Mahal na likha

“Maharlika” has been around a while, referring to the ruling class in stratified Philippine society, and Ferdinand Marcos’ minions at the ’70s education department played with the word to designate the new citizen of the New Society in the 1972 Martial Law dispensation.

The influx of the Maharlikas into the CNMI in the ’80s was fueled by the then emerging textile industry, enabled by the ease by which Pinoys segued into the English environment that made them eminently qualified to staff front offices and organize the requisite files for audit and evaluation. It was later, when many saw the inequities prevailing not only on the factory floors but also in the racist valuation of labor and services, abetted by hotel employee cousins from Honolulu, that Maharlika voices found its own in organizing united efforts.

The Pinay maid-to-order found herself a choice employee around the world so much so that the Oxford English dictionary, faithful to frequency and breadth of use, found the word “Filipina” to be synonymous to “nanny.” It was in the ’70s also when a well-placed Marcos government functionary of our acquaintance took her summers off to be an au pair to a Swiss family who made her a regular in their employ. That all-expense paid trip constituted her European holiday. Smart lady, she was, save that she did not want anyone to know, let alone her compatriots in Europe.

I had lived in the Marshalls and Guam in the early ’80s, and my first foray into Saipan at the turn of that decade was on the invitation of a Guam acquaintance who had returned to the CNMI nursing a desire to enter elected office. The invite included an all-expense-paid week into Mt. Tapochao’s shadow where, in watching the peculiar nature of launching a local political career, we were offered the prospect of making a bundle by importing quality human personnel from Pea Eye. The timing was off, was my excuse, though it was a no-brainer to decline given the dismal treatment of imported contract worker, taken for granted and casually tolerated.

In the late ’90s, we returned to cleric the local English congregation of the United Methodist Church at Koblerville. It was a vocational decision, responding to Barbara Ripple (hubby Jim, erstwhile of the CDA, died last December) who posed the task of shepherding a community of diverse ethnicity and persuasions. Of ecumenical bent and a renegade existential theolog amidst an irrelevant orthodoxy, the challenge posed by the group pried us out of training welfare recipients in Hawaii’s workforce into the pleasantly mild and not too balmy weather along the lagoon.

The fit proved awkward. But I latched on again to the etymology of Maharlika as “mahal na likha,” a precious creature in life’s sumptuous celebration. Life’s beloveds, SJ Fr. Gary Bradley easily fitted the category, one of the few on island, do not begin from the confessional cry of original depravity and sin sanctified by martyrs in the manner of Sanvitores.

“Maharlika/mahal na likha” in our book are also those afflicted with TSD, a curious but rare disorder not very rampant on Saipan, but of the few contracted patients, they display the patience of saints toward our common follies and quietly go about their business of bringing sanity into our midst.

My Pinoy compatriots latched on to the term as well but carried with it the ruling status in the old peninsula oligarchic pattern, or lifted it to the level of a patronized lass in idealized chivalrous state of guided democratic existence. Such was the sense I gathered from the folks on the 6th floor of the old Nauru building whose functions I avoided like the plague, until the genial unpretentious touch of Jeremy Max’s dad (now, numero uno in Havana) convinced us to re-establish our legal Pinoy heritage.

The recent news that the Philippines is finally a net creditor in world financial institutions is due to no small measure on the remittances that the Pinoy population in diaspora remits to kin and country. My mother’s Laoag City in Ilocandia alone, I was told, has 20 or more offshore banks that process the banking transactions.

That the red-white-and-blue bureaucratic flagship of South China Sea’s archipelago is scheduled to march out of the Ada International Airport end of October says a lot about the economic health of the CNMI and the Pinoy’s level-headed resilience in maximizing the utility of its services.

The use of the term “Maharlika” is waning, consigned to designating a section of the newspaper, but the reality of the precious creature evangelizing its message of unconditional life affirmation through word and deed continues around the globe. If the Pinoy can only shake off his predilection to status and showing off “recognitions” over his peers, we might have a natural Order of Mahal Na Likhas. Alas, the chance is grossly missed by a mile.

Happily, the world does not turn on the heels of the despair and cynicism of the horde. Maharlika’s formal organizing of united fronts on Saipan might have been stillborn, and perceived efforts severely punished (early PSS contracted teachers), but the head of hope keeps popping up. Check out Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think available at Amazon. The “mahal na likha,” they will always be with us!

Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang Aerospace University in China.