His name is Edgar. He is fifty seven years old, and everyday he goes to work at 9 AM as a barangay tanod, patrolling the streets of Teachers Village. They would look out for what he’d call the mukhang masama, sometimes walking, sometimes stationed in the tiny, open-air guard houses situated at every corner or so of the barangay.
On occasion, there’d be reports and calls about disturbances by residents or fellow tanods. These would be his favourite times. He and a band of six would march out, carrying the authority invested in them upon their shoulders, ready to meet justice upon these audacious disturbers of the peace. But once their duty has been met, time returns them to the steady routine of watching and waiting. That is, at least, until 5 PM, when his last shift ends and he goes back home for a quick bite and to spend time with his wife and see his children off to school.
Yet his familial sojourn is a short one. Two hours later, at 7 PM, he stands guard at the gates of some of the townhouse compounds dotting the barangay. For the first few hours, his post is brightly lit, and he enjoys the company of the compound’s residents. By 9, however, it’s lights out, and the beginning of his lonely watch in the darkness. Aside from the odd purr of a passing car or the sudden bark of a dog, nothing much happens; and it stays that way until his shift ends at 7 AM. He returns home, exhausted. He rests as much as he can before he sets out again, just in time for the start of his patrol through the streets, only the early birds to keep him company.
His face was the one I’ve known the longest of the guards hired to ensure that nothing goes amiss in the wee hours of the night. His was also the newest. During the times he would be stationed here, his eyes would meet my own, twinkling ever so gently. He would smile his kindly smile to meet mine, and then return his gaze back to the gate, content in sipping the hot coffee his wife made for him and eating the hot dinner the neighbours would make sure to leave for him.
“Para saan?”, he said. This was the first time that my routine greeting of a smile and a Hi po! was followed by anything else. It was his first shift of the week in my compound. I had asked if I could interview him. He was taken aback. “Para sa trabaho sa eskwela po. Okay lang ba po?”, I responded in as much of my baroque Filipino as I could muster. To my relief, he acquiesced.
I asked him what he dreamt of being when he was a kid. In my inability to write quickly in Filipino, I translated all his responses into English. “I dreamed of joining the army and becoming a soldier.”, he said. “There was a righteousness to it, and a sense of purpose to something greater than myself. It was a good dream.”
He grew up in the Cagayan Valley, where he lived at the foot of the mountains and where his parents farmed rice. They were comfortable, and happy. Not close to rich, but that didn’t matter when his father woke up before dawn everyday—all set to work hard beneath the hot sun until the early hours of evening time. It was enough to put food on the table, and enough to send him and his six siblings to school.
As his parents grew older and older, the farm needed younger hands to work the fields. He had no plans of going to college—neither did his siblings—so high school was the end of their education. Just like their father, they worked hard; manning the carabaos, digging canals, planting, fertilizing, and harvesting. The only relief from the sweltering heat of the hot sun was the cool mud squishing between the toes. Eventually, he got married, and had five children.
During my second session with him, he began with a new stage in his life.“In time, I decided that a job in Manila would have better prospects.”, he said. He was contracted by a construction company and worked with them for two years. He sent home enough money for his wife and children to thrive on, even being able to send them to school like his parents did. But just as was the case with his parents, there is no rest for the weary. It was difficult being far away from family and home. “But I could take days off regularly and on special occasions to visit them, so I was content.”
He was still working in Manila when he learned that the New People’s Army, who had taken to the mountains to hide from the government, had been raiding the towns and farms below. He rushed back to his childhood home, where he found that his family’s estates were among the ones raided. “I had returned to the province to help out as much as I could. Eventually, I just decided to move my wife and my kids to Manila to live with me.”
The endeavor, however, proved to take longer than was good for any of them. The construction company laid him off and replaced him. He was left without a steady job for a few years, working odd jobs, before he landed himself in with the barangay tanods. Thankfully, three of his children had grown up by then, already married, though the other two are still studying. Now, he and his family have lived in Manila for ten years, “and hopefully for ten years more.” he added.
