Docents

Pinoy Kasi: Docents
First posted 01:42am (Mla time) May 05, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer

Editor's Note: Published on Page A13 of the May 5, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

"JELLYFISHES don't jam," Carlina quipped with a straight face.

Carlina was this little elderly woman who had been assigned to guide our group around the Monterey Aquarium when I visited last February. She was a walking encyclopedia, ready to answer questions about the exhibits and the Aquarium itself, with a few jokes on the side like the jamming jellyfish.

That's not an easy job, when you consider the varieties of marine life they have in the Aquarium. But Carlina handled it like a breeze, whether explaining how tuna fish get heart attacks from too rich a diet, or the filtration processes for the different aquariums. We think of them mainly as tourist or museum guides, but some of these docents live up to the original Latin meaning of the word, which is "teacher."

I first encountered the term in the Netherlands, where a docent meant a professor. Then a few years ago, while touring a redwoods forest in California, I heard the term again, this time used to refer to the person who was guiding us on a walking tour of the woods. He knew everything about these giant trees, from the way they reproduce to how they gave the city of Palo Alto its name. (I could imagine the early settlers looking at the trees and gasping, "Palo alto!" That's Spanish for tall trees.)

Docents do all this without salaries, almost like a hobby. During the week, our redwoods forest docent earned a living as a computer programmer, while Carlina had long retired but still had the stamina to docent in the aquarium.

Ku Klux Katipunan

Impressed with the docents I met in the United States, I've often wondered if we had similar volunteers in the Philippines. I got my answer the other week when Ken Esguerra of the Ayala Museum called and asked if I could lecture at a training workshop for their museum docents.

I got extremely short notice, but I said yes right away, thrilled that we did have docents here. In the case of the Ayala Museum, these docents' main function is to guide people around the museum's famous dioramas, which give a brief but comprehensive overview of the history of the Philippines from the pre-colonial period to the present.

A docent needs to be ready to answer all kinds of questions. I've had a taste of these questions doing my own informal docent work with foreign friends whom I bring to the Ayala Museum. For example, one time, in front of a diorama depicting a secret Katipunan ritual, with its members in white hoods, one of my American visitors exclaimed with distress, "Oh dear, is that the Ku Klux Klan?"

It was easy explaining that the Ku Klux Klan never established a foothold here. More difficult was going into details about the Katipunan, starting with its kilometric full name. You give it a try: Kataastaasang Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan.

History's stories

Like docents elsewhere, the Ayala Museum's volunteers work out of a love for the museum. They're asked to put in at least four hours a month, whether as guides or as researchers. In exchange, they get free admission to the museum, discounts at the shop and invitations to all the museum events.

I think, though, that their greatest perk is the teaching and learning experiences. To teach, docents need to keep learning, and the museum gives a good head start with the training workshop.

Inquirer columnist Manolo Quezon, who handles much of the docent training, briefed me right before the workshop, and explained that the training wasn't meant so much to give facts and figures than to help the docents to think differently about history itself and make it more alive and relevant. I watched as he tried to do this with the docents themselves, asking them to share what they knew about the origins of their surnames and their hometowns.

I tried to do something similar with the pre-colonial period, getting them to think about the stories behind each of the dioramas. For example, I reminded them that when there's trade, there are all kinds of social interactions, people learning about each other's cultures and borrowing words for the supernatural as well as for the mundane, such as food. Trade lubricated the borrowing of words from Arabic, Javanese, Malay, Chinese, and that includes terms to describe the feelings hosts and visitors had. (Here's one example I didn't use in Ayala: The word "mahal" is imported, and I don't think we adopted it in the context of trading alone.)

Columnists and docents

We need to train docents throughout the country. I am certain even the smallest and most remote of our towns already have potential docents. Elderly people are already telling and retelling their stories to their captive audiences, meaning their grandchildren, so why not get them to do this for the town's visitors as well?

In Palawan, I once visited a mangrove area with local residents serving as guides and explaining the flora and fauna. I felt the tour was a bit too mechanical, too facts-and-figures in its approach, but it was a good start.

I guess in a way columnists like Manolo and myself find affinity with docents because doing a column is one variation on docent work. We get paid for our columns, but beyond the writing, we often put in much time and effort for research, for interviewing people, for finding ways to transform learning into a fun process. That's a docent's work.

Docents, and columnists, work with a sense of mission. When I have American visitors, I stay longer with the dioramas depicting the Filipino-American war, talking about the hardships Filipinos went through, as well as the anti-imperialist movement in the United States, which included the likes of Mark Twain. A recent visitor said sorry, she had not known about that war, and then lamented, "How sad that we're repeating our mistakes-this time in Iraq." (The regular docents told me they've also had Japanese visitors apologizing for World War II, completely with the bowing.)

But docents should be more than glorified tourist guides for foreigners. Even more importantly, the work of a docent is to bridge the generations among Filipinos. There's much that docents can do -- organizing heritage tours, eating tours, nature tours -- and we should be doing this with our own hometowns, retrieving the knowledge from older people and passing this on to the young. Each child, who is fortunate to have a good docent, will remember the stories for life, taking away insights that will give him or her a better sense of who we are as a people.

Nature watch

Try to visit the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines this weekend. The fire trees (also sometimes called flame trees) are beginning to bloom. If you're lucky, you should be able to catch the sunflowers we planted for our new graduates.

A tree watch could also be combined with a bird watch. Mike Lu of the Wild Bird Society sent me a text message the other day about how, in their neighborhood, the regal fire trees seem to succeed quite well in calling in the birds. One of his neighbors has spotted, among others, kingfishers, woodpeckers and “kulasisi” (the winged type).