Showing posts with label Diat Palo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Diat Palo. Show all posts

Thursday, March 22, 2012

The Day I turned into an Ore

Until now, I still need to make sense of that experience; to arrange, to put (my mind) in order. As Karlos said, I can do my own debriefing. I can describe how it started and how it ended. I can begin the story right in the beginning; but I can also jump right in to the most important part, or go back again and again to something that I cannot explain, something that I cannot grasp, something that I found horrifying. The story was not about myself. The story was about itself. It began on the night we saw the body of the girl and the body of someone else carried to the town's funeral house by a dumptruck used to carry ores. The story continued with us, riding the same dumptruck used to carry the dead and always, the ores, in a gravity-defying trip up in the mountains of Pantukan, where we found people constantly battling the elements earth, fire, air and water; winning some and losing more in that battle; and still fighting odds of a different category, such as neglect and greed.