I’m back, after almost a year of not touching this blog. (My “latest” posts, dated half a year ago, had been prescheduled.) I can’t promise to blog regularly again, but I will post important updates.
I’ve been preoccupied with a lot of other matters, especially literary activities. Other local writers and I, I’m proud to say, have done many things, most of which were firsts. We formed writers associations, albeit informal for now. We created Cotabato Literary Journal, a monthly online publication. And we organized several poetry readings and writing seminars. I was also diagnosed with panic disorder, and I’m still on medication up to now. (But don’t worry, I’ve gotten so much better.)
As to the updates I must share with you, let me start with Tau SOX: Festival of the First Peoples, organized last year by the regional office of the Department of Tourism. The one-week event aimed to highlight SOX (short for SOCCSKSARGEN) as a land where early men (tau) lived. The organizers invited me to give a talk on the limestone burial jars of Kulaman Plateau, in a forum that also included a talk on the clay burial jars of Maitum and a talk on the burial practices of Tedurays.
I wasn’t able to take good photos and extensive notes of the event, so if you want to know more about it, check out the news article on NDBC and the post by local blogger Hajar Kabalu. Truth be told, I had a very small audience, even if the venue was the activity center of a mall. It was past lunchtime when it was my turn to speak, and most attendees had gone somewhere else. Nonetheless, I believe the right people stayed and listened, and I’m glad for the opportunity to spread more awareness of Kulaman burial jars.
From left to right: National Artist Bienvenido
Lumbera, me (honorable mention), L. A. Piluden (honorable mention), Dominic
Paul Sy (third prize winner), Joshua Carlo Pile (second prize winner), the father of Joy Anne Icayan (first prize
winner), and National Artist F. Sionil Jose (Photo taken from FSJ’s Facebook
account)
Exactly a month ago today, I won at the F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Awards. Receiving honorable mention in the awards is perhaps the best thing that happened to my writing life this year. I’m not just talking about the award itself. Many other things happened in my three-day trip to Manila. I met old friends, learned of good news about the manuscript of my novel, had a three-hour lunch with National Artist F. Sionil Jose himself, and went to a museum and a gallery to see Kulaman Plateau burial jars.
“Day of Mourning,” the story that I submitted for the awards, is about the Mamasapano incident. Forty-four members of the Special Action Forces of the Philippine National Police were killed in the encounter, and the news outraged many Filipinos. My story, however, is not about the police officers. It’s told from the viewpoint of a Maguindanao woman whose son is a separatist rebel and may or may not have been killed in the skirmish. I remember being quite depressed right after writing the story. I felt that I had created something beautiful, but I was disconcerted that it was borne out of something that shouldn’t have happened at all.
I learned on October 26, during the awarding, that the organizers received 176 entries, all from Filipino aspiring writers who were thirty years old or younger, since only those who belonged to the age group could join. The three judges pared down the entries to twenty-two, from which they were supposed to choose the top three only. In a conversation after the awarding, one judge told me and the other winners that the judges decided to choose five finalists, and the organizers—the family of F. Sionil Jose—agreed. That’s how another writer and I came to receive honorable mention and ten thousand pesos each even if such awards were not included in the original call for submissions. And as promised, the top three winners received fifty, thirty, and twenty thousand pesos respectively.
I had not known before the awarding what specifically the place of my story was. I was just told that I was one of the five finalists and I should pack my bags because I was getting a free round-trip flight to Manila and a two-night stay in a hotel. It was a workshop mentor of mine who broke the news to me, rather accidentally. She congratulated me a few moments after I entered the library of De La Salle University, the venue of the awarding. I thanked her and said, “But I don’t really know if I’m a finalist or what.” She said, “It’s in the program.” I opened the glossy yellow paper that had been given to me at the entrance, and on it I saw my name—the fourth one from the top.
I love the certificate that I
received—minimalist, black and white, onionskin.
My literary mentor had left by this time. Perhaps she had been afraid that I would be devastated to find out that I had not won the first prize, and she had not wanted to see me cry. I felt the opposite, though. I was delighted to receive honorable mention because it meant that I would have two honorable mentions this year; the month before, another story of mine had been included in the shortlist of six in the Nick Joaquin Literary Awards. I like it when good things come in twos. That’s why I always buy an extra copy whenever I see a notebook that I like and my account name in social networks is rj2ortega. The obsessive-compulsive in me might not have been very happy had I gotten a citation in one award and then a numbered place in another award. Besides, I had prepared myself for whatever that would happen in the F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Awards. In the hotel, I had told myself to be just thankful for whatever would be given to me because judges—and publishers, editors, critics, and ultimately readers—owed me nothing. If they appreciated my work, I would be thankful. If they didn’t, it would hardly matter; I had long discovered that I could not simply make myself stop writing. The only worry I had about not getting into the top three was that I would not have extra money to buy the books (and burial jars) that I might want to buy while in Manila, and it turned out that I had nothing to worry at all, for the honorable mention came with a cash prize. I was given an envelope right after the awarding.
The ceremony was short, maybe thirty minutes only. F. Sionil Jose and another national artist for literature, Bienvenido Lumbera, gave the certificates to the winners. What surprised me most was that F. Sionil Jose was visibly touched by the thirty-second acceptance speech that I gave, and I didn’t learn of what happened until days later, when I was already home and browsing Facebook about the event. A member of the audience posted on Facebook that my “words brought tears to Manong Frankie’s eyes.” I wasn’t able to see the national artist because he was behind me on the stage while I was speaking. But I remember that after the awarding, one of his daughters approached me and said that my speech had made her cry. To be honest, I thought she was just pulling my leg. I felt that my speech was for writers who had spent a life of sacrifices for the craft, and as far as I knew, the children of F. Sionil Jose went on to have successful careers but not as a fictionist like their father. Everything made sense to me after I read the Facebook post. F. Sionil Jose’s daughter must have cried because she saw her father cry on stage. My speech wasn’t earth-shaking or anything, but I spoke from the heart:
A few years ago, I decided to spend the rest of my life writing stories, and I believe I don’t have to tell the people here how difficult it is to stand by that decision. This award reminds me that I’m on the right path, that I’m doing the right thing. Thank you to National Artist F. Sionil Jose and his family and Philippine PEN. I am so honored and grateful. I will keep on writing, Sir Frankie. Madamo gid nga salamat.
