The Distant Glow

By Terry I. Sarigumba

As an autobiography, The Distant Glow traces the story of my life to the rough and rigorous way of life in Corella, Bohol my birthplace. Descending from generations of very poor and illiterate ancestors, I exceeded my parents grade three education by finishing grade six and graduating as elementary school valedictorian. Because my parents could not afford to send me to high school in the city, I stayed out of school for six years, helping my father on the farm and my mother in household chores.
One of several backbreaking works I used to do was climbing several coconut trees, about 50 feet in height, to tap the trees (sanggutan) for tuba, a coconut juice that yields mildly alcoholic drink. I used to climb 20 coconut trees every morning, noon and evening, mount over top, sit on one of the palms and tap the juice. One evening after sunset, while atop the sanggutan, I saw a glow, a distant glow. I muttered to myself: Someday, Ill find out what causes that glow. I equated that statement to my goals in life. I did find out what caused the distant glow. Other distant glows appeared and I reached most of them with hard work and having a dream.
When the owners of a private school offered me an opportunity to go to their school free of tuition, provided that I maintained the first place standing in the class honor roll, I went to high school, starting at age 20. To help shoulder the other costs of going to high school in the city, I paid my room and board with service: scrubbing and polishing the floor, fetching water from an artesian well and gathering firewood every weekend for the landlord family. With all the hardship, I maintained the tuition-free deal and graduated from high school as class valedictorian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491844526

Terry I. Sarigumba

Terry Sarigumba descended from very poor parents who inherited their poverty from poor and illiterate ancestors. With scholarships and assistantship grants, he finished high school, college and graduate school. Terry found a job in private industrial forestry in the US in which he used scientific innovations to help the companies he worked for to cost effectively and environmentally meet their corporate goals. Terry and his wife, Nattie (nee Del Mundo), has resided in Brunswick, Georgia since 1975 and they are just six years away from celebrating their golden wedding anniversary in 2019. Terry and Nattie are blessed with three sons, Edzel, Glenn and Dean, who are all hard-working, talented and academically and professionally successful, with two lovely and loving daughters-in-law, Valerie (Nee Dippery), Edzel’s wife and Robin (nee Wedekind), Dean’s wife and five beautiful grandchildren: Dominic (8), Mitchell (6), Noelle (4), Abigail (4) and Madeline (2). With the grandchildren (APOs), Terry and Nattie enjoy doing APOstolic work.

Book preview

© 2014 Terry I. Sarigumba. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/24/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-4453-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-4452-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013923070

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Dedication

Chapter 1 Roots and Rigors of Poverty

The Rugged Paths

Passage to Manhood

Primary and Elementary Schools

Work and Play

Skills and Guts

Courtship

Escapades in Mindanao

Adieu Mindanao

Chapter 2 Getting to High School

Knock, Knock—Opportunity

Coping with a Late Start

Foundations of Learning

Student Politics

Extra-curricular

Vocational Skills

Rewards for Academic Excellence

Getting to the Door to College

Chapter 3 Higher Curves of Learning

Heading to a New Horizon

Scaling the Slopes of Makiling

College Life Began

Summer Interlude

The College Grind Gritting Harder

Extra-curricular Activities

Year Four and Relentless Rigors

Student Politics and Activism

On Track to the Dream

Chapter 4 Career and Status Change

Two for the Road

Interlude Again?

De Colores

Going to Graduate School

I Kissed the Rose and the Rose Kissed Me

The Wedding

Farewell—Not Good-bye

Chapter 5 Adventures Began in the Land of Dreams

Going to America

Coming to America

Footprints in the Ivy League

Working for Food

Falling Leaves

The Autumn Leaves

Falling Snow

The Filipino Connection

Winter Blues—Springtime Hues

New England Summer

Naty and Making Decisions

Autumn Again

On Track to the Goal

An End and a Beginning

Getting a New Title: DAD

Moving South

Chapter 6 Doctorate in the Sunshine State

Trip to the South

Lights and Shadows in the Sunshine State

Acts in Academics

Making Ends Meet

Kokoy

The Scientific Method

Upon This Rack

Go Gators

Surprised By Politics

Family Growth

Driving Lessons

Janitorial Service

Christmas in the Sunshine State

Expanding Database

Winding Up and Down and Up

Dr. Sarigumba

Chapter 7 The Possible Dream

Blue Christmas

Introduction to Private Industrial Forestry

Faces and Places in the Golden Isles

Turning Red to Green

Footprints in the Flatwoods

Family Growth

Home Number One

Building the Expertise

Wheels and Deals

Seeing Places Old and New

Green Card Almost Discarded

Publicity and Change

Pledging Allegiance to the American Flag

Home Number Two

Homecoming Philippines

Back to the Flatwoods

Chapter 8 A Reachable Dream

A Hostile Take Over

GO GP

Technology Transfer

Changes

The Technical Group

The Forest Alternative to Residuals Management

GP GO

Surinam

New Tech

Mixed Signals

New Tech—Solid and Liquid

The Timber Company—World Class

202 and 911

The Clouded Sunset

Chapter 9 We Are Family

Two for the Road and Company

Grade, Elementary and High Education

Sports

Speech

College Education

Wheels and Words

Second Family Homecoming Philippines

Corporate Careers—New Family Members

APOstolic Succession

The Afterglow

The Latest Glow

We Are Family Holding on Together

Chapter 10 Begin Again

Money Matters

BS from the US

Religion and Politics

Faith in God and the Catholic Church

The Papacy

The Inquisition

Indulgences

The Eucharist—the radiating center of the Church

Creation or Evolution

Overview

Liberal and Conservative

Leadership and Social Interactions

Persisting to the End

About the Author

FOREWORD

By Lino A. Blanche, PhD

National Program Leader

National Institute of Food and Agriculture, USDA

The Distant Glow is more than an encapsulation and a narration of Terry’s life (and family) as he journeys from the slaving environment in small town (Corella, Bohol) rural Philippines to the comfortable and often pampering ways of life (livelihood) in big town USA (Brunswick, Georgia). It is a compelling story of a man’s struggles to unshackle himself from the fetters of poverty to catapulting himself to the glory of freedom and comfort. It is an embodiment of Terry’s goals, hopes, dreams, curiosity, imagination, patience, perseverance, victories, defeats and dogged pursuit for answers (truths). It is a statement of his contribution to overcoming poverty (poverty alleviation and elimination) in his own small way. Poverty alleviation/elimination is a mainstream program of every developing countries of the world. Policy makers need to learn from his experience. The Distant Glow glaringly reveals that there is no short cut to poverty alleviation/elimination unless everybody becomes a sweepstakes winner which is a mentality that I have personally entertained myself at some point because of the very attractive and wise sweepstakes commercial notoriously being propagated then: ang nagwawagi ay hindi umaayaw, ang umaayaw ay hindi nagwawagi (A winner never quits, a quitter never wins). Indeed, a very wise statement albeit poorly or improperly used. Terry never subscribes to this commercial as one can glean from his book when he quits his furniture sales job because of being robbed the opportunity to close his first sale (deal). Rather than persevering, he quits but that quitting actually paves his way to the second major break in life: winning a scholarship and going to college with a lofty government scholarship, in fact, the cream of scholarships at the U.P. College of Forestry at that time. Truly, Terry’s contribution to poverty alleviation is education, a protracted process, often overlooked, but a permanent and proven solution. Why can’t developing countries profit from this? Here is a simple model that works based on an individual experience. Can’t it be replicated and multiplied? There is always a huge need for an educated workforce.

A major segment of his memoire is his more than 27 years of professional forestry not to mention his kaingin (shifting cultivation) activities prior to becoming a forester. While he considers these activities his sins from a forestry perspective, kaingin-making is a boon to agriculture. It is a fairly ecological crop production system tied to the natural fertility of the land and appropriately fallowed (fertility restoration) when the natural fertility can no longer effectively support acceptable crop growth. It is when done indiscriminately that the system becomes detrimental as is the case in anything done in excess. As a research forester for the Company, Terry faced the challenge of restricting his research to applied ones and most specifically to increasing productivity. His experimental results showed highly competitive rates of return. Terry scored his first breakthrough when the Company embarked on commercial fertilization, the first of its kind and magnitude in US Forestry. His site specific management approach based on soil characteristics is another silvicultural technique that Terry perfected and implemented. These two silvicultural operations will be increasingly used in the future as land suitable for forest plantation diminishes. Terry provided the scientific evidence.

