Windmills of Bangui

WHAT’S here and not here, goes the riddle I always found easy to answer.

The wind, of course.

I felt less cocky standing at the foot of the towering turbines lining the coast of Bangui Bay in Ilocos Norte.

The wind turbines rise to 230 feet. Twenty turbines are ranged along nine kilometers of the Bangui shore.

Completed in 2008, this wind farm is called the NorthWind Bangui Bay Project.

Finding the place during a late weekday afternoon, I found it easy to believe the local impression that the windmills are only sidelights for visitors seeking the white sands of Pagudpud at the northwest tip of Luzon Island or straying from the Unesco-declared world heritage city of Vigan.

We missed the turn because the roadside marker mentioned a windmill café. Bushes obscured the sign. After a steep, circuitous route, we reached the Bay of Bangui, facing a sullen, white-capped South China Sea.

No café. The windmills are there, of course.

For sightseers, they offer a lot of photo opportunities. My older son asked me to pose as if I were holding a paper windmill and blowing to make the blades turn.

The memories of childhood are stirred by the feeling of diminishing as we left the road and walked down to the shore. All five feet of me, sinking in the shifting sand of fine stones, had to bend back at the torso, not just tilt back my head, to gaze up at a turbine’s 230 feet of whiteness.

Unlike that comforting childhood riddle of an omnipresent but unobtrusive wind, the turbines radiate power. It’s not only because the 20 wind turbines generate 33 megawatts. This electricity is exported to the Luzon grid, reportedly “plagued by expensive and unreliable power supply,” according to the World Resources Institute (WRI).

These state-of-the-art windmills cost about US$35 million, almost 90 percent of which was shouldered by the Danish International Development Agency.

The WRI notes that the Bangui wind farm will displace “highly polluting diesel-based power generation thereby reducing emissions of (greenhouse gas or) GHG.”
Despite their out-of-this-world presence, the wind turbines are all about sustaining the earth. Wind power is a source of sustainable energy.

Overlaying the sound of the sea pounding the Bangui shore is the regular whish of the turbine blades scything through the air.

Does the community hear the sound of the future?

Bangui is an oddity in the Amianan. While other northern Luzon towns and cities boast of sprawling plantations of tobacco and rice, or rely on agricultural products, crafts, heritage churches, natural wonders and other inducements to appeal to tourists, Bangui has to work harder to court transient favors.

The coast is harsh and forbidding, a raw profile of rocks carved by the relentless, ageless battle with the sea and elements. Yet, like its neighbors, Bangui strives to eke a living through tourism.

Vehicles stop at roadside stalls, selling the same garlic and shallots sold in other northern Luzon towns. Then we spot what Bangui alone sells: rocks.

Molded by the sea into a pleasing smoothness, rocks are sold by the color: reds, greens, greys, blues, blacks. Parts of Bangui that end up in gardens, aquariums and Bangui’s souvenirs.

At 13, Rafael still has the height and open face of a child. The incoming high school student runs to cars arriving at the wind farm. For P50 and P70, he sells wooden replicas of the turbines. He says his father carved these.

Near the turbines is a scraggly cluster of stalls, selling more desktop souvenirs and keychains. All look like the ones Rafael says were carved by his carpenter-father.

The desktop souvenirs have plastic flowers. The native bushes only grow long, cruel thorns; perhaps it wasn’t the season yet for their flowering.

The variegated pebbles and stones adorning the tokens are real. It must be a home enterprise: the children and women gather, glue and apply lacquer on the stones. The wooden windmills are made by the fathers.

Which of Bangui’s two windmills will answer the riddle of the future?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 27, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Love in the time of Mighty Bond

LOOK. That’s where my Japanese friend Noki rented something to wear for his wedding yesterday.

This is Harry speaking. Our neighbor drives a taxi. I occasionally ride with him.

Behind the culverts and the dust rising like steam from the unfinished road, a rectangle of glass showcases smudges, a reflection of scurrying workers, and two gowns cut from some shiny cloth that sticks out.

Is this the same Noki who lost more than a million pesos in a barbecue venture last year?

Harry says yes. Harry became a wedding sponsor. Noki also invited the manager of the beach club where he swims daily. He wanted many sponsors, many witnesses.

Poor man, Harry muses. He never really believed he would be allowed to marry.

Which one did he finally settle down with? I remembered someone a few years back. Noki gave her a cellphone but her parents, I think, made her return the phone because it was a secondhand one. This model also did not take pictures.

Harry says Noki’s Fay is 18, a high school graduate. She is the second eldest of a man who sells dirty ice cream. Sometimes, he’s allowed to sell to club guests. That’s how he met Noki.

I think Fay’s parents made a very good deal. Harry slows down to let a gaggle of zone workers cross.

Noki visited many times the home of the dirty ice-cream vendor. He met all 12 children and Fay’s mother, always nursing a baby, which may or may not have been the youngest. Harry swears that he has never seen this woman not pregnant or not nursing. Fay was still in her high school uniform then.

Noki always left something for the family because he pitied the younger children who sometimes had no underpants.

Fay didn’t figure in the equation yet, Harry insists. Noki then was seeing a 17-year-old department store clerk who lied about her real age. Another girl Noki was keen on also maintained a Korean. She chose that fellow when Noki’s barbecue business went kaput. Fay’s mother had been working as a cashier there for a week.

Harry believes Noki would not have been desperate to get married had his father not died. As his other brother lived far from the Chiba home, Noki worried about his 80-year-old mother living alone. He had to close his Tokyo photoshop so he could go home and drive her around. Finally, he drove to Narita airport, left his car there, and flew back to Cebu with no intention of returning without a wife to take care of his mother.

That was weeks ago. Once, Noki speculated to Harry how much his car park fees could now be while they waited for an official who demanded P5,000 to issue the marriage permit. Harry advised Noki not to bother about car park fees.

Harry knew his friend shelled out P16,000 for the priest, chapel and the waiver of wedding bans. Noki gave P100,000 to Fay’s father for the reception at their home. Noki’s father-in-law, who is, at 41, the same age as his son-in-law, asked an additional P50,000 to buy forks, spoons, plates, chairs, curtains and electric fans for the barrio that, invited or not, would surely flock. More witnesses, Noki tells Harry.

The day before his wedding, Noki remembered he had nothing to wear. Then Harry saw the roadside place renting out wedding costumes.

After the wedding, while boarding Harry’s taxi, the right heel of Noki’s rented shoes fell off. “Shoe, why? Why?” Harry remembers Noki murmuring.

Harry drove the newlyweds to a nearby gas station, where he glued back the heel with a tube of Mighty Bond.

Then the wedding broker/ wedding sponsor/ bridal car chauffeur drove Noki and Noki’s bride to the house Noki dressed up for the wedding feast Noki held in honor of the day he could fly back to Narita, redeem his car and bring home a bride for his mother, widowed and alone in Chiba.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 11, 2007 issue