What happened after the ceremony was a delightful swirl. TV5 took a video of us winners with F. Sionil Jose. The news came out on television a day after, and it can be seen on YouTube. Manila Bulletin also interviewed us and took our photos, individually and as a group, but as of this writing, the article has not come out yet. L. A. Piluden of Benguet (honorable mention) and Dom Sy of Quezon City (third prize winner) were really nice. I believe I struck an instant friendship with them. A professor approached me and said encouraging things about “Rajah Muda,” my novel manuscript. She was a judge in a competition to which I submitted the manuscript, and though the judges were not told of the identity of the authors, she later found out that the manuscript was mine because she was a staff in another competition to which I submitted the same manuscript. My work didn’t win in either competition, but she told me that in the competition that she judged, my manuscript was close second to the winner. (I learned weeks later from another judge that on the second deliberation of the judges, they were just choosing between my work and the eventual winner and it was like “choosing between a polished jade and a rough diamond.” The jade won. But a diamond is a diamond. It’s just waiting to be polished!) I was glad to find out that I had not wasted the eight months of my life that I had spent on that project. The director of a university press also approached me and said that the press would publish “Rajah Muda,” which I had submitted to the press a month or so earlier. I’m not naming, though, award-giving bodies and educational institutions here because the news given to me were not official.
That evening, I had dinner in Malate with Jake and Reno, two of my co-fellows at the 53rd Silliman University National Writers Workshop. Jake, who lives in Makati, had gone that morning to the office of the Philippines Graphic to get for me my Nick Joaquin certificate and copies of my two stories that appeared in the magazine the previous year. I felt like a child who was given free toys.
The next day, my fellow winners L. A. and Dom and I had a three-hour lunch with Manong Frankie and Manang Tessie, his wife. We first met in Solidaridad, the bookshop that the Jose family owns, and then we ate in an Indian restaurant nearby, and then we walked back to the bookshop. At 91 years old, the national artist is still so full of energy when he talks. He told us at the outset to ask him questions about writing because he wanted to share or pass on to us his personal views and techniques on the craft. We were no longer so intimidated by him this time because the previous day, he had showed us the F. Sionil Jose Collection in the La Salle library, which contains his own books, his drafts, and one hundred of his favorite books by other authors. I was already familiar with most of what Manong Frankie said, for I had read interviews of him and I had also been studying on my own how to be a good fiction writer. What struck me most among the things that he said was this advice: “Use folk tales and ennoble them.” He said this was what Homer and Yeats did. I realized that this was what I had been trying to do and this was what I wanted to do. The advice is now at the top of my pantheons of advices, along with Butch Dalisay’s “Push the narrative,” which he said while critiquing my story at the 20th Iligan National Writers Workshop.
Manong Frankie has to walk with a cane and needs some assistance, so on our way to and from the Indian restaurant, he held on to my arm. That gave me a chance to ask him a few more questions. I asked him if he had a secret diet. He said, “Nothing. I eat anything.” I also asked him some things about politics, but I won’t quote here his answers. If you’re familiar with the man, you probably know that his views sometimes cause tempers to flare. When we returned to Solidaridad, he pointed to the shelf at the counter where his books were displayed. “Choose two books, each of you,” he told my fellow winners and me. I was ecstatic. I had prepared for it! Earlier, before meeting Manong Frankie upstairs, I had reserved copies of the American edition of the five-part Rosales Saga, the most famous of Manong Frankie’s works. Dusk costs nearly one thousand pesos and is the most expensive. The Samsons and Don Vicente cost nearly five hundred pesos each and contain two books each. So when Manong Frankie made us choose two books that we could have for free, I presented The Samsons and Don Vicente. He didn’t seem to mind that I was being wise. In fact, he decided to give us more. L. A., Dom, and I also received a copy each of Short Stories, which contains works that are “culled from the author’s five volumes of short fiction.” Needless to say, the books were all autographed.
I now have the complete five-part Rosales Saga
and the best stories of F. Sionil Jose, and three of these four autographed
books are gifts from the National Artist himself.
I could spend a whole day just listening to F. Sionil Jose. Unfortunately, we had to bid goodbye to him at about three in the afternoon. L. A. had to travel back to Baguio, Dom had a class in UP Diliman, and I had to meet Reno to see with him the limestone burial jars in Museum of the Filipino People and in a private gallery in Intramuros. I can’t name the gallery for now and my posts about my trip there won’t be online until late next year because I’m wary of making the information public. I don’t want to help spread the news that the Kulaman Plateau artifacts can be openly bought as though they’re ordinary gadgets. I’m hoping for a miracle to happen in the next few months and for the jars to be returned to their original home.
Reno and I spent the evening in Makati with Camille, who was also a fellow at the 53rd SUNWW. I would commit a literary sin if I forgot to mention that Camille had “workshopped” the story that I submitted to the F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Awards. My win is partly due to her careful reading of my draft and incisive comments. Jake also joined us every now and then, like a butterfly in a garden. We hanged out in a 24/7 convenience store and decided to spend the whole night talking. I guess we truly missed one another; it was our first time to meet in person after a year and a half, after the workshop. I gave them Dulangan Manobo trinkets that I had bought from Kulaman Plateau. When morning came, I headed straight to the airport, taking home with me my honorable mention certificates, my signed copies of F. Sionil Jose’s books, my photos of Kulaman jars in Manila, and a couple of intangible things that I kept in my mind and heart.
On my plane to Manila, I had a good view of Mt.
Matutum despite the haze from Indonesia. I also had a glimpse of Mt. Apo. On my
way back, I had a close and clear look of Taal lake and volcano.
I was finally able to stay in Barangay Kulaman for a while. From October 20 to 22, my brother and I visited our mother in the poblacion. She had been reassigned there as principal of the national high school since July. Our father joined us on the twenty-second, and I left for the capital town on the twenty-third. I spent three days only in the central village, but it was so far the longest I had stayed there.
