Mindanao

Today, I have a proposal for you. Let me take you to the land of the durian and Abu Sayyaf. Let me take you to that place where the sun raises everyday over beaches of white sand and blue water. Where the juice of the coconuts is a sweet as sugar and the terrorist and guerrilla attacks are as common as the snow in Siberia. A land where some families can barely survive eating root crops once a day but never lose their smile. A place of starry nights and spiritual mountains. Let me take you to the island of contrasts. Let me take you to Mindanao.

Map of the Philippine Islands

6 am. I wake up due to the noisy pigs of the neighbor again. They are so loud in the morning when they are hungry. It is like if someone was butchering them alive and they were asking for help crying out loud. However, they are just asking for food to their owner. I notice that Cuya-No, the site coordinator, has already got up and his mosquito net is already folded and tidy. I check my cell phone and read the same sms as always: Gud M0wning~. After getting up, I grab a t-shirt and walk out of the room barefoot. I love walking barefoot on that wooden floor… it feels really nice. However, before going downstairs, I wear my slippers to avoid stepping on the ants with my naked feet.

As I go down the stairs, the smell of paksiw (fresh fish steamed with vinegar, garlic and little onions) starts to wake up my sleepy stomach. The rice is already on the table and Cuya-No is finishing cooking the fish. I wash my face and my hands in the kitchen, where the only basin of the house is, and prepare some instant coffee. When the fish is ready, we sit down together and eat that unusual breakfast. In Spain I usually just drink some milk and eat a couple of toasts. Here I eat rice and fish at 6.30am every day. Sometimes we buy some crabs and have a little feast to start our workday. Here fish and seafood are very very cheap. You can buy a huge super-fresh tuna for only 1€ per kilo in the market.

Crabs for Breakfast

After breakfast I take a shower, well a “shower”. The shower room doesn’t have what we call a proper shower. It has a faucet 30cm from the floor which you use to fill a bucket with water (of course there’s no hot water, but actually the temperature here is high enough so it is not really necessary). Then there is a scoop which you use to have your shower, pouring the water on your body. The same scoop is the tool they use instead of toilet paper. I’ve tried that a couple of times but I still prefer the paper…

Here days are very different from each other. We do a lot of field trips to work with the community, meetings with the local government units, other NGOs, foreign government cooperation agencies… so I can’t describe how the typical day is. Sometimes I have to go to Manila to attend some meetings or workshops, sometimes other cities in Mindanao like Davao or Butuan… However, I will talk to you about the different sites we are working in. We work in 4 different municipalities:

Tandag

This is the town where the office is located and where I live. It is the liveliest town and the capital of the province of Surigao del Sur. The office is located just 20 meters away from the beach, so every morning when I wake up I can see the Pacific Ocean wetting the sands of the town. At night you can even hear the breaking waves together with the whistling breeze singing an endless lullaby. But when the weather is bad, it can turn into a heavy metal song, making difficult your sleep.

There are 3 bars in Tandag with live performing bands almost every night. The most popular and big one is “Beeboys”. However it is too loud for my taste and the songs they are playing are really commercial, so you get tired of listening to the same songs again and again. Unless you want to spend the night dancing or looking at the hot girls of the band, this is not the best place for you. My favorite is Nikko’s, in Mabua beach. Small, dark, intimate… this place is really worth a visit if you want to enjoy good music and be able to talk with your companions at the same time. They play acoustic songs, and the regular band is very good. The guitar is blind and can also play the keyboard. He always wears sunglasses, Ray Charles style, and he is quite good even improvising. The bass is also blind, and the singer is mentally handicapped. When I saw him for first time I thought he was just a friend of one of the members of the band, and I also thought he was not able to talk even a single word. He had even this weird posture with a rigid hand. However, when he started singing I was completely amazed… he was SO good. And he was also playing the beat box at the same time! The beers there cost only 30 pesos (0.45€), so you have to be careful when it comes to control the number of beers you drink. A couple of nights ago, I was there with two friends of mine. After a 6-rounds beer fight, when we were already drunk, one of my friends asked for the bill and told the waiter to make an invoice to the “Intergalactic Corporation Pop” and said: “tomorrow we will try to charge it to our corporation”. I think after that we were laughing for 20 minutes nonstop…

@Beeboys

There is also a nice restaurant called Goldbar. It is the only decent restaurant you can find around the town (and also around the province I would say…). Crispy Pata (crispy pork leg) and tuna belly as main dishes, and leche flan (made with condensed milk and egg yolk) for dessert are best. The fresh Mango shake is also very delicious. When it comes to coffee, the best place is “La Jara”, a small coffee shop that serves even iced coffee, like the starbucks’ frappuccino. My favorite is the “Oreo Froccino”. Oh, and they also have wi-fi.

One of the problems that I encounter here is that, because I am the only foreigner living in the town, and usually the foreigners living in Mindanao are older (experienced development workers), all the looks are on me when I am rooming around the streets. And they don’t pretend that they are not looking, they literally stare at me. The children always ask “Hey Joe, Americano, what’s your name?” If I stop and answer them, in a few seconds I am surrounded by more than 10 children wanting to play with the foreigner. The young girls stare at me and smile. Some of them even take pictures of me with their cellphones! And then the guys look at me like if they wanted to kill me, but if I smile, they smile back… so I think at the beginning they are just concerned about if I am a good guy or I am just another colonizer. So the issue is that I have no privacy. It is like being famous, and I’m not definitely the kind of person that likes to be the center of the party.

