Figure it out: What was it like to be deported and exiled 115 years ago, when there were no telephone, malls, family, and faster means of transportation? And your only link to the world was through a snail mail, which perhaps you could not even depend upon because you fear that, perhaps, the Spaniards were prying into your letters to Josephine Bracken or Ferdinand Blumentritt.

Being deported and exiled in Dapitan (which is even within the Philippines) at that time was already mind-boggling experience. I would surmise that it was already a brutal and severe punishment to anybody who would get the ire of Spain for being a filibuster. More than a punishment, perhaps the Spanish friars were trying to nip the bud, thinking that Rizal could keep his mum in the burgeoning rebellion of Filipinos against Spain by isolating him in that remote town in Mindanao.

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