SALAMAN, LIBUNGAN AND KOLAMBUGAN
In 1946, the year that the Philippines became an independent republic, our parents left Carmen, Bohol in search for a greener pasture. They joined the exodus of people from the neighboring islands of the Visayas and even from as far as Luzon, to Mindanao. The migrants were enticed by the island’s legendary vast and fertile lands. Together with our father’s father, stepmother and two half-brothers, our parents dared to cross the Mindanao Sea in an old steel-hull vessel. I could imagine my mother cuddling me, not venturing out of her canvass cot, seasick in her first sea travel. As the firstborn son, I was barely a year old then.
We settled in Tran, Salaman, Cotabato, the place of the acculturated Tiruray tribe who called themselves as etew teran where my mother gave birth to a second child, Silvestre. It was in Tran that they had their first taste of the land of promise, which could not be as sweet as they expected since we did not stay long in that strange, place. I still remember mother telling me about the hassle of caring for her first-born child, which was not easy due to the abundance of mosquitoes in the area. At night, my mother had to wrap me over with a blanket to ward off the swarming insect. I was wrapped when sleeping on the rush plant mat or when inside the cloth hammock tied on both ends to the beams of the hut. The buzzing of mosquitoes must have mingled with my mother’s lullaby as she gently swung the duyan. These blood-sucking pests emerged from dense foliage, nooks and dark crevices before sunset, in earnest search for warm-blooded animals. The presence of soft-skin humans was a boon to the mosquitoes. So every late in the afternoon, my mother had to fumigate the house by burning dry leaves and other litter in the yard. With my mother’s vigilance, we were spared of the proboscis of anopheles mosquitoes, a carrier of the deadly malaria.
Worried of the fragile peace and order conditions of the Muslim-dominated village, the whole clan transferred to Libungan, Cotabato. A homesteader offered my father a farm lot to till as a tenant. With sapling, cogon grass and woven bamboo splits my father built a payag, his second hut in Mindanao. The farm could be at the outskirts of the village since accordingly, our nearest neighbor was beyond shouting distance.
The rural life in Libungan fell short of my father’s expectations. The family had to move again. In 1949, we set foot in the then undivided Lanao province and settled in a farm village of Kolambugan, one of the coastal towns along Panguil Bay. Another brother, Bonifacio, was born there. Still very young then, I only had scattered recollections of what happened during our stay in Upper Balagatasa. We lived in a coconut farm that my father tended as a sharecropper. His share from the sale of copra was a way short for even the simplest living but my father was long in industry and patience. To make both ends meet, he planted root crops and vegetables and raised chicken for the fowl’s meat and eggs. Our pigsty was always inhabited by a few native pigs, with one pig dedicated and fattened for the annual feast of the patron saint of the village. He planted cassava, mainly as feeds for the pigs. However, while the cassava was a blessing to the pigs, it was not to be with my brother Bonifacio. He died of food poisoning after eating boiled cassava. My father also tapped one or two coconut trees for his daily ration of tuba. He drank the palm wine to soothe his tired muscles after a hard day’s toil and to enliven his spirit. Our supply of vinegar was fermented tuba.
