I should be making a list in this post, but won’t, primarily because I have an aversion to listicles. A numbered list is supposed to make an article easier to read—light to the eyes and friendly to the memory. But it doesn’t work that way for me. I feel that a list insinuates to the reader that each item is important and should be given attention. My brain finds that stressful. I don’t want to remember ten persons, things, or reasons. I prefer going over dollops of words and even paragraphs and take note of just one or two truly important ideas that are stated in the article or can be inferred from it.
So no, this post won’t have a numbered list in it, but it will have a list all the same. I will enumerate the reasons why I keep on writing in this blog. But the five or so reasons will be embedded, at no particular distance from one another, in the sentences and paragraphs. So here they are:
When I decided to create this blog, it was for a purely altruistic reason, believe it or not. I wanted graduate students who were doing research on the Dulangan Manobo to have less trouble looking for reference materials. I wanted this blog to contain links to all possible online resources on the Dulangan Manobo. I know it sounds like I merely wanted to do what Google was already doing, but the idea of creating this blog in fact came to me out of my frustration with Google. It was time-consuming to sift through the results for, say, “Cotabato Manobo” or “Kulaman burial jars.” Because of search engine optimization techniques bloggers employed, the “most relevant” results often turned out to be blog posts that barely contained useful information and plagiarized from one another. So contained in this blog—especially in the Bibliography page, the News page, and the tags—are the truly relevant results, I dare claim.
I have pretty much scoured the Internet by now, more than two years since, for information about the Dulangan Manobo, so my original intent for maintaining this blog no longer holds true. It has been replaced by, among others, another altruistic reason: to help promote Kulaman Plateau as the next ecotourism hotspot. The place surely has the potential. It has a hundred caves, for one. The best that has been discovered so far, the White Cave of Kuden village, is one of the most beautiful in the world. Try googling the best caves in the world and compare their photos with that of White Cave. It would not be an exaggeration to say that White Cave is at par with the others. There are other beautiful things in Kulaman Plateau aside from caves, but I’m not going to expound them here. Please check my other posts.
I won’t claim, though, that I’m doing good in promoting the touristy qualities of Kulaman Plateau. I call a piece of shit a piece of shit, so I don’t sugarcoat anything about the place. I have posts about how bad the road here is, how incompetent the government officials can be, and the like. I don’t want to promise paradise to anyone who might be enticed to explore the place from reading this blog. So I help promote Kulaman Plateau, but I’ll never call it a haven or anything. The most generous description I’ll say of it is that it is a rough, raw beauty. Exploring this place is like riding a horse, not making love to a woman. It will take at least a decade for this place to be friendly to vacationing retirees. But, backpackers who like roughing it, I invite thee.
I’m also maintaining this blog for future writers and researchers. I want to record even the inane facts of living here in Kulaman Plateau because it might someday benefit writers of local history or historical fiction. I don’t want them to have the same difficulty that I’m having. I’ve written a few stories set in the past, and it was difficult for me to create characters and scenes with verisimilitude because I don’t know how ordinary everyday life was like back then. I couldn’t find good sources to draw my stories from. Someday, say, 2050, writers writing about the 2010s would be thankful to this blog for recording how different Kulaman Plateau it will be from today—or, hopefully not, how unchanged it will be. I may not be able to brilliantly document or make sense of my generation today, but one writer in the future might be able to by usings as a source, but not plagiarizing, my humble writings.
Now let’s go to my selfish reasons for maintaining this blog. The main item on this subject is my goal to keep my hands moving—to write regularly. I believe in what experts say that writing is like dancing and playing basketball—the more you do it, the better you become. Writing posts for this blog is a good exercise. I won’t run out of things to write about—from humdrum daily lives of farmers to noisy fiestas and noisier horse fights, from dreary village centers to magnificent caves in hidden locations, from the meager meals of many locals and tribal people to exotic food. I write here mostly in a conversational style, so I’m able to write fast, to write as I think. All that I write here will be published, so while writing, I don’t have to worry about the taste of the editor or the superiority of the work of other contributors, which can intimidate and suppress creativity. I sometimes skip copyediting, for it can be tiring and time-consuming. (Once in a while, though, I review old posts and make necessary corrections.)
I’m also using this blog as an online CV and to keep track of my literary progress, if I may call it that. The page about the blogger includes a list of my published pieces. But that’s most likely the most personal, vain, shameless, or uncensored I’ll share here. I’ll spare you from two cents’ worth on the latest national issues, rants on how unfair life is, and names-less accounts of sexual trysts. (Not that I have a lot to share in those departments.) This blog is not about me. I am only one of the thousands of residents of Kulaman Plateau, and I hope to keep that in mind.
