Joecab

I saw Joyce from a distance yesterday afternoon. He was at the poultry supply, perhaps buying goods for his game fowls.

Joyce is a friend from my childhood in rural Balete. We grew up together, went to the same school, and were tutored by the same teachers from Grade 1 to 6 at Balete Elementary School. We were playmates, though not exactly the best of friends. We had our share of differences, and when diplomacy failed, we let our fists settle the matter.

 Old Baleten-ons called him Joecab—a monicker he earned for being the grandson of Old Lo Bador, the original “bagoe.” As you already know, Balete is notorious for giving a second baptism to its favored sons and daughters, christening them with monickers apt to capture certain characteristics in their persons. Thus, Joyce became Joecab, a combination of his first name and his grandfather’s “patented” nickname—not to mention that he was always sporting shaven head we used to enjoy rubbing with a chuck of goso.

 I was on my way home yesterday when I saw him standing before the poultry supply along T.F. Calizo Ave. He acknowledged my passing with a nod and a smile. Something in that smile somehow reminded me of a particular event in our lives—not when we were toddlers playing bricks and goso at the plaza, but when we were already grappling with the puzzle of puberty.

 You see, despite the feminine sound of his name, Joecab was a raging bull. He was already brimming with testosterone in his youth. On one occasion, he quipped, addressing the entire barkada:

 “Tao kon sin-o katon kara iya ro mauna makapangasawa?”

 But that’s not what I recalled yesterday upon seeing him. What I remembered was that particular instance in Mapait, one summer night…

 “This song,” Joecab proclaimed in his loud baritone voice, breaking the silence of the night, “is lovingly and heartily dedicated to Miss—Sin-o ngani to, pre?”

Thus began our harana, or serenade, to a young and beauteous vacasionista.

 As you also know, Joecab had a good singing voice and was a self-taught acoustic player. He was one of those few animators in our group of friends who could turn a simple gathering into festive carousing. Just let him strum his guitar to the tune of Tantaloyloyloy.

 Those were the days!

That’s Joecab.

And he was the first among us to get hooked.

Owning the Church of the Poor

Msgr. Adolfo Depra used to speak of the Church of Balete as truly the Church of the Poor. He made that remark sometime in the 1990s, after celebrating the High Mass during the Feast of St. Rafael the Archangel, which had been rescheduled to October 23 instead of the traditional October 24.

In those days, the roles of the local Church and the civil government in the fiesta were clearly defined. The Church was not trying to take over what did not belong to her. She was simply claiming what was rightly hers.

The fiesta was a religious event. As such, the Church strove to manifest the truth of Christian life in every facet of its celebration: in the preparation, in the celebration itself—from Day 1 of the novena to its culmination—and even in the evaluation afterward. The fiesta was meant to be a witnessing to the ideals of our brotherhood in Christ Jesus; never merely a festal gathering of frenzy and wild abandon.

Perhaps this was what it meant to be a Church of the Poor: not simply to stand with the poor, but to protect what was sacred to them, even when doing so meant confronting the habits and interests that had gradually taken possession of the fiesta.

To claim the fiesta was therefore not to claim power over the people. It was to reclaim a meaning that belonged to the people in the first place.

And perhaps this is where the Church had to be both pastoral and prophetic. Pastoral, because it knew the people and their lived realities; prophetic, because it could not simply bless whatever had become customary. It had to ask whether our customs still bore witness to what we professed to believe.

The question was never: Who owns the fiesta?

The deeper question was: What has the fiesta become—and what does it say about us?

For a Church of the Poor, that question could not be avoided.

BETOK, THE DUMUEUONG THAT HAS TAKEN ROOT AT LAST

 

MY FATHER was regarded by his peers as an outsider, a newcomer—a dumueuong.

He was a jack of all trades from Sitio Hueaton who married my mother of the Flogio-Perez clan of Sitio Pinamunitan. He built our first home on a parcel of land by a nameless creek in Pinamunitan, Batan, Aklan—a wedding gift from my grandparents, Eli and Curoy.

It was a paradise. Birds sang without fear, and the creek ran clear, sheltering fishes of every kind: puyo, pantat, aeogsok, oeang, sili, and more. It was there that our family began.