I never got to visit for long the poblacion because for the residents of my home village, it is more convenient to head straight to the capital town of the province when transacting businesses. The poblacion is west of my home village, and the capital town is in the east. The difference in the fare isn’t much, and the road to the poblacion is worse than the road to the capital town. So normally, the people in my village only go to the poblacion if they have to process documents in the municipal hall.
Though my visit in Barangay Kulaman was short, I was able to accomplish there two weeks’ worth of tasks. In the coming weeks, I’ll devote a post each for the most important ones. For now, here’s the overview.
This is how big the mouth of SNANHS cave is compared to a person.
Please bear with the model. His better-looking companions
didn't want to stand near the hole themselves because something
might shoot out of the hole and bite or snatch them.
October 20, Tuesday
At 8:30 AM, my brother and I ride a skylab from our home village to the poblacion. We ask the driver to drop us at the national high school because we can’t remember where exactly our mom is staying. We knew beforehand that we would not be a disturbance in the school because it’s the last day of their periodical exams and an interschool athletic meet that the school is hosting is starting the next day. There’s no regular class. For half an hour or so, my bro and I eat lanzones in a corner in our mom’s office. I then ask some students who are chatting on a bench to show me the tiny cave inside the campus.
At noon, our mom takes my bro and me to the house where she’s staying, which is also a house of our relative. My phone rings at about one in the afternoon. The caller informs me that I’m one of the finalists in the F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Awards. I’m surprised and delighted, but the problem is that the awarding ceremonies will be on the coming Monday. I tell the caller that I’m currently very far from Manila and could not possibly make it to the event. He tells me my fare for the flight and the hotel accommodation will be sponsored. I tell him all right, I’ll be there.
With my brother, I go to the compound of Catholic nuns to see the Dulangan Manobo objects that are on display in one of the structures there. I realize I forgot to bring the list of Manobo things that I have prepared. I have no easy way of knowing the names of the displayed items. I've left the list because I’ve been thinking how to book a flight to Manila here in the middle of nowhere. I content myself with just taking photos.
I learn from my mom’s colleagues that one of them has a ticketing business and there’s already an internet café in town. It means that I no longer have to “go down” to the capital town the next day to make arrangements for my travel and to keep on communicating with F. Sionil Jose’s daughter, who called me after the guy from Philippine PEN did.
Inside the Dulangan Manobo “cultural heritage home” run by Catholic nuns
October 21, Wednesday
I start the day with a hot drink made from powdered marang seeds in the house of my uncle, my mom’s landlord. Marang, which looks like a cross between jackfruit and durian, is a common fruit in Mindanao, but it’s my first time to take it in a drink form, a la hot coffee. The seeds were dried and ground, and the powder looks and tastes so much like soybeans.
When my bro wakes up, I ask him to go with me to Kulaman River to bathe. Our four-year-old niece tags along and acts as our guide. The little girl and I bathe. My brother doesn’t. The girl loves the water, and my bro and I have a hard time persuading her to get out of it to go back home.
In the afternoon, my bro and I spend a few hours in the only Internet café in town. The café has six or seven computers only, and customers often have to wait for fifteen minutes to more than an hour before a station is vacated. Later, we eat batchoy in a stall and watch the parade of athletes. Five zones from the towns of Senator Ninoy Aquino and Bagumbayan will be competing against one another in the next two days; the winning teams will then represent the unit in the provincial meet in November. The batchoy, at best, tastes all right. Local cuisine is one thing that still needs to be developed in Kulaman Plateau.
Morning dip in Kulaman River with my niece
October 22, Thursday
I was told the previous day that there’s a busay, or waterfall, near the river, so I decide to check it out with my brother. There’s a waterfall right beside the river, but it’s just more than a meter high and the water isn’t much stronger than a trickle. I deduce that the waterfall I was told about is behind the tiny waterfall, hidden by tall weeds. To see the hidden waterfall, I have to cross the river, climb the tiny waterfall, and walk the narrow path behind. I try going to the opposite bank, but I can’t find a spot that is shallow enough to wade through. I have to swim. I decide to abandon the plan. I’m afraid to swim because I can only do it in steady waters and short distances and because I’m not familiar with the river’s current and all.
My bro and I go back to the nuns’ compound because I have to make more-detailed notes on the Manobo objects displayed there. Because I’m no longer distracted, worrying about how to book a flight, my second visit to the compound turns out to more productive. With the help of some Manobo high school students, I’m finally able to identify most of the items listed in the Kitab (Customary Law) of the Dulangan Manobo.
I finally get my plane ticket at noontime. I ride a motorcycle to my home village to get a traveling bag and some pairs of shoes. The travel to my village and then back to the poblacion takes about an hour and a half. I can clearly see that the haze coming from the forest fires in Indonesia is getting worse. It looks as though there’s rain on the hills in the distance, but I’m sure that there’s no rain because there are no massive dark clouds in the sky. The sky—and indeed, the world—is covered in gray.
I’m writing more-detailed accounts of my trip to Kulaman Village, and I’m posting them every Friday for the next several weeks. This “Three Days in Kulaman” series will run parallel with “The Other Towns” series, which started last month and appears every Monday.
It has been a special month for me and this blog. October is the National Indigenous Peoples Month, as declared through Proclamation No. 1906, series of 2009. It is also the third anniversary of Portal to the Plateau. I must say, however, that I didn’t mark the two occasions with any special activity. For one, every month is Indigenous Peoples Rights Month for me. My research on the culture of the Dulangan Manobo is a perennial preoccupation. As to the birthday of this blog, I prefer to celebrate not the length of time this blog has been in existence but the number of times it has been useful. I prefer to count my success by the number of posts I’ve published. I celebrate my 50th post, 100th, 150th, and so on. Nonetheless, I’m pleased with myself whenever I realize that this blog is still in public space after one, two, or three years. It means that I’ve had much greater patience and passion for Portal to the Plateau than for my previous blogs. It may also mean that I’m becoming a more responsible person.