He would laugh from time to time, his eyes crinkled as much as they could be as he told his story. And when he wasn’t laughing, the slight shadow of a smile never left his face. He tended to only answer directly what was asked, rarely going beyond to tell little anecdotes or stories, but I soon learned that this was simply how he answered questions. In any case, his economical responses were made up for by his eagerness to give them. If this was a tragic backstory, you couldn’t have known it from the way he told it.
He was laid off and he and his family of six lived through at least three years of unemployment. The farm on which he grew up in was raided by communist guerillas. His father, and he and his siblings—fresh off the graduation march—had to endure the back-breaking life of a rice farmer in the Philippines; an occupation that rarely ever gives more than enough. He sacrificed sleep, time, and energy to support his wife and children eight hours away, and he still hasn’t stopped. He just mentioned all of these in passing, so much so that I didn’t realize how absurdly worlds apart we lived until I read and reread the notes I had taken.
To my young, sheltered ears, connected to a brain that had not yet had the chance to stare down the gullet of true human hardship, that had mired itself in the weak netting of petty dilemmas—of too much schoolwork and too little sleep, of the social politics of girls and guys, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera—I could only perceive a man with a strength of character that I in my privileged life could never achieve without an active effort develop it.
What do I lack, then—this strength of character that had eluded me during the decade and a half that I had lived on this Earth and still does? It is, I realize, the ability to be content. His was not the soft complacency that follows decadence and privilege. His was not the refusal to look for something more in life. Rather, his was the gift of finding home in every place he’s been in.
When asked about what other job he would like to have if he could choose, he said he wanted to be a farmer again. That was his childhood, when he was younger and stronger, when his family was complete, before the NPA came to mess things up. But he still says that what he wants right now is to keep the job he’s had for the past three years. The barangay is his extended family; among the other tanods, whom he goes out often with on his days off; among the many residents, many of whom he could always count on to invite him to share their Christmas dinner. The wedding reception of his third-born daughter was held in the compound where I live in.
Kuya Edgar didn’t talk about God much, but that didn’t matter. I saw Him in him. In the twinkling eyes that knew how to live on the smallest pleasures of life. In the mouth that could not help but smile at the world that continues to make him happy. While not obvious, that is the gift that God wants us to have. He wants us to be like him, generous with smiles and time. He loves and is loved by the barangay for whom he has spent and will spend the latter part of his years protecting and assisting and being there for. When he walks along the sidewalks of Teachers Village, God walks beside Him. He did reach his dream of being a soldier after all, even if he doesn’t know it. He lives as a part of something greater than himself, as he has done all his life.
My neighbours were poor. Their parents worked for my grandparents, and they were much poorer than my family was. Yet they were my best friends. It wouldn’t be until I grew up and saw children begging on the street that I saw them as anything other than people in dire need of a heavy shower. But even then, among the sullen faces and weary eyes, there were smiles. My background has helped me empathize much with the poor, but I still know that my life was not theirs, and theirs not mine. Theirs was a happiness that I could not understand.
It is over the course of my dialogue with Kuya Edgar that I saw where I might find that happiness. It is always good to seek better opportunities. To believe that in the highest heights that we look up at, where even more power and privilege than we already have can be found, we can find contentment, is not always wrong. Yet in Kuya Edgar, we can see that looking down upon the ground where our feet tread can be better than looking up at the stars. The dreams I have, of being a great doctor or a lawyer or a natural historian or a journalist, may or may not work out. That does stress me out. But one must make do with the hand God gives to him, as I have learned from hearing Kuya Edgar’s story.
Today, I look forward to a brighter future. But while destiny is a thing best kept under leash, I think now that loosening my grip and following or staying wherever it sees fit to run to or stop is an option we can and should take from time to time.
We spend our lives homeward bound, searching and searching and searching for a place and a time where we can finally find contentment and satisfaction. We know that God lies at the end of our journey, so we look for Him in holy places. But why do that, when we may seek Him in holy faces? As we continue on our journey to at last find the hearth by which we may finally rest, let us follow Kuya Edgar’s example. He, at least, has already found it.
Manila by Twilight 