THIS week, onto more eerie and out.
Last Thursday, my BFF Noreen Flores, her dear cousin Nora, and I had the opportunity of being able to see for ourselves what the war-torn area of Marawi City now looks like. The much publicized videos and stills of Butig were suddenly before our very eyes, as we stood on a view deck that allowed us a 360-degree sight of the place ISIS tried and failed to conquer.
Understand: we were heavily escorted by a truck of Philippine army soldiers, duly briefed, and duly allowed onto the site. Thank you, Regent Mambuay, thank you, Col. Cuerpo. Amanpour and Anderson, I do not envy you at all.
It was quiet, still, eerie. Most of all, it was sad. Sadder to realize that families there were one day going about life and business and then the next, had no homes to return to. Perhaps saddest is that that war had to happen on Filipino soil.
Before that, Mindanao State University (MSU) Regent Cecille Maumbay, who grew up with Noreen in Dipolog, had taken us on a tour of said university, where she had graduated and where Noreen had spent the first two years of her college life. She finished in Silliman.
The drive up to MSU is reminiscent of the one up Kennon Road, though the foliage is different and Kennon takes longer. Cecille and Noreen reminisced throughout the tour, catching up on each other, childhood friends and memories, and their common Theater experience spent with Sining Kambayoka, of which they were founding members.
Sining Kambayoka holds the distinction of being the first if not only ensemble in the country dedicated to Kambayoka, a Theatre form based on the Maranao Bayok (love song) and Darangan (a Maranaw epic), also sung.
So the whole MSU tour was also a loooot of shoptalk that I especially enjoyed. Always good to be with Theatre folk who speak the same language as one.
As also was the case the day before that, when at a table with Noreen and her friends Frank Rivera and Art Casanova. This was at the 2018 Philippine Tuberculosis Society, Inc. (PTSI) launch of commemorative stamps, of which one is a floral painting by Noreen, oyes. Noreen says she did that painting in something like two hours. How's that for God-given talent and used for public good.
Frank and Art had been directors of Sining Kambayoka when Cecille and Noreen were young students at MSU. How's that for karma.
Also at that table was another BFF to both Noreen and myself, Thess Bolneo. I have written about her, one of a group who travel together as bakets dong Act III of our rich, rich lives. Along with a Maichie Trana, we were young educators in Morong, Bataan, where once upon a time a refugee processing center was. So much so we can most probably manage such camps with our eyes closed.
Whilst our dear Maich was not at that table, that day I wore a dress that she gave me in Bicol about a month ago and I told Thess and Noreen: “So Maich is kinda here, too.”
The kicker to all this is that after exiting Marawi, we happened back upon the place called Balo-i, which we had passed on the way up to MSU. At the entry to Balo-i is a sign. Picture this. The sign says: I “heart” Balo-i The heart is an image. The text alone reads: I Balo-i.
And I tell everyone we must take a picture.