Mama

Mama

 

Originally uploaded by anetz.

beautiful girl

outstanding student

studies interrupted by war.

 

chose love over all others

crossed seas

settled in land of promise

gentleman-farmer’s wife

life’s battler.

 

english high school teacher

bookkeeper

mother of eight

lost two sons who died for the country.

 

gardener and fruit tree grower

suffered a mild stroke

recovered

loving grandmother.

 

ageing gracefully

gathers wildflowers

still loves and quotes shakespeare

loves and quotes the bible more

heart of that family.

 happy birthday.

From Nick Joaquin’s Almanac for Manileños

Establishment of a normal school for teachers in Manila: 1865.

Inauguration of the first Philippine Republic in Malolos: 1899 

 

a letter opener from another friend

Hanunoo Mangyan Ambahan

 

Originally uploaded by anetz.

 

In the early days of the internet, in the early 90s, I became friends with those who had personal web pages. I had one myself. Now vanished in that particular presentation.

One of them, a lover of islands and an island person like myself, made me a gift or pasalubong, a homecoming gift, sent by mail after a holiday on his island.

It is a letter opener from a Mangyan Center. Incised into the bamboo body is a verse to friendship in the Mangyan syllabic script.

From Filipino Heritage Volume 2, page 566:

What sets the Southern Mindoro Mangyan really apart from the other groups on the island, however, is the daily use of their indispensable writing system.Centuries ago they must have acquired this art of writing, and no outside influence could take the tradition away. There are no formal teachers but the children can be seen eagerly copying the incised characters from the bamboo containers of their parents, relatives or older friends. With bamboo for paper and the sharp point of a small knife as pen, the young pupils practise the angular symbols, memorizing them. Nobody obliges them. It can generally be said that if a Mangyan knows the script, he must be a person with initiative and interested in undertaking something. Moreover, knowledge of the writing system sharpens greatly memory and intelligence.The existence of this syllabic script among these Mangyan has certainly helped them retain their traditional folklore literature which is expressed in poems, chants, folk tales and riddles. Over and over again, these are written down on bamboo and copied by the following generation.

two cards from a friend

two cards from a friend

Originally uploaded by anetz.

It is 2008. At the start of the year I thought of all the friends I have made.From the time I was a little girl called dagsa or driftwood because we were not originally from that barrio.

I learned to fit in by speaking the dialect which was different from the one I spoke at home with family. Most of my classmates could not afford any kind of footwear, so I hid shoes or wooden clogs in the bushes along the roadside while walking to school.

Whenever we had to speak English in school, I made sure that I sounded just like my classmates. Whenever I had to speak it in my mother’s presence, I had to speak it the way she taught us to speak it, in her English teacher’s way.

Later, many of my friends were penfriends. I was always reaching out to the farthest points of the globe it seemed. The written word fascinated me. So did captured images, photographs. My grandfather encouraged me. We searched the pen pal section of the Philippine Free Press for likely candidates for my pre-pubescent yearnings.

These cards are from a friend who was a well known photographer. She took photographs of people she admired, as a passion, apart from the photographs she took for a living. These people were mainly writers.

So there was this confluence of photography and words again.

We were not to meet. She lives in my memory now that she no longer lives to photograph her beloved Paris.

She also lives on in the letters and cards she wrote me. And these will live on after I am gone in the archives of a university library.

I still have friends whose lines of love are cast over the seas and through space. I do likewise.

It is still possible to have beautiful, sustaining friendships in this troubled world.

Often I see film clips of devastated areas- bombings, civil wars, droughts, natural disasters in the evening news on television. Many are made to sound as if they were the nest of nothing else but terrorists and the most impoverished with unenlightened leaders.

But I know otherwise. I have friends there.

On a one to one basis that friendship is, a country becomes better known.

There is always a heart.

There is always a soul.

Aliwagwag Falls

Untamed beauty

Originally uploaded by anetz.

All those years growing up in Cateel, all those holidays from university and work, this was a name that for me conjured unseen beauty and mystery.

It was said to be accessible only by motorboat if the occupants were willing to disembark to drag it over slippery boulders. This was to be done for a series of thirteen rapids. I don’t know if this was true.

We have a propensity to choose those magical numbers: siete, trece … seven, thirteen. Old carpenters and home builders used to recite oro, plata, mata to determine the number of steps in the main stairs leading to our salas. To make it end on  oro – gold. Always. For good luck.

There were no photographs. The lenses of cameras fogged up in the vicinity of the falls especially in the afternoon.

