SM
“Nasan ka?”
“Sm.”
“You mean the shopping mall SM?”
“Simenteryo.”
SM is such a sexy word especially in the Philippines. You might heard of the inspiring story of Henry Sy who has turned the small shoemart into a giant group and become the richest man in the Philippines. However, there is another story of SM in the Philippines that is not that filled with consumerism and mundane definition of success, but I personally find it much more intriguing: the simenteryo.
Simenteryo, which sounds so similar to the Spanish word ‘cementerio’ that I have never doubted its origin, is a place where people sleep. In the Philippines, it’s quite true that people do sleep in a simenteryo, but in addition to sleeping, people actually live there. Actually, so many things happen there that I personally believe it’s one of the cores of the Filipino culture.
I still remember my first visit to a simenteryo in Pasay city. A funeral was ongoing, and it was a chaos. However, when I took a deeper look into this place, I started to love this place.
I was supposed to do other tasks at the simenteryo (click here to learn more about the Pasay Pups project), but I couldn’t help but become distracted and start to do my fieldwork à la anthropologiste as I had done in Cambodia.
The simenteryo in Pasay city is a small delicate town. Local people might fetch most of the things they need without leaving the simenteryo. There are even two Internet cafés (or maybe more) in this small town.
But that’s not the whole story inside the simenteryo. It’s not the facilities that make the simenteryo special; it might sounds like a cliché, but the best part of the simenteryo is the people.
I first met met Ives and Justine not long after I got in the simenteryo. They were enjoying themselves in a hammock inside a grave room. They were so friendly that I believe we have become friends at the very first sight. Although we could not communicate precisely since I could only speak basic Tagalog, it’s still a pleasing experience. It’s one of the many times that I do find that, paradoxically, language hinders the communication. Those nuanced interactions were small but clear that language might destruct all the details. It’s something ineffable. The interaction was built on nothing, not on money, on partnership, or on anything. There was not even the tiniest conflict of interest in any kind. We don’t even have a chance to meet each other again in our lifetime. Though it’s really sad to understand that, I just couldn’t stop making those sweet yet bitter bonds.
It had become those short moments that I would cherish for the rest of my life.
It was the experience in simenteryo sa Pasay that I started to find the days in Metro Manila become even more interesting. I started to anticipate every day for the next visit to the simenteryo on weekends.
Lungsod ng Pasay is actually a little bit far from Makati, which unfortunately I spent most of my time in, so I need to take the MRT-3 to reach the simenteryo. On one holiday, when I was sauntering down the streets, I inadvertently found another simenteryo nearby, and I decided to have a look.
When I finally arrived at the simenteryo, I could not actually get into it. Four sides of it were walled, and the wall was so high that I could not see anything inside. I actually thought of climbing the wall and get inside, but considered it rude shortly after the fancy, thinking of giving up and went back.
I rambled along the wall, and found the sidewalk so tidy and clean that it felt somewhat void. I somehow felt the same serenity as the feeling when I circled around the wall of Angkor Thom.
Finally I arrived at the entrance of the simenteryo. It looked so similar to the front gate of those wealthy community that caused strong visual contrast against the Olympia Village next to it.
Walking directly into the central part of the simenteryo where there was a roundabout with a grand grave in the centre of it inscribed ‘ Elpidio Quirino,’ I stopped and took a seat on the ground.
People were playing basketball and volleyball around that place. There were many people selling grilled food nearby, creating a plume of smoke curling around the area.
I played volleyball with them.
The next time when I visited the Manila South Simenteryo, there were a crowd gathering. They were playing a cruel game called spider fighting.
It’s such a pity that this simenteryo had also become the simenteryo of the spiders.
I met a guy named Ronald who was playing his friend’s smart phone, using the free.facebook.com domain to post. He seemed to be working hard to earn a living. We had a really really great talk.
When I was leaving the Simenteryo, Gelai asked me whether I was afraid of the place. She liked this place, “The more dead people, the more fun.”
It’s all like a mirage. When I walking out of the gate of the simenteryo, looking at the fainting sky, I was thinking, “is all this real?”
So many things has been happening in the simenteryo. It’s literally where Duterte’s Oplan Tokhang ends, by sending the corpses of innocent young lives here. Nevertheless, it’s also the place that I felt the pulse of the city during my short stay in Metro Manila.
It’s the simenteryo where I feel so close to death, but it’s the same place that I feel the energy of life. It’s a place where the living meets the dead. It’s home to many Filipinos, and it’s heaven to me that someday I will rest in.