In 1973, with our growing family of five, he moved us to Balete and settled in a small hut behind the old puericulture center. The decision was practical, but in retrospect it seems almost providential.

My mother had just been hired as the town's midwife. She worked alongside a lady-doctor from Banga and a nurse who was the mayor's wife, and who would later become an “accidental mayor” herself. Soon after, my father was appointed Sanitary Inspector, serving first with old Tay Jamin Rafol and later with Tay Lende Barrios.

Yet despite his position and authority, the old tumandok—the true Baleten-ons—still regarded him as a dumueuong.

He bore the stigma with a mixture of derision and defiance. When intoxicated, he would sometimes rail against those who called him an outsider.

“Bah! They call me dumueuong—those without roots to boast about. Remember, Al, you are deeply rooted in this land. Your forebears were here long before those hypocrites came around.”

He would then recount the lineage of our clan, naming Dela Cruzes, Gomezes, Marcialeses, Rebenitos, Gallardezes, Teodosios, Tamayos, Redondos, and others.

In adulthood, I went looking for those names in the archives. His boast was not entirely a drunkard's invention. He was indeed descended from families whose roots reached deep into the history of the place. Perhaps that knowledge gave him the courage to ignore the label others had given him. Or perhaps the label itself made him more determined to prove that he belonged.

In the late 1970s, he astonished Balete by building a house out of coco-lumber. “What on earth is coco-lumber?” people scoffed. He answered not with words but with a shining, sturdy, termite-resistant house.

He bought a chainsaw, introducing it to Balete for the first time, and taught his Tamayo cousins, along with others, how to use it. He then made coco-lumber available to Baleten-ons as a cheaper alternative to good lumber. With his Rebenito uncles, he established a furniture shop. Their craftsmanship found its way into homes across Balete and beyond—tables and cabinets made from naga, dao, apitong, kamagong, and other hardwoods.

In 1982, he left for Saudi Arabia as an OFW. Two years later, he returned home and took over the management of our family's fishpond in Pinamunitan. He turned it into a thriving aquaculture venture, raising milkfish, tiger prawns, and mud crabs. To protect its earth dikes from the tides and flood, he planted nipa palm along the river.

By the late 1980s, his Teodosio cousins persuaded him to open what would become Balete's first hardware store. With little capital, he sought help from Fr. Tito, who was skeptical of the venture. But my father's conviction prevailed, and together they founded Balete Mini-Hardware. Through it many sturdy houses sprouted like mushrooms in Balete. The partnership did not last long, but the business prospered. It opened another door for him—this time into small-scale government contracting.

For the first time, perhaps, leisure seemed within reach. But success brings its own temptations. In midlife, pride and desire proved stronger than discipline. The ventures that had once carried him forward gradually slowed, then faded into silence.

Life, however, has a way of bringing us back to where we began. In his final years, my father returned to Pinamunitan. There, on the land where his journey had begun, he built a simple hut. He planted fruit trees, mahogany, acacia, and eucalyptus. I gave him a water pump and had a deep well installed, sparing him the burden of fetching water from the murky creek.

He died quietly on the early morning of January 3, 2024, at the age of eighty-two. His remains are now entombed on the quiet hill of Balete Cemetery. No longer a dumueuong. The land had finally claimed him as its own.

By then, our family had grown from five to eight. Five of his six children had families of their own. His fruit trees bore fruit for children who would never know the man who planted them. His hut was vandalized. His pump was stolen. The land grew forested. And the creek—the same creek that once ran clear and sheltered puyo, pantat, aeogsok, oeang, and sili—now struggled to breathe.

Perhaps that is what remains of a life in the end: not the houses he built, the businesses he started, or the things he accumulated, but the roots he leave behind.

My father was called a dumueuong because others thought he had no roots here. He spent his life proving otherwise.

 

OF CARPENTERS AND OLD SONGS

 

Old songs are doorways to yesterdays. On Sundays, I make it a ritual to listen to them—the ballads of the fifties, sixties, and seventies—not merely for their melodies, but for the rhythm they awaken in memory. 

