Written January 11, 2015
We have traveled, inside the villages now, deeper inside the voices of this place and the material facts from which these voices emerge.
Animals tied to the roadside, goat and cows, this majestic horned caribao, an ancient waterbuffalo imported to the island a long long time ago. Pulling carts or standing, roped through the nose, huge dark liquid eyes, living, laboring, dying mute.
What do they do with the carcass when these strong silent beasts drop dead in the field?
So many flowers, little gardens. Blooms I don’t know, pale purples, extravagant fushias.
Hungry dogs everywhere. I catch moments of tenderness, two dogs touching their noses together, a mother cow licking her calf.
Little houses, they seem to be woven more than built, woven like baskets in contrasting geometric patterns. Some have what seems to be tiger grass on the roof, others are corrugated steel. Occasionally there are structures of cement. Ocasionally there is a large gated home, an SUV in the driveway. Often there are churches, many denominations. Less often, there are mosques.
It is hot. There are mosquitos. Some of us are taking malaria pills, some of us are not and this is discussed. There is always the search for a bathroom. For toilet paper. For soap. Our guide from CRS travels with us and we ask question after question. But everyone greets us with kindness, as we step over thresholds of culture and class and tradition and beliefs, sometimes clumsily, and everyone answers our questions. And the lines, the lines we have been conditioned to know as absolute, between civilians, combatants, religions, idenities, they begin to shift. Roles are often surprisingly interchangeable here, roles are simultaneous.
On the division between Moro tribes and the new Bangasamoro Basic Law. “Catch the chicken before you divide it.” On the necessity of living together as Lumad, Christian, and Muslim in a Peace Zone, “It takes three stones to support the cooking pot.”
Every severe expression I see from the window of the van we travel in changes with recognition of being looked at into a smile, a smile that is as warm as welcome to a familiar place, to a place you might belong. We see more children now. We see more elderly. Shy old women, one hand masking smiles of broken teeth.
Palm and cocunut, banana, fields of rice and corn and sugarcane. Wooden shacks along the riversides. Small shops along the road, glass coke bottles filled with a red liquid, diesel, to buy fuel for a single trip.
We see many on motorbikes, 2, 3, 5 people… sometimes carrying produce, bundles, once a guitar.
And what about the killing? Mostly they tell us it didn’t happen here. It happened in the next barangay. It happened but it happened somewhere else. But maybe it was here. When here was somewhere else.
They tell us we walked along the road and we had nothing. In one place, in one time, a mother gave birth in an evacuation center and the military protected us from “them”, in another place and another time four children starved to death in the evacuation center and we went back to our village and the military was “them.” There was no food, we were all rebels to them. We went back and declared peace because it was the only door to life. One man calls it “primal courage.” The courage that chooses any risk over death.
We walked along the road again and again. We walked between the bullets. There are landmines out there, they tell us. “Where?” we ask. “The way you came.”
I have only seen one cemetary. Large aboveground tombs, with these touchingly flimsy wooden shelters above them, to shade them, to protect the ones we can no longer protect, shelters as fragile as we are.