How This Blog Came Into Being

I have long been into blogging. Since 2005, I have been jumping from one blog to another. I could not find a topic or theme I could regularly write about. I have created at least five blogs, and the longest I stayed in one was perhaps a year.

Now I think I will be able to maintain this blog for a long time, maybe years. I am passionate about Kulaman Plateau and the Dulangan Manobo, and I have a rich material, both personal and from other sources. The idea to create this blog, though, came to me rather accidentally and slowly.

It all started when a cousin of mine asked for help for her graduate-studies research. Her goal was to gather the folk tales and similar stuff of the Dulangan Manobo. She’s not tech savvy, and she could not find adequate references online. Googling master me came to the rescue. I loved googling, for a hundred reasons, which I won’t enumerate here because they’re irrelevant. To cut the story short, I was able to find about half a dozen downloadable academic papers and other references that were quite helpful to my cousin. I saved copies in her laptop and in my own.

Though I did not help my cousin write a word of her thesis, I read the materials. I was personally interested in the Dulangan Manobo. I dreamt of writing a novel about the life of Manobo women. My interest intensified when I learned about the lost burial jars of Kulaman Plateau. One Google result led to another, and I eventually realized that for a few weeks I had been spending hours almost every day doing research on the Dulangan Manobo. The more surprising realization was that I had been spending much of that time on sifting Google results, not on reading the materials.

I thought of how difficult and time-consuming the task was for researchers. I wished no one else had to go through what I had. So I decided to create a blog on the Dulangan Manobo that would direct the readers to all available relevant materials online. At first I wanted the blog to be academic and technical, but later on, I just couldn’t help blabbering about my personal experiences in and knowledge on Kulaman Plateau.

I hope you readers find my personal adventures and misadventures interesting and not a clutter you have to brush aside while doing your research. I can’t promise you’ll like each of my posts, but I promise that this blog will keep on evolving and expanding to always give you something new.