I first met Terry more than four decades ago at the University of the Philippines in Los Banos, College of Forestry. We were classmates in Forest Products. He was a graduating senior and I was a freshman. He recruited me to become a member of the UP Varrons, Ltd and we became brothers. Our relationship flourished that he asked me to be one of his Groom’s men during his wedding. That was the first opportunity to meet Nattie, his new bride, and since then to get know more about her. I quickly learned she is a loving, devoted, kind and above all, smart lady. I thought she was my Vrod Terry’s biggest catch and blessing, and his principal collaborator in his pursuit for graduate education at Yale University and the University of Florida. Undeniably, Nattie is the woman behind a successful Terry Sarigumba. One can learn more, by delving deeper into the book, of how she played her role in growing three wonderful and exceptional boys and keeping the family together sometimes under trying situations.

There is a saying that a book should not be judged by its cover. The Distant Glow is an exception. Its cover is attractive and glowing, a product of Terry’s imagination and creativity. It contains the many sparkling gems. Grab it, read it and filter those sparkling gems. Re-read it and mentally experience the life changing events that Terry negotiated in his journey.

Overall, this book is a pleasant reading. It is highly INSPIRATIONAL. I’ll keep my copy handy for a re-read to filter additional implications. I congratulate Terry for an outstanding work. May his tribe increase.

PREFACE

Edzel, Glenn and Dean in their early youth started hearing my stories about poverty in the Philippines, my youth mostly spent in poverty and my poor parents who inherited poverty from their illiterate ancestors. At first, the word poverty drew blank in their eyes. Regardless of some details I told them of my youthful experiences, they still could not grasp the meaning of the word.

That changed during and after our family trip to the Philippines when they were in their teens. There were seven of us traveling including Nattie’s mother, Nanay Candida, and one of her sisters, Elma. The boys started seeing the images of poverty at the Manila International Airport (MIA) where upon exit from the gates and into the streets men, women and children milled with the arriving passengers, offering taxi rides, begging to carry their luggage, or just begging for money. (The airport is now named Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) where order has been in place and arriving passengers no longer experience the hassles.) Along the streets to our destination, they saw children, many in rags, hawking things and begging.

We spent the first night in the Philippines in the small house occupied by one of Nattie’s sisters, Mila, and her husband and two young sons. The house was barely sufficient for a family of four, but that night it had to accommodate seven more. In the absence of beds, we had to sleep on the concrete floor. With our stomachs set free by travel stress and unfamiliar foods, we lined up with grimacing faces for the turn to use just one toilet. Remarkably, I did not hear the boys complain about the discomfort. We could have stayed in a hotel but not doing so enabled us to more closely interact with relatives and the experience was more memorable for the boys.

In Bohol, the sleeping accommodation remained hard on the back: on the wooden floor or wooden cots without mattresses. The boys seemed to enjoy using the outhouse for their comfort needs. There were abundant traces of the things I used to do in my youth: a newly burned hillside farm, the rugged paths I used to thread on going to different farming activities, the rice fields I used to plow, a water buffalo which the boys enjoyed riding on, my father’s wooden plow and the coconut tree sanggutans I used to climb three times a day. They clicked well with their cousins and made friends with the other kids in the neighborhood. There was a basketball court, unpaved but quite level probably because of constant threading. When they played a game, they asserted superior skills probably because of their experience in the US or also probably because while they were wearing their Nike shoes, the other kids were playing barefooted. Playing and interacting with the kids in the neighborhood enabled the boys to see images of hunger, want and poverty, the same images that I used to wear when I was a boy. When we were there, my hometown was suffering from a long drought. Water was scarce. The boys went with the group to bathe beside a well, about 2 miles away, in the company of many people of both sexes in the community. On their way back, they helped carry cans of water for cooking and drinking purposes.

When we returned to the US, the boys told me in chorus: Dad, we now know what you meant by poverty. Seeing many children hungry and in worn out clothing taught us a lesson: we are grateful for what we have and we should not be wasteful. Then Edzel continued: Dad, it is remarkable how you were able to break away from the shackles of poverty, go through college and graduate school and have a good job with a private company in America. You should write your life story, Dad, so we can use it to tell our children about what you have done.

Edzel’s request was easy to comply with because actually I had been writing articles recounting parts and parcels of my journey. When I started putting together the story, I did not have yet a title. The title materialized while I was writing the episode of my story during which I was sitting on top of the sanggutan about 50 feet high in the air one cool evening, seeing a glow in the distant horizon and pledging to find out what caused that glow. "The Distant Glow" became the metaphor for my goals and dreams and the title of this memoir. I did find out what caused the glow, lights of the city of Cebu and I also have reached many of my distant glows.

The Distant Glow reflects almost all aspects of my journey: social, educational, professional, technical, political, economic and spiritual. Episodes are recounted in chronological sequence, with occasional flash-backs when appropriate. For every aspect, I try to convey my message in a layman’s language: even the technical stuffs are written non-technically. I want my readers, foresters and non-foresters, to understand what I did in forestry. So, going through my professional work, the readers can learn lessons on the principles and the mechanics of site specific management and the economic and environmental rationales behind pursuing the upper limits of forest productivity. I look back with pride that in a small way I had helped Georgia-Pacific Corporation become a world class forestry practitioner.

I drew heavily from on-line materials and based my discussions and opinions on what I know and believe and on the books I have read. Because this is not a technical book, I did not include a reference section but I identify within the text sources of materials that need to be cited. Most of the pictures I use I took myself but those that I did not are cited for their sources within the text.

Because of my efforts to begin again after retirement, the writing of this memoir took a long time. Distractions, many willfully welcomed on my part, were considerable. Encounters with a writer’s block also contributed to the slowdown. There had been occasions when I almost ran out of resolve to finish the writing project. But, while Edzel motivated me to start writing the memoir, Glenn and Dean would not let me quit. Every time we talk, Glenn would never fail to ask: Where are you in the book, Dad? Dean gave me a push with no escape route. He said: "Dad, someday, one of your grandchildren will be president and when that happens, he or she will be waving a book saying ‘The title of this book is The Distant Glow written by my great Lolo.’" I hope I will still be around when that happens but whether I will be or not, I have made the resolve that there will be a book to wave.

Nattie, having read what I had written in bunches, would remark that what I had gone through were remarkable and the way I survived obstacles were remarkable as well. Nattie identifies with the hardships I had gone through and survived because she experienced those hardships with me and was part of the solutions that we found. Her love and encouragement are great inspiration.

Several people who had read the draft of this memoir had made encouraging comments and those who just knew I was writing my memoir would say they could not wait to get hold of a copy of the book. The late Carol Child made her living editing materials for publication. She offered to read my manuscript and made the necessary corrections. Carol, the mother of my daughter-in-law, Robin, tightened up many of my passages and told me what I was writing was inspirational to read. What a great push! Her soul rests in eternal peace.

Authorhouse, in giving me a good deal to publish this book, is another great inspiration.

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to the Sarigumba, Del Mundo and my families.

The Sarigumba Family:

Andres and Flora—both deceased

Melchor, Cecilia and Eleno (Dodoy)—all deceased

Rosita and her husband, Manuel, and their children: Dexter and wife Mishyl, Manuel, Jr. and his wife Daria, Mae and her husband Cyrus

Felisa

Ruth, Dodoy’s widow, and their children: Roel and wife Marjorie, Joel and wife Michelle Lym and her husband, Rudy (deceased) and their children Dodong and wife Shirley, Dioscoro, Mark and wife Marj, Phoebe and husband Mario and Raoul

The Del Mundo Family:

Pedro (deceased) and Candida

Nattie (my wife)

Oscar—deceased

Elma and her husband, Sixto

Junior and his wife, Yolly, and their son, Ryan Kristoffer

Mila and her husband, Bonnie and their sons: Milbonn and Bryan and his wife, Julie

Estrella

Violet

Rey and his wife, Olive and sons: Royce Jeffrey and Jared Michael

My Family:

Nattie, my wife

Edzel and his wife, Valerie, and children: Abigail and Madeline

Glenn

Dean and his wife, Robin, and children: Dominic, Mitchell, Noelle and Seb Vance.

CHAPTER ONE

Roots and Rigors of Poverty

The Rugged Paths

"Mga Hapon!" my mother screamed. Alone in my grandmother’s house with my infant cousin and me, my mother turned pale and quaked in terror as Japanese soldiers, accompanied by two local Filipino civilians, came to the front yard of the house. But she did not cower in helplessness. Instead, she picked up my cousin from the cradle and led me by the hand as we went outside the house. I saw three Japanese soldiers with guns and bayonets and two Filipino civilians milling around the yard.

