Amid grief from ‘Yolanda,’ cadets bring cheer

SILENT DRILL Philippine Military Academy cadets prepare to “twerk” during a silent drill parade at Burnham Park as they participate in Baguio City’s “Silahis ng Pasko” program. VINCENT CABREZA/INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON

BAGUIO CITY—The country’s premier military school tried to raise a bit of Christmas cheer for the summer capital on Sunday despite the lingering grief of 31 of its cadets, who are natives of the typhoon-ravaged Leyte and Samar provinces.

Philippine Military Academy (PMA) cadets performed a silent drill parade at Burnham Park for the annual “Silahis ng Pasko” and surprised an audience of children by “twerking” and “doing the dougie” in unison when the sound of drums and bugle in the background suddenly shifted to pop songs.

A cadet, who annotated the drill from Melvin Jones Grandstand, said people had often mistaken cadets for being dull because they rarely smiled in public during official functions.

It did not help, she said, that the cadets often acted like robots when performing their drills. That was the cue for the cadets to drop their rifles and remove their caps to dance to tunes familiar to their young audience as well as songs they may never have heard, such as 1990s pop group Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”

“It was just time to make the children smile,” said

Capt. Agnes Lynette Flores, PMA spokesperson, as children applauded the twerking cadets.

Former Councilor Narciso Padilla, 83, who has been organizing the Silahis ng Pasko for the last 40 years, acknowledged that the celebration this year would be hard for Filipinos who all shoulder the despair from recent tragedies, including a 7.2-magnitude quake that struck Bohol province in October.

It was even harder for their Visayan cadets who were sent home last month to check on their families, Flores said.

“So far, we are certain none of the cadets have immediate family members who perished from the storm surges that struck coastal areas in the Visayas,” she said.

In the first few days since Supertyphoon “Yolanda” pummeled the Visayas on Nov. 8, PMA officials and the members of the PMA Host Parents program came to terms with the fact that they could become the custodians of cadets who may have been orphaned by the disaster.

Like the rest of the country, the PMA had to communicate with military officials engaged in rescue and relief work in the Visayas for news on the status of its cadets’ family members, Flores said.

On Nov. 13, reports circulated that a graduating cadet might have lost both parents from the catastrophe that struck Tacloban City and other areas in the Visayas, according to a parent involved in the PMA Host Parents program. But the cadet was later informed that his mother was found alive, Flores said.

Baguio Mayor Mauricio Domogan, chair of the program’s executive committee, said he would not know how to deal with orphaned cadets because there was no precedent involving a cadet who has lost both parents while studying here.

The program, which was developed in the 1970s, provides cadets with “homes away from home” during short breaks in training, academy records showed. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon