[NEIGHBORS] Covering home: Ateneo makes me angry, Ateneo makes me hopeful

“Neighbors” is Rappler People section’s space for community and human interest stories told in a personal way.

I spent most of the afternoon angry.

Not the anger of the distant social media clamor we’ve been receiving, but the particular kind of anger that emerges when one’s sense of home has been shaken.

It was the anger of belonging — the anger that comes from loving a community enough to feel wounded when it is wounded, and from recognizing that the grief and frustration on display were not abstract subjects of reportage but emotions shared by many of us present.

Throughout the afternoon of Friday, June 19, it became increasingly difficult to draw a clean line between myself as a journalist and as a student.

On my third week as a volunteer with the Research and Data unit at Rappler, the call came for the Atenean interns to help cover the walkout for institutional accountability following the deaths of Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili. The task seemed much larger to me than simply documenting what was unfolding. It was to render legible a community’s anger, grief, and hopes for people who could only encounter them at a distance.

The story we had been entrusted to tell was, in many ways, our own.

Every chant carries years of investment in what Ateneo represents; every placard reflected not only outrage but also a deep desire for accountability, care, and change. What I had initially approached as an assignment to cover a demonstration, I now felt body and soul as an encounter with a community attempting to articulate its love for an institution through criticism rather than compliance.

Today there were two simultaneous narratives unfolding on campus. A long walk away from the Blue Eagle Gym, graduating students still in their togas stood among the crowd who walked out after coming from their commencement exercises. On the one hand, there was celebration — the culmination of years of study, friendship, and growth. On the other, there was protest — a collective insistence that joy and achievement could not erase the questions and pain that had brought people together that afternoon.

What struck me about that image was not the contradiction between commencement and protest, but their coexistence. There is something deeply moving about students standing at the threshold of departure, and choosing, before they crossed it, to remain present for a community in distress. In doing so, they seemed to embody a truth that often gets lost in public discourse: that celebration and dissent are not opposites, and that the deepest expressions of loyalty to an institution are not always found in defending it, but sometimes in demanding that it lives up to its own ideals.

Over the past days, much of the conversation surrounding Ateneo tended to reduce its members into opposing camps: either defenders of the institution or its harshest critics. Yet what I witnessed on the ground resisted such easy categorization. The people I encountered were not motivated by hostility toward the community they belonged to; rather, many seemed driven by an enduring attachment to it. The frustration was real, and so was the disappointment, but both appeared inseparable from a profound investment in what Ateneo has been and what it still has the potential to become.

I ended the day emotionally exhausted, carrying many of the same questions that had been present when my coverage began. Yet alongside that exhaustion was an unexpected sense of hope. Amid the outrage, I did not witness a community unraveling. Instead, I witnessed a community refusing indifference. I witnessed students, faculty, alumni, and staff choosing engagement over apathy and accountability over complacency. I witnessed people insisting that care for a place must involve the courage to confront its shortcomings rather than avert one’s gaze from them.

For that reason, what remains with me tonight is not simply the memory of a protest, but the reminder that communities are often defined not by moments of agreement, but by how they respond to moments of crisis. In a time when it might have been easier to disengage, what I saw instead was a collective willingness to remain invested, to continue caring, and to imagine something better.

There is, I think, a quiet kind of hope in that — a hope rooted not in certainty, but in the belief that people who love a community deeply enough will continue to demand that it becomes worthy of that love.

We are just as angry. We are just as hopeful. – Rappler.com

Ava Dumaup is a Rappler volunteer for the Research and Data unit. She is a third year AB Communication student at the Ateneo de Manila University.