The year was 1943 when I was four years old. That was the year of World II when the Japanese soldiers in the Philippines were at the darkest hours of their atrocities when stories were heard about babies and little children being grabbed from their mothers’ arms, tossed in the air and caught by bayonets on their way down. My cousin, who was sleeping peacefully on my mother’s shoulder, and I were in a vulnerable set up for whatever the soldiers would want to do with their guns and bayonets.

But the soldiers had something else in mind. One of them talked to the two Filipino men who in turned talked to my mother. The soldiers wanted to have one of my grandmother’s pigs. I was leaning against a banana trunk and one of the soldiers just laid his rifle against me. My mother turned paler and told me to move away from the banana trunk. The two Filipino men tied up one of my grandmother’s pigs and the group left with their loot. Squealing and hanging from the bamboo pole by which it was carried, the pig was just minutes away from becoming grilled pork. One could only wonder what might have happened if my grandmother did not have any pigs. Would there have been a slaughter of animals or humans?

Despite my youth when it happened, the incident remains vivid in my memory and the story, told and re-told by my mother in the course of time, unfailingly bothers my mind whenever I remember it, as that indeed was a very close brush with death at so early a time in life.

The episode of danger with the Japanese soldiers actually was my second brush with death. The first one occurred before I was born. According to one of my aunts, my mother considered aborting me during early pregnancy, not because she did not want me, but because of how she was treated by her mother. My grandmother had opposed my father’s courtship of my mother because she did not like my father’s parents. Despite the objection though, the courtship bloomed into love and later produced a baby before marriage. That drove my mother’s mother crazy and she verbally castigated my mother unmercifully. Hurt by the stigma that she had given up her chastity before marriage, by lack of support or sympathy from her mother, and hurt much more when she learned that my father had left town, my mother ran down a steep hill and tumbled down. That was interpreted as an attempt to abort me.

When I was born, my father was in a faraway land in Mindanao doing some kind of business. I was already two years old when he came back to our hometown. Shortly after his return, his love affair with my mother resumed. And they finally got married. My mother’s mother probably could no longer do anything to be in the way. Otherwise, another baby would have come out of wedlock.

After their marriage, we stayed at my father’s parents’ house where my first brother was born on January 6. He was named Melchor in honor of one of the Three Kings and my mother nicknamed him Ondoy, roughly meaning sweet little boy. Ondoy Melchor was a beautiful baby boy, robust, happy and always smiling. But at the tender age of nine months, he suddenly became sick and died shortly afterwards. My mother was inconsolable. During the funeral, several men had to pull her away because she would not allow Melchor’s coffin to be nailed closed.

During the war, many families, running away from the rampaging Japanese soldiers who had occupied the lowland areas, fled to the mountains and opened up settlements there. My father built a little hut with bamboo slat walls and flooring and cogon grass roof at the foothill of a virgin forest. I was the only child then and I remember my mixed reactions of fear and fascination to the sights and sounds of the creatures in the wilderness. I had endless questions about what I saw and/or heard:

What is this? What is that? What made that sound?

Those are monkeys chirping and swinging through the vines, my mother would tell me.

"The resounding yell you heard came from the kalaws (hornbills) from the high treetops," explained my father.

They would point out to me the antilihawon, (the graceful black and yellow orioles in flight across the forest openings) and the kagwang (flying lemurs) gliding through the air from tree trunk to tree trunk. And I would get nervous watching my mother responding hysterically to the shrieking hawks circling in the sky and swooping down to pick their preys, mostly the hapless little chicks among the flock of chickens raised by my parents.

Hawks were not the only predators of my parents’ chickens. One of them was the hawo, a type of lizard which was more efficient than the hawks. My father decided to do something about it. One morning, he fed the chickens with corn grains and hid behind a tree. Pretty soon the huge hawo, about three feet long and four inches thick, slithered from behind the bushes and attempted to grab one of the feeding chickens. My father immediately jumped out from his hiding place and pursued the predator which was attempting to hide in a hole of the tree. But the hole was not big enough to accommodate its whole body. My father grabbed its tail, pulled out its body half way, stabbed it several times with his sundang (a long and tapered machete with very sharp point) and then pulled the lifeless and bloody body out of the tree hole. My father triumphed against the hawo but he could do nothing against the marauding hawks.

