Bapa's Notes: January 2013

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January 2013

01/29/2013

Nangahanaw nga Kalasangan

Trees are gifts. Our dwindling forest is enough proof of the abuse done on these natural gifts. It was in the 1950s up to early part of the 1980s, our natural forests were all ravaged by logging companies ran by Filipino magnates who were long gone, whose corpses were now decomposed by microbes, the same breed of microbes that are responsible in making soils fertile, a good place for growing of trees. What was left of those forests are only the crumbs of second growth, or maybe third, fourth or at the extreme the nth generation of trees.

Who utilized those gifts? It was largely sold to wealthy foreign nations through importation. Economically advance nations that have successfully preserved their own natural forests, they have kept it untouched, and are meant to sustain their nations’ survival for the next untold number of years, decades or centuries. And the deforested third -world countries like ours will have to perpetually depend on those rich economies for our own survival too.

As a nation, we just failed to learn from our history. Yesterday, it was our trees, today it is now our human resources. They are leaving our country by the thousands; nothing is stopping our countrymen’s exodus towards those rich nations who were once the traducers of our past natural riches. These wealthy nations have kept their natural resources intact because they shrewdly bought and imported from poor countries like us the necessary resources that had built their advance economies.

No wonder, these powerful economies have celebrated their triumph of successfully preserving their natural forest, showcasing before the world their glorious feat of keeping their 700 years old trees, their untouched national heritage and many tourists of varied nationalities have swooned into their National Parks by the thousands every year, giving accollades, write ups and praises about the uncommon dedication of these nations towards their natural resources. Their nature sites were regularly featured on many international publications, and cable TV channels, lauding these nations of their discipline in keeping their nature unscathed, without telling the world also as to how they had exploited many helpless and poor countries by indiscriminate importation of logs coming from poor countries.

And we all saw how nature vindicates itself. We saw how nature avenged itself from atrocities done against her in the past and even nowadays. And we also realized that nature’s wrath cannot be stopped by whatever formidable barriers built by those powerful economies. We also saw the futility of the advance engineering designs of these nations' megastructures being torn down by nature's unimaginable wrath. We all had seen how nature’s wrath have humbled down the megacities –built and founded through countless years, maybe decades or perhaps centuries- only to be melt down, vanished by just hours of tsunamis. It literally obliterated those megacities from its past geoposition, as shown by the satellite-generated aerial maps. Or was it an apocalyptic pronouncement that was written: “….and for destroying those who destroyed the earth.”(Rev.11:18)?

Time is beholden by nature. Our ravaged forest during the 50s up until the early parts of the 80s is lost forever. Irretrievable, it was. It was desecrated and terrorized by the restless roaring of chainsaw machines, cutting down our precious heritage, transporting those logs loaded on trucks towards awaiting gigantic cargo vessels docking on many privately owned wharves surrounding Mindanao then. It was our forest woods used by a nation that built their great Gazebo structures, our woods were crafted into intricately sculpted carvings and fixtures found inside their emperor’s palace. Maybe nature was too tempered, too tolerant, and lenient during those decades.

Was nature unforgiving and vindictive? Maybe mankind’s crimes against nature since time immemorial have piled up, and there wasn’t enough room to store those crimes anymore, and suddenly nature’s storehouse of wrath broke off, as if nature fights back maybe for her own preservation. And in the first decade of this millennium we all have seen what devastation nature could do to mankind.

One Mindanao daughter has aptly composed her poem entitled Palihug:

Palihug

by Fe Echavia Remotigue*

Ayaw’g tunla

ang among mga kahoy

kay dinhi nagagakos

ang duyan sa mga langgam

Ayaw’g kastigoha

ang mga kahoy

kay gigakos nila

ang tabunok nga yuta

Ayaw’g hiwaa

ang kabukiran

kay siya ang kaban

sa mga mina sa bulawan

Ayaw’g titia

ang dugos sa kagubatan

kay kini ang among kalibutan

ang among kinabuhi.

* a member of Women in Literary Arts (WILA), a contributor- writer of the book Anthology of Women Writers from the South.

Posted at 05:55 PM in artists, environmental issues, pinay, pinoy concern, tagum | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/25/2013

Emerging

Not as in the old days I pray, God.

My life is not what is was.

Yours, too, accepts the presence of the machine?

Once I would have asked healing.

I go now to be doctored, to drink sinlessly of

the blood of my brother,

to lend my flesh as manuscript of the great poem of the scalpel.

I would have knelt long, wrestling with you, wearing you down.

Hear my prayer, Lord, hear my prayer.

As though you were deaf, myriads of mortals have kept up

their shrill cry, explaining your silence by their unfitness.

It begins to appear this is not prayer is about.

It is the annihilation of difference,

the consciousness of myself in you,

of you in me; the emerging

from the adolescence of nature

into the adult geometry of the mind.

I begin to recognise anew, God of form and number.

There are questions we are the solution to,

others whose echoes we must expand to contain.

