PERSONAL

CHRONICLES

CATHOLIC
AND
EMANCIPATED
ELIZABETH LOLARGA
Catholic and Emancipated 51

August Moon

I’ve always had a distaste for politics, but I love my liberal, libertarian,
socialist and communist friends. Long ago, too, I learned that the act
of writing is already a political act in itself. One cannot hide behind
the journalistic code of objectivity all the time. In the end, you have
to make a choice: Are you on our side or on the enemy’s? Whether in
the home with the threat of domestic violence hanging on one’s head
or out on the streets where cruel traps are laid, we face the challenge
of choosing, of making a stand.
Dying is easy; it’s the living that’s hard, so a wiseacre said.
Today, how I can pose like a placid fence-sitter while I await former
President Corazon Aquino’s casket to pass by, not too far from the
lobby window of the Manila Diamond Hotel? I’ve been here since 12
noon. People with yellow shirts or yellow ribbons tied around their
arms have been lining up the sidewalk since the sun rose.
I’m on a comfortable seat; my need to constantly pee has kept me
from joining them. Yellow banners with the silkscreened image of
Sen. Aquino festoon the street lamps. Manila is Cory City, Mayor Lim,
whom she endorsed as her presidential candidate in 1998, has seen to
that. Suddenly, Dirty Alfredo Lim smells clean.
My partner Rolly and friend Anna Leah Sarabia rushed out, he with
an umbrella and still-intact power of observation, she with her camera
and feistiness, to await the six-wheeler truck carrying the casket.
We never thought we’d make it this far—Rolly, Anna, me. We had
other plans for the day. Rolly wanted to get back to Baguio to be in
time for his pet dog’s dinner and his 7 a.m. class tomorrow at the
University of the Philippines there.
52 Personal Chronicles Elizabeth Lolarga

Anna was supposed to give me a pep talk and repeat her old line
about women’s rights being human rights. After which I was scheduled
for a 2 p.m. meeting with Anvil Publishing’s Gwenn Galvez to map
out the launching of The Baguio We Know, a two-year-in-the-making
anthology of essays by Baguio’s finest, timed for the celebration of the
highland city’s centennial.
But all plans were thrown in the waste basket. We decided to bear
witness today. As we ate a hurried lunch at a nearby Vietnamese
restaurant, memories of the August 21, 1983 assassination of President
Aquino’s husband Ninoy came back vividly. So did the anger at the
current lying and thieving Presidency. At one point, Anna thought
aloud, “Gosh! GMA makes Marcos and Erap look like saints!”
Rolly tried to be facetious to deflect the tension. Perhaps, he
surmised, the Filipinos are longing for a happening like today’s march.
No, I said, they had been waiting for the right time and occasion.
Anna agreed, pointing out that we are moving towards a full moon,
a lunar eclipse is going to happen. The moon, ah, for me who swears
by its inconstancy, is what moves the masses. The sun represents the
leaders. Expect something to happen to an awakened people.
It was the same Anna who said, around the time Marcos’s star was
dimming, that the Filipino is like a carabao—hardworking, patient,
etc. But once pushed to its limit, it gores its own master.
Two months ago, another friend said, half in resignation, half in
exasperation, that people were thinking, “Gloria (Macapagal-Arroyo)
has a year to go. Let’s just ride it out instead of protesting. Maybe
change will come after the 2010 elections.”
Apparently, we’re near breaking point like the time Sen. Aquino
was treacherously “salvaged,” to use Sen. Saguisag’s so very apt
word. I never thought the line “Tama na, sobra na, palitan na” would
resonate again with vibrant, refreshing beauty, no longer a cliché.

www.brooksidebaby.com, August 4, 2009

172 Personal Chronicles Elizabeth Lolarga

The Stuff of Memories

One can never have a surfeit of Palawan. Paul Theroux, described by

The Times of London as needing “no more than three or four strokes of
his pen to complete the most vivid of pictures,” had enthusiastically
explored the place earlier, including its tributaries and land forms,
despite the cautionary “Don’t go” advice of well-meaning people.
Before the scattered incidences of bombings in Metro Manila, the
country already enjoyed worldwide notoriety. In Fresh-Air Fiend,
Theroux wrote: “[T]he very mention of the Philippines brings to the
narrow mind the images of dog-eaters and cockfights, urban blight
and rural poverty; and Mrs. Marcos’s ridiculous collection of shoes;
where the visitor industry consisted mainly of sex tours and money
launderers and decaying old white men looking for doe-eyed Filipinas
to marry, or else willing catamites in Manila, and of course the furtive
visits of European branches of Pedophiles sans Frontieres.”
According to a cynical colleague, no matter what good things one
may write upon one’s return from a weekend in Palawan, the fact of
the matter is that the bombings in Bali, Zamboanga City and Metro
Manila have scared off even the most intrepid travelers.
Tell that to Theroux. For only in the Philippines did he have an
encounter such as this one he narrated:

