March Updates

Instead of putting postscripts and addenda to posts, I decided to gather all of them in a single entry. Hence, this post. I also had something like this for February, and this might be a monthly feature of this blog. With this system, I will be able later on to keep track of my changes to this blog, my corrections to posts, and the like.

In my March 4 post, specifically in the fifth paragraph, I created a link to one of my essays that appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. After the piece was published, I found out that the villages I mentioned toward the end are not really named after geographical features. Valley in Dulangan Manobo is lepak, cave is takub, and stream is wayeg. Kulaman takes its name from a Manobo ruler, while I have yet to research why Tacupis and Basag are so called. I wrote that essay while I was away from Kulaman and had no reliable source. My bad.

In January 27, as I was typing my posts for this month, a swift darted inside the house and flew in circles for nearly ten minutes. When the bird came in, I stopped typing, lay still, and watched it. It was black but had a gray underside. It flapped its wing in a dizzying speed, and I promptly learned that how appropriate its name was. I thought of closing the door so that the swift would be trapped inside the house, but my better self prevailed. The bird was probably looking for a nesting place. It kept on touching the wooden ceiling with its beak, producing a dull thud each time. Once it rested on the ceiling upside down, but only for less than a second. I had been observing the bird for more maybe more than two minutes when I thought of checking the time in my laptop. It was 11: 36 a.m. The tiny guest continued flying until 11: 40, often whizzing past my face as close as less than ten inches. It then flew out of the house and came back in an instant. It stayed for two minutes more before deciding our house was not a good replacement for a cave. Maybe it also realized that I might be greedy and I would take its saliva-coated nest and sell it. I was left on the couch a little lightheaded and suffering from a mild stiff neck. My point for writing this is, you only get to have such a simple wonderful experience here in a plateau.

Burial Jars in Inquirer

My efforts for this blog have paid off! An article of mine about the limestone burial jars was published in the op-ed section of a national newspaper. “Where They Should Be” appeared in the Youngblood section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer on December 30, 2012. What an exhilarating way to end the year. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Upon seeing the burial jars, I had to take a deep breath. I had to keep the tears from flowing.

I was in the University of San Carlos (USC) Museum in Cebu City, and the burial jars I had come to see were taken half a century ago from Kulaman Plateau, my hometown in Mindanao.

For several weeks before the visit, I spent hours almost every day doing research online on the archaeological artifacts. By scouring websites and poring over downloadable academic papers, I felt that I had been a witness to the journey of the burial jars—how they were discovered in the caves and rock shelters in our town and ended up in museums in the Visayas, Luzon, and even as far away as the United States.

Seeing the jars for the first time, running my fingers along their vertical ridges, staring straight at the hollow eyes of their anthropomorphic covers, I felt reunited with long-lost loved ones. I had reached a major point in my search for identity. I had found a missing part of me.

The body of the article contains mostly facts about the burial jars—their features, where they are discovered, the explorations conducted by some institutions, where the jars are now. The information isn’t much different from what you can read in The Burial Jars page of this blog. The Youngblood article ends this way:

It is sad that the jars were taken away from their original sites, even if the institutions involved have done so much in preserving them and informing the public of their significance. It is despicable that some of the jars are blatantly put on sale online as though they were limited-edition action figures or used laptops. Nobody should put a price tag on archaeological artifacts; they are invaluable treasures of a tribe, a locality and even a nation.

If I had the money, I would buy all the burial jars now on display in California and take them back to my hometown. Unfortunately, all I can afford to do is see the ones that are in museums in the country. I’ve ticked off one destination in my list, and there are a few more to go.

Whichever museum I will visit, however, I have a feeling the experience will be the same: Upon seeing the jars, I will have to take a deep breath. I will have to keep the tears from flowing. No, I won’t let myself cry. I’ll cry only, in joy, when the limestone burial jars are back in Kulaman Plateau, where they came from, where they should be.

You can read the complete article at inquirer.net. Perhaps for the sake of consistency, the editor used “Kulaman Plateau” all throughout the article. Note, however, that in some parts, I originally used “Kulaman” only and I was referring to the barangay. The village of Kulaman is the seat of government of the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino, while Kulaman Plateau covers an area that includes some parts of Kalamansig and Lebak towns.

Snapshots of my article. Yay! I’m sharing the page with a former chief justice of the Philippines and the present prime minister of Japan.