Monday, May 25, 2015
Monday, May 18, 2015
A Note on Human Behavior
The previous Holy Week, when my younger brother, my nephews, and I visited some interesting spots in Bagumbayan town, we didn’t have a laid-out itinerary. It was my first time in that part of Kulaman Plateau, and I didn’t know where we should go and how much time we needed to reach and enjoy each place, so I didn’t insist on having a schedule, list of things to bring, list of things to buy, and what have you. So we winded up barging into people’s kitchens and cooking our food there. It was, for me, the weirdest of the things that we did—weirder than sleeping on a tarpaulin used for drying corn, hitching with other groups in exploring caves because we didn’t have our own flashlights, and stuffing ourselves (six persons) in a motorcycle that, at the kind of road we were traveling, should be carrying three persons only at most, including the driver.
My companions, of course, asked permission to use the kitchens, but I still felt as though we were marauders. I don’t visit anyone’s home unless I have texted or called first and the owner of the house has told me that I could be accommodated. In the three houses we went to, we just parked in their yards, said we haven’t had our meal yet, and asked, “May we cook our rice here?” The owners of the house would say yes right away, as though they were just asked to lend a ballpen or anything that is not private or intimate. For me, letting someone use your pot and wash in your sink is akin to baring your soul. By letting someone into your kitchen, you are revealing to him your socio-economic status, sanitation habits, and personal taste. In any case, my nephews showed no hesitation when they asked the favor. In that part of the world, barging into people’s kitchens seemed a natural thing to do.
That’s one good thing about community spirit, about living in a rural or mountainous area, where everyone knows almost everyone. If you suddenly find yourself without a roof to shield you from the rain, without a bed or floor to spend the night on, without a hearth to cook your rice in, and even without anything to eat, you can count on the nearest house in sight to take care of you and your emergency needs. Try doing that in a crowded urban neighborhood. Your neighbor’s mouth would utter a polite yet vague excuse why he couldn’t be of help even if he wanted to, while his eyes would dart from one spot of your body to another, checking if you’re hiding a knife or something, for he would suspect you’re just trying to find a way inside his house to steal his iPhone or HDTV.
I’m not saying, of course, that people in the boondocks are good and people in the cities are bad. Dichotomies are for dummies. I want, in fact, to show you the two sides of the community, or communal, spirit in rural areas. Because there’s no strict sense of privacy and property in rural areas, some people can sometimes be shameless, unmindful of the difference between sharing and stealing. When we left my cousin’s fish pond after letting out most of its water and catching a moderate number of fish, one of the neighbors took over without permission and, using an improvised device for electrocuting fish, was able to catch bigger fish than we did. I didn’t see the man myself, but the other neighbors told on him to my cousin. I even gathered that the man had been doing the same thing whenever my cousin and her family were away.
I try to understand why the man must have felt he was entitled to a share in the product of the pond. One reason I can think of is that the pond is actually a stream dammed with rock and soil. He must have felt that the stream, like the sources of potable water, belongs to everyone in the community. I have observed the same mentality in my own village. If you have a well in your property, you keep it clean and make improvements at your own expense, and your neighbors are free to fetch water from it anytime they want. (Much of the village now, though, is served by a water system.) If a stream passes through your property, your neighbors are likewise free to catch fish, crabs, and bakbak (frogs) in it and gather shells, takway (taro runners), and tangkong (swamp cabbage) from it. My cousin’s thieving neighbor, however, failed to take into account that my cousin’s family spent effort, time, and money damming the stream and releasing commercial tilapia hatchlings into the water. And what I find most disagreeable about him is that he gained unfairly from my nephews’ labor on that particular day. My cousin did not allow her sons to empty the pond of its water and fish, so the barriers were returned to their place and we left. By this time, the water level was already very low, and it was easy to catch fish, especially if you were using a device to electrocute them. The neighbor took this opportunity to obtain a week’s worth of free meal for his family. It looked as if my nephews spent the whole morning shoveling mud and sweating buckets just so he could conveniently pick up fish at noontime.
Let me conclude this rant by employing a lazy writing technique—by telling the reader that this post is getting too long. That’s it. I want to say that living in an open and close-knit community has its endearing and frustrating sides. Of course, I’ve long known that, but I had not given it much thought, I had not been keenly aware for a long time of the specific situations until I decided to disrupt my humdrum everyday life and went someplace else for the Holy Week. This is what travel does to you. (And I mean travel, not vacation.) It makes your blood run a little faster. It makes your eyes see a little farther. It makes you a little more alive, more human, than you have been.
