When I was a boy, my Nanay would always impress upon my young mind that I had to study hard to escape poverty, or I might become a kubetero.
One recent morning, when I was having a coffee chat with Reggie in his home in Chicago, he’s the husband of my sister-in-law, I told him about that kubetero story and how my Mom would constantly prod me to focus on my studies with the accompanying or else warning.
I immediately sensed Reggie could not understand what I was talking about, and before I could say anything, he asked, what’s a kubetero?
Since both of us were in front of our laptop computers, my first reaction was to search for the word kubetero on the Internet, but I couldn’t find one. The best way was to surf any entry on the word kubeta (Tagalog term for toilet) at Google so I could easily explain to him the meaning of the word Kubetero.
I found nothing, so it would be a good idea to type the waste management; maybe somewhere from that article, I might come across the word kubetero or any explanation.
Finally, I gave up searching the Internet; I told Reggie why being a kubetero was the lowest job back home in the 50s.
I said since most of the people in Manila at that time didn’t have septic tanks, the way to go was with the use of Kubeta, a flat wood with a hole cut out in the middle of it that served as a toilet bowl and under it was a wooden pail.
After a few days, the kubetero would collect and carry these pails with a piece of wood placed on his shoulder, balancing the two buckets at both ends of the lumber.
Then, he would load them down and store them in a warehouse near a public toilet. A few days later, a big truck would collect all these wooden pails.
In this public toilet, there were some concrete toilet bowls with water flushes and a septic tank; it had two sections for men and women without any dividers separating these toilet bowls; therefore, the people using these public washrooms didn’t have any privacy at all.
Being a kubetero was a degrading job because when people saw this man carrying his load, they would keep a comfortable distance away from him to avoid the rancid smell emanating from these pails.
I’m curious to know how many residents in Manila had used the septic tank for waste management in the late 50s in Manila; however, a number of our neighbours in the Sampaloc district had wooden kubeta in their homes.
While in Chicago, I went to the bookstore, and while I was browsing some books, I chanced upon a Spanish-English dictionary. I looked up the word cubeta and found its meaning as a bucket, pail, or keg. So definitely, that’s where we Pinoys got the word Kubetero; its root word comes from the Spanish word Cubeta.
Most baby boomers could easily relate to my story because they have seen how our kubeta evolved as part of the country’s waste management system.
However, Reggie and his wife, Cora, have yet to learn what a kubetero is because they are only in their early 60s, and Reggie grew up in the province.
In Quezon province, where I grew up, we just dug up a hole in the ground, and that was it, he said.
Kubetero is a dead word because this kind of job is non-existent in the first place, and most of our kababayans would find it weird even to discuss it.
But one thing is sure: whether we like it or not, the word kubetero is part and parcel of our culture.