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.