Love and oblivion

AT Santiago Bay, Camotes, the dogs live the life.

Low tide leaves a wide expanse of fine sand, enjoyed by early morning strollers, selfie worshippers, and dogs.

Recently in Camotes, I got to know the mutts very well. They are Asong Pinoy (Aspin), lean and even bony, with rough coats from living outdoor and eating scraps.

But the dogs have a contagious zest for island life. In an excess of brio, one puppy leaped up and pawed every stranger as if reunited with a long-absent mistress.

The ones napping on the shore were gradually isolated into isles by the incoming tide. When the water finally lapped too close, a dog snapped awake and plopped down on a drier spot.

While going through the motions of winding up the semester, I took minute breaks from theses defense by holding out my right leg, which bore the silvery shadow of a nail scratch from an Aspin encounter.

To crisscross the borderless sliver separating wideawakeness from oblivion: I envy the dogs.

During the last thesis defense of the semester, I glimpsed why, despite our kinship with the canine, we are fated to search for but never find this refuge.

Judelyn Felicilda is one of the strongest-willed young women that I have worked with. Before this month is over, she will don the Sablay, the official garment worn to culminate one’s journey in our university.

For Judhai, the years of searching for knowledge ended on the streets, where she engaged commercial sex workers (CSWs) who are men who have sex with other men (MSM) and transgender women (TG).

Last June 8, Judhai presented a video that seeks to convince CSWs to use a condom in every transaction as a protection from the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (Aids).

Judhai’s video rests on testimonies why, even among hardened professionals, love becomes the knife we turn against ourselves.

According to her, CSWs fall into two types. The professionals offer sex for pay. For the non-professionals, “harvat (gay lingo for “harvest,” meaning the need to earn) determines whether money exchanges hands.

Yet, some CSWs admit that “harvat” can be set aside for an attractive partner who looks clean (healthy and non-infectious).

However, when the CSW is in love with the partner, “modnoc (condom)” is never used.

Over the years, the rise of cases has been accompanied by the rise and fall of monikers for persons living with HIV/Aids: “Gset,” “shitsu,” “posit,” and “josh”.

These euphemisms may be attempts to blunt the cut of living with Ida (Aids).

As Judhai suggests, teaching CSWs the skills for condom negotiation can zero in on ways on how to cope with love.

Who among us is immune to it anyway?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 11, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Spirit diving

I EXPECTED least but got a baptism when I recently swam in the underground waters of two caves in Camotes Island.

A dedicated armchair tourist, I still somehow ended up in caves, from the wartime bunkers in Alegria, south of Cebu to the trans-water caves, with a few running for 2-km stretches, in Trang An, Vietnam.

Caves exert a powerful hold. From World War II survivors in Alegria, I learned how upland caves aided their escape from the Japanese Imperial Army and town collaborators.

Almost a quarter of a century after, survivors recalled vividly how the caves held water they took care not to spoil with human waste. Inside these caves, entire clans lived and wove mats of river reeds for extra warmth and barter while under siege.

Yet in caves, too, repose our primal fears. When the husband had me sit closest to the prow of the boat, he kidded that he only wanted to make sure I wouldn’t fall off while we were part of a group exploring the Underground River of Palawan.

Inducted in 2012 as one of the New Seven Wonders of Nature, the now-renamed Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park has one other thing, aside from stalactites and stalagmites inducing awe, that it has in common with other sites of natural heritage: tourists.

As tour operators and communities co-exist in uneasy compromise to manage traffic and the inevitable degradation, tourists of all persuasions—including newly-weds having their pictorial while balanced on a bamboo boat outside the trans-water grottoes of Trang An—dispel superstitions enshrouding caves.

Only some.

Perhaps because entering a cave involves descending and leaving a realm where light and air are taken for granted, caves bring to mind entering a crypt and never being able to leave it, like Persephone hostaged by Hades in the bowels of the underworld.

Bukilat Cave on Poro, Camotes is ideal for families. It has seven “windows” or natural ceiling apertures to let in light dappling the cool brackish pool, and serving as natural spotlight for selfie poses and Facebook memories.

High tide raises the level of the underground waters of the Amazing Island Cave in San Francisco, Camotes. A life vest and buddies helped me hurdle for the first time being dunked in the water to go past a low ceiling, competing for thin air in a cavern overcrowded with tourists, and kicking around like a day-old tadpole in waters about 9-ft deep.

Later, while drinking my fill of the sky above the sea in Mangodlong, I realized why swimming in caves draws and repels: as life throws a curve, caverns deprive us of our comforts and conceits, forcing us to claw inside and reach for that which we never knew existed just to break through.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 4, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Camotes

ON my first visit to Camotes, I count it as a blessing that I ate at the house of a resident.

Having breakfast at the ancestral home of the Borlasa clan in Poro, I was fortunate to not only break fast with colleagues who have become friends, I escaped the tourist handicap of seeing a new place as being created for the express purpose of amusing me.

Jiji, who once sat in my classes as an undergraduate and now teaches at the same state university, recalls spending summer with cousins who homed in from many parts of Visayas and Mindanao.

The home of her grandparents may have been transferred to above the street after a truck veered off and rammed into it, but it still retains many reminders of those endless summers of reunion.

If by some quirk of fate, the Borlasa home in Poro will lose all its material connections to the past, there’s still Jiji’s aunt.

Josefa “Pipay,” 82, does not only give obvious cues about how Jiji will look when she breaches her 80’s. Aunt and niece share, beyond a puckish humor and a direct but inoffensive way of speaking, a sense of place.

When the expression, “take root,” is used, it often refers to how something germinates, flourishes, takes hold.

Over the course of four days, I’ve seen how Camotes takes root in people, no matter how dissimilar they are.

Perhaps due to an economy that has remained agrarian and maritime, the two generations of Borlasas reflect how the people of Camotes are segregated between the native-born who never leave like Josefa, and those like Jiji who live and work elsewhere but never fail to go home.

Yet even among her sons and daughters who cannot escape the diaspora, the hold of Camotes on their sensibilities implies a complexity lying below its pastoral and placid charms.

Wrapped around the island is a thick belt of mature, verdant mangroves that serves as a natural buffer for disaster.

This resource so vital for marine ecology and disaster preparedness co-exists with the beach resorts, caves, and other hangouts in Santiago and Mangodlong.

Yet, more than political will prioritizes sustainability over present gains.

The community decides and participates, down to the “barangay,” ”sitio,” and “purok”.

A dialect named Porohanon is still spoken fluently despite the influx of Cebuano and English. Traced to migrants from Bohol and Leyte, Porohanon fascinates: “Nikuligi na l’at an puza (the child is crying again).”

A nylon sack, that’s reused after storing rice to holding trash, hangs outside every home in Camotes. It speaks volumes to visitors, perhaps not in Porohanon but of the ethos of interdependence: my home is your home. Treat it as you do your own.


(mayettetabada.blogspot.com / mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 28, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”)