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The hometown I long for

Last summer was the most turbulent of all the summers that I have experienced for the past twenty years. I was in the depths of despair for not graduating on time that I thought the only way I can salvage self-respect is to make a little difference with other people’s lives. I was lost, at least figuratively. I carried with me just one of my lucky jackets, my red star purse, and in my head, the quote from a Bodyshop t-shirt that says: “If you think that you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.”

I suppose it is one of life’s jokes that my self-booster acquired a different context. The other volunteers’ paranoia was quite true. When I was already in the field, I could not help but panic with all the news discussing malaria cases throughout the province of Kalinga. I was never afflicted though. Thanks to the bitter drugs my colleagues gave me a week before the trip. During my stay, I got insect bites in my legs that resembled the Cordillera map in a good range of itch and colors. The insects there just have a good taste of my waist as well, in that way tattooing me with a belt-like design. Masochistic as it may be, but I have a nostalgic feeling every time I see the marks.

As part of the “Balik-Ili Program” of the Progressive Igorots for Social Action (PIGSA), I stepped into the land where mountains always get a good trim because of the unbridled swidden farming practiced in the place. Common folk there burn a part of the mountain, clean it, and wait for the rain to come wet the soil so that tilling it would become relatively easy. It was timely that we came there when some of the families were still in the waiting episode of farming.

Before I went there, the only thing I know of Kalinga is that they, for years now, still deny that they are Igorots. It was out of sheer ignorance that I expected to see in the province fierce people with all their tattoos and headhunting outfits.

Later, I learned that the Guilayon tribe in Kalinga is divided into three sub-tribes namely: Magnao, Guilayon, and Nambukayan. The local government unit (LGU) of Tabuk later transformed these as three neighboring barangays. From PIGSA, I came to know that Wolfland, a mining corporation is about to exploit the place and its people. I learned that some of the people who reside near the rivers practice small–scale mining and that Wolfland, with its mining exploration that promised scholarships and cemented roads would have to be paid with the indigenous people’s right to self-determination. Again, another set of mountains in the Cordillera region will be transformed into a restricted land with a series of no-entry-private-property big gates like that of Lepanto Consolidation Mining Company mine site in Mankayan, Benguet.

As I have observed, the people there no longer care about their supposed oneness. They seem to view the names as mere tags that delineate territorial boundaries, nothing more. Seemingly, there was no Guilayon tribe consciousness, a manifestation of a collectivist culture which literatures on social psychology and sociology enchant students of the social sciences.

If you are from another place that had been married to someone from the area people will call you a mestizo. It is a funny thing to note however that they cling to their sub-tribe identity. People from the Uma tribe that have familial ties with some of the native folk of Magnao are also called mestizos.

I worked with the agtutubo (youth) in Magnao. There, we all discovered the power of “isang malaking bilog… isang maliit na bilog’s” (an ice-breaker) ability to convey the essentials of leadership. Before I knew it, I gladly became one of them. I found out that I have warrior blood because the insects there, particularly the mosquitoes, love me. How I wish I also had a warrior temperament so that academic failure could no longer defeat me.

I had made one of my newfound friends adopt me in their tribe and announce to the world that I belong to the Uma tribe just like “the rest of my relatives” in Magnao. Since I became a tribal mestizo, I have witnessed how teenagers there love eating haybol, a concoction of coconut and condensed milk, during siesta. How a lot of them like to talk about love so much and dream of going to the city. Most importantly, I heard stories of how mannalon (farmer) teens start to work and marry at a tender age.

Back in Dagupan, (a barangay in Tabuk where the office of Kalinga Apayao Coordinating Body is located) rumors spread that the leadership workshop we all have had turned out to be a mass recruitment for the New People’s Army. I was shocked at how the intelligence unit of 501st Infantry Battalion equated words like “progressive,” “social,” and “action” to “rebellion” and “terrorism.”

In Guilayon, I had my first chance at dancing a tadek. I was awed. Not that it was a courtship dance.

The idea that birthdays and graduations are still spectacles in the place titillated my sentimentality. I was moved by the fact that the whole community would literally walk mountains just so they can celebrate with the family. One Ina (grandmother) told me that only well-off families could afford to hold big parties like that. Year after year, the chances that there will be celebrations are diminished so they grab every opportunity to witness or participate before the merry-making practice completely vanishes. She said that their children are moving toward the cities where there are “good” schools. Some of them return only during class breaks. Their lallakay (husbands) are either going abroad or finding jobs in other places in the country where they can earn bigger amounts. Those who were left and continue with the planting and selling bukel (beans) also have plans of going away.

“With the kind of economy we have now…” she muttered then shook her head.

It is also intriguing for me that the gathering, through the dances, readily gives young men and women alike a license to be romantics even for a time. However, it is saddening to note that playing gangsa is still, strictly a man’s business. Unlike here in the city where women can play the gangsa as much as they want, women and children in the community are not allowed to play with it. The instrument symbolizes manhood and a very specific gender role, that is, to always be in control of the dances. It is where I knew that dancing is following the beat and Guilayon women are raised to be good at it.

In Nambukayan, I met a Visayan child who, like the rest of the kids in the area, loved the common bilug-bilogan game. They say their names as I so excitedly blurt out “Mangajin nu?” in a pure Magnao accent. Of course, they were as affectionate as all of the ubbing (children) I came to know in the two barangays.

That summer, I didn’t just find the malayong nayon where I can not only teach pre-schoolers how to start playing the games of life but also help parents decide to build more clean comfort rooms in schools in the community instead of too many chapels; I have also seen the perfect site to lay my sepulcher with colored stones and an epitaph that says: I came home like a shooting star.

The sun is always up in that place. #

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