One day I paddled about ten miles southwest to a headland and then
caught sight of an island that had been hidden from where I had been
camping. I paddled out three or four miles to this hump of rock and
found a sandy beach and some huts. A Germanic-looking man in a green
bathing suit stood on the beach to welcome me. He said “Hi” and grabbed
my bow line and helped pull my boat to shore.
Catholic and Emancipated 173

“Nice kayak,” he said. It was salt-smeared and wet from the long haul
from the headland. “Isn’t that the kind of boat Paul Theroux paddled in
his travels around the Pacific?”
Being cautious, I said, “You read that book?”
“Oh, yeah. Great book.”
This happens now and then—more often in a remote place like
Palawan than in places closer to home.
“I wrote it.”
“Cut the shit.”

So now this Palawan visitor landed at Busuanga airport aboard

Seair’s 19-seater plane that was built to withstand Siberian and
Saharan winds. (This bit of info from Jingjing Romero of the media
familiarization tour organization seemed to comfort the quivering
types casting about for barf bags.)
The mid-afternoon drive afforded views of a privately owned ranch
straddling either side of what to foreign eyes must be an exotically
rough road. White egrets flew or clustered atop trees while cattle
grazed on forlorn patches of green.
At the Coron pier we transferred to the pumpboat Busuanga Dream
and met guide Robert Agusto. He recited his spiel about tourism, the
pearl farms and fishing being the main means of livelihood in the
northern part of the province, and the youth comprising 50 percent
of the population.
The mobile-phone carriers sent good-night text messages to their
adored ones. (Henceforth, they would be incommunicado for at least
two nights and a day.) Midway through the ride (almost two hours) to
Coral Bay Resort on Popototan Island, one realized that Metro Manila
seemed a lifetime away.
Whichever way one turned, one confronted the horizon. The sky
wore intense oranges and violets as dusk turned to eventide.
Jingjing managed to thaw the usually unsociable members of
media through an after-dinner group-dynamics exercise that involved
revealing the secret dream of the partner assigned to you.
One’s utmost wish of hitting 50 without a stroke was probably
so pedestrian compared to one’s neighbor’s “dying on top of a bull
running in the streets of Pamplona in Spain,” another’s “being a better
flamenco dancer than Joaquin Cortez,” still another’s having Robert
174 Personal Chronicles Elizabeth Lolarga

Redford—warts and all—for a lover and settling down in the south

of France.
The exercise showed that hard-boiled journalists nourished a
fantasy life of some sort. Where else to indulge it than on a remote
island where the only rule agreed on was to keep identities off the
record?
On Saturday we rose at 4 a.m., left the resort at 5, and tried to
keep down the breakfast eaten on board the boat as it tossed in the
open sea.
Froilan Sariego, resident project manager of the Calauit Game
Preserve and Wildlife Sanctuary, gave us some welcome remarks. The
kidnappings of a few years ago had hit the tourism industry hard. But
he belied talk that Northern Palawan was susceptible to the intrusions
of extremists. “We’re far from danger,” he said.
Froilan quoted visiting Englishmen as saying that the grazing
areas of the exotic animals resembled the terrain of Kenya. Here
giraffes (some named Yeye, Eva, Lemuel and Baleleng), zebras, water
bucks, impalas and bushbacks are found. In 3,760-hectare Calauit,
40 percent is made up of plains, 20 percent undulating hills, and the
rest, mangroves and swamps.
The moments in the field reminded us of Isak Dinesen’s words:
“... [T]hen the dreary bush gives way and the plain widens out;
before one lie the great tablelands, surrounded by a magnificent
panorama of blue mountains, teeming with game... The zebra are
sweet, but they look like horses of course... a most wonderful sight
is a herd of giraffe, and the first time you see them you can hardly
believe your own eyes when you see their incredible height and
slenderness, like a flock of great snakes with the most strange
rocking movement.”
The Calauit sanctuary is the first translocated project in Asia where
the fauna are free to roam and propagate, and the second such project
in the world next to the San Diego Zoo in the United States.
The formerly endangered Calamian deer, found only in Palawan,
increased from 25 heads in 1976 to today’s 1,025. “They multiply fast
so long as they’re not harmed,” Froilan said. And 15 deer have been
sent to San Diego at the zoo’s request.
Mouse deer are also being raised. The adult, which weighs as much
as two kilos, consumes a kilo of fig fruits every day.
Catholic and Emancipated 175

