A Field Worker's Diary

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 a spy or a crazy tourist yelping at the sight of crocodiles.

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.