They carry me back to afternoons beside my mother as she repaired a broken bariw mat. Her hands moved with quiet precision, each movement a beat in the rhythm of her day. As the lone midwife to a community of some fifteen thousand souls, perhaps this small act of mending was her way of resting from the heavy demands of her calling. I was told to take my siesta, but I resisted. I hated siestas. Instead, I rolled a pencil across the mat like a toy car while the afternoon stretched lazily around us. The movement of her hands, the rolling of my pencil, the drowsy heat—somehow, they have remained with me. 

The old songs take me there. They take me to the old house by the puericulture center, and later to my father’s furniture shop. There, the local panday worked with the quiet confidence of men who knew their craft. They arrived before seven, their pomaded hair already part of the morning scene. At nine, they paused for breakfast—sinabawan nga sapsap sa kamatis o eba—which they loved enough to sip down to the last drop. Fifteen minutes later, they were back at work. They labored until eleven, broke for lunch, took a strict one-hour siesta, and returned at exactly one. At five, they tidied the site, gathering their waste and leaving the workplace almost as they had found it that morning. 

There was a discipline to their hours, but there was also something gentler in it—a rhythm of work, food, rest, and work again that belonged to the life of the town itself. 

And so the old songs bring all these back: my mother mending the mat, the carpenters shaping wood in the afternoon light, the taste of broth, and the stubborn boy who thought an hour of sleep was an hour stolen from living. They bring back a way of life I did not know I was witnessing. 

I miss them. I miss those Sunday afternoons. 

Last Sunday, I switched on my phone’s Bluetooth to my Marshall. There, The Carpenters began to sing, and it is yesterday once more. 

Songs do not return the past exactly as it was. They return fragments of it—the sounds, textures, tastes, movements, and feelings that somehow survived in us. The old panday built the houses and furniture of my childhood. The Carpenters now help rebuild them in memory.

 

ARBOR DAY MEMORIAL

 

We observed Arbor Day today.

Early this morning, some of us from the local government unit went up to the foothill of Eumati at Sitio Arcangel Norte to plant trees. I scaled the heights of Eumati when I was a young man, but I had not been there since. Not even at Arcangel Norte. I decided to ditch the motorcycle, being unfamiliar with the terrain, and hitch a ride on the back of one of our 4x4 service pickups, together with the girls.

The road was long, winding, and mostly uphill, with the final ascent stretching more than 300 meters at a sustained incline of almost 45 degrees. Eumati leaned over us, inviting us to discover her again. But our roads diverged. We stopped at the entrance of Arcangel Norte Primary School, an old, solitary building with three classrooms, perched on a plateau facing the crest of Eumati. The school stood on an expanse bordered by a game farm on a rolling hill teeming with rambutan trees heavy with ripening fruits.

There, we planted varieties of endemic trees—narra, taghangin, and another whose name I failed to identify.

We planted them for us later to forget.

Yes. To forget.

We have been planting trees since the late 1990s. At one time, we aimed to plant a million trees across our vast territory. Balete has a total land area of 11,892.78 hectares. Its upland forest cover is pegged at only 2,054.30 hectares, while its mangrove forest covers 179.36 hectares. Our population, according to the 2024 CBMS data, is 30,310. One could imagine how thickly forested our land might have been had those million trees thrived.

But we forget.

We plant, then return to our quotidian worries, forgetting that we have planted trees.

Precisely why there is a need for an annual observance we call Arbor Day. We need it to remind us that we planted trees long before we planted trees today. Perhaps we should call it Memorial Arbor Day, an occasion to remember those trees we planted in the bare thickets of Eapos, at the foothills of Agtawagon, in the shade of Nasunogan, on the hidden hill near Kabuhian, in the heights of Anao, in the wilderness of Cortes, and in some other places I can now barely recall.

I wonder why, but today reminded me of the chocolate pig my daughter Aurea loved when she was just three. Something in them seemed to connect one to the other. I just can't figure out what.

