Lordei Hina knows she loves UP but struggles to remember why. Her voice perks up at the mere mention of the university. She swings her feet back and forth and seems to jump up from her seat in excitement. Yet some of her stories about UP would flit in and out her memory like sand through a sieve, so that, all of a sudden, she would draw a blank face when asked for specifics.
“Di ko po alam,” she said, tapping me on the hand as if in apology. Her face is otherwise lit with a wide, beatific smile. I had come to visit Lordei expecting a woman on whom years of dismay and injustice had taken a toll. But, if anything, Lordei welcomed me as she would a friend, beaming from ear to ear.
“UP rin ako!” she exclaimed after I had introduced myself, hoping for a story that would come in glimmers of lucidity, a peek into a life laid waste by an act so heinous that it would not be so easily forgotten. Hers are fragments of memories of the better early days, long before the terror of grief and the pursuit of justice.
Patient Profle
Lordei Camille Anjuli Hina pours her heart out for other people. In fact, though her own memory may be spotty, she has endeared herself to so many friends and family that their moments with her seem to piece together an image of someone given to laughter, empathy, and care.
"Kapag umuwi ‘yan dati sa bahay, mangunguha 'yan ng mga pinamili ko,” said Carlo, her younger brother. “Dadalhin daw niya sa boarding house nila kasi 'yung mga kasamahan niya minsan ay wala nang makain."
She was a Political Science freshman, then, in UP Diliman. Carlo thought she would fall in with the sorority crowd but soon found Lordei hosting a bunch of sandal-shod young activists in their living room. Often, she even walked home from protests in Mendiola with her feet caked in dirt. A single mother, Nanay Concepcion or “Connie” worried only for her daughter’s studies but nonetheless supported the latter’s decision.
In 2012, to nobody’s surprise, Lordei became the secretary general of the progressive youth organization Center for Nationalist Studies. Though most days found her on the streets, shouting calls from behind a banner, she spent her weekends in their house in Fairview, bumming around just like any teenager.
“Kasi maarte 'yan, e, may pagkatamad,” said Carlo, laughing. “Maglalaba lang, ipapasa pa sa'kin." He said they amused themselves by squabbling, like that one time, back when they were still kids, Lordei told their classmates that he had just gotten circumcised. He became the butt of the joke for some time but could not retaliate as she helped him nurse his wound in their father’s absence.
“Maarte, oo,” Carlo told me, “pero mapagmahal din ‘yan.”
History of Present Illness
Lordei liked to help out. It was the height of tragedy, then, that she would one day meet violence while on volunteer duty.
On February 1, 2012, at noon, while Lordei manned the UPD University Student Council (USC) office as part of the committee for the upcoming UP Fair, Dan Mar Vicencio, together with an accomplice later identified as Dante Santos, entered Vinzons Hall with a 12-inch icepick in a backpack. They would flee the grounds at 3:15 p.m., carrying two laptops and leaving behind Lordei sprawled on the floor, drenched in blood.
“Siyempre, mas pinangunahan kami ng shock kaysa galit,” said Carlo, recounting how the doctors told him and Nanay Connie about the skull punctures, the stab wounds in the left side of Lordei’s neck and head, and the one-centimeter skull fragment lodged in her brain. The icepick injured Lordei’s hypothalamus, a portion of the brain responsible for emotions and limbic movements, and its trauma resulted in brain hemorrhages and abscess.
Lordei stayed for nine days in the intensive care unit and, for a couple of months, could neither move nor speak. Meanwhile, Vicencio, who had been intercepted on campus, faced trial for robbery and for carrying a concealed weapon. Helping the Hina family, the Diliman Legal Office pushed to elevate the charges to hold-up, serious physical injury, and frustrated murder, to no avail. Santos also remains at large to this day.
In May 2012, Vicencio posted bail and has since been a no-show at arraignments. He became a free man just a few days after Lordei was released from the hospital where she had spent over four months and had undergone a three-hour operation. Throughout the ordeal, Tita Connie took time off work to watch over Lordei. "Kaya nga noong unang nagsalita ulit si ate, ang first word niya ay ‘Mama’ nung nakita niya si Mama,” Carlo said.
Treatment Plan
Her voice never lost its zip, and her eyes never lost their shine. Lordei is 26 years old now, a sturdier version of the wiry student joining sit-down protests in front of the US Embassy six years ago. Yet her daily schedule is no longer structured by mobilizations and mass actions, but by medicine, meals, and muscle exercises.
Lordei also has difficulties retaining short-term memory and is prone to excessive happiness, slapping the table and hollering her words. Carlo compares her behavior to that of a child. “Kahit ganito siya, sana hindi makita ng tao kung ano si ate ngayon,” he said. “Sana makita nila kung ano ‘yung mga nagawa ni ate noon."
He recalled the earlier promises made by the then UPD administration to enhance security in the aftermath of the incident. Back then, in 2012, the campus security guards were reduced from 302 to 236, which saved the university about P13 million. The same year saw the government slashing P27 million from UP’s budget for personnel services (PS), which funds employees like the UP police, and P181.7 million from maintenance and other operating expenditures (MOOE) for agency-hired security guards.
In 2017, though the Department of Budget and Management approved only a third of the proposed UP budget, the biggest allocations went to both PS and MOOE. Still, the government must confront the clamor for higher subsidy lest more lives are put on the line, through whatever string of tragedies and mishaps, and bear the brunt of state neglect through budget cuts.
In an earlier interview with the Collegian, Tita Connie said, "Hindi lang buhay ng anak ko ang pinag-uusapan sa kasong ito kundi pati buhay at seguridad ng kasalukuyan at mga susunod pang henerasyon ng mga Iskolar ng Bayan."
In her mother’s words, I learn where Lordei must have drawn her will to soldier on in the face of horror. It is in her family’s refusal to be vanquished by grief, to insist with a quiet knowing that justice will soon prevail, that I finally understood Lordei’s certainty of her love of the university and all that it stands for, even as she struggles to remember why fighting is not at all a lost cause. ●
The article was first published in print in the Philippine Collegian on July 23, 2018, with the headline “Case History: Lordei Hina, six years after.”
On July 26, 2021, the Collegian reported that a Quezon City court had found one of Lordei Hina’s assailants, Dan Mar Vicencio, guilty of robbery. In a court order dated January 19, 2021, Judge Wilfredo Maynigo sentenced Vicencio to eight to 12 years in prison. The judge also ordered Vicencio to pay Hina P50,000 for civil indemnity.
