Kropek & Chicharon Kayo Dyan!

PD has never been fond of potato chips and crackers and would not normally include these in his grocery list or his snack. In fact, his definition of snack would involve rice and not chips or crackers. It’s not out of being health-conscious, though many of these really contain high levels of sodium and saturated fat, which are anything but good to the body. This is not to say, however, that he does not consume a pack or two once in a while, especially when it is the pulutan. It’s just that PD has never craved for them.

While they don’t always have a place in his stomach, kropek and chicharon have a special place in his heart. For those who don’t know kropek, it is that flour-based, rectangular cracker that is usually colored yellow and tastes like, well, a cracker. Sometimes it is shrimp-flavored or coated with sugar. It is usually packed in a rectangular cellophane container in twelves or twenty-fours. It is more popular in the provinces, where it is actually called chicharon (in the city, chicharon = chicharong baboy and we will stick to that equality here) and PD has seldom seen these in the super or wet markets.

The special place in his heart was created on the summer before first year high school. Early that year PD was accepted into the premier high school of Cagayan de Oro under full academic scholarship (another story altogether; oh, yes, PD thrived on scholarships). He knew that the per day baon of two pesos that he had enjoyed his whole elementary school days was not going to be enough anymore. Not even close, since this was an exclusive for boys high school, not like his very public elementary high school. An idea came to him to prepare for the incoming school year: earn and save enough baon.

So he asked his neighbor, Auntie Mimi , who packed kropek at a small kropek and chicharon factory, to get him the kropek-packing job as well. He got it, his first paying job. There were only five of them ‘packers’ of kropek. He, of course, was the youngest at eleven. And the only male. The others, including Auntie Mimi, were old, ageing or work-aged mothers. Money was earned by the pack: isang piso for twenty-four of them. They also packed chicharon but only sometimes since in those days the orders for chicharon were few and far between. The work was tiring, and it took some time for PD to get used to packing the kropek the right way so as to maximize speed. At the end of the week PD would earn a little over one hundred, which to PD at that time was already a fortune in implied possibilities if not in amount.

PD can tell you that the first bites of kropek and chicharon while packing them were delicious, but that point came when you stop looking at them as food and start treating them as useless objects to be packed. Our employer, Kuya Dodong, was a nice man who probably admired my initiative and sort of promoted me from a packer to actually cooking the kropek. He, of course, was the only one who knew how to mix the ingredients but when this was done, it was my and his other assistants’ duty (his older daughters actually, since he had no son) all the way – from putting the mixture into these elongated trays to putting these in the oven to cook the mixture to slicing the hardened mixture into rectangular shapes to putting them on these rectangular nets for the sun to dry them up and to actually frying them so they’d expand and take their final, crispy form. The final step was when PD and the daughters would deliver the packed kropek and chicharon to the customers.

Those were exciting days for PD and he remembered waking up excited and running to work. Money ceased to be the motivation; after a while it was all about the work and the sense of accomplishment every kropek delivery brought him. And the nod of approval from Kuya Dodong and his daughters. PD would sleep tired but satisfied and happy with his small accomplishments. It was the one of the most unforgettable summers of PD’s life.

These days when PD takes a bite of chicharon he gets to be reminded of that kid who did not mind spending summer working at that kropek factory, while other kids his age were playing jolen and taguan and hitting the rivers. It reminds him of the sacrifices that gave him very good learning experiences.