According to Benito Sario of the sanctuary’s information, education

and recreation unit, a female mouse deer can give birth five times in
two years and is ready to mate again after giving birth.
In a compartment, there are four to five females and one male.
If all the females give birth simultaneously, the male is moved to
another compartment and a new one introduced “to keep the blood
strain strong.”
The young are protected with an overhead net from the crested
serpent eagle that preys on them. In Balabac Island, Southern
Palawan, where mouse deer can also be found, their numbers are
being depleted by people who catch and serve them to guests as
kilawin or papaitan.
The six-by-six viewing truck took us to the top of Balatbat Hill
overlooking Tanubon, a turtle nesting island. Starting from the day
the pawikan eggs hatch, predatory birds, snakes and monitor lizards
are fenced off, Benito informed us.
The hatchlings are brought to a rearing pool after 60 days. When
they reach the size of a plate, they are considered able enough to
survive in the sea.
And thirteen sea cows (dugong) have been seen around Calauit,
Benito said.
This is Calauit’s quandary: will the government give the island back
to its original inhabitants, the 256 families who were paid during
Marcos’ time to vacate their land and resettle in Culion, or will the
project be maintained?
Because of the return of 120 families who are scattered all over the
island and are unable to harness resources for a living, except those in
the sanctuary, poaching has become a problem.
“These people seem to want to wipe out the animals so that the
government has no more reason to maintain the sanctuary,” Froilan
said.
He and wife Edwina, Benito and wife Nenita, Maximo Lobo-on,
Ramon Ortega, Eliezer and Tessie Cruz, Estelito and Rose Hachero,
Orland and Dinah Cruz and Rafael Gobayan have served the sanctuary
for 26 years. But they still have no tenure and, worse, their pay is late
by as much as three months.
At different periods the sanctuary has fallen under the Department
of Environment and Natural Resources, the Presidential Committee
176 Personal Chronicles Elizabeth Lolarga

for the Conservation of the Tamaraw, the Office of Muslim Affairs,

the Department of Agriculture, the Conservation and Resource
Management Foundation, and the Palawan Council for Sustainable
Development.
Benito picked up the common thread in the field staff’s story: “This
was where we met and got to know one another, like the impala.
This was where our children were born and raised, and now we have
grandchildren. If the animals are endangered, so are we.”
It was letting-go time at Malajon or Black Island—swimming,
feasting on crabs and adobo, looking for coves perfect for couples
fantasizing on doing a Burt Lancaster-Deborah Kerr roll in the sand
(From Here to Eternity).
The island has such a cove. Someone said, after appraising the
limestone walls enclosing it, the fine sand with no human imprint, the
waves lapping at the edge: “If you film on location here, people won’t
believe it’s for real. They’ll think it’s still a set.”
Despite the itinerary, we played it by ear the rest of our stay.
The last evening at Coral Bay featured dining and wining under the
stars with Robert the guide switching easily from waiter to dancing-
instructor mode.
Next stop: Busuanga Seadive Resort in Barangay 3, Coron, whose
dining hall and veranda face the sea. Aboard Seadive Blu, we moved
on to Banul Island.
On the water in a kayak, one paddled madly when a passenger
started to feel leg cramps. She managed to utter: “I want to die gored
by a bull in Pamplona, not in a non-biodegradable rubber kayak!”
One’s paddling partner managed to correct her upon our reaching
shore: “By the way, it’s plastic.”
Thus are memories made, said a wise man. It’s not the place; it’s
still the people, and one yellow kayak drifting in and out of one’s
dreams.

