Jeepney Ride

reposted from Dog Eats Avocado - July 11, 2008

Inside the first jeepney I rode this afternoon I tried reading the first chapter of a book I bought yesterday.

I couldn't. So I gave up, zooming out to the larger unfocused world which was the jeep's cabin instead. To my right was a woman whose position had her sit beside a pregnant woman who was seated by the jeep's rear end.

On the Catalunan Pequeno stop, the pregnant woman stood up and dropped her mobile phone by accident.

What's seemed off at the time was that she walked backward to retrieve it, before crossing the road and finding another ride.

The woman beside me didn't budge, didn't even move to where the pregnant woman sat - the way people usually would replace those who would get off. Which was weird.

And right before my vision blurred to her form, the woman beside me sighed: "Ang iyang tinubigan!" The pregnant woman's water had broken - we could all see that the lower part of her dress was wet.

Everyone was actually looking at a woman who was minutes away from labor.

While my thoughts were elsewhere, like how that could have been a story for tomorrow's paper, everyone else had stories of their own.

"Where's the husband? Why does he let her travel alone?" a fellow passenger, a man in his 40s, said.

The woman beside me answered: "He's at Camp San Gabriel, training. Actually, she was telling me about her belly starting to get painful." The two women beside me had been talking while I was trying to read.

Everyone else had their own take on the event.

"If that woman had given birth here, that would have been fun!" one of the passengers quipped, igniting a series of mini-discussions.

"Why didn't she just go directly to the hospital at home?"

"She told me she didn't have her things with her," the woman beside me went on.

So did the jeep, running fast ahead without warning. And as it did, another passenger remarked to another: "I wish the driver would slow down," she said. "Look at that woman, she almost gave birth because of him!"