Those high school presscons

PAREDES

When this column sees print, I shall be in Pagadian City to attend the National Schools Press Conference (NSPC) that the city is hosting this year. I have been invited by Director Isabelita Borres of the Department of Education Region 9 to be one of the judges for the Editorial Cartooning contest.

This trip to Pagadian is special for me for many reasons. First of all, I have been an alumnus of the NSPC (called National Secondary Schools Press Conference or NSSPC in our time), having always been sent by our school, the Surigao del Norte School of Arts and Trades, to compete in the different fields all the way from city division through the national level.

And the one inviting me now, Dr. Borres, was our adviser in the Hub, the official publication of our school and the one in charge with mentoring selected participants to the secondary press conferences. She was thus my mentor in journalism and our surrogate mother when she had to accompany us on our journey to the regional and national competitions.

I used to brag that I spent most of my high school days traveling. We always shuttled to nearby Butuan or Cagayan de Oro, the latter being Region 10’s capital when Surigao was still part of it, to take part in regional competitions, usually having to do with art or writing. The regional student press conference was a regular event, so I eventually became friends with some of the best budding writers and artists of my generation in Northern Mindanao.

After winning in the regional level, me and another student were sent to the NSSPC accompanied by Dr. Borres. My first time was in Olongapo City, which hosted the NSSPC in 1987. That trip was a lot of “firsts” for me. It was the first time I flew on a plane, the Philippine Airlines turbo-prop DC-3, a World War II vintage locally nicknamed “Bulilit” due to its size. Arriving in Cebu, we then boarded a BAC-11, my first ride on a jet plane, on our way to Manila.

It was the first time I visited Manila. We stayed for the night in UP Diliman before taking the bus to Olongapo, where you could still find the Subic Naval Base of the United States Navy. It was an exciting experience for me, seeing all those fighter jets that we only saw in Top Gun patrol the skies above us almost endlessly and going around the streets at night to peek through the glass windows of the bikini bars at night amid the neon lights of the “Sin City.”

We were toured around the Subic Base and had a view of the American naval arsenal belonging to the Seventh Fleet assigned to the Pacific. Fed regularly with Hollywood Cold War propaganda, such as Top Gun, Iron Eagle, and Rambo, my friends and I were ecstatic to see all those gleaming F-14s, F-18s, and the monstrous Chinook twin-rotor lifters, Black Hawks, and the Apache helicopter gunships.

I was probably too distracted for I did not win a contest in Olongapo. My first win was in the year after when our own region hosted the NSSPC in Malaybalay, Bukidnon. It was a long journey by bus from Surigao City to Bukidnon. We left early in the morning and I could still remember how our bus climbed dangerously through the zigzag road against the fog in pitch darkness on our way to Malaybalay. But we were already too weak from vomiting several times due to seasickness all throughout the journey to notice.

We arrived in freezing cold air of Malaybalay and was billeted in a classroom of a public school along with other delegates from our region. You struggled to sleep curled up in your jacket and a flimsy blanket and then had to take an ice-cold shower in a makeshift outdoor bathroom early in the morning. Some students got sick on their first day in Bukidnon.

I remember taking a hike under the pine trees in the forests of Malaybalay and having a taste of pasteurized milk bought from a small grocery. We also were taken in a long convoy of buses to a trip to the Del Monte pineapple factory in Manolo Fortich, where each of us were given two big and still unlabeled cans of sliced pineapples.

But my best pasalubong was the news that I made it to the top 10 in the editorial writing contest. It wasn’t always that a small vocational in the province can win in a national level writing contest. This made Ma’am Borres happy, and I felt that I was able to make up for the trouble we gave her, having to attend to her students stricken with travel sickness. It made it all worth it.