Proud to be Bisaya: There is still Hope

Well this week's events were pretty consecutive. Wednesday was TEDx University of San Carlos and Thursday and Friday was Geeks on A Beach, which I was privileged enough to attend. I'll be posting about said events separately in different posts so we'll get to the details later. What I really felt like writing immediately about though was the urgency Kaloy Uypuanco, one of the GOAB speakers, and Insoy Niñyal, one of the TEDx speakers, talked about regarding the Visayan youth's lack of faith and respect of their own language. 

Daghan kaayo kog gihunahuna lately, until ganihang kadlawon it dawned on me.

— Sinugbang Sugbo (@SinugbangSugbo) August 17, 2014

"I've been thinking of a lot of things lately, until dawn came, it dawned on me."

  Insoy Niñyal's Sinugbang Sugbo is a Twitter account for his many witty and refreshing Visayan jokes

Although true that many of the youth today find our native tongue, which in this case is Bisaya, not the most appealing language to listen to perhaps due to our radical Westernization. I personally had the same prejudiced mindset until quite recently. But, it is also true that lately many of the youth have started realizing this paradox of "finding one's language baduy" as an error.

Many of you following this blog may have recalled us, my classmates and I, shooting films for our multimedia projects a year ago. The most popular one, which was our rendition of the Papictura ko nimu, Gwapo music video reached 35,651 views as of August 24, 2014 and a lot of comments from the Visayan youth complimenting the song and the film itself that was made in the modest island of Bohol.

I understand that number doesn't qualify the video to be "viral" but, to be fair, I personally hadn't expected such a response especially from our kabayan youth. I get at least 3 notifications a day, as of now, whether it be a comment or a share, from our youth praising the song's lyrics, quite specifically how endearing it was, and the artistry that was put into the work _{(especially Hannah, the leading lady's cuteness haha)}.

What I found funny was, while we were splitting up into groups before shooting began, all the teams decided, completely by coincidence, to work on purely Visayan songs for our music video project. We only realized it when we all stopped to compare our works mid-way. We all got so hyped up about it that we brought that excitement to our second project, the short film, and all groups still did them in Visayan.

Music Videos:

Balay ni Mayang

Chinita

Short Films:

Ikaw na ang Gitakna

The Short Film Project

After shooting and airing our works, we felt so proud that we did our stories justice. And it actually helped that we did them in Visayan because we could freely and fully express ourselves in our films without the fear of pronouncing anything wrong because the Visayan language made us feel at home. 

So there is a change. The youth will understand that your efforts, to those who strive for this cause, are not in vain. My suggestion, as proven by our Papiktura ko nimu, Gwapo music video, airing quality music videos that show a clear story about the Visayan song written will enormously help the understanding and relation the youth feel about the song. Because face it, we don't really understand all the Visayan words out there and a little shove would be great for us to be able to relate with it.

Oh, and for those curious to know which short film won over ours, it was Love, Alora. The language used was Tagalog.

And I encourage you, young Filipino artists, to please please please make homage to your home country and language. Do not accept that our culture is dying and that we have to do something to keep it alive. I have a few plans myself on how I can contribute to this and you should start thinking about your master plan too. As a parody to Aomine's catchphrase, 

"No one can save us but us."