THE nation’s destination during the cool months starting this November until February next year is Baguio City and Benguet Province.
Baguio City is in Benguet Province. One cannot visit much of this province and the Cordillera highlands for that matter without passing by the City of Baguio and Benguet’s capital town of La Trinidad.
November is special to Benguet as its founding month, which is observed with the staging of the Adivay festival. This exciting month-long festival will have its kick-off program on the 11th of November with the theme "Adopting Change for Inclusive Human Development."
I always look forward to this festival because it is harvest time for Arabica coffee in Benguet and participating in the festival for me means savoring the taste and flavor of freshly brewed coffee from new beans.
Ah, cool November and a coffee guy like me, waking up to your cool Siberian breezes mixed with the flavor of coffee is bliss. Such moments are important to my memories of the mountains. Like the rest, encountering this event and its flavor has always and will continue to define the highlands for me.
Who we are can be associated to our common and special food. As a mountain man, growing up, I have always been hungry. I always crave for food and the unique and distinct flavor of coffee and heirloom rice cooking by the fire are like incense that would readily calm me up.
In later years, rice and coffee became part of the main course and appetizers to my meal. Coffee and its flavor accompanied me throughout the days. I missed the smell and taste of heirloom rice for quite too long and my temper for its lack is a shame. I am trying my best to calm down and deal with this concern by savoring and thinking about the magic of mountain coffee than filling my being with abundant and politicized white rice with its less life-sustaining elements, and now more associated to life threatening ailments.
With that in mind, we will continue this November to wage our campaign for the eating of less of white rice. Consuming more brown rice is healthy and best for your wellbeing.
I do not want the sad story of white rice to linger any length in my mind. Instead I sustain my meditations with home-brewed coffee during my mornings, entertaining myself with the images of friends and great folks of old, relishing and cherishing the flavor of our food together and their lives to this otherwise bland modernized existence in the city that insist on making everything instant. Instant things makes us lost without our taste and appetites for food, art, love, and life.
This week, I have been greatly entertained with our meetings with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) presided over by director Myrna Pablo, in her precise-seeking manner that is also participatory, inclusive and engaging. It sought to brew the 2nd national coffee conference out of available and joint resources from all participating agencies.
Well brewed this way, this foundational conference will gather more than 800 of the nation’s coffee connoisseurs and industry stakeholders in Baguio City on November 23 to share the taste of the future of Philippine coffee.
They will also review the Philippine Coffee Road Map to develop, enhance and sustain livelihoods in the nation’s coffee industry.
It is going to be a heady but fun-filled conference that promises to be the best learning event in Northern Philippines. It will fill us with good energy. On the first day alone, participants will be greeted with the distinct aroma of coffee brewed from different coffee varieties from all regions of the country.
The latest information, knowledge and best practices on coffee production, marketing, consumption, and concluding in an actual coffee processing and cupping on the last day of the event shall be shared by international and local coffee experts.
Simultaneous with this important event, the Second Cordillera Highland Agricultural Resources Management Project (CHARMP2) will also gather its regional stakeholders in Baguio City to celebrate its 8th anniversary and stage its accompanying Knowledge Learning Market (KLM).
To our visitors, we welcome you all to our mountain home.
Home to me is not about the four walls of a building, but about people and the memories of scent and flavor that define my experiences in the given environment and space.
Home is that place where I was born and saw the first light of day. It is a place, whose substance I keep in my memory, discovering and rediscovering it like a Rembrandt portrait with friends, loved ones and other people.
As a mountain man, I may define home as a place in the interior that one reaches through circuitous, rugged, and dusty mountain roads. We come to the place with battered bodies after riding through the rough and tumble of a narrow road that snakes into the peaks and glides into the valley floors. When we step out of the bus, although still dizzy, we would wipe our blurry eyes, take a deep breath, and all of "home" rushes back into my being.
In a moment, the visions of home become real. As we walk along the mountain trails, we are home once we step on the stone cobbled paths that lead us straight into the door of our house.
At home I am ecstatic with visions. I a child again, growing up as a son, grandson, brother, a friend, and yes a father. I tread carefully and gently. I close my eyes and inhale the aromas of the forest, pine stands, rock boulders, rice fields, cloud mists, young shoots of grass, lemon, coffee trees, pig pens and chicken coops in the backyard.
The aroma of the place, any time of the day, have all been imprinted in my subconscious mind, renewed and reinforced during those early years of my "comings and goings" while growing up.
This will always be the substance of home for me even if the reality does not appear, except in my memory and as it may come to you, it is but a dream.
Perhaps, someday, I can recreate it, breathe it fresh, or that the heavens will let me walk again along pine-scented trails and hidden stone cobbled pathways of gold, that is long ago.
Whatever, in dreamy vision or real, to all our visitors, welcome to the Cordillera highlands! Let us have coffee when you get here, thanks to the DA-DTI 2nd Philippine Coffee Conference. Yes, perhaps, new gems of friends like diamonds will emerge held by gold. I pray you are home to me, whether you stay or go wherever the road leads you.