The Language Barrier

Darna, a classmate of mine from medical school who was currently in a long-term relationship with her boyfriend after EngineerBoy, was just like the rest of the classmates in my batch who were in committed relationships. She found it her responsibility to set up the single girls in the class with her equally single male friends. Hence, Mr.Bisaya.

Mr.Bisaya was her boyfriend’s ex-landlord. He came from a rich family who originally hailed from Cebu. Because of his work, he moved to the provinces and was currently living at some boarding house with some friends. Darna gave my number to him and we started texting. Because he was of a different cellular network, I didn’t reply as much as I would have wanted to... Yes, I can be such a cheapskate sometimes. Well, it wasn’t as if he knocked my socks off with his text messages anyway.

Because I was bored and curious about him, I plotted on how I can find the opportunity to finally meet him. I was going home soon for a short weekend vacation from the community. Mr.Bisaya lived somewhere between the community and home. I told him I would be stopping by his area since I needed to catch another bus and that we should meet. He agreed.

I met up with him at a local fastfood joint. He was short, well-built (from all the tennis playing, I suppose) and average-looking. He was nice, yes, but he didn’t knock my socks off.

There was a major language barrier considering that he speaks in Cebuano (which is something like a deeper version of the local Bisaya) and although most Cebuanos can carry a good conversation with the local Bisayans and vice versa, I, on the other hand, can’t understand nor speak Cebuano. Although I do understand a little of the local Bisaya, that is, if you don’t talk too fast enough for me, I can barely speak the language. My Bisaya-speaking abilities is basically limited to the following medically-related phrases:

“Unsa imong gibati karon?” (How do you feel today?)
“Ginhawa lalum.” (Breathe deeply.)
“Kini imong tambal, imuhang ilumnon tulu ka beses sa usa ka adlaw, usa ka semana.”
(This is your medicine. You drink it three times a day for one week.)

And I am not even going to start ranting about my Tausug. It’s just sooo darn embarrassing enough - for someone who lived majority of her life around Muslims - that I can’t even make one coherent sentence in Tausug.

So, Mr.Bisaya and I ended up sign-languaging. LOL. Kidding… Actually, he spoke in Bisaya while I spoke in Tagalog interspersped with occasional Bisayan terms, in the hopes that we can both understand each other. I finally realized that it’s incredibly difficult to be your true self with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you do. You find yourself unable to crack jokes and show him your great sense of humor, which is basically what I usually do during first dates... Yes, I don’t take life too seriously. So sue me… You find yourself drastically thinking and rethinking the things that come out of your mouth. My cerebral faculties goes on hyperspeed as it tries to catch up with the Tagalog-English conversations in my head, translating as much of it into Bisaya, and then leaving everything in God’s will as I let my lips and tongue enunciate the words as correctly as I can, hopefully without butchering the dialect.

It was no surprise that I ended up with a major headache.

I must have been a sadist in my past life because apparently I loved torturing myself and he was able to angle a second date from me after that. I spent one very wholesome night with him the next time. On my way to the community, I stopped by his area after a short weekend vacation at home and we had dinner, drinks and listened to some local acoustic one-man band show which he loved and I didn’t but didn’t tell him (The band was singing my grandfather’s favorite songs, for God’s sake!). We ended up checking in at a room at some hotel and sleeping on separate beds. There was certainly no canoodling in the middle of the night and neither did I give him any impression that I wanted him to sneak into bed with me.

I don’t really know if he wanted me to though and frankly, I didn’t care.

As much as I would have loved to torture myself with migraine brought about by English-Bisayan translations, I didn’t think that it was going to work. We ended up on another date, this time with Darna, her boyfriend and some of Mr.Bisaya’s friends. Maybe he was becoming more comfortable with me because all their teasing finally brought out his caring and occasionally flirty side, but at that point, I really just wasn’t feeling it. We started communicating less and less until a year or so later I found out he got some girl pregnant and ended up marrying her.


I was okay with it. He wasn’t worth all those headaches anyway. Seriously.