The Good Herb

 

In the last three days, my boy has agreed to take the Oregano tea to ease the soreness of his throat. 

Whipping up the delicious dream!

This morning, I tried baking a banana cake with raisin inside my humble oven toaster which does not have temperature control. I don’t know why, but mixing the ingredients and pouring the batter into the pan simply relaxes me.

There are some things that I missed

I am surprised to discover that I only posted five blogs for the entire year last year.  I failed to mark the coming of the new year and the going away of the old because I'd been working nonstop since July 2018, and the workload never allowed me to breathe all through the year. At Christmas and the New Year, I was simply too tired to celebrate. I even remember battling with sickness while I was doing the usual work overload.  My memory comes in fragments now because of fatigue. 
Since I arrived here in July last year, my days have been bleeding into each other,  the nights becoming days and nights into days, I could no longer tell one from the other.  At times--and it's because I edit the stories fast before they go out to the world as news, I oftentimes get the feeling that the headlines are stale when I see them in the morning. I get the feeling that they happen the other day or the day before that, instead of just yesterday. 
Sometimes an excruciating pain shoots up from my back somewhere and I begin to be afraid of things that I don't understand about spines and lumbar column or whatever they are called. I want to read and learn more about them but the breaking stories keep me occupied. The breaking news, they get in the way of everything I do. They even awaken me from sleep in the middle of the night. I long for simple things--like reading a good book at a leisurely pace in the middle of the garden or eating pizza with my boys at a table near a big window. 
The other day, I got a message from Prateeh but I was too busy when it arrived, I can't even put a finger on the goddamn phone. When I replied, Prateeh must have already gone too far away to even see it. I want to sit down and read a book without anyone disrupting me. The thing that I loved most working in Makati was reading The NewYorker everyday and listening to the Fiction podcast until I drowse off to sleep.  Now all I hear in the morning is the sound of gunfire.

Simply for the love of horses

They were not mistaken when they asked me to cover the country's longest running horse show and competition at the Riverfront Stables in Maa, which opened today and will run in the next three days. By acting just like an ordinary journalist, I get to ask questions and know more about these most magnificent and fascinating of creatures. For a long time now, I have secretly nourished this love for horses.

Elegy to the Laua-an Forest

Near the boundary of the land, where my Pa has left his imprints in the last 50 years, stands a lone Bunwang tree, known for its softness (a liability in the world that is obsessed with hardwood, the unquenchable demand of which fuel the wholesale devastation of timber forests.)
“It’s the only tree that is left of the logging,” says Pa. “No one wants it because it’s soft.”
“It’s a big tree, with broad leaves,” he keeps saying, as if, until now, he is still amazed by its uselessness. “It’s not durable and it’s not good for furniture,” blurts out Ma, who thinks I merely want a nice bookstand for the books we carried home in a jutesack.
So, I stand there, too stunned to say a word, unsure whether to feel glad or sad, about the lone tree that is left standing because people couldn’t find any use for it.
When my father arrived in this part of Davao from his hometown in Capiz in one of the islands of the Visayas, the forest that would later turn into his copra farm in Upper B’la had been teeming with Laua-ans. Later, these magnificent trees that littered the land for hundreds of years were cut and fed to the sawmills by logging concessionaires who had stripped the land of trees for lumber.
“Over a hundred Laua-ans in every hectare of land,” Pa estimates. “Trunks as big as drums," he says, "Maybe, even bigger. So tall, you have to cut them down many times to make them easier to handle.”
I find it hard to grasp the tragedy that had befallen the forest.
Afterwards, when the land was stripped bare, settlers like my Pa began buying parcels after parcels of land from the Bagobos, and planted them with crops. This is ironic because the Bagobos, whose ancestral land covers much of the Mt. Apo areas that stretch from what is known today as Davao city's Toril district down to the boundaries of North Cotabato, never used to believe in that foreign concept called land ownership.
“They’d sell the land, then, move deeper into the forest,” says my Pa, who thought that the sale of the land was as real as the buy and sell of goods in the market. He bought one parcel from Ayok, Bagobo. He bought another parcel from another Bagobo named Bansalan, and so on.
Again, I was too stunned to say a word, as I try to grasp the complexity of what happened: the betrayal, even the sell-out, of some members of the tribe of their own ancestral beliefs just to extract a measly sum from the equally unsuspecting (albeit ignorant) settlers.
For according to the Bagobo’s worldview, the land is not for sale.
For a Bagobo wise man, it actually sounds stupid and hilarious for a man to claim ownership of a piece of land.
“How could you claim to own the land?” I remember an old Matigsalug Datu named Salumay, explain to me the worldview shared by most indigenous tribes in Mindanao.
"Long after you die, the land remains," said Datu Salumay, “So, how can you be in a position to own something that outlasts you for over a hundred years?”
He used to live in Davao’s Marilog district before he passed away a few years back. Now, I wonder if there are still enough Bagobos who still think like Datu Salumay.
For the coming in of settlers from the Visayas and Luzon had saturated the population of the Moros and the indigenous peoples of Mindanao and had brought about the dying of a totally different culture. Later, wholesale destruction of dipterocarp forests after the World War 2, coincided with the huge demand for lumber exports to Japan and other markets. At the time, the Parity Rights agreement between my country and the United States, had accorded equal rights to Americans and Filipinos in the exploitation of the Philippine forests and other natural resources.
Pa, who arrived in Upper B'la about a decade after the signing of the Parity Rights, gives me a vivid picture of how it was to live in the time of the logging.
“There were no chainsaws, then,” he says, as if to stress a point. “People used axe and the curtador.”
He leads me out of our house in B’la to show me what the curtador (cutter) looks like. As I stand there, trying to reconstruct the devastating event, I can feel my hair bristle, as I watch him draw out the instrument, bequeathed to him by the former cutters, that had once ravaged whole forests.
All that I wanted that morning was a pleasant conversation with my Pa. But I ended up hearing about the wholesale destruction of the land teeming with Guihos, Apitongs, Narras, Dao, Tugas, and other trees, the likes of which, I may not see anymore.

My Changing Landscape

My landscape has been changing so fast the last few days. First, I remember taking a snapshot of davaotoday at the two-story YMCA building in Davao at the back of The Venue. Now, as I climb up the Cebu Daily News' rooftop canteen to eat, I can't believe I'm being greeted by the sight of cranes and containers being loaded at the Maersk container port! Last night, I climbed up here at six o'clock and I actually saw all those lighted cranes at work! What would Ja say if he'd find out I'm closely living close to Maersk?! He has been in love with Maersk for a long time. He has been in love with all container ports for that matter. Cargo boats and cranes and container vans litter his adult dreams. His love has been so deadly and fatal that it has driven us out of our rented house in Matina! Maersk, of course, had delivered his shipment of bananas to Vladivostok! But sometimes, luck is in short supply. Sometimes, the yellow corn from Bulgaria also get stranded in the Black Sea on their way to Vietnam. So, we are cast homeless. Now, I can't believe I'm actually staring at the pile of Maersk containers at the port! Sighing and turning around, I see on the opposite end, far off Nivel Hills, where Marco Polo Plaza beckons! This is a totally different landscape!