Thoughts on an alumni homecoming

Less than a month from today, the Sibale Academy, Sibale’s only private high school, will be host to an alumni homecoming.

This event will go into the school’s history books as the first grand attempt to gather a disparate population whose only common characteristic was that they, once in their lives, went to the same high school and daydreamed in the same class.

No one can tell yet if this attempt will be successful in terms of the number of alumni attending the event. This writer feels this is the lone criteria that the organizers, of whom I am one, have set to gauge the success or failure of the April 11-14 gathering.

Which is unfortunate, if you consider past experiences of alumni homecomings elsewhere.
The fact is that alumni homecomings, regardless of how well-publicized and well-organized they are, are really only social events and, therefore, do not acquire the urgency of say, a job interview or a visit to the dentist, to be red-marked in an alumnus’ calendar.

One may debate the merits of this observation, but yes, the 2009 Sibale Academy Grand Alumni Homecoming which has been in the drawing board for over a year does not register in the radar of ALL alumni.

This seems to be the cause of exasperation of many of us in the Sibale Academy Alumni Association (SAAA) when we meet with empty stomachs last Friday at my office along Sen. Gil Puyat Avenue in Pasay City. To say that we were fretting was an understatement. Tess Felisilda, VP for Alumni Affairs, succinctly expressed for all of us our deathly worry—that very few alumni might attend, given the cold and pathetic response of many to our urgent call to participate, to contribute to the finances, to attend the meetings, and to comply with other “impositions”, such as responding to e-mails and text messages.

I can only empathize with Tess. It is really difficult to take a leading role in such an initiative. Boy Fabregas, the SAAA president, admitted to me after the meeting (it was already well past midnight) that we were really in a Catch 22 situation—damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

The question is: Why are we still at it? Why, even if only very few alumni hear our calls and pleas, are we still attending meetings after meetings and devoting precious time of our waking hours to organize the event?

No one seemed to have the answer. Or, yes, we have but are we so afraid to blurt it out? During the meeting, I suggested rather strongly that we postpone the event and went as far as saying that those who claim to not know any information about the homecoming, even if I suspect they already have an idea about what’s going on, should be expelled from the SAAA.

Of course, I was alone in this crazy idea and the suggestion was trashed. So we go. Forward, we go. The problem, it seems to me now, is communication. I am afraid we at the SAAA have not really sat down and crafted the message we ought to deliver. We haven’t even spent a single centavo on a stamp for a snail mail.

I think we are missing the big picture, spending the larger part of our meetings talking about the minute details of, say, for example, how to feed the attendees.

Well, it is correct that you cannot call a homecoming “grand” if the alumni are suffering from the pangs of hunger, but surely this misses the point of the event. The alumni homecoming is about alumni coming home, not alumni splurging on a sumptuous feast. If an alumni is bent on the latter, he or she can go to MacDonald’s, not to Sibale.

I am not saying this organizing strategy is wrong. I am saying it is very wrong.
After I say this, I may be left with only a few friends in the Association, but what the heck. Anyway, I only have very few true friends who can take a criticism or two from me from time to time, and I will say now, rather than later, that we ought to re-assess in the next three weeks where really are we headed even if it costs us a few friendships.

Make no mistake about it, though. I would very much like the homecoming to succeed, and even if it means spending personal time and money on the effort, which all of us at the SAAA have already been doing at the peril of losing our senses, I would still do so—participate and help—even if it means losing a good night’s sleep.

So, let’s talk about it and ask once again: Why so only very few alumni coming forward to help? It’s the economy, stupid. That’s a Clintonian answer to it.

We at the Association should accept the fact that these are hard times. The homecoming comes at a time when people everywhere are losing jobs; when the economy is in deep shit; and when there is not enough moving-around money on every alumnus’ pocket.

We should also look at the demographics of SA graduates. Not too many alumni are what you call financial success. Not many have secured jobs. Many of them live a hand-to-mouth existence. And not many are what you call “salivating” over the prospects of going home to Sibale.
Some of them may, in fact, no longer want to be associated with anything about their former school or even Sibale itself. This is what I really mean when I said earlier that SA alumni are disparate members of a group. Different tempers, different times.

This is not to disparage them, but this, Virginia, is a realistic take of the situation. That’s why we have keep on texting and calling our fellow alumni to go home to Sibale on April 10, not on April 11, because they will miss the opening ceremony and the singing of the national anthem right there on the Sibale Academy grounds where we used to poke fun at each other and send messages to our “first loves” by flying paper planes.

That's why we should advertise in the SAHA Gazette and buy a copy of it for P100.00, because that’s a record of our life stories that the New York Times will not care to publish. We can keep coming back to this record in our rocking-chair years. That’s why we should join the second-day parade and wear our P150.00-colored T-shirts, because it has been a long time since we joined one, and I suspect the only “parades” we have been joining after we left the Sibale Academy have been the funeral processions for friends, acquaintances and relatives who had been called by our Maker ahead of us.

That’s why we should also plant a tree, clean-up our seas, and dance during the nights when we are there, because 45 years ago when the Sibale Academy has not stood up yet, Sibale was still forested, its seas still pristine, and there was still no music videos that we can dance to other than the ukulele. That’s why we should also gather our classmates and try to come out with the P10,000.oo-per-class-contribution, because yes, there will be food! If money’s a problem, sanglaan anay nang libo-o!

You know, one of the main causes of my unhappiness in this world is to see an alumnus willing to join meetings and events, but is hesitant to do so because he or she doesn’t even have transportation money. I am not even thinking about educational attainment, for I know that many alumni who have not gone to the university have this suppressed feeling of inferiority towards those former classmates who have gone places. This, again, is a fact of life. Not all are created equal. Or, to put it another way, not all are equal, even if they were created.

And as creations, indeed, as human products of a school like no other, we should attend the homecoming because we may not be able to attend another one in the next 45 years. Who knows?

So, if you are a Sibale Academy alumni, be grand. Be generous to yourself. Be what you were before. Join us and we assure you, there will be food and fun.