Without consciously meaning to, I’ve celebrated the two occasions by doing more for this blog. A week ago, I went to Kulaman village, the seat of government of the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino. I spent three days only there, but I did things that were worth ten blog posts or so. The posts are coming out in the coming months. I also just got back from Manila, where, among other things, I visited two places that exhibit limestone burial jars from Kulaman Plateau. The photos I took of the jars are probably worth ten blog posts also. My calendar for this blog is filled to overflowing! I actually already have prescheduled posts for all the Mondays of the rest of the year, and for all the Mondays of January and February next year. But I’m not going to make you wait long for my posts about my recent trips. I’ll insert them between prescheduled posts or wherever suitable.
Dulangan Manobo elders, garbed in traditional clothes, sit on a tarpaulin and engage in an antang-antang (negotiation) as the younger generation, wearing shirts and jeans, look on. This is a photo of a photo displayed in Delesan Kailawan, a “cultural heritage home” maintained by the RNDM sisters in Kulaman village, Senator Ninoy Aquino town.
I found a bird’s nest—with two eggs in it! Now this isn’t really news in a mountainous area that still has considerably lush vegetation. If you set out here to look for a bird’s nest, your quest will end in less than thirty minutes. What’s special about the nest I discovered is that it’s cuplike, which is getting rarer to find nowadays. The nests here are commonly that of a sparrow’s—ball-like and has a small circular opening at the side.
I found the nest in the school across our house. I was taking a late-afternoon walk, pretending I’m Charles Dickens exploring the streets of London, when I noticed a sparrow’s nest nestled in the newly trimmed hedges. I happened to have my camera with me that time, so I decided to take a photo of the nest. The mouth was clearly exposed to passers-by, but the whole nest was intact because whoever spruced up the plant either had a good heart or had the artistic sense to include the nest in the design. After I took just one shot, a tiny bird flew away in fright from inside the plant. I brushed aside the tiny leaves and branches, and found the beautiful cuplike nest. I peered closer into the nest, and to my delight, I found two unhatched eggs.
The eggs were maroon or purplish. I could not tell for sure because it was getting dark. I took a photo of them, and I hope my camera processed the color right. I also did not see the color of the bird that fled from the nest; it just appeared to my eyes as a brownish blur. As I know from experience, though, cuplike nests are built by yellow hummingbirds (yes, the kind of bird that can fly backward).
I checked the sparrow’s nest, and as I had assumed, it had already served its purpose. The eggs had hatched and only shells were left there. I got worried that, just like what happened to me, the sparrow’s nest would attract passers-by and inadvertently lead them to the other nest. So I took the used nest and threw it away. I wished that the eggs would hatch soon because June was coming and regular classes would start again. The eggs or the hatchlings would surely not survive in the hands of mischievous students.
I wondered if the person who trimmed the hedges had seen the second nest. Maybe he didn’t, for the nest was well-hidden inside the plant and he must have been working fast. Maybe he did and he was really good-hearted so he left it there untouched. In any case, I was glad that it was safe. Soon, two lives would be born in it, and then fly around and liven up the air with their music.
My brother saved or downloaded two dictionaries in my tablet, and the applications have been making my writing and editing life more convenient, so it occurred to me to give a shout-out to the hardware and software without which this blog wouldn’t exist or would be arduous to maintain. I’m not nerdy enough to give nicknames to inanimate objects and virtual items, so here they are in the names their inventors gave them:
1. Toshiba Satellite C660-1GQ
There isn’t much to brag about my loyal companion. What I love most about it is its 14.6-inch screen. When I’m writing in Microsoft Word, the screen has enough space for the document at the center, the Search panel on the left-hand side, and the thesaurus on the right-hand side. When I’m copyediting and the Track Changes feature is on, the screen has enough space to display on the right side the corrections I’ve made, even when I zoom the document to 150 percent. However, because the laptop has been with me for quite a few years, its battery operating time has reduced from four hours to a little more than an hour, its webcam has gone pfft, and it hangs whenever connected to a wi-fi.
2. Microsoft Office Word 2013
It’s the latest and most advanced word processor in the market. Its Search feature, editing options, and thesaurus are superb, at least compared to similar programs. I, a broke guy, was only able to download a copy of this because I used to have a Microsoft 360 account that my former company was paying for. The account was closed when I left the company, so the interface of my Word now includes a distracting notification that my subscription has expired, written in a pink line half an inch wide across the screen and below the toolbar. Also, I no longer have an access to a huge online storage space. But other than those chinks, the software is working perfectly.
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica Concise Edition CD-ROM
My copy is the 2004 edition. Though the content is still useful, the interface is outdated. Every time I open the program, the screen of my computer blinks and I get a notification that the “color scheme has been changed to Windows 7 basic” because “a running program isn’t compatible with some visual elements of Windows.” This program also has a good dictionary and thesaurus.
4. Blogger
This should be at the number one spot, but it is an obvious placing, and obvious is uninteresting. I started blogging in Blogger, and I never changed platform since then. I don’t feel like trying other websites just for the sake of trying. I’ve been happy here for the past seven or eight years. Blogger’s service keeps on getting better, especially when Google took it under its wings. What I love most in Blogger is the prescheduling option; I get to create my posts in bulk and set them to come out one at a time weekly.
5. Canon PowerShot A2500
Aside from books, this digital camera is perhaps the only sensible thing that I bought from my salary when I was still in the city working as an editor of technical documents. I lived by the paycheck; I splurged on Friday-night beer and on meals in the fancier fast-food outlets. I bought the camera primarily for this blog. I wanted my posts to have accompanying photos. However, my text-over-visuals philosophy has remained. I consider myself a writer before anything else. Photos and videos will enhance but will never replace my words.
6. PhotoScape
This freeware has been quite helpful in my photo-editing needs. As much as possible, though, I refrain from manipulating my digital images for this blog. I use this software mostly to mark my photos with the name of this blog. I used to go to Pixlr.com for this, but because I’m offline now most of the time, PhotoScape became a reliable replacement.
