THE sun is about to rise above the mountains, you are on the road two hours since you left home en route to a destination deep in the mountains.
The light chasing the darkness makes you glad and grateful to the heavens. You pray some more that the forecast last night on the arrival of an unwanted super typhoon has changed.
Another hour elapses. You should be close to where you were meant to be but you are still hours away, having been rerouted to a circuitous road to the mountaintop. That is bad, but you are still glad there is another way.
As you surge forward trying to gain time, you wonder if the vanishing darkness of the previous night is returning back. Not really. It is just that thick clouds from nowhere have blocked the emerging sun and so much of the white mass along with the wind has descended and blanketed the land. You see nothing on the road ahead but white.
A few moments later, my driver said, “this place is the house of the rain.” Indeed it was drizzling hard. In spite of the driver’s poetic description of Madaymen, Kibungan, you realize that this is the start of your encounter with a weather wreaker that was named after a man after all – Ompong – as you pursue a worthy mission in a place called Bagu, deeper yonder in the mountains.
From Madaymen, you plunge deep down towards Ampusongan, Bakun, on a steep, one lane tire-pathed road. It was a good thing, we only met one truck along the way, and it backed down almost a kilometer away, to a place where there is a meeting bay constructed for two vehicles to pass each other by. The driver of the truck is from the place otherwise, he would have not known where the closest meeting bay is.
From Madaymen to Bagu, you must content yourself riding at the back of a snake-like road that rises and plunges down to the valley bottoms and up the mountain tops, with its jolting crevices but breathtaking sceneries.
On this Ompong day, along the road, I can no longer hold on, as my gallbladder seems to burst. I force the driver to stop the vehicle so I can relieve myself, never mind being drenched, to suffer cold and wetness, until we return from work.
Up there, I imagine the sun rays are trying to pierce through the clouds that enveloped this piece of prime land. I shiver while Ompong continues to batter us with fiendish wind and rain.
On reaching Sinacbat, Ompong relents, and the skies clear out a bit as we descend towards Bagu. We pass by the fading green of an old cloud forest holding on from unrelenting human onslaught into its territory. It knows, as we do, that its natural resources and diversity, victims of the human age, will soon become extinct.
We finally reached Bagu, nestled deep in a valley that opens out between dark, brooding and rocky mountains. Alighting from the vehicle, you gaze into the distance, at the hazy layers of jagged peaks where the two sides of the valley join downstream.
A river meanders along the slit of the valley, its fertile banks having been transformed into rice fields, “since time immemorial.” If rice farming is done the way we do it in Mountain Province, these rice fields are precious markers of the community’s generational memories.
Why did I come here, in the first place? Well, the Second Cordillera Highland Agricultural Resource Management Project Scale-Up (CHARMP2) Provincial Coordinating Office invited our participation in the groundbreaking and pre-implementation orientation of the community’s footpath and irrigation projects.
During these activities, people want to hasten things up. But the process is also important. You cannot help it but become philosophical and invoke those things people readily understand. In pursuing community development, “Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.” (Marguerite Yourcenar in the Memoirs of Hadrian.)
What Marguerite is really getting at is the process of awakening to wisdom, something that we are not born with, or something that comes to us in a transformative moment of Zen.
As in the process of birthing, so is growing, that takes a gradual process of awareness and insight gained through time and experiences here and there. We explore new areas and places, we experiment, we do things together, and slowly, our knowing and becoming slowly begins to take shape. Hopefully, we leave behind legacies, markers, stories in time that we ourselves can look back upon and recognize as...us. Hopefully, we leave our legacies of community and social structures that our children can be proud of too.
At the CHARMP2 and its scaling up phase, the process was and is important. That is why I am here, even if I shiver and suffer in the cold. We live and endure our current environment. We work together to make things better.
During the process of working together, men and women create communities and strengthen the nation.
History bought with “blood, sweat and tears,” will stain the human consciousness too long, forcing the generations to revere and value their rich heritage. By going through some sacrifices in conserving and preserving the cloud forest, heirloom rice varieties, rice terraces, and constructing irrigation canals and pipes, farm-to-market roads, footpaths, food storage, among others, that we are working on with them, we hope that our scale-up barangays will evolve meaningful markers and memories in the process.
That is why I am here in a place like this, marginalized but remnants of a time, where the community is still intact. I am part of the on-going effort that sustains, if not build new markers. Deep within, we all want a place we could be able to return to, a hometown of our memories. The place is pleasant and sweet that is built with hands united like the way we want it done in our scale-up communities.
Even if a super typhoon ravages the land, you still wish to be where the action is, where you build hometown memories.