Three
months before that dreaded Martial Law was proclaimed by the late strongman
Ferdinand E. Marcos, I was born. That was 1972. Three years later, my younger
sister also came, and unfortunately the Marcos-sequestered wood industry, the
Aguinaldo Development Corporation (ADECOR) where my father had worked went bankrupt,
many were jobless during those days, and my father was one of them. The rise of
insurgency, the civilians’ distrust on our abusive military men, the incessant threat
of secessionist groups to form an independent Islamic state in Mindanao and
added to these arrays of destabilizing forces was the unabated labor unrest that
had plagued many industries all over the country then. My mother had kept her
job as a rank and file employee in a Catholic- run hospital; managed by the Dominican
Sisters then. Ours was a typical family that had our simple luxury of drinking
a Coke during paydays, commonly every end of the month. We shared a bottle of family
size soda, equally filled our five Nescafe
glasses, after we were done with our once- a- month sumptuous meal of Pancit and Lumpia.
Magugpo was the familiar name, as my late grandfather told me about the place. Before the war, many settlers coming from Visayas and Luzon were encouraged by the government to populate Mindanao Island by distributing tracts of lands purposely to entice more new comers-homesteaders. My Lolo mentioned that Magugpo was swampy and was infested with blood-sucking leeches; he concluded then that it was unfit for growing Abaca hemps and corn crops, and he quipped that only Bakhaw (Mangrove trees) would be ideal for planting. From then on, he had chosen to settle in Dujali, which was part of the reservation area of the Davao Penal Colony.
Magugpo was the home of Aeta, Manobo, Kalagan and Mansaka tribes. Some local historians found out that the name Magugpo was a compound tribal words, mago and ogpo. Mago means tall, and ogpo means trees. Our local historians were able also to collate their findings from interviews on elderly and pioneer settlers on the origin of the name. Tall trees of unnamed species abound in the place, so that the local settlers had to climb on top of those trees in order to have a glimpse of the elusive sunlight during daytime.