blood and K'na the Dreamweaver

      This week was wonderful partly because it was punctuated with two holidays. You know how, when you're driving in the middle of a crazy downpour and the rain is just so noisy on the roof of your car that you can barely hear yourself think, when you go into a tunnel everything just becomes so suddenly still and quiet? And when you drive out the end of the tunnel, the rain comes crashing down again on your roof. Those two days were like being in the tunnel: sudden, temporary, silence.

      And thank God that there isn't an exam to study for on Monday, because now I can spend my weekend gathering my bearings instead of scrambling to memorize names of enzymes and co-enzymes. 

      Not that the workload this week has been particularly hectic. I mean it is, of course, but it's also very fun. On Friday, we had small group discussions (SGD) about the case of a young 12-year-old male named JVC. When the case came out on Wednesday, we set to work trying to deduce a diagnosis given just symptoms and no lab exams. During the SGD itself, our facilitator gave us the results of some lab tests that JVC had done, and it was our job to make sense of the tests. We had to interpret his complete blood count results (which were actually incomplete) and make sense of his bone marrow aspirate and peripheral blood smear. It was really fun, and my group had a really fruitful discussion. Because we'd been studying a lot about the little details like biochemistry and biomolecules, I found it really easy to forget that I was studying to be a doctor and not a... biochemical... scientist... person. It's the activities like this that make me feel closer to my getting my dream job. 

      And in the afternoon, we did blood typing in the lab! In order to obtain said blood type, we had to get our fingers pricked, either by ourselves or by a classmate. It doesn't sound so hard just talking about it here on my blog, but it's a different story when you're actually there, holding the lancet to your fingertip, knowing it's going to hurt. I think that maybe a part of us just wants to resist pain, whether self-inflicted or otherwise, as much as possible. Because I spent a good long time just holding the sharp poking device to my finger, trying to summon the courage to just press down. 

      Eventually, I got over my squeamishness, and I poked myself. Hard. When I removed the lancet I saw that I had made a teeny tiny red hole on my finger, but no blood was coming out. Quickly and forcefully, I squeezed my finger from the base to the tip like a tube of toothpaste. If no blood came out then I'd have to go through the trouble of pricking myself again. But thankfully, a droplet of blood slowly oozed out, and I was so relieved. 

      The rest of the activity was chicken pie compared to that. When we had gotten three drops of blood, all we had to do was mix them in with some serum, wait for a while, and then voila, blood type determined!

      So it turns out that I'm a B+. If you ever need blood, you know who to call! (Actually I can't donate blood because of my rheumatoid arthritis but I do know some B+ people who are willing.) This is a pretty significant activity for me because prior to this, I didn't know what my blood type was. I'm really happy to have cracked the mystery myself!

. . . 

      Okay, in other news, Rap and I went to see a Cinemalaya film last night called K'na the Dreamweaver.

      The movie had caught our eye because it was about the T'boli community in Southern Cotabato, and we both think that more effort should be taken to integrate the indigenous groups of the Philippines into the public consciousness. Plus, we heard that they would be selling T'boli crafts outside the screening.

      But we were disappointed on those two levels. One, because no T'boli stuff was sold (my bad; it was only being sold in CCP and we were watching in Trinoma), and two, because the movie sucked. Now let me qualify that statement. 

      Was it a visually appealing movie? Yes! Well, most of the time! There were lots of dreamy panoramas of the lake, the village, the looms. But there was also a lot of awkward scenes where abaca strands would obstruct the view of the actors, or a renegade plant would get in the way of the (very crucial) passing on of a dream pattern from grandmother to grandddaughter. And since we're on the topic of visually appealing, I couldn't stand the acting of the lead character Mara Lopez, who only ever had two emotions: smiling and unsmiling. 

      Was it nicely written? Hell no. The script sounded like something my 12-year-old brother could have written. In this movie, the characters are flat, boring stereotypes. Thirty minutes into the movie and we don't know anything about K'na the Dreamweaver other than that 1.) she is T'boli, 2.) she wants to become a dreamweaver, and 3.) she has a thing for this guy Silaw - THREE THINGS YOU COULD ALREADY KNOW JUST BY LOOKING AT THE MOVIE POSTER!

      

      Did it give insight into the lives of the T'boli people? Like I said, this is something my 12-year-old brother could have written, so the plot reads like something from a grade school play. I know that a lot of research must have gone into this, but it sounds like somebody just googled "T'boli facts," and then tried really hard to incorporate all parts of T'boli culture into the story. Thanks to the movie, now we now what kind of weapons they use, what kind of music they like, what kind of crafts they produce, what kind of rituals they have, what kind of traditional garments they wear. Well and good, but it came off as forced and overly simplified. It's like the director was thinking, "Hey, they have an interesting marriage ritual. I guess we should have a marriage in the story!" And on that note, the people were wearing their traditional garments even as they went about their daily lives, complete with flashy headgear! What the hell? The real T'boli now dress in casual shirts and jeans, just like any other Filipino would. 

      I wanted authenticity. I wanted to know more about the day-to-day stories of the T'boli. What kind of difficulties do they really face? What are the powers that come into play? How do the members relate to each other? These are questions I want answered. If I wanted an exaggerated, two-dimensional account of the T'boli then I would've just opened my grade school Civics textbook. 

     I'm glad that the T'boli people have this opportunity to share parts of their culture with the (sort of) mainstream audience, but this movie is almost like a caricature of them. We don't need media reinforcing the image of indigenous people as backwards cultures who wear bahags and are completely isolated from the rest of the world. We need movies to respect the indigenous communities enough to tell their stories more accurately, because they are not stagnant and closed-off. They, like the rest of the Philippines, are always changing and growing. Our culture is fluid as the waters of Lake Sebu.