Philippine Daily Inquirer, November 10, 2002

192 Personal Chronicles Elizabeth Lolarga

Down-River Cruise and

Heavenly Voices

Two months before I stepped on Bohol’s soil for the first time, I received
from a friend a t-shirt showing the Chocolate Hills and a tarsier in
eye-popping colors. Although he stayed overnight in Panglao Island
and only saw Tagbilaran City in the daytime, he was profuse with
praise for the province. Maybe his gift meant that I would be able to
see Bohol at a future time, I thought then.
And now here I was, talking on the phone with Ricky A.R. Santos,
marketing and promotions director of Sandugo 2000.
Ricky told me how to get to Cebu via a Cebu Pacific flight and hop
over to Bohol via a Supercat ferry. I would arrive in Cebu at 6 a.m.
and have about four hours to kill before the ferry pushes off at 11.
We were to meet at the pier. “How will I recognize you?” he asked. I
said I’d wear my sunflower t-shirt, yellow blossoms against a field of
blue.
What to do with the four empty hours when the Queen City of
the South was just waking up? My Cebuana friend Evelyn Paul, then
in Manila, texted her pal Eileen Mangubat, Cebu Daily News (CDN)
editor, to ask if I could park myself and my stuff at her office during
those hours. For breakfast, Evelyn told me, I could cross the street and
try Kukuk’s Nest and Inn.
While the rest of Metro Manila was being pelted by a weeklong storm,
I was at Kukuk’s one sun-blessed July morn, eating breakfast by my
lonesome. The security guard at CDN let me in to read the papers from
where I gathered that there had been an encounter between the New
People’s Army and the military in the hinterlands of Trinidad, Bohol.
At the pier Ricky spotted me easily. Soon we were off, over the
bounding sea with the Supercat ferry’s videocassette recorder cued in
Catholic and Emancipated 193

on Jurassic Park. The movie wasn’t halfway through when we docked

at Tagbilaran pier.
“See?” Ricky said, gesturing at the sky. “It’s sunny and dry.”
After a quick check-in at the Metro Center Hotel and Convention
Center, the tallest building in the city, we boarded a van to catch
the participants of a marketing conference for the Loboc River cruise.
Onward we sped until Ricky caught sight of the jeep bearing Gardy
Labad of the Center for Culture and Arts Development. Stop! Brief
intros. Then it was go, go, go before the riverboats left.
In the riverboat a buffet was spread on a table—puso (rice wrapped
in banana leaf and shaped like a heart), jackfruit salad, raw fish in
coconut vinaigrette, braised pork belly, charbroiled fish in pandan,
roast chicken, and crab relleno. I sipped the juice of young coconut
from its shell, which had a dainty pink hibiscus stuck near the rim.
We ate while the boat moved downstream, past thick mangroves,
children bathing and waving, and rock formations that reminded
me of certain people’s faces. According to Ricky, if we had cruised
upstream, we would have ended by a waterfall. The cruise took about
an hour and a half. There was a little difficulty docking the boat, but
we managed to reach shore where a brass band played “Don’t You Go,
Don’t You Go to Far Zamboanga.”
Next, we watched the performance of the youthful cast of Muro-ami
on a tired-looking ferryboat with Gardy emceeing until he was hoarse.
From her perch child actress Rebecca Lusterio, who played Kalbo in the
film, smiled wanly at the crowd. To cap the jiving dance to the music of
the Street Boys, the male youths somersaulted into the water.
At the Bohol Tropics Resort, with the Dimiao Children’s Rondalla
playing in the background, I tasted my first deep-fried, coconut-meat-
covered ube balls and downed them with Four Seasons juice.
Evening found me admiring the long aquarium behind the front
desk of Metro Center, a departure from the large-scale paintings
one usually sees at these places. Hotel owner Frederick Ong chose
moving sea life instead of a still life. The aquarium simulates the
conditions under the sea with a customized chiller that maintains the
temperature. The fish are thriving.
Early the next day, Gardy buzzed me, whispering, “Huwag ka nang
magpa-beauty. Pack your things. You’re moving to Panglao Island
Nature Resort.”
194 Personal Chronicles Elizabeth Lolarga

