118 days in 555

This year has indeed been quite a year. And out the 365 days, I spent 118 days in Tagbilaran, Bohol with strangers. 

As part of our training, we are to serve four major hospital departments in a public hospital. We unfortunately couldn’t get into a public hospital in Cebu and so our school affiliated with the provincial hospital of Bohol. We already served the first two departments in the first half of the academic year and it has been such a good learning experience which is why we really looked forward to the last two major departments. But who would’ve thought that 2020 has so much for us. 

We had several problems. It was a challenge right from the start since we had to fight for our beds. The first time we were in Bohol, there were only 40 of us staying in one house. The house had 5 bedrooms – 1 big room situated outside the main residence for the males – with a total of 45 beds. On our second stay, there were already 60 of us with the addition of the irregular students – thus proving the name “555”. The school provided another residence however no one was willing to relocate – each of different valid reasons. Thankfully, we managed to solve it by compromising knowing fully well that not everyone would be sleeping each night at home since others would be on 24 hours duty and others also opted to rent their board and lodging by themselves. 

Another problem we had was the food. We buy our own supplies and only had one refrigerator where we place our food. If you’re lucky no one would touch your food and if not, you won’t be seeing your food ever again. For some reasons, even if your food container has your name on it others would still touch it. But, since all of us are busy we could only just message everyone about missing food stuff and it goes off unsolved. The above mentioned problems didn’t bother us at first until the pandemic happened. With the quarantine, everyone was in 555 for 24 hours all 7 days in a week. What’s worse is that we only have one quarantine pass and around 50 of us who’d go out and buy our own supplies. Now, our beds aren’t enough and we have to fight over the quarantine pass. And oh, the cooking schedule too. 

What a struggle, right? 

But hey, we managed. We developed a quarantine pass booking method aka the paper on the wall where we write our names to reserve a 2-hour time slot for our groceries and personal errands. We also somehow made arrangements with our living space. Some shared beds (I won’t spill the tea as to who) and the living room was converted to a sleeping area at night – though a little inconvenient, especially for me (I guess). 

I’m a very morning person and my housemates are really opposites. I, almost always am the first one up, would wake up at 6AM, then I bath and go prepare my little breakfast on tiptoes because people, especially the living room people are mostly asleep. At around 8 others start to rise up, and do their thing – having their coffee, doing their laundry, taking a bath and whatnot. The house fully wakes up at around 10AM. Everyone buzzing around, chattering, playing and then fighting for the their turn in cooking. We only have two burner stoves and around 10 sets of people cooking for their group of friends, roommates or even just for themselves. If you don’t start early, you’re gonna eat late. But then again, each of us have different body clocks. For me, lunch should be at 12. For others, 12 is still good for breakfast. After the cooking, we then take turns in doing our dishes. And yet again, we only have one sink where we can do the dishes. So yeah, it’s another struggle to get our dishes done. After the dishes are done we continue doing our own businesses until it’ll be dinner time. And oh, we also take turns in eating because we only have 3 dining tables (2 actually, 1 was just a long bench-turned-table) and eating in our bedrooms wasn’t really desirable. 

Looking back it amazes me actually how we managed the extended stay in Bohol. A total of 60 heads, of different personalities, cultures and belief but no bloodshed. We might have had little arguments here and there but we got over it. I would say I am quite blessed to have been stuck with the people I was with. I would say that everyone had mutual respect for one another – putting aside the missing food issue. An example would be when we the Catholics celebrated the Holy Week and our Muslim friends had to celebrate Ramadan. Each respected the practices and accommodated the needs one another with regards to the religious practices. We also adjust to each other, we learned to clean up after ourselves knowing there are others with us. We also developed a deeper relationship with each other. Though we went through three years together as classmates, the extended stay in Bohol made us know each other more. We learned of our housemates’ habits and skills that we didn’t know of. For example, who sings in the shower, who cooks and experiments real well, who does housekeeping at an expert level, who’s actually quite the gentleman but is previously judged to be not, who’s the really thoughtful ones and so much more. I personally became close friends with people I barely make eye contact or notice for the past years in med school. 

And though I said “deeper relationships” we didn’t cross any boundaries. By boundaries, I meant cheating and having affairs. Despite being an island away from our partners (the school always separate known lovers into different rotation batches to avoid issues) my batch mates, including me, have remained loyal to our partners. It was said before that clerkship would break relationships and create new ones since we get to be with others for almost 24 hours and it would be inevitable to develop feelings for someone else aside from your partner. But our batch probably proved otherwise. Rather than that, I think we became a family instead in 555. We celebrated birthdays together, I am one of those who celebrated the birthday in Bohol. We supported each other at times of need, we make decisions together by holding meetings asking for the consensus of everyone. And everyone was so excited and supportive on the arrival of our little bundle of joy baby Drei.

I really am still amazed of what we went through this year. It was quite an experience. It was a practice on getting along with others, compromising to others, learning about others and of course discovering one’s self. And if I were to write everything I want to write about that experience I’d probably make a novel already. No one probably had the same experience as us. I wouldn’t want to go back though, once is enough. But if I really had to do that again, I’d go with the same set of people still.

🦋