I WAS 8 years old when our family finally settled in Sitio Kawayan in Barangay Sambag 2, Cebu City after stops in Waling-waling St. in Barangay Capitol Site also in Cebu City, and in Argao town. The village, located at the back of the old TB Pavillon in B. Rodriguez Ext., was a community of informal settlers mostly coming from places outside of the city. We didn’t have titles to the lots where our hoses were built.
Life was harsh for many of us in the neighborhood. Some families survived by scavenging, going around with empty straw sacks or pushing rickety wooden carts looking for any thrown items they could sell. Others did odd jobs. Admittedly, there were few who resorted to stealing or doing illegal acts to survive. Others, like our family, had a member or two who had regular jobs or sources of livelihood.
One can enter the community using the road that branched from B. Rodriguez St. towards TB Pavillon and which then turned right along the back of the medical facility’s fence towards the river that separated our place from Barangay Calamba. As the years went by, the place got cramped with structures as the village’s population grew. A farmed lot owned by a Chinese businessman separated the village from the Aznar Coliseum compound.
The area near the river where the old basketball court was located was eventually called lower Kawayan. The rest of the village was upper Kawayan where the chapel, which became the center of the community’s religious and non-religious activities, was located. When TB Pavillon’s fence was abandoned, the people appropriated for themselves the vacant lot at the back of the facility. A space was left for the village’s covered court and structures built by the barangay.
In this cramped surrounding, the only space where people could chill out and socialize was the roadside and the space fronting the chapel. I remember us kids spending our time at night talking or playing below the street lamps. Drinking binges were done mostly near roadside stores. Those gatherings often became boisterous but quarrels rarely break out. In a way, we were closely knit.
Outsiders dread walking the length of the road and passing by those people chilling out there. This was not surprising because we weren’t the mestizo and rich looking types—we looked like those lawless characters we often see in movies: brown-skinned, unkempt, shabby and often shirtless and sometimes tattooed. And we spoke and acted like the tough guys that we weren’t. Our term for that: “paugat.”
I was actually amused by the outsiders’ reaction because I knew those people. Many of them looked like tough guys, or even criminal types, but the look is often different from real character. Most are actually gentle and meek and shy away from quarrels. They became “estambays” because they were jobless and didn’t have anything much to do.
Now the government, after failing to win its war against illegal drugs, is now targeting the “estambays” as part of its drive against criminality. It is targeting the wrong people, but apparently it only wants to show that it is doing something after the failed Oplan Tokhang.