Over breakfast there we met Frederick Ong and his wife Barbara.
“Here in Bohol, land is more evenly distributed,” he said. “The
middle class has been preserved and strengthened so we have no
social problems, unlike in Negros Occidental where you have large
haciendas.”
Landscape architect Socorro Atega incorporated plants that are
more adaptable to the tropical sun and the sea breeze—santans,
bougainvilleas, Shanghai beauties, red palms, coconut trees, royal
palms, champagne palms and Manila palms, the last locally called
saluwag.
From the white-sand beach decked with cabanas, lounging chairs
and a volleyball net, I saw the limestone cliff which over time has
been shaped by waves and strong winds. “The sun and rain have
painted their colors on the rocks,” Frederick said.
Our next stop was Our Lady of the Assumption parish church in
Dauis. Gardy uncovered the well at the foot of the altar. He explained
that the second and present church was built around the well in the
late 18th century while Fray Joseph Nepomuceno Paves constructed
the convent and original, old church in 1753.
“The belief is, if the water in Dauis is exhausted, people can still
get water from this well,” he said. He dreams of mounting a dance
drama behind the church with its stupendous ancient windows and
door as backdrop.
The intact frescoes of the saints and Holy Family were painted
sometime in 1907-1910. The convent features landscape paintings
on its ceilings. Fr. Felipe Diga, parish priest, was there to meet and
inform us that of the town’s 14,000 population, 11,000 are Roman
Catholics.
In Baclayon, we admired the Parish of the Immaculate
Conception established in 1596 when the formal evangelization and
Christianization of the Boholanos began. Because of Moro raids, the
construction of the church was often halted. The original was made
of wood and nipa.
The diocesan museum curator informed us that the coral stone
church was built in 1727. The builders used the tabique Pampango
method: Limestone, mud from the sea and millions of egg whites. The
Recollect fathers added the portico facade, organs, paintings on the
ceilings, belfy and watchtower.
Catholic and Emancipated 195

Inside the church, Teatro Bol-anon, the province’s first community

repertory theater ensemble and founded by Gardy, presented an
excerpt of Dagon sa Hoyohoy (Talisman in the Breeze). Bohol’s first
full-length musical composed by Elvis Somosot, it is based on the
life of anti-Spaniard rebel Francisco Dagohoy. The talisman, made
of feathers, scales and a pearl, was reputed to have guided and
empowered him.
We ventured close to the retablos. These were originally put up by
the Jesuits and are made of hardwood gilded with gold leaves. There
is an upstairs tribuna, an inconspicuous mezzanine where priests and
their privileged special guests used to stay so as not to be exposed
to the public while hearing Mass. We toured the adjacent church
museum with its floors of molave planks that are pegged, not nailed
down.
Our group detoured to the nearby light tower, an unprepossessing
sight except that it was where actor Cesar Montano proposed marriage
to singer Sunshine Cruz over a candlelight dinner one moonlit night,
the Loboc Children’s Choir serenading them.
In Loay we paused at the ancestral house built by Aniceto Clarin
and his señora Margarita in 1840. Inside are five four-poster beds,
all still in use, generations-old crystals, a reproduction of Luna’s
“Spoliarium” and countless memorabilia.
The current lady of the house, Antonietta Clarin, led me to a room
that has an altar for the ivory statues of the Holy Family which she
believes ensure that the house is safe.
Lunchtime caught us in coastal Dimiao, the cleanest and greenest
municipality in the province. The mayor’s staff prepared fried fish,
menudo, seaweed salad, squash and stringbeans cooked in coconut
milk, and heaps of rice.
Dimiao is where the 17th-century St. Nicholas Church stands in
the center of town, where white-sand beaches, part of Chocolate
Hills, the twin Pahangog Falls and caverns are found. The Ermita
ruins are there. These are catacombs or graves that are the subject of
an archaeological study by the National Museum. The next phase will
be their restoration.
Back in Tagbilaran, we visited the Bohol Museum inside the late
President Carlos P. Garcia’s house on F. Rocha Street. Inside are CPG
memorabilia, former first lady Leonila Garcia’s ternos, a skeleton of a
196 Personal Chronicles Elizabeth Lolarga

500-year-old Boholana recovered in 1970 at a pre-Spanish burial site

in Mansasa, Tagbilaran, and a 500-year-old remnant of a house post
dating back to the Dapitan Kingdom, a pre-Hispanic settlement in
Bohol, and discovered in Guiwanon, Baclayon, in 1993.
On my last day I met Alma Taldo, the slight, soft-spoken conductor
of Loboc Children’s Choir. She let me listen to a CD of her wards
singing, among others, the folk ditty “Bol-anon” (“If you want a
partner in life, choose a Boholano-he will love you till forever”). The
ages of the 17 girls and seven boys range from 8 to 14. What heavenly
and earthly tunes are included in their repertoire (“Ave Maria,” “Panis
Angelicus,” “Our Father,” Negro spirituals, “Lollipop Tree”).
I missed their live performance by an hour or so before the river
cruise, but their voices haunted me as I returned to Manila’s floods
and driving rain.

Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 20, 2000