Circular as our way is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted

garden, but onward to the tall city

of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

by R.S.Thomas, from the collection of poems, Laboratories of the Spirit (London:Macmillan, 1975)

Posted at 11:06 AM in Religion | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

01/18/2013

Seemingly Untouchables

That lurid Antimonan incident which rocks the echelon of the whole bureaucracy now sends a chilling warning against motorists that are using these commemorative plates for the ill-purpose of evading apprehension by government authorities on various crimes, from minor violations like driving without license and to a more serious breach of transporting of unlicensed firearms. Commemorative plates are sold and issued by LTO to all interested motorists as part of the agency’s additional source of revenue and many motorists, seizing the opportunity bought and used these plates bearing names like PMA, PNPA, NBI, CIDG, others even used plates bearing names like “LAWYER”, “MAYOR”, “CONGRESSMAN” and more.

Does the use of these commemorative plates exempt the motorists from routine inspection done by our law enforcers? It was a mindset that should be exposed to criticism. If a vehicle bearing a commemorative plate like PMA ’88, does it follow that the driver or the passenger of such vehicle is a member of PMA Class 1988? It can be unlikely. If I am the Police officer manning the check point, should this vehicle bearing the plate PMA ’88 be accorded an unusual courtesy different with the other vehicles bearing ordinary plate numbers?

If it was a government vehicle, bearing a red plate, should it be exempted from the usual inspection done by police officers manning the check point? Is this a proletarian mindset that accords unusual honor to those in power? Why does there are varied intensity in the enforcement of the law? Who decides what?

If it was the government’s goal to augment its revenue by selling commemorative plates like those being mentioned here. Are they not playing with natural propensity of all motorists to violate the laws of the land? Are they not indiscriminately enforcing our motorists to violate some laws? It’s a dilemma indeed for the issuing agency, because on the two opposite ends of the pole are real cause and effect. On the one end is the agency’s aim of selling more commemorative plates to generate more revenues, on the other end, these plates were being used by unscrupulous motorists whose ill-motive is to escape apprehension and keep their criminal activities undetected by the serious pursuit of our dedicated crime busters, the PNP and the AFP.

Who would like to buy these commemorative plates that bear names such as: “CARNAPPER”, “GUN SMUGGLER”, “DRUG DEALER”? Nobody in his right mind would buy these, even if you give these to motorists in exchange for a sum of money, for them to put these odd plates on their SUVs.

Posted at 04:03 PM in pinoy concern, pinoypolitics, State policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

01/14/2013

Odong and Tinapa

Our buds were tamed at that time. Within the stretch of five months, we were served with similar dishes throughout the duration of countless batches of seminars. Those dishes were widely popular among local executive hotels, and the pride offerings of well-informed restaurateurs in the city. From breakfasts, lunches and suppers, we were served with the same dishes prepared by their in-house chef. I was with a developmental works among our banana farmers during those days. I was designated as documentation staff for all those equipping and retooling exercise among our farmers. Our group rhetorically termed those efforts as capability building for our grassroot banana farmers. Such advocacy and extension works were already applied and tested in Latin American countries where banana farming was also prevalent.

My boss never complained for the first three weeks of continuous serving of the same dishes. Our capability building seminar lasted Five months among the eight hundred lowland banana farmers. We split them into numerous manageable batches until the last week of the Fifth month. We hooked up with a garden resort as our training venue, located just below the place of another non government organization (NGO) with an advocacy on the preservation of wild life habitat at the foothills of Mt. Apo, and on propagating by artificial incubation our endangered bird species, the Philippine Monkey-eating Eagle.

Until our taste buds were blunted with the familiarity of the foods that were served to us within three straight weeks, and my boss finally resolved to ask for a relief. We then pleaded with the venue hosts for a change of the foods being served to us, members of the training staffs. We even asked the management if they could serve us with the ordinary Odong and Tinapa just to give our taste buds a break from their entire world class menu. Unfortunately, our venue hosts graciously declined our request. We could not budge them to serve us with such too trivial dish, too simple, too ignoble to be included from among their long list of world class menu.

Perhaps Odong and Tinapa (O&T) is the only dish one could never find in any menu in several food courts, because it is not worth offering or even appealing to their highly sophisticated, urban-finesse guests and customers. O&T is just a home dish, prepared only when “nothing else” can be cooked and served for a meal. O&T is not worth displaying, not even worth tasting for some cultured pinoys. Maybe our host’s chef considered our ridiculous request as an affront to his hard earned degree in acclaimed culinary school, or they misunderstood it as degradation for such a highly esteemed profession. We knew that they were not trained in culinary schools, and went into on the job training (OJT) on some famous executive hotels downtown only to be asked to prepare such an underrated dish of Odong and Tinapa.

Back to our venue host, they partially heed to our request for a temporary relief by adding a dose of fried dried fishes and Pinakbet in lieu of our requested ordinary O&T, and such a dish at that particular time, just reminded us that the simple, the common, the unsophisticated is still the best. It was as if, we revolted against the conventional preference of that classy gastronomic world, when we craved then for that old time best dish of Odong and Tinapa, or they just simply ignored us and prejudicially branded us then as tagabukid, whose minds were undernourished by such dish with unknown nutritional value, our lowly, Odong and Tinapa. And I just mused over our natural simplicity then.