7. Youtube
I don’t think I need to explain the use of this website. This site is cool because my videos can be easily embedded to my blog (and other websites, for that matter). And because Youtube, like Blogger, is also now connected to Google, I can use the same account and doesn’t have to perform the pesky task of logging in multiple times. I have two things to gripe about, though. First, the quality of my video lowers when uploaded on Youtube. The original, when played in my camera or laptop, are clear enough despite the moderate resolution. On Youtube, they look like they’re taken by a 2-megapixel camera phone. My second complain is that my videos, each of which runs for just a minute or less, take a long time to upload. Each one takes thirty minutes to an hour. (But this may be due to the speed of my Internet connection.)
8. Windows Movie Maker
This software comes handy whenever I need to edit videos. Its features are limited, but it’s got all I need. Usually, all I want to do is cut the video so that it would not be longer than sixty minutes.
9. Samsung T210
This device is useful to me because of the two dictionaries installed in it recently, as mentioned above. I no longer have to endure the glitchy Encyclopaedia Britannica on my computer. For several months, I had no good use of the tablet because I had bought it for its capability to be connected to a wi-fi, something that you can’t expect to find in a remote plateau. (As you can see, I’m pretty much a one-gadget-one-use person.)
10. SmartBro
This device is here only because I’ve run out of better things to enumerate. SmartBro has been such a disappointment since November last year. When Smart started to offer “free” Internet access to mobile phone users, my broadband stick became practically useless. I have tactfully reported the problem to the company’s Facebook page and to their call center, but I got either no or useless reply. One customer service representative even hung up in the middle of the call.
(Continued from yesterday’s post, this is the last of two parts.)
The person who spoke for CAAP on television said, “We completely deny [that a plane crashed in the area.]” He added that a “registered” plane has a “flight plan” and the radars of the agency would have detected it if a crash really happened. I don’t know if the rest of the statement was edited out, but what came out on television was rather curt. It irked me. There are simply a lot of loopholes in the statement. But before I go to those loopholes, let me state that I agree that the object could not have been a passenger plane. Had it been an aircraft of Cebu Pacific, Philippine Air Lines, or a similar company, the news would have spread like wildfire. Apparently, only CNN Philippines and none of the major television networks got wind of the news.
The plane, if the object was really a plane, could very well be a private one, despite CAAP’s denial of the same. It’s possible that the owner or pilot of the plane did not have the flight registered with CAAP. We’re in the Philippines, and if there’s an individual or company that doesn’t comply with government requirements, it shouldn’t be shocking. Also, regardless of whether the flight was registered with CAAP or not, I highly doubt that the agency could properly monitor all the activities in our aerial territory. I’ve seen quite a few reports on television about outdated or completely inoperative essential equipment at the country’s main airport. It won’t be surprising if CAAP’s radars are less than serviceable. And of course, there’s plain old indolence and incompetence of government employees. You see that everywhere—in your municipal or city hall, the Department of Health, the Department of Education, the Department of Social Welfare and Development, even in the “elite” Special Action Forces of the Philippine National Police. It won’t be shocking to find out that workers in CAAP, the Department of Transportation and Communication, and related agencies have been sleeping on their desks.
I heard from some people that eyewitnesses claim they saw a plane. Could they be mistaken? While we live in the boondocks, I believe that the people of Kulaman Plateau are civilized enough to be able to identify a plane from a kite, a weather balloon, a flying garbage truck, a manananggal, or a saucer-shaped spaceship. Airplanes to and from General Santos City can be seen in the sky regularly, and scenes with airplanes are fairly common in movies, so they know what a plane looks like near or far even if they have not been on one. If they say it was a plane or something that looked like a plane, then it could only be a plane or something that looked like a plane.
I wonder if the object was a drone. A drone is unmanned, and it could be the reason why no one seems to have publicly sought help from the authorities to rescue any victim or recover any debris. I doubt, though, if a drone would produce the kind of sound that I heard. For the nth time, it was very loud. It was heard all over the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino and beyond. That’s an area of at least 40,000 hectares. If it’s true that the sound was heard in as far as the municipalities of Lebak and Esperanza, then the area can be as wide as 150,000 hectares. It must be a huge drone and quite low-tech, considering the kuliglig-like sound it made, and that doesn’t make sense. A conspicuous and cranky drone doesn’t make sense. I must admit, though, that the only drone I’m familiar with was the one that Jeremy Renner shot down in The Bourne Legacy. So it might really be a drone. But the question is, What would a drone be doing in Kulaman Plateau? My best conjecture is that it was a U.S. drone looking for the other two terrorists that the PNP-SAF failed to neutralize in Mamasapano. Usman and Amin Baco might have sought shelter in the camp of Moro rebels in the municipality of Palimbang, southwest of Senator Ninoy Aquino. I’m not saying of course that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is coddling the terrorists. I’m just saying that, just like what happened in Mamasapano, the terrorists might be hiding in an MILF territory without the knowledge or consent of the MILF leadership. Again, let me emphasize that this is merely a conjecture. I think it’s the fictionist in me who wrote the preceding couple of sentences. I’m merely exploring—and hopefully eliminating—the rumored but unlikely explanations for the bizarre incident. I still have more reasons to believe that the object was a private plane.
So if it was a private plane, why has there been no explanation or public call for help from the family or associates of the possible victim or victims? One possible reason is that the plane was doing or carrying something not legal, and the people who arranged the flight didn’t want the authorities to get wind of their activities. (Many people in the plateau have the suspicion that the plane was carrying Yamashita gold bars, and they’re wishing to stumble on the wreckage.) Another possible reason—and the religious may pray that this is really it—is that the plane was able to land safely despite the engine trouble. This isn’t impossible. As I’ve narrated earlier, the last sound coming from the sky was almost similar to that of a normal airplane. The rumbling became faint, but it didn’t end with an explosion, at least as what my ears caught. So if it was a private plane, what could it be doing in Kulaman Plateau? Maybe it was just supposed to pass and it had another destination. Maybe it was carrying an official or owner of the powerful logging company that operates in the area; the plane might have just been hired or might be owned by the company or the owner of the company. Investigators should ask a statement from the company. (And while they’re at it, they may ask the company why it doesn’t seem to have had any corporate social responsibility projects in the decades that it has been operating, stripping Kulaman Plateau of its virgin forests.)
