Wednesday, September 19, 2007 Heritage is where the heart is By Mayette Q. Tabada
THE sleepy town of Argao has become a hive of revival, rediscovering and affirming its pride of place and past.
For instance, this Sept. 22-23, the adventure race “Hagit-Argao: Lumba-Lingaw 2007” will have local and visiting athletes climb coconut trees, race with inflated tire interiors, and traverse landmarks, like the rice terraces in the mystic mountains of Barangay Linut-od and Butong, the caves of Balay sa Agta (House of Giants), and Bugasok Falls in Conalum.
Although marshals will be fielded, this is one race “where it will be best if one went astray,” observes Dr. Madrileña de la Cerna, director of the Central Visayas Studies Center (CVSC), which is co-sponsoring the race with Sali-Argao Outdoor Specialists (SOS). The CVSC is the regional studies center of the University of the Philippines in the Visayas Cebu College (UPVCC).
De la Cerna, SOS founder and native Argawanon Jose Rechie “Bulak” delos Reyes, and adopted native son Ruel Rigor of the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (Rafi) live out their belief in the serendipity of digressions.
As heritage vanguards, they’ve stirred up the groundswell of interest, pride and commitment that’s sweeping up Cebuanos, specially the young and the influential, in the collective legacy of identity.
Belying that heritage only interests the old, CVSC and RAFI reach out to students, the stewards of tomorrow, to touch base with where they are coming from. As a culmination of National Heritage Month last May, Rafi invited Cebu City children to museum tours, storytelling sessions, Pinoy games, and sharing of tigmo-tigmo (riddles).
From 2002-2005, De la Cerna witnessed the enthusiasm of local leaders and teachers in the heritage forum series that involved the towns of Carcar, Argao, Bantayan, Sibonga, and Toledo in documenting and writing their local histories.
Public school teachers though were often overloaded with duties to make much headway in heritage work. In 2005, De la Cerna mobilized UPVCC’s Science, Technology and Society classes while Rigor, coordinator of the cultural heritage program of Rafi’s Cebu Heritage Frontier Project, tapped Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) leaders.
This team-up made possible the cultural mapping of nearly all barangays in Argao, Dalaguete, Alcoy, Boljoon and Oslob, a 2005 initiative that culminated in the April 2006 valuation seminars where SK leaders prioritized the local landmarks and artifacts for preservation.
But it is not in voluminous paperwork that De la Cerna sees the resurgence of heritage advocacy. If southern fervor had been stoked, it is kept burning by, for instance, the newly formed mountaineering group of Nug-as, Alcoy teachers and students who initiate members by requiring them to attend a heritage workshop. Heritage is the young Dalaguete teacher that wrote the town’s history in Cebuano.
Rather than throw a traditional Christmas party in 2006, Rigor and SK leaders went on a walking heritage tour from Argao to Oslob. Trained by UPVCC Mass Communication students, youth leaders in Alcoy and Argao produced their town newsletter, with Argao coming out recently with its second issue.
In such gestures—Alcoy youngsters recording the many calls and songs of the native Siloy, delos Reyes and other young Argawanons reading aloud their balak (poems) amidst the ricefields of Lawis—De la Cerna rests her belief that heritage, far from languishing amidst the mothballs of forgetting, lives on in the heart and mind, in the here and now.
