The Chocolate Hills were green when I was born in the landlocked, tranquil Carmen town. Chinese Year of the Rooster it was which my parents didn’t know and many things they didn’t know. The Hiroshima and the Nagasaki bombing they must have heard about but not the Auschwitz dismantling, Adolf Hitler’s suicide, the Chinese Civil War, the earthquake in Japan, the tsunami in Pakistan. The return of McArthur and the World War II ending they must have heard about too but not the United Nations founding, the Nag Hammadi scriptures, the Herbicide 2, 4-D, the microwave oven, the Streptomycin. No fanfare trumpeted my humble birth but the Chocolate Hills were green and my loving parents’ triumph and joy soared beholding the first fruit of their love’s labor.
I was tiny at birth so my parents had me baptized in haste, fearing I might not live long. They dedicated me to St. Vincent Ferrer and during their lifetime, never missed to pray the novena in honor of my patron saint on my natal day. I do not know why my parents chose the famous Dominican missionary and logician as my intercessor in heaven. Perhaps, like my name, they picked him from the Almanac, a compendium of names based on the birthdays of saints.
According to my parents, I was born on March 3, 1945. But they did not have a copy of my birth certificate, so in 1974 I asked for a copy from the Civil Registrar of Carmen, Bohol. Their record showed that I was born on March 14. Somehow, somebody made a mistake when my birth was registered since my parents could not be mistaken of the nativity of their first child. So I continued to celebrate my birthday on the third day of March. But since March 14 is my official birth date, I have to use the later date in official documents like my resume. When it was mandated that only the Certificate of
Live Birth issued by the Civil Registrar General of the Philippine Statistics Authority will be honored in government transactions (such as getting a passport), I had to apply for delayed registration since the Civil Registrar of Carmen, Bohol could no longer accept the certification issued by the office. I was told that all records of births before 1947 were declared lost or damaged. In January, 2007, I received my Certificate of Live Birth issued by the Civil Registrar General.
Both my parents were natives of Bohol. My father, Miguel Genson Sumagang was born in Carmen, Bohol on May 7, 1925. He grew, married and had his firstborn son in his hometown. His parents were farmers, raising rice and corn in marginal farms in the vicinity of the Chocolate Hills.
My mother, Epifania Ebdao Salabsab was born on April 7, 1924 in Loboc, Bohol where the family planted rice, corn, yam and taro. Their family transferred to Carmen when my mother was in her adolescence.
My parents did not talk much about their lives in Carmen. I learned about their engagement and marriage in 2007 when I visited Fructouso Vista in Katipunan, an adjoining town of Carmen to get his signature in the “joint affidavit of two disinterested persons” to support my application for delayed registration. The lanky elderly, who used to be the village head there, entertained us at the porch of his roadside house.
“Yes, I know your father and your grandparents who lived at Sitio Datag,” Fructouso said, bidding us to take a seat.
“I bought the land of your grandparents there from the original buyer,” Fermin butted in. Fermin, a relative, helped me in my transaction at the Civil Registrar’s Office.
“Your father was a member of the village band,” Fructouso said.
“I heard of that. Tatay used to play the banjo when I was still a kid.
How many members were in the band?”
“Not less than five. The band was in demand during fiestas and
celebrations.”
My mother who lived in Sitio Suba must have met my father in one of these festivities. That could have started a budding romance that led to their marriage at the Church of St. Anthony Abad on May 31, 1944. They married young, both of them barely nineteen years old. I was born before their first wedding anniversary, attended to by a traditional midwife.
Uprooted from their native place, my parents lived far from relatives. They had visited Carmen only two or three times since they migrated to Mindanao in 1946. During their second homecoming, sometime in 1952, they brought with them their three children – infant Ediltrudes, Silvestre and me. We stayed at the house of our mother’s parents whose faces I can no longer remember. There were other people in the house and I have a vague recollection of my mother’s sister Romualda, a deaf-mute, and her daughter Rita.
That homecoming was unforgettable because of my first and only encounter with a typhoon. It was a terrifying experience for me, then seven years old. With my face drenched by the heavy downpour, I struggled to breathe as we stepped out of the house and retreated to the bamboo grove. A blanket spread above us by tying its four corners to the bamboo canes sheltered us from the heavy downpour as we huddled tightly to share body heat. The pliant bamboos, hissing and undulating with the strong winds, remained rooted to the soaked earth, defiant of the onslaught of the typhoon. We stayed in the bamboo grove for the rest of the day and the night that followed. As the typhoon waned on the second day, we returned
to the house. The house was a wreck but erect, its round timber posts remained rooted to the ground. The slanting bamboo poles that reinforced and propped the building prevented the house from pitching over. Inside, I can see the sky since most of the roofing was gone; the remaining cogon grass that adamantly clung to the bamboo slats were in tatters. Half of the amakan wall was gone; the woven bamboo panels were ripped off and flown away and scattered at the rice paddies. The brush of the typhoon flattened the rice crop, heavy with ripening grains, to the ground. It took many days for the adult members of the family to repair the house.
(Excerpt from the book, Looking Back, Memoir)