Some people thought that the sound was caused by a bomb or bombs. It wasn’t. It didn’t sound like any of the bombs or missiles that I’ve seen explode in movies and documentaries. It didn’t sound like the improvised explosive device that went off some seventy meters away from our house in Isulan, several years ago. I don’t want to go into so much details about this. It wasn’t a bomb or any form of ordnance. Some people suggested that it might be the debris of the satellite that was expected to fall, but the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration has denied this. The agency said that the satellite was still in orbit when the strange sound was heard. I don’t see any reason why NASA would lie, and as far as I know, a metallic object or a meteor falling from the sky—in the remote chance that it’s not yet burned up—wouldn’t sound like a truck engine.
To sum up, here are the things that I’m sure of about the source of the sound: (1) It was traveling in the sky. (2) It had an engine. (3) Its engine malfunctioned. Here are the things that I heard from other people and that might be true: (1) It looked like a plane. (2) A part of it was burning. I’m also sure that: (1) It was not a passenger plane. (2) It was not a bomb.
And the million-dollar question: Was it a spaceship? Many of the people in the plateau are thinking so, and that’s primarily because the authorities cannot give any reasonable explanation, and if the authorities don’t do anything further, the spaceship theory will surely become the best explanation for it. The Kulaman Plateau Mystery will tickle for sure the balls of UFOlogists, conspiracy theorists, and similar weirdoes. Imagine having at least 50,000 people as witnesses. All of them heard the sound, and dozens of them saw the object, and their descriptions are the same! This must be the biggest verifiable UFO sighting in the history of the world. I don’t mind if the rumor about aliens will spread. It might be the best way for people outside Kulaman Plateau to be interested in the matter. It might be the only way to persuade authorities or concerned organizations to conduct a thorough investigation. Let’s spread the lies and ignorant opinions so that we can solve the real mystery and find the truth.
While I was inside the house the previous Sunday, June 14, I heard an extremely loud rumbling from the sky. The sound made me so scared that I decided to go out of the house and glance around, expecting something enormous, metallic, and on fire to appear out of the clouds and come crashing down on me. The strange sound went on for about thirty seconds to a minute, and then the air became silent again, as it usually is in most part of Kulaman Plateau. It took me I guess a minute more to calm myself. When I went back inside the house, I forgot rather promptly what had happened. It didn’t occur to me again until lunchtime the next day, when CNN Philippines reported about unconfirmed “reports” about a “plane crash” here in Sultan Kudarat Province.
That could have been the end of it for me. News about plane crashes generally don’t pique my interest. I can’t give a definite reason for it; perhaps it’s because plane crashes get almost everyone excited, and the popularity turns me off, as what I normally feel about things popular. Even if the crash happened in Kulaman Plateau, I wouldn’t give it much attention, much less write about it. I decided to create this post, however, when I found out that the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines denied the occurrence of such an incident, or accident, as though hundreds of people in the plateau merely smoked hemp together and hallucinated the same thing.
The thing did happen, whatever it was. I heard the sound myself, and reportedly there were some people who saw something, specifically an object in the sky that exploded or was on fire. The claims are true, and the appropriate government agencies should investigate them. It is frustrating to think that this incident will likely remain a mystery forever, as what happened to the unsolved medical enigma that struck Sitio Parreño, Barangay Tinalon, last year. The residents of the hamlet butchered and ate a couple of horses that had fallen ill or died within hours of one another, and the meat made the people sick. More than a hundred suffered from headache, diarrhea, and vomiting, and seven people died. I heard that the Department of Health conducted an investigation. The doctors suspected that the affliction was caused by a virus, and this is both interesting and worrisome because horse-to-human viral transmission is very rare. (And I would like to call it SNAV or Senator Ninoy Aquino virus, after the name of our municipality). The results of the tests, however, were inconclusive, probably due to the difficulty of going to the remote area and sheer lack of willpower and incompetence on the part of responsible government workers.
Some people in my village estimate the sound to have lasted five minutes. Some say ten minutes. My own estimate, as mentioned earlier, is merely thirty seconds to a minute. I’m fairly sure of my calculation, even if I didn’t look at any watch or clock during or after the incident. Time seems to stretch ten-fold whenever all you are doing is observe something. This is what I often feel every time I cook instant mami or instant pancit canton and closely observe the boiling time. I don’t like the noodles to be soggy, and there are still remnants in me of my old obsessive-compulsive self, so I always make sure that the time that elapses from putting the noodles into the boiling water to removing the pot from the fire is no more than three minutes, as suggested in most packaging. During such waiting time, I often feel that a minute is as long as five minutes. Furthermore, when the 7.2-magnitude earthquake hit Bohol and Cebu about two years ago, I was in Cebu then on the fifth floor of an eight-story building, crouched between the upper and lower bunks of a double-deck bed, waiting for the whole world to collapse on me. The shaking and rumbling of my dormitory seemed to me to go on forever, but I learned later from the news that the temblor lasted for about forty seconds only. I knew since then that time could indeed be relative or our sense of time may not be synchronized with a mechanical device.
Stories about what people here heard or witnessed that moment will surely be less accurate by the day. I assume I don’t have to explain how our own memory can deceive us. So I’m setting out here today my own account, and I’ll try to be as accurate as I can be.
When I heard the strange sound, I was seated in the couch in our living room, reading Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout. I don’t know what time it was exactly. It must be between 8 a.m. and 12 noon. I’m sure that it was morning because electricity in our town runs for twelve hours only, from noon to midnight, and the lights were not yet on that time. The sound was like a thunder. Let me describe the volume. Imagine yourself inside your house while it is raining, and then you see a flash of lightning outside. I’m sure you’ve experienced that. When a lightning is that near, the thunder that accompanies it is usually so loud that it makes your chest vibrate. The strange sound was as loud as that. So I thought it was just a thunder. I expected it to die out within a few seconds. It went on, however, for a little too long for a thunder. After seven or eight seconds, I decided to check it out. I went out of the house through the backdoor.
