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.

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!”

Holy Week in Bagumbayan Town

My companions were laughing at how badass we must have looked, and in my mind I told myself I had no business being with them. As a thirty-year-old, I was supposed to be mature and responsible. I had no business riding a motorcycle in a rocky and sloping road with five other guys. Even if the motorcycle was designed to carry several passengers, it still didn’t have enough space for us. Two among us had to sit on the tank in front of the driver—sideways, one on the other’s lap.

My companions, including the driver, were my younger brother and my nephews. They were aged sixteen to twenty and thus had an excuse to be wild and free and stupid. I had none, except maybe for the fact that I didn’t have much choice. Riding the motorcycle all together was the most efficient way for us to get where we were headed.

It was Good Friday of this year, and we were on our way to Guano—a sitio (hamlet) of Masiag village, Bagumbayan town—to explore the two caves in the area and watch a series of horse fights. We had come from the nearby village of Monteverde, where the previous day, Holy Thursday, we scaled the Toro-toro, one of the most distinctive peaks of Cotabato Cordillera.

The road between Masiag and Monteverde, just like most of the roads in the mountains of Bagumbayan, made for a most inconvenient ride. We were a little lucky because El Niño had been going on for months and the road had been dry. We only had to negotiate protruding rocks. During rainy days, the rocks, exacerbated by mud, could make the road so dangerous that many people traveling in the area for the first time would cry, swear not to come back, or both.

Our cramped arrangement elicited jokes from my nephews about squashed penises and torn asses. The whole thing was a harmless joke for them, while I was thinking that if my nephew who was driving made even just a minor lapse in judgment, or one of us passengers moved when we were not supposed to, it would be such a tragedy for the entire family. My parents would be left childless. Fortunately and unfortunately, I didn’t have to worry about accidents. The mere act of breathing was difficult. Whenever the motorcycle was running downhill or along a stretch of half-buried rocks, our chests would press or bump hard against each other, which made me understand the pre-mortem agony of stampede victims.

The ride was over in just thirty minutes or so, but because mortal danger hanged in the air in every minute of it, it felt as though we would never reach our destination. It was the most dangerous part of my four-day visit to the village of Monteverde, specifically in Sitio Miasong, where my cousin and her family lives. (On our way back from Sitio Guano, two of my nephews rode other motorcycles.) The ride, though, was neither the most challenging nor physically demanding. As mentioned earlier, we climbed a mountain and explored caves (which also involved climbing mountains). We also helped empty a pond to harvest the fish in it, watched a horse-fighting event, and spent idle hours with relatives catching up on one another’s lives. It was an experience worth sharing, I believe, and in the coming days, I will make additional posts on some of those activities.

Photos: (1) It seems to me that there are balete trees everywhere in Sitio Miasong. The tree normally starts as a small plant that clings to and sucks the life out of another tree. (2) The mouth of Guano Cave looks big in this photo, but I tell you, it’s way bigger in person. (3) My brother tries to hide his exhaustion behind a smile. The peak of the Toro-toro looks so near on this spot, but the worst of our trek is yet to come.