My companions, of course, asked permission to use the kitchens, but I still felt as though we were marauders. I don’t visit anyone’s home unless I have texted or called first and the owner of the house has told me that I could be accommodated. In the three houses we went to, we just parked in their yards, said we haven’t had our meal yet, and asked, “May we cook our rice here?” The owners of the house would say yes right away, as though they were just asked to lend a ballpen or anything that is not private or intimate. For me, letting someone use your pot and wash in your sink is akin to baring your soul. By letting someone into your kitchen, you are revealing to him your socio-economic status, sanitation habits, and personal taste. In any case, my nephews showed no hesitation when they asked the favor. In that part of the world, barging into people’s kitchens seemed a natural thing to do.
That’s one good thing about community spirit, about living in a rural or mountainous area, where everyone knows almost everyone. If you suddenly find yourself without a roof to shield you from the rain, without a bed or floor to spend the night on, without a hearth to cook your rice in, and even without anything to eat, you can count on the nearest house in sight to take care of you and your emergency needs. Try doing that in a crowded urban neighborhood. Your neighbor’s mouth would utter a polite yet vague excuse why he couldn’t be of help even if he wanted to, while his eyes would dart from one spot of your body to another, checking if you’re hiding a knife or something, for he would suspect you’re just trying to find a way inside his house to steal his iPhone or HDTV.
I’m not saying, of course, that people in the boondocks are good and people in the cities are bad. Dichotomies are for dummies. I want, in fact, to show you the two sides of the community, or communal, spirit in rural areas. Because there’s no strict sense of privacy and property in rural areas, some people can sometimes be shameless, unmindful of the difference between sharing and stealing. When we left my cousin’s fish pond after letting out most of its water and catching a moderate number of fish, one of the neighbors took over without permission and, using an improvised device for electrocuting fish, was able to catch bigger fish than we did. I didn’t see the man myself, but the other neighbors told on him to my cousin. I even gathered that the man had been doing the same thing whenever my cousin and her family were away.
I try to understand why the man must have felt he was entitled to a share in the product of the pond. One reason I can think of is that the pond is actually a stream dammed with rock and soil. He must have felt that the stream, like the sources of potable water, belongs to everyone in the community. I have observed the same mentality in my own village. If you have a well in your property, you keep it clean and make improvements at your own expense, and your neighbors are free to fetch water from it anytime they want. (Much of the village now, though, is served by a water system.) If a stream passes through your property, your neighbors are likewise free to catch fish, crabs, and bakbak (frogs) in it and gather shells, takway (taro runners), and tangkong (swamp cabbage) from it. My cousin’s thieving neighbor, however, failed to take into account that my cousin’s family spent effort, time, and money damming the stream and releasing commercial tilapia hatchlings into the water. And what I find most disagreeable about him is that he gained unfairly from my nephews’ labor on that particular day. My cousin did not allow her sons to empty the pond of its water and fish, so the barriers were returned to their place and we left. By this time, the water level was already very low, and it was easy to catch fish, especially if you were using a device to electrocute them. The neighbor took this opportunity to obtain a week’s worth of free meal for his family. It looked as if my nephews spent the whole morning shoveling mud and sweating buckets just so he could conveniently pick up fish at noontime.
Let me conclude this rant by employing a lazy writing technique—by telling the reader that this post is getting too long. That’s it. I want to say that living in an open and close-knit community has its endearing and frustrating sides. Of course, I’ve long known that, but I had not given it much thought, I had not been keenly aware for a long time of the specific situations until I decided to disrupt my humdrum everyday life and went someplace else for the Holy Week. This is what travel does to you. (And I mean travel, not vacation.) It makes your blood run a little faster. It makes your eyes see a little farther. It makes you a little more alive, more human, than you have been.
Monday, May 11, 2015
My 150th Post
I plan to create at least 500 posts for this blog, and this means that, if my average number of posts per year is 50. I have to maintain this blog for at least 10 years. I still have more than seven years to go.
There’s no shortcut to my 500th post, so I have to do it one post at a time, and to mark my progress, I’ll allow myself a celebratory post for every 50th post. So here it is—my 3rd celebratory post, my 150th blog post.
I think I sound silly in the preceding paragraphs. A “celebratory post” simply means the title goes something like this: “This is my xth post.” It is still not much different from other, ordinary posts.
For this post, I’m featuring a very short video I took of a Dulangan Manobo dance. The dance was performed last year in the fiesta of my village. The quality of the video isn’t very good because it was nighttime and I used the zoom feature of my camera. I didn’t go near the stage to shoot because I didn’t want any undue attention. The audio is good, though, because the speakers of the sound system were loud. The dancers were Dulangan Manobos studying in the local elementary and secondary schools.
There’s no shortcut to my 500th post, so I have to do it one post at a time, and to mark my progress, I’ll allow myself a celebratory post for every 50th post. So here it is—my 3rd celebratory post, my 150th blog post.
