Thursday, April 10, 2008 Yap: Schooled by the sea By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
“DAYTIME is when you get orientation,” he says. “At night, you’re left to your senses.”
Bonar is a biologist who gave up a job in a multinational company to be a change worker for the environment. That seems to be the right formula to get into a financial trajectory. The bonus, he says, is that he seems unable to tell between work and vacation. His job requires him the very difficult task of staying on the beach and feasting on fresh seafood everyday. You may have premium pay in coat and tie while Bonar dons nothing but pair of shorts, but you go to fastfood. God’s fair.
Well, he talks of orientation and senses in the middle of darkness. Bonar, Dee and I are wolfing on fresh, robust aninikad and imbao, God’s divinest gifts to mankind (or “manunkind” if you get the point of view of the lowly fish), when suddenly the lights go out. We can’t use up all the stored power we caught from the sun earlier. The trick is conservation, although what’s trickier is dinner under the Big Dipper.
We are in the School of the SEAs in Santa Fe, Bantayan Island. We are in its dining area, an isolated gazebo on a beachside compound so plotted along the marriageable concepts of ecology and idealism. Water, land, air, and humans may do their chores without killing each other.
“Much of the job is scientific,” I say. Bonar agrees, “Yes, and not just rah-rah.” We are talking about the whole green fight many pick up these days because it seems voguish.
The far edge of this gulf of darkness before us is bordered by a thin strip of flickering light from which billows the noise from another island feverish on its fiesta. Our corner under the stars, however, leaves a tender difference. It is quiet, pitch dark, breezy. I slid my hand on my love’s shoulders. One of the reasons the school leaves everything in the dark at night, explains its founder Atty. Tony Oposa in a video, is that it awaits for that fleet of turtles to come home, nestle on its shores, and heap the next generation on the sand. Strange but one of the ironies of existence is that the making of life is done in the dark. Death is rather well-lit.
Bonar takes out the flashlight, and summons us excitedly to shore. He throws a ray of light across the waters and, in a second, silvery pods leap beautifully in an arch against the dark. And there are more. He pans the light and we see more, the sea is a field of zealous, underage partygoers in flashy dresses. MPA, says Bonar, means marine protected area. I think it’s marine party animals. Humans, I realize, don’t have the monopoly of a vigorous night life.
I realize, too, what it is that makes people like Bonar not trade a single minute of being here to any purse-fattening job anywhere. He is one of the many volunteers of the Law of Nature Foundation. In the School of the SEAs (SEAs means “sea and earth advocates”) he is helped by Tuti Menguito, featured by the Readers Digest’s “Everyday Heroes” as “the man who talks to the fishes.” He was responsible for the success of the MPA in Hilutungan, which now delivers revenue of P5 million for the LGU.
“So how is it like to be schooled by the sea?” Dee writes later, “I feel littler than the bulinaw. I don’t really know a thing about living.” (to be continued)