The sound was obviously coming from the sky in the west, but I couldn’t see anything. The sky was almost filled with thick white clouds. I don’t believe in aliens, or in humanoid aliens that drive a saucer-like spaceship, but I thought that time that the sound was perfect for such a spaceship. It only seemed fitting for a spaceship to emerge out of the clouds and fly toward our house like a giant Frisbee. I guess I thought of a spaceship because the previous night, I caught on HBO some scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though the scenes I saw didn’t have a spaceship in them. I walked the length of our house toward the front yard. Because the noise was obviously not a thunder and sounded like a cranky engine of a large truck, I told myself that it must just be one of the very few six-wheeler trucks that ply our village. But there was no truck in sight; our house is far from the road. And a truck could only sound that loud if I was very near it, or my ears were pressed against its engine. It then occurred to me that the sound might be coming from a thresher; a harvest had been going on for a few days at the farm lot about fifty meters from our home lot. I looked at the farm and didn’t see any person or mobile machine. I also realized that threshers are for rice, and the crop in the farm is corn.
Twenty or thirty seconds since the sound erupted, it became fainter. It’s a plane, I thought. It’s just a plane, but it still sounds odd. I looked at the sky in the east, where I usually see passing planes to and from General Santos City, but clouds still kept me from seeing anything. After a few seconds more, the noise died down, and I became aware of another noise—a truck running in the road about a hundred meters downhill. I was sure it was a truck because it blew its horn. I was sure that that the earlier sound wasn’t a truck, but because the last thing I heard was something familiar and harmless, I didn’t dwell on the matter. I didn’t want my imagination to get away with me, because that happened a few months ago and I seriously hurt myself physically. (But this is another story.) I went back inside the house and continued reading my book.
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.
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.
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.
I have not written anything for this blog for the month of March—for the past several months, in fact, since I have just been cheating in my previous ten posts or so. Most of them are merely lifted from a book and other sources.
I got preoccupied with what I believe is an important project. I also just lost interest in updating this blog. For several days, I even made this blog private and seriously considered setting it so for good. You see, doing a thankless job can be draining. I don’t earn anything, money or otherwise, from writing in this blog, and every now and then I ask myself why the heck I continue doing this. I don’t have to, and sometimes I don’t want to.
For the said reason, I have resolved to update this blog just whenever I want to. I’ll stop trying to beat my self-imposed weekly deadline. On one hand, this will mean unpredictable schedule of posts. On the other hand, this might result to better-written posts. Only one thing is sure: I won’t close or delete this blog—at least for the next few months.
I no longer post selfies on Facebook, but I
can’t fully resist the temptation yet, so I’ll do it here—hopefully just this
time or for personal updates only. I’m catching fish here, by the way. When I
went to a relative’s house this Holy Week, in the mountainous half of
Bagumbayan town, we drained their fish pond because we abstained from eating
meat. I couldn’t resist the mud, so I waded in even if my huge wound on my feet
had not completely healed.
This post was supposed to be about my wishes and similar sh*t for 2015, but because I didn't get to finish "Last Post of the Year" yesterday, I'm continuing it here. There might be another brownout today, so I'll keep this short. Below is the list of the best decisions I made in 2014. As I mentioned yesterday, they had something to do with writing and Kulaman Plateau.
5. I applied (and got accepted) to the 14th Iyas National Writers Workshop and the 53rd Silliman University National Writers Workshop. I had so much fun in the one-week Bacolod workshop because I took a leave from work, while I feel that I didn't have as much fun as I could have in the three-week Dumaguete workshop because I had to be online to work for twenty hours every week. Don't misinterpret me, however. The Dumaguete workshop is the most enjoyable of the five workshops that I've attended so far. You can find more information about the workshops in my other posts or somewhere else in the web, so I won't give so much details about them here.
4. I left Silliman University. I don't say this with bitterness or any ill feeling. In fact, I will always look back with fondness at the days I spent in the school and the city of Dumaguete. I didn't want to leave, but because I was studying, teaching, and working at the same time, I couldn't find the time to write, and it sort of defeated my purpose in being a teaching fellow at Silliman. I wanted to improve as an aspiring writer, but my time was used up on learning how to write instead of actually writing. I realized that I didn't need to have a master's degree in creative writing to write more and write better.
3. I left my work in Cebu. Again, this is a happy goodbye. I enjoyed the company of my office mates and the opportunities that my company gave me. For several months in 2013, I led a small team of technical writers in Cebu and Ahmedabad. It was challenging and memorable to work with Indian nationals, especially because we had to communicate through online meetings and long-distance calls mostly. It was fun. But I wasn't editing and writing what my heart yearned for.
2. I came back home to write. I was able to revise four old stories, write six new stories, update this blog regularly, and finish the first draft of a one-hundred-thousand-word novel. Four of those stories have been published in 2014 or accepted for publication in 2015.
1. I stopped drinking. I observed that I couldn't write for three to five days after getting drunk. Alcohol doesn't make me creative or prolific, and I just have no f*cking idea how Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and their ilk did it. As for me, alcohol turns me into a zombie. One solution of course is to drink in moderation. But that won't work for me. Once I start, I can't stop. It must be in the genes. So the best solution is to stop before I start. This is not a New Year's resolution. I've been dry for the past few months, and I hope I'll continue to be for the rest of my life—or at least my writing life.
I feel that Facebook is too crammed with end-of-year nostalgic statuses, so I'll post mine here. Much of my life for the past 365 days, anyway, had something to do with writing and Kulaman Plateau.
Let's start with the best thing that happened to me. I think it's coming back home and writing a draft of a novel. Yes, that's right. I'm stating it publicly for the first time. I'm writing a novel. I know I'm supposed to be humble about it. I'm supposed to put the word novel in quotation marks or use the word attempt somewhere in the sentence. But what the heck. Wringing out one hundred thousand words from my brain was a difficult thing to do, regardless of the quality of those words, so allow me to congratulate myself.
