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Monday, October 11, 2004
Editorial: Fire in the belly
HUNGER has its seasons. In the mountains of the south, the tempo is beat to the count of three. Among tenant-tillers of small landholdings, pockmarked by limestone and erosion, the first crop of corn is planted in May when the rains sate the parched earth.
But even during the panuig, when the chances of reaping the land’s bounty are highest, prudent families already intersperse the rows planted to corn with root crops. The homestead is ringed with tubers of gabi, which takes time to flesh out but can always be depended upon if the second cropping, the pangulilang, fails.
Corn planted at the close of the year is nearly always a gambler’s throw of the dice. In the monsoon season, wind and rain can drown seedlings and leave famished families who failed to hoard from the first crop. Yet for some, the compulsion to risk is also religious. In honor of the Cebu patron, the third and last in the cropping season, the paninyor, is planted in January.
But erosion and land fatigue are inevitably deaf to petitions planted with the corn. In the season known as tingbitay sa iro (dog-slaughter days), the only thing keeping an uplander from starving will be one’s neighbors.
In her 90s, Emil Catubig cannot recall a time when she was not approached by neighbors in Bato, Samboan to spare corn grits, dried fish or pork preserved in fat during the long dry spell before panuig. She believes though that had a neighbor been refused help, the oddity of that incident would have stood out in her memory.
Fire-eaters
In the cities, where good neighbors seem to be as scarce as lagutmon ringing homesteads, hunger does not seem to fall into any cycle but has the predictable sameness of the weather outside the window.
For some, like rugby boys sniffing to kill hunger or the Calamba netherworld dependent on neighbors for a free meal or a piso (P100) of shabu, the coping mechanisms are well in place, and hunger is just another inhospitality to be inured against.
Kim (full name withheld upon request) wakes up late in the day even if he’s not nursing a hangover. He just wants to skip breakfast, which he knows won’t be there. His father, Berte, is a sireno employed to guard shipping lines’ goods at the pier. Although he has the responsibilities and risks of a night watchman, he does not have the license and, correspondingly, the pay.
Cita, Kim’s mother, has sold everything, from masiao (jai alai) tickets to ukay-ukay (secondhand clothing). But what she earns on a good day is never enough to feed their family, which includes Kim and four other siblings, as well as their common-law wives and brood of kids.
Kim is the only son who works. Although his odd jobs are interspersed with longer lean times, he can still afford a stick of cigarette. He may be a little better off than another neighbor who adds tap water to a litro of softdrinks so that there is enough for the children.
No bellyache
If there is something genuinely going for Kim, it is not the cigarette he puffs to mask hunger pangs but the ties he has made with some of his neighbors. Aside from the odd chore, neighbors help him out with credit, meals, hand-me-down clothes, and even the occasional unsolicited but well-meant lecture.
When Kim was battered back by the common-law wife he slapped and their domestic dispute was elevated to barangay authorities, neighbors tried to help the young couple.
Kim’s wife finally left him, taking away their infant son. It was to his “other family” that Kim confided his fears that his son might just end up starving in the uplands of Mindanao.
This veteran of countless “memorized” and “substituted” breakfasts has found out that some hungers cut deeper than the fire in the belly.
(October 11, 2004 issue)
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