Then the bridge was built. Aliwagwag Falls became accessible.

The rainforest around it also became accessible to illegal loggers. One overloaded truck caused the bridge to collapse and that killed several people.

The load? Logs.

It is no longer too misty to take photographs, even in the late afternoon when a light drizzle falls.

When I took this photograph, a thought came unbidden: are there no longer enough trees in the surrounding rainforest? The fog did not obscure my camera lens. Or was that fine day just my buenas, my suerte? My good luck.

January 19

Banning by royal decree, of the Masonic Order in the Philippines: 1812. 

Third Sunday of the month which this year falls on the 20th is Holy Name Sunday, the fiesta of Tondo, Pandacan, Cebu City and other shrines of the Santo Niño. 

 

from Nick Joaquin’s Almanac for Manileños 

 

kurob

kurob 

Originally uploaded by anetz.

This was the kurob of my childhood. In the cycle of amihan, rice planting and rice harvesting, it was the prelude to the third stage, harvesting. When we went to the kurob, the rice was ripening and notice had been given to the pivotal persons in the barrio grapevine that the Reynes ricefield would soon be ready. It was a makeshift affair, usually quickly constructed from wood, bamboo and nipa by my father and another man, sometimes two men. After the harvest it was usually dismantled and the nipa thatching kept in storage with other materials for the main house’s maintenance.

For us children, it was an annual pilgrimage which smacked of a grand adventure. My parents would pile us up on the kangga which was like a big sled built from bamboo and hardwood, pulled by a water buffalo or carabao. Before this it had been different pots and pans, a half barrel and several kerosene cans of drinking and cooking water, food supplies, clothes and a small number of reading material.

A ritual that went with the harvest season like an opening ceremony was making pinipig. Rice which was not quite ready for harvest yet, still with a minute quantity of the milky juice that made it soft, not quite brown but greenish was harvested then dry roasted. It was then pounded to the quick rhythm of the harvesters’ strong tempo. When they finished and the grains were separated from the husks, the product was fragrant, flat-grained rice pinipig. This was mixed with sugar and milk and again pounded in the meticulously cleaned wooden lusong. Then the final product was moulded into attractive shapes on fire-softened young banana leaves. That is if the waiting children could be held off for such matters of aesthetics! It kept very well.

We learned special things during our stay there. For example, I learned to be ready for the owl’s sudden screech and powerful swish of wings early mornings in the ricefield and not to be startled witless by them. It always seemed like it waited until I was just three feet or so away before it took flight. That heavy dew sparkled like fat diamonds on the leaves of weeds between paddies, fat and wet enough to wet one’s feet and legs. That the orchids with the dove-shaped white flowers hanging along the banks of the Tagada-o River had such a powerful fragrance that if you inhaled it for a long time, it would make you sneeze. That if you left footprints in the gray mud along the river banks and it was low tide the following day, then you would most likely find small fishes in your footprints where water remained until the next high tide. That it was easy to capture the fish in your scooped hands, take them home in a can of river water but they did not survive on the diet of rice, although mudfish sometimes did. The same with trying to steal and foster the downy gray chicks of the long legged tugtug, newly hatched from their brown flecked eggs- they died or if they survived early days, then the family cat which also made the move to the kurob as an essential member because it was the sole pest control unit would kill it.

One learned to stay away from the little paths that led to heartbreak.

One day when we were at the kurob, my parents left me in charge of my younger siblings while they were in a place called Bagidanan to collect rice owed us. This was common practice that people who ran out of their rice supply early would borrow rice from those who still had it and pay it back in the next harvest season. I was just a little girl but responsible, able to cook rice and look after the baby. This time though it was night and my parents hadn’t come back. I had the rice cooking on an iron tripod but the baby cried and cried and wouldn’t stop. My Tio Joe and his wife and all my cousins were also in a kurob on the other half of the ricefield. They must have have heard the baby’s cries. He came over to our kurob and took the baby from me. Relieved, I finished cooking the rice.

Soon all was quiet.I went out into the night and looked for my uncle and the baby. They were up on the huyaban. This is a very high ladder made of the tallest bamboos one could find, with a small platform at the top shaded by a small nipa roof. My father and his men separated the chaff from the grain here by waiting for winds to blow and when they were just the right strength pouring the rice in a steady stream on to a big reed mat below . The chaff gathered in mounting piles at the sides outside the mat. When all was still, the men would take to a long drawn whistle supposed to call up the wind.

Tio Joe had taken the baby up there. He sat on the platform humming a song, the baby asleep in his arms.

