. Since most of my classmates were Hindi or Muslim, we did not study Catholic catechism. Most Filipinos are Catholic, and the Philippines has the third largest Catholic population in the world. During Easter week religious shows were mostly shown on television, and churches were packed. After I moved to Tokyo, Japan, I was taught catechism at Sacred Heart International School.

During class recess my classmates and I played Jackstone, a game where five or more jacks are thrown on the ground. A ball is thrown in the air, and a jack is picked up one at a time. We played Jackstone with small bean bags. We had sewing kits at school, a bowl of dry beans, and some burlap with which we made our own bean bags. Lunch was served at school: rice, vegetables with fish or chicken, and small, sweet bananas on the side. This made up somewhat for the strict food rationing at home.

My classmate Amelia and I rarely socialized outside school. She came from a large Scandinavian family of eight children and was the only girl she said. Amelia’s father worked as a deep-sea diver who cleared the giant propellers of cargo ships when they were moored in Manila Bay. He also performed clearing the propellers on my stepfather

Peter’s cargo/transport ships. It was dangerous work as the waters in Manila Bay are infested with sharks. Amelia’s family had very little money and so many mouths to feed, she said.

One day Amelia asked me to meet her after school in front of a neighborhood store which was only a few blocks from where I lived on General Luna Street. She said she had a shopping list from her mother for groceries. Amelia told me that she and I were on a “mission from God.” If we completed this mission we would go to heaven and the Lord would make sure we had a house to live in up in heaven. I was gullible and vulnerable; I wondered what kind of mission this was, and I also asked myself why I needed a house in heaven. I had not given much thought to what heaven would be like if I made it there.

Amelia planned to steal the items on her mother’s grocery list from the neighborhood store, then take the grocery money and give it to charity she told me. We would be acting out a scene from “Robin Hood” who stole from the rich and gave to the poor.

She instructed me to wait for her in front of the grocery store and be the “lookout” while she stole groceries inside the store. Amelia managed to find and steal most of the groceries on the list her mother gave her. She left the store unhindered, and we returned home. It turned out that she had planned on keeping the grocery money for herself, and

I went home believing that she would give the money to charity. A few days later, my stepfather Peter returned to the house in a rage. He told me that the store owner had confronted him that very afternoon about Amelia and me being at the store. The store owner, who knew my stepfather as we lived right down the street, demanded that Peter

pay for the groceries Amelia had stolen. I explained what had happened and was told to stay in my room until things were sorted out.

In the end, Peter contacted Amelia’s father whom he knew from having hired him to work on his transport ships. Amelia’s father went to the grocery store and paid the owner for Amelia’s illicit shopping spree. Later on, at school I confronted Amelia about what she had done. She told me that she needed money to buy some new dresses because she never got to wear anything new. She did not apologize to me, and Mother told me not to be friends with Amelia anymore. I started spending more time with my Hindi friend, Sarika.

I attended San Jose Abad Santos School for a year and a half while living in Manila. I learned to speak Tagalong well back then, though I regrettably forgot most of it when I had to learn Japanese in Tokyo.