ANGAY-ANGAY LANG: Eighty years old na ako (3)

ILIGAN CITY (MindaNews / 11 October) – Between me and Upi I think change in me proceeded at a much faster rate. Throughout my four years of high school in Cotabato City, the province itself was called the Empire Province of Cotabato. In those days, Marist Brothers, all Americans, managed all Notre Dame Schools for boys in the province. My school was Notre Dame Boys Department, or “Boys” for short. They were the first Americans who touched my life, very good at imposing discipline – I think I loved them for it – both external behavior and study habits. They could be playful outside of class hours, they could be terrible during class hours. It was only in my third year that the first two Filipino Marist Brothers arrived from their studies in the States.

During the Notre Dame Meet, athletes from all Notre Dames would converge in one campus to compete. That was how I got to know that there were other Notre Dames where boys were always separated from girls. There was always a boys team and a girls team from each locality. We had one such Meet in our school, lasting for a whole week. No classes, just fun and excitement. Our biggest opponent in Softball was Notre Dame of Lagao (now part of GenSan) whose athletes were mostly overaged, sons of new settlers, we agreed, and very Ilonggo in speech. Gabagrooong gid ah! (I wish I can translate that into English). But our school was best in the Quiz Contest usually held throughout the year over the air at the DXMS radio station, established by Bishop Gerard Mongeau in the mid-fifties – the first radio station in the province.

Our valedictorian, the principal Quiz Contestant, is now the President of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce. [The one piece I love to recall was when I defeated him in the final exam in Filipino in my second year, he he he, by two points. Vic was one I admired all four years. That year I was in the list of second honors twice, never again till I finished. I could not think of any other high point in high school.] Another contestant was chosen from the Girls department, run by the RVM Sisters.

Social life with the other sex was next to nil. Even if we tried to write love letters to the girls in the Girls Dept, the Sisters would ambush the letters and embarrass the girls in front of their classes – as if it was their fault. The only time the two would mix was on Notre Dame Day. It was the girls who came to our school, not we going to theirs. The seniors were more privileged. If you want to meet more girls, become a catechist in your senior year and teach catechism to small children in the Cotabato City public elementary school.

Once a week, I think every Friday, the catechists would be dismissed early in the morning to teach catechism. One could also be an altar boy (I started serving mass in the summer of my third year and through the senior year) and be popular that way to the girls – as a daily mass goer. I was an altar boy (when the mass was still in Latin), a daily mass goer and a catechist!

Every weekend I went home for supplies. The economy of Upi was centered mainly on two crops, rice and corn. All others were supplementary. No high yielding varieties yet. We had upland rice all the time. It smells and tastes so good you can eat it without viand. We had lean days, too, in times of drought. That is when we mixed rice with corn. We would get rice from the farm and buy corn grit from the market in the city. It was usually half the price lower than rice. Rice at that time was 1.00 per ganta; corn grit was 50 centavos. Dried fish, the good one, was 1.20 per kilo. Salt was cheap.

The road from the city to Upi was good, 39 kilometers of road, layered with limestone, the supply of which is plentiful even now. The ride was one hour, the bus hardly getting stuck in mud even during the rainy season. Sale of products was minimal to two or three middlemen in town, one Chinese Filipino, another Ilonggo. Selling products in the city was too much trouble so people would prefer the lower prices of the middlemen.

Life in Upi went on very quietly and unexcitedly through my high school years, 1956-60. Even settlers were not so keen in coming to the place. Drastic changes took place with the entry of logging concessions.

I went to the seminary in Manila immediately after high school. When I came back in the summer of 1961, there were already logging trucks racing through the winding road of Upi. And their operation went on until the 1970s. Their first accomplishment was to destroy the road. Istakan was one vocabulary that was coined and easily became popular. Places where the trucks get stuck were called istakan. I had several experiences of traversing the once one-hour road the whole day. Sometimes, as many as twenty trucks would be lined up in front and behind one that was hopelessly stuck, complete with its entire load of two huge logs or more. Well, it depends on which truck hit the hole first. Up to now the road has not fully recovered from that devastation.

To what extent did logging change the image of Upi? More wooden fuel was now on sale along the road within the town proper where some men would take turns peeling the logs and cutting the skin to smaller sizes. I did not really know how the economic landscape changed because I was away most of the time. I was in Manila while I was in the seminary, or in Cotabato City after I left and enrolled at Notre Dame College (now University) in Cotabato City. I was no longer a farm boy. What I learned when I headed the Mindanao Regional Development Project Research on the Cultural Minorities of Mindanao in 1974 was that only 164 logging companies, whose timber concessions were for 25 years and renewable for another 25 years, were responsible for denuding Mindanao’s commercial forests. Mindanao’s total commercial forest area was approximately 3.92 million hectares. The combined hectarage of these logging companies’ concession area totaled 5,029,340 hectares! Pasture leases, 296 in all, followed as a poor second with a combined total of 179,011 hectares in 1972-73, mostly concentrated in Bukidnon and South Cotabato.

What has happened to Upi? When I paid a week-long visit in 1986, I traveled 69 kilometers inland towards Lebak in Sultan Kudarat. The whole place is bald, Meteber river’s watershed is nowhere to be found, the river itself is hardly gurgling with the little life that is left. Darugao river tells the same story. The water is dirty brown, almost too dirty to touch, least of all bathe in. The rivers that nurtured my childhood adventures no longer possessed the same magnetism. [I said Amen at that time.]

TOMORROW: The rock that grew into an island

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Rudy Buhay Rodil posted these notes on his 80th birthday on his Facebook wall. MindaNews was granted permission to share these notes.)