BARCELONA, SPAIN — I learned of Mrs. Josefina Cornelio’s passing when I was on the high seas in the Mediterranean.
I did not reflect on this right away in a particularly significant way during this week of hilarious and mind-blowing entertainment, beautiful sights, exquisite and unending food, exhausting walks and climbs through forts and towers, other than to feel regret that I did not get to see her one last time.
Mrs. Cornelio was a favorite teacher and Scout leader of mine.
I had gone to visit her earlier this year as I’d done most years when I’d be back in Dumaguete, but found she no longer lived in her house at the back of the Silliman University High School. She was now living with her daughter. Streets with no names and numbers make it near impossible to locate anyone on one’s own. Far too quickly, in hindsight.
As the week progressed, I thought more and more about Mrs. Cornelio, and what she meant to me.
I am not alone in this but one of the most instrumental tools I had in my skills set that positioned me well to be a solid contributor at the work place, and the volunteer work was my ability to speak well, almost without an accent, to write well, to have the necessary vocabulary and logic to argue a point, all this because of Mrs. Cornelio’s unrelenting ability to persuade us of the value of learning English well.
The world is driven by English, and she nudged and prodded us into being comfortable in this world.
But the mark she left on me that’s been my guiding principle as a teenager and adult was the day she called my classmates and I to a homeroom meeting. She was our homeroom advisor. The only meeting she ever called — if my memory serves me well.
“Because I was quite small when I was young, I got bullied a fair bit,” Mrs. Cornelio started off by saying.
She then proceeded to say that the jesting, the tying of one’s ribbons to the chair, the gossiping, the deliberate exclusion of a person because they are awkward and unable to engage in teenage camaraderie — these are all acts of bullying. Subtle but bullying nonetheless. Yuhhhh, but this person deserved it because she was unkind, selfish, and just plain unlikable — was our collective reaction.
Mrs. Cornelio kept it brief. I suspect to make sure we did not miss the forest for the trees. “Often times, when someone is difficult to be with, and this manifests itself in various types of behaviour, there’s reason for it. And it’s almost always because there is severe dysfunction in the family, abusive fathers being a common cause, that a child gets lost along the way.”
Years later, I found out the classmate we made fun of constantly had an abusive father, an unsupporting mother, a set of parents who required the children to be the best (read: high marks) in class, regardless of how they got there.
And kept quite the front to the public, so no one was the wiser.
The bullying stopped that day. A small woman who started us off by letting us know firsthand what it feels like to be made fun of for reasons not of one’s own doing.
Every day after that, every encounter I had with someone who put me off, I looked beyond the surface. The number of young people I helped turned around to a better path I can no longer count. Because of what Mrs. Cornelio said more than six decades ago.
Mrs. Cornelio loomed large when a young Venturer (older Scout) called out to me one evening in a crowded concert hall break room, “Rainbow, Rainbow, Scouter Diana, look where I am today!” He was the barista in one of Toronto’s top notch entertainment centres.
Thank you, Mrs. Cornelio, for giving us that moral compass. You are still with us.
Diana Banogon-Bugeya (She/Her)
DianaBugeya@gmail.com
