PEERING THROUGH my window in Seat 7F, I watched a dog strolling nonchalantly beside the runway as our plane landed in Kalibo airport. Apparently the mutt didn’t or couldn’t read the signs I saw as we drove from the airport to the campus of Aklan State University: “Beware of the exhaust from airplanes.” Any place where people and dogs come perilously if indifferently close to steaming jets has got to be worth a visit, and we were not to be disappointed. Kalibo would prove refreshingly laid back, over the days that our group of UP professors spent there to conduct a workshop for teachers at Aklan State University.
The formal title of the workshop was “Online Journalism: Web Writing for Cultural, Literary, and Historical Content,” and we had been invited by the good folks at ASU—through the sponsorship of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology—to help teachers write for the Web. Like many other schools around the country (including the University of the Philippines), ASU has entered the Digital Age, with impressive banks of computers hooked up to a fast Internet connection and wi-fi routers spreading the signal, but the teachers and staff themselves have some catching up to do with the technology now available to them. ASU President Benny Palma and CICT Project Manager Leanna Beltran put their heads and resources together to support a workshop to produce both the content and the means to get ASU’s teachers and their ideas online.
I’d originally thought of begging off from the workshop, pleading fatigue after having already taken one too many flights and road trips this summer, but I really couldn’t say no, for more than one reason. If I could gallivant around the world, I could certainly go to Aklan. Also, and unknown to even many members of my own family, the Dalisays—those of us whose grandfathers, like mine, were farmers in Romblon—have roots in Aklan. I’ve found Dalisays in Davao, Iloilo, Quezon City, and Central Luzon, but there’s probably no greater concentration of Dalisays than in Aklan, specifically Ibajay. There, in 1673, a man named Don Francisco Calizo Dalisay was elected gobernadorcillo by the principales. Presumably, his descendants crossed the strait to Romblon and settled there; one of them was my grandfather, Anatolio, whom I met just once when I was ten; he was a big tall man who was husking coconuts, and didn’t say a word to me.
So going to Aklan was a homecoming of sorts, and I looked forward to visiting Ibajay or even just passing through it, on our way to our one day in Boracay, after the workshop. I was also challenged by the prospect of bringing my fellow teachers onto the Internet.
I’m a strong believer in technology as a means of bridging or leapfrogging over social and economic gaps. We can talk all day about the “digital divide,” which is sadly real; but that divide won’t close unless and until we bring the machines to the people—and, in ASU’s case, bring the people to the machines. Too many computers rot in the offices of presidents and principals and in locked “computer labs” because the people who are supposed to use them either can’t, or don’t know how.
Over three days, around 35 teachers and staff members from ASU’s several campuses listened to lectures on literature and the Internet from me and my colleagues, Drs. Isabel Banzon-Mooney and Lily Rose Tope. Isabel and Lily Rose guided them through a reappreciation of Philippine and Third World literature, then I stepped in to talk about the Internet, hypertext, reading and writing for the Web, and finally, publishing on the Web.
Predictably, many participants began with an admission of being ignorant about or intimidated by computers and Internet. As far as they were concerned, they may have felt too old to learn about the Internet in a workshop they didn’t even ask to attend (the visionary Dr. Palma had ordered them to go). They could write ideas down on paper, but putting them online was an entirely different challenge.
To put them at ease, I recounted how I myself at one time avoided computers like the plague—I even lugged my Olympia portable typewriter with me to graduate school in the US and worked on it doggedly for my whole first year, before succumbing to the lure of my first Mac. From then on it was love sweet love.
But more practically, I walked them through the process of putting up a group blog (http://asuseminar.blogspot.com), using a live Internet connection. They had worked on individual translations, critiques, and commentaries, and we uploaded a few of these, plus a few pictures, for them to see how easy it was, before breaking up for lunch. I had given them the password to the blog so they could upload their own material, and I saw people finishing their lunch early so they could go back to their computers and try their hand at getting their work and their names online. Within less than two hours, I was happily astounded to see that our three original entries had grown to 21.
They may not exactly have been literary gems, but suddenly we had a nosegay of Aklanon translations of poems by such stalwarts as Alfred Yuson, Marne Kilates, Marra Lanot, and Angelo Suarez, where just a day earlier we had none. And now they were online for all the world to see. The joyful wonderment in our workshoppers’ faces mirrored ours. With a few guided keystrokes, these Aklanons had empowered themselves as writers and publishers, claiming their rightful spots in cyberspace.
Many thanks to Dr. Palma, Len Beltran, ASU Arts & Sciences Dean Mary Eden Teruel and Prof. Edecio Venturanza II (whose life story beats any telenovela, but I’ll save that for another time) for the opportunity to have been of service to my sometime provincemates. Fittingly perhaps, I never would never discovered Don Francisco Calizo Dalisay if it hadn’t been for the Internet. It’s a long way from 1673 to 2008, but last week, my past and present came together, and for many others, the future just began.