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Monday, April 11, 2005
Editorial: Dreaming of buli
WHEN Leny Catubig-Tagayong began harvesting buli (buri palm) at the age of nine, she never imagined she would be sending her only child, Christian, to college 43 years later because of a food that, she complained, hardly filled the gut.
Living in Barangay Bato in the town of Samboan, Cebu, Leny was fifth in a carpenter’s brood of 10. Walking daily to Bato-San Sebastian Elementary School in the Poblacion, three kilometers away from her home in the slopes, she carried her rubber slippers in her hand, her baon of milled corn and a single dried fish in the other.
Only when she reached the highway did she put on the slippers. In the afternoons, she took off the slippers again before trudging up the dirt road going home. More real than the rocks that sliced her feet was the fear that there was no money to buy new slippers if she broke her old pair before school closed.
No indulgence
Weekends, Leny worked at home and in the farm. There was one chore though that she never got used to. Forty-four years later, her hands still remember harvesting buli.
The clear pearls of sago that float so enticingly inside a sweating tall glass of halo-halo, and the chewy globules of landang that distinctly flavor benignit, a favorite local snack, are all products of buli, a hardy palm with a tough trunk and thorny leaves.
For Leny’s family, buli did not promise a choice of sweet indulgences. In lean times when even milled corn was scarce, kinugay from buli was the sole thing on their plates.
What could be bought for a few pesos, the nine-year-old harvested, enduring innumerable cuts and splinters. Even now at 52, Leny can still minutely describe the food that was so hard to swallow:
“The whole plant is harvested. When you get to the subok (core), it is resistant and sharp. There is no way not to get splinters under your fingers, in your hands. Sisi-on nimo (you hack and slice thinly). You dry the chips for a week; bring it in if it rains, spread it out on the ground again.
“When exactly dry, lobokon (pulverize) with losong and alho (heavy, wooden mortar and pestle). Ag-agon ka-upat (sift four times). The flour had to be fine enough when it was dissolved in hamabaw sa dulang (half-full wooden basin).
“When the mixture was no longer lumpy, the liquid was poured out. Left at the basin bottom was natok. Toasted, it became kinugay. Nothing else has been so difficult to make. I would fall asleep, still hungry.”
Provident
Next week, Leny looks forward to seeing her 16-year-old son go on stage and receive his diploma.
Christian will never quite understand why his mother makes benignit for her employers but eats it sparingly. He thinks she finds it too sweet.
On the contrary, Leny finds landang, sago and the mere sight of kinugay bitter. She admits though that this has been a good thing because it spurred her, at 13, to leave Bato and work as a house helper in Cebu City.
By saving her earnings and that of her taxi driver-husband for more than four decades, she can offer their only child a college education.
Last week, the technically inclined Christian canvassed schools offering computer courses. At about the same time, Leny learned from her employer’s daughter, who now lives in Australia, that work involving computers has become very competitive. Immigrant Filipinos who worked in banks and stable firms woke up to find themselves “redundant.” With Information Technology (IT) teams downsized, employers prefer to outsource work to “cheaper” alternatives like India.
In welfare economies like Australia and the US, Leny learns that the in-demand jobs are really in health care. But work is stressful, she is warned. Many nurses suffer from unending verbal and physical abuse. Hospitals in New South Wales bear conspicuous signs pointing out that health care professionals are only human and get hurt as well, “so please try not to be disruptive.”
For Leny, who only finished fourth grade, it is a confusing world where one cannot find work because one is too qualified. Work is work, she has always believed. When his time comes, she hopes her son will not look down on any job, contractual or otherwise.
Yet she wants, too, only the best for her boy. Not to get lost in the labyrinthine complexity of college and labor markets. Not to ever walk barefoot to school.
And never ever to go to sleep, just dreaming of buli stands waiting to be harvested.
(April 11, 2005 issue)
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