Posted at 02:48 PM in Adventures, Food and Drink, pinoy concern, pinoyfood | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/02/2013

Talicud Island

Talicud Island could be an ideal place for an incommunicado, away from the fast- pace urban life which is now slowly contaminating Davao region, the once touted backdoor economy of the South. And such inevitable change will drastically result to a demand of unimaginable ecological sacrifice, unknown to many. This could be our last glimpse of the untouched rural in this part of the region. An islet, approximately 2,000 hectares in area, consisting of four barangays, and can be reached by two known routes, one, through a 20 minutes boat ride from Kaputian, a district of Island Garden City of Samal and the other one is through an hour and half ferry -boat ride from mainland Davao City at Sta. Ana wharf.

Within the islet, a strange sights of protruding fossils of coral reefs can be seen everywhere. Most households in the place are literally building their houses upon a rock! (I surmised that these are not sedimentary rocks as commonly seen in most coastal areas in the region; these are remains of some century old coral reefs). The clay type soil of the islet is identical with the soils of the mining sites of coastal Davao City, where a world renown multinational cement manufacturer sprawl over the industrial estate in the coastal Tibungco, and operating an open pit mine that have radically changed the landscape of northern Davao City into a bald, disrobed and bulldozed mountains, disrupting the ecological balance of the place.

The old and abandoned open pit mine of the then Bacnotan cement now stands as an ugly remembrance of the once rich ecology of coastal Tibungco where my grandfather, a pioneer from Bohol, adding variety to his agrarian endeavor in the highlands of Mahayag, alternating his activity from farming to fishing, and vice versa, it is a kind of breaking the monotony of livelihood, sagely trying to arrest that pernicious effect of boredom which had killed many at young age. Such stress- busting work- variation could also be an attribute to the veritable long life that my grandfather had enjoyed before he died at the rich age of 95!

Those abandoned Bacnotan Cement open pit mine also depict a silence known only in cemeteries and memorial parks, a graveyard where repose is the past rich ecology of the area, buried in the place were the following: the pristine river teemed with fresh water fishes, the forest trees where flocks of birds safely perching for a respite from a daylong food gathering, wild cats intently crouching, set for an ambush for their long awaited prey, reptiles awaiting for scavenging of the left over by other carnivorous predators that have frolicked over the forest, and the priceless heritage that could have been enjoyed and utilized by the present generation. That sanctuary was also the fishing and hunting ground of my kindred who came over to find assortment to their seemingly perpetual dish of Law-oy in their farmlands.

Samals are the local natives of the place and they peacefully cohabited with the Dabawenyos and the fisherfolks adventurers Tausugs or Jolohanos that generously thrived in the shorelines of Talicud.

Talicud island has preserved its agrarian living that dates back countless decades before the arrival of the first Bisaya in the area. One pioneer from Cebu, Pedro Tangag arrived in the island during the late 30’s, barely a decade earlier before the Second World War broke out. Only a handful of landowners owned the island and they are mostly residents of Davao City, a positive reality that have temporarily put on hold the irreversible industrialization and urban living that currently infeasting the nearby across- the- gulf cities of Davao, Panabo, and Tagum. The strait that lies between Samal and Talicud islands may have kept at bay all the unstoppable consequences of urban development and the inevitable destruction of untold Million dollars worth of ecology of Talicud.

But I surmised to conclude that nobody has the power to stop the future imminent ecological change of Talicud Island. There is no cul-de-sac or some kind of dead end to all this unstoppable motion towards “development”. Even though there could be some Zealots among us who would act as vanguards for this cause, but mortality makes it impossible for us to perpetually guard the unavoidable future displacement and the tearing down of the natural Talicud.

Talicud could be described by experts as the last remaining frontier of Davao region. There was this amusing theory about the existence of Talicud Island. About million years ago, an unprecedented climate change have killed innumerable species of Dinosaurs, unimaginably wiping them out from the face of the earth.

The theory was that a gigantic sea creature died in this part of Davao Gulf and during its postmortem decay, it became a fertile host of millions of soil and marine microbes that readily thronged and thrived. The complete details of the birth of Talicud as explained and told. The death of a sea creature comparable in size to the much publicized Lochness Sea monster had served as the biological corner stone that hosted millions of microorganisms (our unseen microscopic earth janitors, also known as saprophytic microbes) that in turn hosted also a variety of macro organisms and ultimately hosted the original flora and fauna species in the area. It took countless number of years until the completion of such complex biological construction that gave birth to the natural Talicud Island. One should check on these things when visiting the Island.

Some readings could be worth doing on the subject of ecocriticism like the one published by a bioengineer writer, the late Mia Erdmann whose first book, Hitched to Everything: Literature and the Unseen World. The best quote from such work is:

“Living things, faced with the pressure of changing habitat, must adapt or move.The only third choice is death. If the literary mode wants to survive the catastrophic climate change we ourselves have engineered, it must do the same.”