Leksyon 4

Matignaw duon haw gatilitili. Madayaw sa kay dugay da wa maguwan ngani. Yangkatahay da tanan yang mga lupa, kaigay yang mga karnero haw baka. Amo ngani na duha da ka adlaw yang mahimo magbisbis ng mga garden- Miyerkoles haw Domingo. Isa ka adlaw, hambong awon pay ikita ko na sakyanan imarkahan Water Patrol. Galibot-libot ngini yagahanap daw awon masakpan na gabisbis na wa sang oras na itugutan: bag-o magalasdiyes ng masusum haw lampas alas cuatro ng hambong. Kaluoyay ng Australia. Pero usahay isab hunahuna ko yang mga farmers sobra yang istock na mga karnero. Madaigay sud sang lupa na bagas agaw pero way sagbut haw pila ka semana na dili magauwan. Sang kanato pirme sa magtilitili haw dum. Mahimo gihapon na magsalig sang uwan na sawdon sang tangke para imnon. Sang Manila bagyohanon gihapon. Baha yang problema.

Kinateel da isab para madugangan yang kanmo leksyon

Sin-o yang ama mo? or Unan ngan ng ama mo? Who is your father? or What is your father’s name?

Sin-o yang ina mo? or Unan ngan ng ina mo? Who is your mother? or What is your mother’s name?

Pila kamong maglumon or Pila yang lumon mo? How many siblngs do you have?

From Nick Joaquin’s Almanac for Manileños:

November 6
Revolt of Rajah Lakandula: 1574

Here is a film posted by mcgym at youtube.com. It shows neighbouring Caraga and its celebration of Madyaw Karajao courtesy of the Caraga Department of Tourism. The place and people are very reminiscent of Cateel and Mandayas.

Leksyon 2

Matignaw duon haw gatilitili. Madayaw sa kay dugay da wa maguwan ngani. Yangkatahay da tanan yang mga lupa, kaigay yang mga karnero haw baka. Amo ngani na duha da ka adlaw yang mahimo magbisbis ng mga garden- Miyerkoles haw Domingo. Isa ka adlaw, hambong awon pay ikita ko na sakyanan imarkahan Water Patrol. Galibot-libot ngini yagahanap daw awon masakpan na gabisbis na wa sang oras na itugutan: bag-o magalasdiyes ng masusum haw lampas alas cuatro ng hambong. Kaluoyay ng Australia. Pero usahay isab hunahuna ko yang mga farmers sobra yang istock na mga karnero. Madaigay sud sang lupa na bagas agaw pero way sagbut haw pila ka semana na dili magauwan. Sang kanato pirme sa magtilitili haw dum. Mahimo gihapon na magsalig sang uwan na sawdon sang tangke para imnon. Sang Manila bagyohanon gihapon. Baha yang problema.

Kinateel da isab para madugangan yang kanmo katigaman

Sin-o yang ama mo? or Unan ngan ng ama mo? Who is your father? or What is your father’s name?

Sin-o yang ina mo? or Unan ngan ng ina mo? Who is your mother? or What is your mother’s name?

Pila kamong maglumon or Pila yang lumon mo? How many siblings do you have?

From Nick Joaquin’s Almanac for Manileños:

November 6
Revolt of Rajah Lakandula: 1574

Isa ka leksyon

Gusto kaw matigam magkinateel? Sige basaha:

Unan yang kanmo ngan? What is your name?

Ha-in kaw maghuya? Where do you live?

Pila yang kanmo idad? How old are you?

Sang-awon

Madayaw na pag-abot ngani sang Sang-awon. Ngani hapit lumbos dabawenyo/kinateel yang kamayo mabasa. Awon gihapon masagol na sebuano, ininglis haw tagalog kay amo sa ngini yang kanak tiniyaban haw personal. Sugdan ko ngini haw magsugud da yang bag-o na panahon sang kanak kinabuhi. Istoryahan ta kamo daw uno uno. Dili magdugay sugdan da ta. Du-on ga-andam pa lang ako. Dili pa completo yang tanan na kinahanglan. Mada-igay yang ilista, daw dili matapos isa-isahon!

Para sang mga gusto awon makamang na madayaw bisan wa pa magsugod ngining kanak istorya, ini isa ka entry gikan sang Almanac for Manileños ni Nick Joaquin. Bisan dili kitang tanan mga Manileño, daw madayaw gihapon kasayudan ngini.

November 5
The “Republic of Negros” is proclaimed in Bago town by Generals Juan Araneta and Aniceto Lacson: 1898.