Salvador, My Father

One of the few details I know about my father was that he was a graduate of Silliman University in Dumaguete. Silliman was the first American-founded university in the country, and it's oldest Protestant school. Graduating from Silliman, I gathered, was a singular achievement during his time. It set the bar for us kids in terms of academic achievement.

Today I wonder about the relationship between my father and Silliman. How did he choose to get his college degree there? How did his stay there affect his fundamental values? I remember him to be anti-religious. In a country that was predominantly Roman Catholic, did his education there in any way help push him into atheism? He never attended church with my mother and us kids. We would come home from church on Sunday to his grumbling about the wasted time. He had already done this and that. Church was not important to my father as it was to me during those early years.

While I don't remember him talking about literature or the arts, he must have at one time loved literature. Or did he study English at Silliman only as a means to an end, as his passport to steady income? How did he become associated with the Lopez family that owned Iloilo City Colleges where he taught? Was he interested in politics or was the connection purely financial? What were his fundamental beliefs in life?

For years now I would joke about my father's name, Salvador. In Spanish, Salvador mean savior. Despite his tough exterior my father was tenderhearted, some family and friends would say gullible. A frequent image from childhood is people waiting in the living room to speak to him. He didn't always publicize his generosity. He was largely an unknown quantity although increasingly I sense his influence on many facets of my own character and choices in life that I’ve made.