 

Aurea at 4, guarding her sapling

RUBBING SHOULDERS

There is something valuable about riding public transport in Rural Balete. A jeepney ride offers the commuter perks that enliven his experience of humanity. In it, he is part of the whole. He rubs shoulders and body with the rest. He hears their stories. He smells their histories. He sees them as persons—not just individuals, and neither as statistics.

The jeepney is his public sphere. In it, he interacts with others through his daily commute and their quotidian worries. In it, the exigencies of life are shared. The jeepney is his community. In it, he belongs. He feels the others’ joys and struggles, the others’ victories and defeats, the others’ hopes and angsts, the others’ faith and disbelief.

Yesterday, I had the grand opportunity of commuting to Kalibo. I seldom take public transport these days. I am what others see as a privileged one, being placed on the high seat of power by local standards. I rub shoulders with the power-that-be. In a way, I am alienated from the common tao, from the ultimo, those who have least in life.

I seldom hear their stories and woes firsthand these days. I’m confined in the inner air-conditioned room, guarded by gatekeepers. Only the select can come to see me on a regular basis. My office has been appropriated and allotted to those who sought my advice or those who sought my intervention.

But yesterday, I had the wonderful opportunity of commuting. My travel was personal, not official. And I opted to commute. I don’t want to abuse the perks of a service vehicle. I want to reclaim my experience of rubbing shoulders with my fellowmen. I miss hearing their stories. I miss hearing them utter their unguarded tales, inflected in the sound of their language. There’s something different in their idioms, in the way they exchange words.

Yes. Yesterday, riding on a jeepney bound for Kalibo, I regained that heartwarming experience. As I rubbed shoulders with my fellow commuters, I listened to the tales of a woman behind me. She was addressing someone from her place. She was telling him about someone who was hospitalized and whose bills were now accumulating fast. She wondered where they would get the money to pay the bills. She talked also of a loanshark they happened to know. She said she was soulless. She said that she believed in gaba—karma. But the loanshark, she said, was not affected by it. It was her family that suffered because of her evil ways.

Kaeuoy ta ra mga unga nga nagaantus. She pities her children who suffered in her behalf. Sayod na gid ron. Sayod na gid ron. She emphasized it as if reciting a mantra.

Her words reminded me that the jeepney is not merely transport but a chapel of stories. In its cramped benches, we carry each other’s burdens, and in rubbing shoulders, we rub away the illusion of distance between privilege and struggle.

 

THE LIST

 

The morning is breaking softly today. The wet blades of grasses mirror the morning light in mythical symmetry. Some roosters still perching on their Indian Mango roost welcome it in solfeggio intervals. The brood of chicks plea on their mothers to hasten their morning rituals to hunt for some prospective worms. A couple of snipes inspect the drying stream winding through the orchard and down into the culverts set up by DPWH. It follows them across the Aklan East Road to join the greater water of the Jal-o yonder several communities in rural Balete. The lanzones and mangosteens spread their leaves quietly exposing proudly the ripening of their abundant fruits. On their branches black ants are already queueing in their endless lines as if they have not taken a respite.

The morning is breaking sweetly today. My wife’s brew is already steaming, a weft of bitter aromatics escapes into the fresh air and mingles with the sweet scent of a ripening eangka. The coffee! My morning ritual. A candle is lit, its flame dancing silently as if a laud, its whitish smoke raising the sigh of praise and longing around the altar in our living room.

The morning is breaking. Vehicles zoom fast the road outside in different directions. People are rushing it for their worries and concerns. The net is buzzing. The radios break in angst.  All are up and about.

All save for one.

In her bed, a barangay official refuses to welcome the day. She puts her pillow over her head. The night had been restless. Morpheus failed again to lull her to slumber. In her mind, no sheep are jumping over some fence. In its stead, a list of names keeps appearing as if phantom haunting her over and over again.

The list. That robbed her of her rest. It was not a very long one. Nor it was a very short one. Nothing special about it. But something in it deprived her of her sleep.  Names she knows quite well. It was like any other, a simple list of names. Names everyone in the small neighborhood know. Names of people whose roofs displays no stars and whose house stands on owned lots. Names of people whose parents get invited in social events and whose family names carry weights in a community that give due regards to men of consequences.

The list is for indigent beneficiaries. And they are there. All of them.