I think I sound silly in the preceding paragraphs. A “celebratory post” simply means the title goes something like this: “This is my xth post.” It is still not much different from other, ordinary posts.
For this post, I’m featuring a very short video I took of a Dulangan Manobo dance. The dance was performed last year in the fiesta of my village. The quality of the video isn’t very good because it was nighttime and I used the zoom feature of my camera. I didn’t go near the stage to shoot because I didn’t want any undue attention. The audio is good, though, because the speakers of the sound system were loud. The dancers were Dulangan Manobos studying in the local elementary and secondary schools.
Monday, May 4, 2015
Where Bad Catholics Go
In this predominantly Catholic country, most people spend the Holy Week taking part in church activities or at least taking some rest at home or in a serene resort. The bad ones, though, grab the opportunity to meet and gamble, and one of their destinations is a dreary hamlet somewhere in Masiag village, Bagumbayan town.
I was there on Good Friday with the gamblers, so you may judge my moral character. My sin, though, is not as grave as the others’ because I didn’t bet. I just watched the horse-fighting event. It was my first time to watch such an event, though I had plenty of opportunities to do so before. For one reason or another, I would not grab the opportunity.
I had expected a horse fight to be similar to a cockfight, where the opponents would be at each other’s throat almost without rest. To my surprise, the horses spent more time sniffing each other than biting or kicking. I learned from someone, though, that intense fighting do happen but usually between “rated” or high-caliber horses only. The three fights I witnessed were just arranged that day. The owners brought their horses to the venue and spent the whole morning negotiating with one another. The fights took place in the afternoon. One of the three fights was just a “test fight” because the owners failed to find enough supporters to finance the wager.
If you noticed in the video above, there’s a gray horse tied at the center of the arena. It’s a female horse. Male horses will only fight if there’s a female around. To agitate the horses, each of the males are first brought near the female. The owner would let his horse try to copulate with the female, but the owner would cut the courting short. When this has been done to both horses, they are released. They will then fight. They are actually fighting over the female, not to prove to each other who is stronger or who should own the territory. If the males just keep on sniffing each other or standing with the female between them, one of the organizers would hit the female with a stick or loosen its rope so that it would move around and the males would be after her and against each other.
If you listen to the video, you can hear people, including kids, yelling and cheering, demanding more action, more gore, while you don’t hear anything from me. I’m simply not thrilled at the sight of two horses trying to kill each other at the orchestration of human beings. I don’t even watch boxing or mixed martial arts on TV; they’re not sports for me. I went to watch the horse-fighting event just out of curiosity, and now I know that it’s one curiosity that should have not been satisfied. I guess I’m not that bad a Catholic at all.
I was there on Good Friday with the gamblers, so you may judge my moral character. My sin, though, is not as grave as the others’ because I didn’t bet. I just watched the horse-fighting event. It was my first time to watch such an event, though I had plenty of opportunities to do so before. For one reason or another, I would not grab the opportunity.
I had expected a horse fight to be similar to a cockfight, where the opponents would be at each other’s throat almost without rest. To my surprise, the horses spent more time sniffing each other than biting or kicking. I learned from someone, though, that intense fighting do happen but usually between “rated” or high-caliber horses only. The three fights I witnessed were just arranged that day. The owners brought their horses to the venue and spent the whole morning negotiating with one another. The fights took place in the afternoon. One of the three fights was just a “test fight” because the owners failed to find enough supporters to finance the wager.
If you noticed in the video above, there’s a gray horse tied at the center of the arena. It’s a female horse. Male horses will only fight if there’s a female around. To agitate the horses, each of the males are first brought near the female. The owner would let his horse try to copulate with the female, but the owner would cut the courting short. When this has been done to both horses, they are released. They will then fight. They are actually fighting over the female, not to prove to each other who is stronger or who should own the territory. If the males just keep on sniffing each other or standing with the female between them, one of the organizers would hit the female with a stick or loosen its rope so that it would move around and the males would be after her and against each other.
If you listen to the video, you can hear people, including kids, yelling and cheering, demanding more action, more gore, while you don’t hear anything from me. I’m simply not thrilled at the sight of two horses trying to kill each other at the orchestration of human beings. I don’t even watch boxing or mixed martial arts on TV; they’re not sports for me. I went to watch the horse-fighting event just out of curiosity, and now I know that it’s one curiosity that should have not been satisfied. I guess I’m not that bad a Catholic at all.
One of the defeated horses. Its left eye, not
seen in the photo, is also bloody. While the owner was tying the horse to a
tree, his wife approached him and said, “See, I told you not to agree to the
fight. The opponent is much bigger!”
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