Fr. O'B's Opus

Amidst the festive rush and celebration of the Tercentenary of the Peñafrancia devotion, there was something else happening in one of the resorts out in Carolina. The place is called Casa Ofelia, owned by one of the students in the batch, Roger Cariño. The former classmates coming from Manila and other places in the region were gathered to celebrate a teacher and his memories.

Nostalgia always has a charming place when people try to remember things. This group, added something to memory - and that was action. They launched a project that transformed the book of Fr. James O'Brien, SJ, into the more accessible electronic form.

For those who spent their high school in Ateneo de Naga in the mid-60s to the late 70s, they must have used this book in white wove, its text in mimeographed form. Tell me who in this generation recognizes the word "mimeograph"?

The book bears the title "The Historical and Cultural Heritage of the Bicol People." By the title, the book comes across as a ponderous exercise but it was really a labor of love in the real sense of the word. Mr. Greg Abonal, principal of Ateneo de Naga University High School, remembers how one summer and the summers after that, the Jesuit priest sent off his students to do their most unusual homework: to gather origin myths, adventures of their father and grandfathers during the last wars, folktales and folksongs.

The result was the book, heavy in its title, humble only in its paper type, but magnificent in its intention and impact. What was initiated as an adventure and fieldwork exercise - unburdened by theorizing - turned out to be the education for generations of students loving their towns and traditions, their languages, dialects and riddles, their folksongs and folkways.

At the center of this learning process was this American from New York who was so keen to learn the language of the place he was assigned to that, as recalled by Greg Abonal, he would move from being their English teacher to being their Bikol language pupil. In those situations, Fr. O'B would ask his pupils to read for him certain passages from "Mahal na Pasyon." Abonal still hears those opening lines: "Ano sa boot nindo an tamang pagbasa kaini."

In Casa Ofelia the Saturday of the Traslacion, the group awaited the arrival of Fr. Joel Tabora, S.J. The Ateneo de Naga High School Batch of 1975 was giving CD copies of the work of Fr. O'B to the university president, symbolically giving back to the university what the group described as the best legacy of their education. In his speech, Fr. Tabora, S.J., relayed to the class how their project was not only unique but also a triumph of education.

Anthony P. Ferrer, President and Chief Operating Officer of Cybersoft Information Technologies, Inc., is the main person behind the project. He shared how after graduation, he went back to the book both as inspiration and reference. Ferrer is a geologist and in his first sorties to do mapping, he would be in places in Bikol and see those sites in his mind as he did in the many quizzes given by Fr. O'B. Ferrer recalled how they would be asked by the priest to enumerate all the towns between Camarines Sur and Sorsogon aside from being asked to draw the locations of these places relative to each other.

Some places were made special because of the course. Upon reaching the island of Rapu-rapu, He recalled both the place and the song about the place. He also told the crowd that he even sang that song to his grandchild.

Fr. O'B loved to sing Bikol songs. When he flew from Manila to Naga to receive the Bikolista Award in the mid 1980s, he sang Bikol songs in strong, piquant New Yorker accent to the delight of the flight attendants. He told them those were the songs of the land he loved.

If he knew that one of the students was singing one of those songs from a forgotten island as a lullaby, he would certainly have called that pupil and started the conversation with "Ano sa boot mo...."