| 27 The Saga ContinuesWe at PESJ were certainly
risk-takers. But we were crazy enough to not have made money out of it, in spite of all
the suspicions and accusations that we had to bear.
All the officers in the school board and
various management committees, except for those actually teaching or those holding regular
school positions such as the cashier and office clerks, never received any salary, not
even allowances. I got refunded of some of my personal money when we finally had to
liquidate the assets of the PESJ in preparation for the merger into the New IPSJ, just as
the other parents in the school got their equitable shares of the proceeds of the
liquidation based on the initial amounts they contributed.
I got a table and a prize Pakistani
hardwood divider back to their old nooks in my house, but decided to donate some cabinets
and other tables to the new school. In the meantime, the parents of some one thousand
Filipino children in Jeddah, as a whole, saved themselves as much as Saudi Riyal 1.5
millions from the reduced tuition fees annually. I suspect some businessmen out there must
be twisting and turning and howling in their beds.
It was not until the start of the school
year 1997-1998 that the Saudi authorities and the Philippine embassy came down hard on the
feuding IPSJ sections. The embassy refused to open the new school year unless the school
was reorganized to have only one management and one set of faculty members and staff. When
it was finally allowed to open, the IPSJ was renamed to the New International Philippine
School in Jeddah (NIPSJ) in its nth incarnation.
Some of my co-revolutionaries joined the
new Filipino school; some decided to continue a revolution on the sidelines, conducting
clandestine classroom activities anywhere they felt comfortable while looking for Saudi
philanthropists who would privately sponsor them; some joined the community schools of
other nationalities; some sent their families back to the Philippines.
The saga continues to this day, in
mid-February 1999.
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