of hymns and bananas

i treasure a lot of memories from my LCC days--give or take 2,200 (or 22,000 hours) of them. it was an all-girls school, but we had boys up to grade 4. in grade 1, the boys' section was separated from us girls, and everytime a student was talkative, the teacher would send her to the boys section (and vice versa). imagine having to sit there amongst the boys--utterly humiliating. i know--i was sent there once.

LCC is a BIG school. you can get lost walking through its corridors. from the school entrance is a long walk through a shaded lane crossing the first and second gates. we had our own chapel, auditorium, audio visual room, a quadrangle that can accommodate the whole student body during flag ceremonies, 3 libraries (elementary, high school and college), 3 canteens, playground, basketball/volleyball court, music rooms, sewing room, a refectory, biology room, zoology room, chemistry labs, student dorms, nun's laundry area, another quadrangle inside the school grounds, nun's dorm, a big parking lot, home economics room, reception hall, typing room... we've managed to roam around the campus in our days but there were still a lot of doors left undiscovered.

we had mass every first fridays, at every saint's feastday, principal's birthday... in our gala uniform. confessions were held before each mass otherwise we couldn't receive communion. every section would be scheduled for confession and sometimes we would have to invent sins so we will have something to tell the father confessor. we wondered how our school priest still had the strength to say mass after hearing a multitude of sins. we had a music teacher, Ms. V, who tirelessly taught us new songs for the mass. our music room was located at the back of the auditorium. to alleviate sleepiness (our class was every 2pm), we would mimic Ms. V's mouth as she sings, exaggerate the pronunciation of the words, or sing loudly... we were shouting, actually.

when i was in 2nd year HS, my best friend L. and I discovered an enchanting area inside the campus. somewhere at the back was the janitor's area. they had their own dorms and basketball court, adjacent to the nun's laundry area. they had pigs, lots of them and during recess, we would watch them eat. trees abound--atis, starapple, guavas, bananas, chesa, sampaloc, and so with several other vegetables which the janitors plant themselves. we didn't think it was forbidden to roam around so every lunchbreak would find L. and I dawdling at what seemed to be a plantation of some sorts. we would laugh hysterically each time we found a ripe banana. one time, we discovered a "buwig" of bananas and we cut it off the tree using a small blade, then naughtily hid it and covered it with dried leaves so the janitors wouldn't see. we stashed it away and ate it as it ripened. then our eyes rested on a guava tree. another treasure! i would climb up and gather all the ripe ones, using my skirt as a basket. there was one time i was caught by a nun atop a guava tree. i almost fell. the starapple was the hardest to get, though. since we couldn't find a stick long enough to get it off the tree, we threw rocks at it and mumbled our frustration instead. other times we would bring home a schoolbagful of vegetables (sigarilyas, pechay, puso ng saging, bataw). what about our notebooks? since it was impractical to have one bag for school things and one for our loot, we decided to get ourselves a bigger bag instead. maldita talaga, hahaha!

one thing i learned from this--banana sap (dagta) stains--badly. all my uniforms had banana stains all over, and had the nuns rounded up all the students to find out who had been harvesting their bananas, L. and I would have been guilty as sin.

in 4th year high school, the rooms assigned to us were former student dormitories at the second floor. our room was big, with huge capiz windows on both sides of the walls so the breeze crossed, softly rocking us to sleep. and sleep we did. there was a wide divider at the end of the room and what the teachers didn't know was we pulled a bed from the stockroom and positioned it behind the divider. we took turns sleeping on it... during class hours. if the teacher happened to call the name of anyone of us taking a siesta, we would chorus, "ma'm nasa cr po". the comfort room was another world. since it was a dorm, we had about 5 or six cubicles all in a row. we would sometimes hear the doors open and close by themselves. it was creepy so we normally go there in two's... or three's... or four's... when the lesson gets boring, our class of 38 would be reduced to around 20... the rest would be found having their own discussion or eating in the comfort room. my last year in LCC was the most nostalgic. we spent the last half of the year practicing for our graduation--and getting ready for the world.

i always smile each time i pass by my alma mater. it molded me, strengthened my faith in God, and to this day holds some of the fondest memories of my youth.