revealing

how we learn

As I was opening this laptop, my phone rang. I saw the caller is our grandson who is celebrating a birthday. He sounds so grown up, patiently answering my determinedly silly questions about birthday cake and his present. Where are the years going?

It’s such a tonic after a hard week. The community discovered Monday we had lost a resident who moved here in 1998. He did not live in our building so I am not sure precisely what happened but he was a nice fellow we somehow managed to sit with a community picnics. He always mentioned more than once wanting to live on a boat which I think he did in his younger years but he was thoroughly contented in this beautiful place along the water in his final years.

As if that wasn’t enough, my office mate from graduate school lost her husband to Parkinson’s on Wednesday. She was in political science while he was in economics but their work intertwined so closely. They came from the Philippines in the 1970s because the United States both welcomed foreign students and was the place where students sought to learn.

They became as deeply enmeshed in Notre Dame as anyone I have ever known. Football, the academic departments, our PIMPing (Progress in Moody’s [the graduate advisor] Program), and all that makes the University of Notre Dame into a community completely separate from the town of South Bend. A priest once told me that was the design; I found it succeeded.

At the end of my first year, Cecilia and their three year old needed a ride to the D.C. area where her husband Gabby was doing research at the World Bank. I had a 1977 Izusu which had not yet ever needed a replacement part so I felt confident as Cecilia, Patrick and I piled in for the 550 mile trip east.

In the early 1980s we had no electronics to occupy a tyke, of course. We also had no massive car stereo systems, particularly in my bright blue five speed. But, Ces strapped Patrick into the back seat so we could launch about 6.30 am.

We had not made it to the Elkhart exit on the Indiana Tollway when Patrick began screaming. He could see her but he wanted to be in the front seat with her. She asked me to pull over, the put him under the seatbelt with her in the front.

I didn’t have kids but I knew that wasn’t safe. I was the generation when officials began strenuously encouraging seat belt use (the federal mandate went into effect three years later) but evene without that advice I could tell this just wasn’t going to be safe in this little car, cute as it may have been. Ces was unhappy, Patrick was furious, and I was dubious.

Turned out Ces had a handheld cassette player/recorder (D batteries, probably) with a one single song on the single cassette: the Notre Dame Fight Song. She would hit ‘play’ and Patrick would miraculously quiet.

The song would end and the screaming began anew. Rewind, and play. Scream! Rewind, and play. Scream! This went on for all 11 hours. I thought I would need transfer elsewhere for my degree as I honestly could not fathom listening to that bloody song ever again. (Since Notre Dame is rather limited some times about its aura, I doubted they would flex on songs for me. I figured I would have to hear the song. Only about 3 million times after this trip. I somehow managed to stick it out.)

When I dropped them off at Gabby’s rental that night, I murmured something about the Fight Song. Gabby, always a laid back guy, asked if the trip had been an easy one and had Patrick been a gem? I simply hopped in the car before I managed to lose my access to the office Cecilia was generously sharing it with me.

The whole thing seems so fresh in my mind yet I know it was 42 years ago in May. Patrick is, of course, long grown. He attended Virginia Tech through Army ROTC program, as true so often with immigrant kids, then served in Iraq, and has an established physical therapy career centered on vets in the Midwest now. He and his sister are both married so they, their both their spouses and grandchildren already provide Cecilia with comfort as she told me last night.

We as graduate students also provided Ces and Gabby with comfort not too long after the famous drive to the East Coast. They suffered a profound loss which shook them both. They had departed South Bend for teaching positions when it occurred but I recall the graduate student community mobilising to offer what limited help we could. At that point, I think they simply wanted someone to hear their pain.

I knew the Philippines was a Catholic country before meeting Cecilia and Gabriel but I had no idea how ingrained their faith, sharing their grief with us, and how much the community’s embrace helped get them through. I learned that Catholicism around the world really had some dramatic differences in its manifestations as it would not have been quite that way in South America in my experience.

Gabby and Ces were the generation of Filipinos who still spoke Spanish rather than Tagalog when they weren’t speaking English. Their surnames evidenced Spain’s centuries’ hold over that vast island chain struggling to be country. They were the first people I really talked with about why the Corazón Aquino phenomenon would matter to average folk. They both knew her well from Manila and because Aquino and her martyred husband Benigno had also studied and in the United States. Filipinos value and sustain the networks born of that shared experience here and in the homeland.

Additionally, Gabby and Ces exemplified something I don’t think we take into account when we consider foreign students matriculating here for graduate school education. Not only did Gabby earn a doctorate in economics but Cecilia’s undergraduate work was in that field. Lots of us in the government program wondered if she was really happy in government rather than econ.

What we so often miss is that struggling nations implore their most promising students not to study humanities like literature, art, or history but to pursue engineering or economics which acts as a driving factor for modernising and nation-building. We don’t appreciate that humanities are unaffordable luxuries, as academic fields, for nations still wrestling with development. Gabriel and Cecilia were prime examples of that as was one of my classmates in London who had done his undergraduate work in engineering (and struggled mightily with the less definitive nature of economic history).

I learned a lot about the world from Cecilia and Gabby. They went to any and every portion of it until the illness stole Gabby’s mobility. We lunched with them near DuPont Circle about 14 years ago when they were here for the American Political Science Association annual meeting. With my husband’s tour in the Philippines and multiple visits over his career, it was an free-flowing discussion about the changes underway in Asia which keenly interested all four of us.

It is seductive for academics to assume our knowledge of an item, a place, or a country’s trajectory must come with the survey data, the vast statistics needed to publish an article in a major scholarly journal. Anecdotes are thus rejected as insufficient and personal ‘interviews’ (a.k.a. conversations) inadequate for knowledge.

Yet we gain insights about ourselves and about other nations when we listen to people melding their home cultures with their new lives. I once suggested to Gabby that he apply for a program I had attended as I thought he would learn a lot and bring his particular analytical skills. He sighed that he was still awaiting citizenship so he was ineligible. He then launched into a keen discussion of how much he looked forward to being an American for so many reasons. He had already lived her for 13 years at that point. The cynicism washing over we native born so often had not found him.

Seeing the world with others tells us not only about them as individuals but their cultures, their faiths, their educations, and so many other facets of life outside of this nation and how we mold them into new citizens. All of that knowledge benefits us as we age and evolve as individuals and as a nation.

Ces will have a long road as she adjusts to this loss. I understand why she is still in shock. My only surprise is that she seemed to apologise for feeling the pain. I cannot imagine she would feel any other way.

We had quite a bit of thunder and lightning and welcome rain last night. The sky was Carolina blue with a few clouds here and there. May your weather be moderating as we embark on the privilege of another week. FIN