Crossing Over to the Mayayabang na Lasallistas
In the early sixties, there used to be a school called the Our Lady of the Rosary Academy or OLRA. It was a co-educational Catholic school run by an American order of nuns who bore strange masculine religious names like Sister James Catherine. They were the Maryknoll Sisters.
The campus was to the right of the St. Sebastian Cathedral, where there was a dark gloomy building and a small yard. At the far end of it were tombstones behind which rested priests and nuns who had been called to the Almighty. One held one’s pee in rather than risk trips to the washrooms for fear that the adjoining commode would mysteriously flush by itself or that the doors would slam shut even when there was no wind. Those washrooms had mumô written all over them.
The Maryknoll sisters were well-loved, as American missionaries tended to be in those days. They were kindred people who loved being with their pupils; and the affection was returned aplenty by not only their students but also by their lay co-workers. Their discipline was firm; but not coercive and never strangling.
I think I was in Grade 2 when word started to leak out that the beloved sisters would start to make graceful exits from the country over a period of several years. They were really more missionaries than educators and would like to stay true to their mission. At least, that is as far as I remember things – and it has been almost half a century since. As it turned out, they would be in Lipa only until I finished Grade 3.
Those were sad times when the Maryknoll sisters said their goodbyes. They told everyone before leaving that the school would be taken over by another order of nuns, the Canossian sisters from Italy.
At any rate, my classmates and I moved back to the gloomy building beside the cathedral for Grade 4, our last year in the school before we crossed the Great Divide to that school in Paninsingin. The boys were already separated from the girls in two sections; I suppose, in preparation for our eventual transfer.
Like most everyone else, I wondered why we could not have simply stayed on in the school like boys used to do before. It was later that I learned that, since the Maryknoll sisters were leaving, there was an agreement that the boys would be going over to that school in Paninsingin that was operated by what were called Brothers instead of Fathers; while the girls would stay on in the school that would henceforth be operated by the Canossians.
There were those among us who dreaded crossing over to that school that everyone simply referred to as La Salle; and its students, the mayayabang na Lasallistas. You have to understand, we were brought up in the serene and orderly world of the sisters.
What was it about that other school that, when we passed by it in our Air Force school bus, its students were always shouting or tearing at each other loudly and boisterously and acted as though they owned the world? The place always looked like it was in a perpetual state of barely-controlled mayhem. Who would want to go there?
Students were not the only ones hurt and saddened by the departure of the Maryknoll Sisters. The legendary Ms. Alice Rivera, Maryknoll-educated and who had returned to her alma mater to teach, would later openly admit that the reason she moved to La Salle was because of the departure of the beloved sisters.
Of course, my classmates and I did not really have much in the way of choices. We did cross over. And the rest, as the worn-out cliché goes, has been history…
But what does a silly schoolboy know? Especially about crystal balls and eventually becoming one of the dreaded mayayabang na Lasallistas. It was all, as it turned out, simply a matter of which side of the fence one was in. In the end, those Lasallistas were not too bad, after all.
As to the OLRA-nian pledge, I am what I am no small thanks to the Maryknoll Sisters. When I come to think about it, I did not really break the pledge. I just appended to it.
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