Confessions of an Expanding Waistline

I Was Aiming for Greatness, But hit a
Snag

(The field worker’s
diaries)

When I was in grade 6, my English
teacher somehow managed to put
ideas into my head that I was going to be a writer. I had a great future in the
field of communications, she said. I took
that to be gospel truth and wrote pretty much about everything from then on- believing that by
writing I was going to change the world
and alter the orderly chaos of the cosmic system with my small and huge words. I
wrote about boys and their various haircuts,
about prom and my disastrous velvet prom
dress, about falling insanely in love with 1.)a long-haired rocker (who was my first love, and who also  maimed me for life),2.)a cute nomad with big webbed feet and; 3.)a gay person who later decided he wanted to be a dad - sexual orientation notwithstanding
-and proceeded to marry a real, live, woman (I mean, c’mon, I still hear
stories of your nocturnal visits to chico’s);
about wanting to impale myself on a
barbed wire and die a messy death at the Sunken Garden during a Yano  performance (at age 19 I was pretty intense)—-pretty much all of it was crap that only served to feed on my
self-indulgence and round-the-clock preoccupation with myself and my imagined
tragedies.

In my twenties, right after college, I got into research. Armed with only the biggest self-confidence
this side of the equator, I wrote about the largest indigenous group in
Mindanao and their fight to claim their ancestral domain, taking potshots at
local officials and their lame-ass government policies that were funnier than all their toupees and fake noses combined. I
stayed for 3 months at a secluded, remote Manobo community in

Eastern
Mindanao

, doing ethnography, and yes, dancing barefoot at night to
a chorus of animal sounds. As you can imagine there was no electricity; the
village sat atop a clearing that was home to 20 indigenous families, a quaint and
little community whose dirt road starts up from the edge of the river and goes
straight up the hill. The journey from the munisipyo
took 2 hours on habal-habal, and
another hour and a half on a motorized banca.
You get to see the amazing sights so you don’t really think about the guerillas
watching on either side of the river, figuring you for 1.)A spy, or 2.) A crazy
tourist yelping delightedly at crocodile sightings. The

Umajam

River

snakes through a dense virgin
forest and two other indigenous settlements before reaching mine. When I stepped off the boat on the first day,
a little crowd of Manobo children and the tribal council had gathered by the
edge of the river to welcome THE anthropologist;
it was so much that I began to see parallelisms between me and Margaret Mead
when she first arrived at the island of Ta’u in Samoa to write Coming of Age. Only that I can bet she did not wear huge
sunglasses or overdosed on sun block, which I did. Oh, yeah, I did.  Big time.

On the very first night I almost died from the cold. I slept alone at a
nipa hut to better effect
internalization of anthropological work. I learned to smoke like a chimney to distract my self from the biting
cold and to keep from crying because I was terrified of the dark. (It’s a
childhood thing that I would never recover from even as I speak)I learned to
sing back at the dead silence and made friends with the stars and the fog that
just would not quit. I, true to form,
slept alongside a homemade bolo, a
voice recorder, my boyfriend’s picture, and a bag of chicharon in case I got hungry at night. Amidst the deafening
silence you could hear me go crrrrrrrrrrrrk, crrrrrrrrrrk, crrrrrrrrrk as I sat
up in bed, munching on chicharon,
fancying myself a prisoner of war tied up in the jungles of Afghan. I did not sleep for 90 days. I mean, who
could.

And of course there were visitors. Oh I had lots of ‘em.One early morning
as I was drying my hair by the asotea, fully intending to spend the day
daydreaming about helicopters rescuing me, when who should come marching up the
hill 50 meters from where I was standing. Guerillas! In full battle gear! I
dropped my cup of corn coffee and turned around to get my pepper spray. Then I stopped. My my, there was one cute guy
from among their ranks who was actually waving at me!  Later on he would tell me that I looked like I
had seen a ghost and looked like ready to die of aortic thrombosis.  I wonder if they are still alive today. Hmmmmm, he was really cute. And he smoked
camels.

By the end of the third month I was about ready to declare residency at
my newfound home, having found immense joy at jumping off from cliffs unto the
river and listening to tales of the Baylan
about diwatas and their numerous
exploits in sky heaven. (My favorite was Alimugkat,
the god of water,)But, alas, we had to be whisked off to safety when my partner
in another area got caught in a cross-fire between the military and the
guerillas. He was washing his feet by
the batalan when a bullet whizzed
through the air, barely missing his chin. Fearing that insurgency would spread
farther among the area and reach me in the riverine communities where I had been staying alone, the agency
pulled us out in 2 two seconds flat. Oh, the stupid wars we wage!( In one
community, a religious group put up a lumad
high school where indigenous children were taught the tenets of their
fast-eroding culture; my friend Jay thought
up a summer theatre workshop for the Manobo kids who acted out their tragedy in
the theatrical plays, songs and dances. You
watch these kids dramatize their ordeal during military operations through
theatre and it is enough to make you abhor war and the war-mongers among
us. Nothing can ever justify war – no matter
who wins, it is always the children who suffer. ALWAYS.)

So I went home. And travelled extensively across Visayas and

Mindanao

to write about reproductive health and rights,
women’s lib, good governance (or the lack thereof) and urban poverty. In between lulls, I wrote about boyfriends
and my inability to distinguish between love and rumor. Somewhere in all of this I found and forged
great friendships, lost a few, got hitched in a Rasta-reminiscent ceremony which I swear I cannot remember having
participated in, thereby nullifying the whole process; had a best friend die in
my arms, met cool and crazy people, fell in love, lived to tell about it, and
had a daughter (at 3 years old, she affirms my belief in good karma).

Now I am working in the government. No, excuse me, I should say, working FOR the people. My boss is the
people, not…..her, the one with the big mole. She just runs the system, and we do pay her, so I’m not that
impressed. Anyway, this is why I am
still up at 2 o’clock in the morning, still munching on chicharon. Instead of writing about core projects and their
corresponding budget for the year, I want to write about my job- the sometimes
thankless job - and the places I go to and the people I see everyday. I want to tell you stories of little people
you don’t know and will never know, stories of triumph and of loss, stories of victories
and unrest, of amazing friendships and amazingly hateful people, of everyday
tales of survival and dreams that would never come true; stories of men and
women helping each other, holding each other up, buoying each other’s hopes of someday
crawling out of this hellhole to run towards life.

These are our stories.

** I Was Aiming for Greatness, but hit a Snag: Episode 1 debuts next week. Or when I have the time.Whenever.

Episode 1: Who Wants To Ride A Habal-habal ?

Episode 2 : The Chichacorn Experience

Episode 3 : Backpacking Through The
East

Episode 4 : The Crazy Bunch Called
Raxel

Episode 5 : Oi! Naay Duhat Wine Diay?!

Episode 6 : But I Wanna Get Hurt!Why
Office Romances Will Not Work

Episode 7 : Ang Sayote ng Bayan

Espisode 8 : I Love Joiners!

Episode 9 : Sometimes The Best
Plan is No Plan

Episode 10 : The Kids of Mat-I : Three Good Reasons Why Bambi Should Listen