I usually go to the same hair salon, owned by Tommy Bautista, a really funny gay stylist that was working in Korea for a number of years. The haircut is just 60 pesos (0.90€), and he spends more than an hour with me. Sometimes he even shaves my beard for the same price. The normal price in a barber shop where they cut your hair in 10 minutes is 30 pesos only, but I don’t want to take the risk… However, after the haircut with Tommy I have to pose for his photo session… anyway I’m always very happy with the cut, so I don’t mind posing.

In Tandag, the project is being implemented in barangay Awasian. A barangay is like a district or neighborhood. We also work with some indigenous people in the uplands, in a place called Sitio Hita-ob. I have visited Hita-ob only once, but I was really welcomed and was offered some fresh coconut juice by one of the households there. The kids were lovely, and at the end I ended playing hide and seek with them. They are incredibly shy when they see me, because they are not used to see any white people, but at the same time curiosity bring them to me and after a few smiles they get excited and start playing.

Lanuza

One and a half hours by bus from Tandag is Lanuza. This is one of my favorite sites. Well, we actually work in 3 different barangays, but my favourite site is Sito Ebuan, in barangay Mampi. To get there you can only ride a motorcycle. The motorcycle is called “habal-habal” and it has two wooden wings to carry more people. In other places they call it “skylab”, because its shape imitates the shape of the spatial station with the same name.

Trying to load a 100kg abaca stripping machine on the habal-habal

Ready to go with 300kg+ load on a 155cc motorcycle

From the lowlands to Ebuan it takes you around 40 minutes by that habal-habal. There are around 75 households living in the area, all of them indigenous people. The average household has 9 members, the biggest one 13. I would also say that 40% of the people living there are children. There are children everywhere, that is why I like Ebuan so much. Some of them are playing around naked and some others just with a big, busted t-shirt. They are smiling all the time and they can play and enjoy with anything, don’t need toys or any other tools. They play with water, with rain, with insects, with flowers, with stones, with sticks... Maybe the families there don’t have a single peso, but at least they enjoy nature and life like a few do in western countries.

I remember my first day there. As I was arriving with the habal-habal, everybody was going out of their houses to check who was ridding the motorcycle. Everybody was looking at me as if I was an astronaut landing in their village. The children were hiding from “the white man” and the old people were examining me carefully. Now, every time I go to Ibuan, the children run after my habal-habal and the old people smile and wave at me.

Smile!

The youth, the children and the "white man"

There is a river very near the village where I take a bath every time I am there. Though the water is very cold, it feels nice on sunny days.

I usually sleep either in the school or in the teacher’s family house. And the best thing of Ebuan is that is the only place in the province where there are no mosquitoes! So at night I don’t need any mosquito net. However there is a very small flying insect called limo-limo that tries to get into your eye, probably attracted by the moisture. I call it the kamikaze, because it instantly dies after achieving its goal.

Cortes

This municipality is situated between Lanuza and Tandag. The project is being implemented in barangay Burgos, a barangay that has direct access to the sea. They have a huge mangrove area and also a Marine Protected Area that they call “Fish Sanctuary”. We work with a community formed by fisherfolks.

The community is devoted to protect the sanctuary, so they patrol it 24/7. They are having problems with the illegal fishermen that try to get inside the sanctuary. Sometimes - as they conveyed to me - they carry spear guns, so the patrollers cannot apprehend them and take them to the police. They want guns to frighten the illegal fishermen and deter them to do illegal activities inside of the protected area.

With KAAMPAKA members

The Children of Burgos

I will always remember that evening. The sun was already low in the horizon and we were having a meeting with the association of fisher folks, trying to convince them that guns are not the solution to their problem… The solution is to address the poverty that leads those other fishermen of neighboring barangays to undertake illegal activities. They nodded at us, but 4 months later they still ask me for a gun once in a while. Step by step…

Cagwait

… or the town of artists. Thirty minutes away from Tandag, this small municipality is full of really interesting people that have a great aptitude for anything related with art… painting, singing, dancing, playing and even composing music, acting… Almost everybody is engaged in one of these activities. And they are really good!

Dai-dai singing the Philippine anthem. Beautiful voice.

Dancing lessons in Cagwait

The project is working in 2 areas, barangay La Purisima and sitio Mam-on (in barangay Tubo-tubo). I have not been able to visit sitio Mam-on because of the insurgency. The NPA (New People’s Army), that is a communist guerrilla, is very active in the area and there have been on-going skirmishes in the uplands since last May. It seems that the situation is getting better and the Philippine Army has already cleared the place, so I will be visiting the community there by the beginning of next year.

Regarding La Purisima, that is the first place I visited. The situation was quite special because they were having an induction ceremony for the new officers of the barangay. After being there only for half a day, I was invited to eat lunch in the house of the barangay captain, where they butchered a native chicken for me to eat, and after that invited as an honor guest to the ceremony sitting next to the captain. I tried to refuse the invitation but some of my colleagues advice me to accept it because otherwise they could get offended. So at the end I ended up in the honor committee and for the official picture invited to sit with the captain too. Here is the proof:

Best friend of the Barangay Captain

My favorite beach is also located in Cagwait. They call it the white beach because of its white, fine sand. The water is very clear, and it forms like a little bay, so it is also protected from the waves. The Local Government Unit is managing a small resort where you can spend the night for a very cheap price, or just stay under a wooden hut during the day having lunch, drinking…

White beach, a.k.a. "Heaven"

Enjoying the beach with the youth

So this is pretty much all about the place I am living in right now. This week I am staying in Manila to attend some meetings and fix some issues in the head office. I have been only 5 days here and I’m already missing Mindanao…