Slippers

October 2008  



One Sunday show on TV has this habit of giving slippers to barrio pupils. It both amuses and irks me. The show’s simplistic storytelling and fast-paced format make the children appear so pitiful, when in real life, they’re not. I should know. I was once one of them.

I studied elementary in a far-flung area in Sultan Kudarat. Our place was like Baguio City—minus the concrete structures, the parks, and the electricity. (Got the picture?) In our school, slippers were the everyday footwear. You only wear shoes on special occasions, like when it’s your graduation or when you’re the contestant for poetry delivery during Linggo ng Wika.

Like the kids in the TV show, some of my schoolmates had to cross streams and walk up to three kilometers everyday. I myself had to walk nearly a kilometer everyday from grade two to grade five, when my family moved to a (more) secluded part of the village. But unlike how the show presented it, walking for us was never considered a burden. We simply took it as a way of life. We never wished riding a vehicle to school, for we knew it was dangerous and useless. Tricycles would just roll over down the hills, and with the kind of roads we had, it would take cars eons to move an inch forward.

Kids didn’t wear shoes not so much because of poverty as for practical reasons. It rained in our place every so often, turning the road into an endless chain of large mud cakes. Thus “slide” got early into our limited English vocabulary. To keep ourselves from being the subject of this verb, we had to walk barefoot sometimes. Just imagine what would become of white socks and shiny black shoes in such a road.

In many ways, pupils in public schools are indeed pitiful. (Take for instance the number and kind of books they have, or the state of their classrooms.) Their having to wear slippers, however, should be the least of society’s worries, for there’s a bright side to it.

In our pre-Havaianas days, slippers looked alike and cost almost the same. In this respect, our school had an egalitarian set-up. No one cared whether you had Rambo, Beaver, or Silver Dove on your feet. No one even cared if the sole of your slipper already had a gaping hole or its strap had snapped and was only kept in place by a wire. As far as we were concerned, a slipper was just a slipper. Compare that to a school with shoes-sporting pupils. Kids there usually form a pecking order. At such an early age, they learn to live by this absurd capitalist rule: Skechers draw buddies, Skeechers invite bullies.

Our all-weather foot apparel also came handy during recess time. With it, we could enjoy tumba lata or sipa tsinelas anytime we wanted. Our school playground might not have swings, slides, or see-saws, but with the games we could play and invent with our slippers, we felt like we were not missing anything. We could live without shoes, but not without our tsinelas, or ismagol (as some kids—and adults—called slippers, perhaps because many slippers in earlier days were smuggled.)

When I caught the TV show recently, its slippers feature had attracted a sponsor. We’re giving away this time a “famous” brand, said the smiling host. I couldn’t help chuckling when the items were flashed on screen. For all the sponsor's seemingly good intentions, the slippers were bulky and had shoe-like front ends—just the thing you need to be the subject of the verb “slide.”

I began to imagine what would have happened if the TV program existed before and it distributed free flip-flops in my school. Probably, I would be thankful. I might clown and dance for the camera, too. But sooner or later, I’d surely realize that, for the sake of ratings, the people behind the show were treating me unkindly—by turning a normal and happy part of my school life into a sappy tale.

A story can be told in many ways, depending on the knowledge and sometimes interest of the narrator. One narrator may only let you see one side or one part of it. This is my version. This is from someone who once wore slippers to school.