The novel is primarily set in Cotabato City and about the sultanate of Maguindanao, but because there's a dearth of research materials about the subject and I have to use whatever I have, a significant part of the story has something to do with Kulaman Plateau. I still need a lot of revisions and polishing to do, and where the manuscript will go (hopefully not in a recycle bin or at the bottom of a slush pile) is something I look forward to in 2015.
Update: This post was not finished because the power went out. The local electric cooperative has been behaving badly after Christmas. Perhaps it already got its present from Santa and no longer cares about the naughty-or-nice list. But of course I'm not surprised that this is happening. Here in the boondocks, you're supposed to endure a lot of hardships.
We subscribe to Cignal, the most commonly used satellite TV provider here in the plateau. The brand irks me because it is often confused with the word signal. I have no major issues with its service, though. If memory serves me right, the package (a satellite dish, a box that looks like a CD player, cables, and a remote control) cost P3,999 and came with a four-month subscription. After that, we had to pay for the monthly subscription, the price of which depends on the number of channels you want. We subscribe to the cheapest package; for 300, we get to let all local channels kill our brain cells. It also has Al Jazeera and Korea’s Channel M.
A cellphone antenna, which works only for the phased-out Nokia 3310. We no longer use this because there’s always a problem with the phone, the wirings, or the signal. There’s also a normal (but not regular) cellphone signal in certain parts of the village, so as far as I know antennas such as this serve as mere decorations now. If you want a textmate from our boondocks, find someone from the town center, where the signal for major cellphone networks are more reliable. By the way, can you spot the moon in the photo?
Forget about climbing a coconut tree to find a cellphone signal. Here we do it atop cropped bamboo trunks. Locals call such a spot “signalan” or “texter’s zone.”
The cold climate of Kulaman Plateau allows the people in it to grow almost any kind of flower. My mother is one of those people who take advantage of the opportunity. In almost every house we’ve lived (we’ve moved three or four times just within our village), she would always turn the front yard into a flower garden. Heck, even the backyard.
My mother loves working the earth. It’s her garden that she tends to first thing in the morning. She studied agricultural economics, in fact, but by some twist of fate winded up a high school principal.
I’ve never lent a hand in weeding or landscaping the garden because the remnant of my old obsessive-compulsive self hates getting my hands dirty, but whenever I go back home and bum around, some people ask me if it’s the garden I get myself busy with. I politely and truthfully answer no. In fact, I began to appreciate the flowers in our yard just recently. I would barely glance at the garden before. Now, whenever I find time in my hands, I take photos of the flowers.
Below are some of my photos. Red anthuriums occupy more than half of the garden, but I find the purple and lavender flowers more attractive, so I chose the photos of the latter.
After days of staying at home revising a few stories, I woke up one Sunday with an unusual (for me) desire to walk around the village. There isn’t much to see in our Third World neighborhood, so I decided to visit an abandoned well near my old elementary school. The well is no longer in use because large pipes now carry water from springs nearby to large tanks at the center of the village, and a web of small pipes carry the water from the tanks to the houses.
The well is in the boundary of the campus and two or three private lots. It is at least a hundred meters away from the nearest classroom or house, and the area around it is sloping, so it looks as though it’s at the bottom of a basin—a marshy basin filled with weeds, vines, and trees. To get near the water source, I had to try two or three paths. Along the way, bushes or deep mud would block me.
The well is right at the heart of the village. Though the immediate vicinity of the well is not crowded, from above, it would look as though the village was built around the water source. Houses fan out from it. And it was indeed the center of village life. The village didn’t have a plaza. (The barangay hall with covered court was built only in the 1990s.) So the well was where the people normally socialized—while, of course, fetching water, bathing, or doing the laundry. No one could tell how many romances blossomed from the mundane activities the people engaged in at the well.
When I was a kid, I was in awe of this well because it seemed so big.
Coming back 17 years later, I’m surprised that it’s just
approximately the size of a four-foot drum.
I don’t have much memory of the well because my family, in the 1990s, lived far from the center of the village. Our home lot was wide, at least seven hectares maybe, and we had our own private well, though some neighbors would share with it. I remember, though, that the well near the elementary school was regarded as the well. It was the mother of all wells, the well of all wells, the well to end all wells. It was the largest, most accessible, most used, and most modern. While the other wells were made of rocks and soil, it was made of culvert. While the others were not even waist-high, it was deep enough for an adult to drown in it (if he’s drunk or dunked into the well headfirst). The water from it quenched the thirst, cleaned the bodies, and washed the clothes of dozens of people every day. It was a source of life, no less.
OK. I must stop now, before I hail the well the true, hidden location of the Garden of Eden.
Water still flows from the well, turning the place around it into a mini marsh, a sanctuary for common plant life and tiny animals. Mournful cries of crows have replaced the chatter of people. Residents of the village are probably happy that they no longer have to use the well. They no longer have to walk for a hundred meters and carry containers and heavy basins. I’m tempted to be sentimental and feel pity for the well, highly valued once but now forgotten. But I know that the water does not exist for human beings. It will continue to flow. It will continue to nurture whatever life-form wants to benefit from its natural powers.
After being gone for a year, I'm back here in Sultan Kudarat Province. This also happens to be my 100th post for this blog. So to mark these occasions, I'm giving you . . . photos of me!
Ha-ha. I'm just being vain, of course. I'm using these lame reasons to turn this blog into a Facebook or Instagram account. Cut me some slack, though. I let 99 posts pass before doing this. If you have noticed, aside from the About Me page, I don't have a photo of me anywhere in this blog. I did it on purpose. I wanted to post here as few personal stuff as possible. Also, whenever I wrote about something, I would choose only the most relevant or best-looking photos to accompany the text, and normally there would only be three to five photos. My selfies never made the cut.
Next to vanity, my purpose in posting my photos is to show you proofs that I have really been to the spots that I have featured in this blog. So one photo below is of me in the White Cave, in Sitio Siokong, Barangay Kuden, Senator Ninoy Aquino. Another one shows me at the top of Ilyan Hill. The photo has an accompanying one-minute video in another post, and I've written about the hill when I had not yet climbed it.
