Forget the fare matrix. What greets you on this bus is a wall of mug shots—except they’re not criminals. They’re students, barkadas, workers, and strangers. Tiny portraits taped like a scrapbook in motion, each one claiming: I was here.
They’re not arranged neatly. Some ID's lean sideways, some are cropped rough, others already fading. It’s a collage that looks more like a messy 'barkada notebook' than a gallery, but that’s the point. Order doesn’t matter. Presence does.
No one’s really sure how it started. One story says a student taped his picture as a joke. Another swears the first photo just appeared one day, no explanation. After that, more followed until the driver’s cab looked like a bulletin board. What’s clear is it’s always the passengers who begin it, never the driver.
“Para makisama lang,” says Megs, a Grade 12 student, pointing to her own picture stuck near the back window. She laughs. “Nakikita mo na andiyan ang mga kaklase mo, kaya maglalagay ka rin.”
Most do it to join in, but the effect is bigger than that. In those tiny faces is the Filipino instinct to belong. Not the headline kind of bayanihan, but the quiet, daily version that you see on a crowded bus.
Drivers notice it, too. Some just shrug it off. “Pang-design lang yan,” one says with a grin. But another sees more. “Nakikita ko sila habang nagmamaneho,” he admits. “Naalala ko, mga estudyante, manggagawa, mga may pangarap ang sakay ko. Hindi lang basta pasahero. May buhay din sila.”
Every stop feels like a small finish line. But the bigger finish line—the dreams these passengers are chasing—isn’t his to cross. All the driver can do is bring them closer, trip by trip.