Our bamboo and cogon grass house was built at the edge of a mountain top basin, a slightly depressed area that was shaped like a big vat. My father called the depression "lupa", tilled it and planted it to corn and sweet potato. Around the basin were my father’s hillside farms, also planted with corn, sweet potato and yam. The corn, responding to the fertile soil, produced big ears some of which my mother would pick and cook directly on wooden charcoal (inanag) or boil in a pot (tilaob). Or she would shred the fresh corn and stuff the shredded grains into a pouch (called puso’) made of coconut leaves that were weaved into heart-like shape and cooked the preparation in boiling water. When the corn ears matured, my mother would deftly loose the dried kernels from the cobs with her bare hands (lusok), grind the loosed grains in a heavy stone mill (ligsanan). And the process would yield three types of grits: bugas (for ordinary cooking), binlud (for porridge or lugaw) and tik-tik (the powder-like portion that my mother would cook like a cake).

At the edge of the basin was a cave where bats slept during the day and from where they emerged during the night to feed on flies and other flying insects. At the middle of the lupa was a well, about 20 feet deep, from which my parents drew our drinking water. During dry days, the water level would recede to the bottom, beyond the reach of the pitching bamboo dipper. My father told me that at the bottom of the well was an eel that bore a small channel to connect the well to the spring and prevent the well from drying up. But the well did dry up many times. It looked like the eel did not do its job.

My father planted near the edge of the well a special species of banana called saging tindok. According to local folklore, the tindok banana possessed a magical power. It was said that in the bosom of the plant’s heart-shaped inflorescence (puso, pronounced pu’-so)) there was a gem that would drop right at the very moment when the puso first opened up. This was known as "Ang Mutya Sa Saging Tindok" (The Gem of The Tindok Banana). The gem had to be caught on its flight downward and swallowed right away for the magical power to take its effect. It required timing and luck.

My grandmother told my cousins and me a story of a man who made a concerted effort to get that power. First, he waited until the tindok banana started to bear fruit with the emergence of its puso. Many days he waited because the tindok banana was a very slow-growing plant. When the inflorescence finally started to emerge, he camped at the base of the banana plant, waiting for that magical moment for the puso to open up. He camped there for several nights. Finally, at the break of dawn, he heard a sound from the top of the banana plant and saw the inflorescence gradually bending downward. When it stopped moving, the maroon petals started opening up and let go a small round object that started to fall. The man stretched his arm to catch the falling treasure, but as he was about to snatch it, another hand materialized, trying to snatch the gem away from him. As the hands collided, the gem dropped to the ground. The man looked at the gem that gleamed under the nascent sunlight, looked up and realized that his competitor was a formidable one: the devil himself. Because it had dropped to the ground, the gem may already have lost its power, but the man and the devil continued on with their competition. They pushed and grabbed and wrestled. Minutes passed and the combat raged on. Then as the sun rose and beamed its full light, the devil relented and vanished. The man looked around, then down to the ground. The gem was gone. The moral of the story, my grandmother told us, was that we should always go for things that enhance as long as we were careful about entering a deal with the devil, a deal that no humans could win.

One day, I heard my father tell my mother that the tindok banana was having its inflorescence. I did not know if he was planning to camp overnight to watch for the puso to open up. It would not have mattered anyway. That night, a soaking rain fell, lasting through the following morning.

When I woke up in the morning, I saw the basin flooded and my father wading knee deep and looking up at the tindok inflorescence that had already opened up. I never had seen so much water before. Delighted by the spectacle, I started wading into the flood, heading toward my father by the tindok. As I approached the middle of the basin, I was already chest deep in the water. Then I heard my mother screaming hysterically. When my father saw me, he shouted, Stop! He then led me out of the water and back to the house where he told me that had I moved a couple of steps further in the water, I would have fallen into the well. And nobody would have known about my fate because the flood did not subside for several days. That really was a very disturbing brush with death.

Most of the lofty trees that gave perch to the hornbills had been felled and burned by the settlers to provide space for growing crops to feed their hungry families. The war evacuees practiced the slash-N-burn farming method regardless of the terrain or size of the trees they cut down. In the first plantings, the crops grew productively. But the bounty would not last long. I heard my father and his visiting friends complaining about the declining yields from their farms. And what used to be dark colored and thick topsoil following slash and burn had gradually disappeared and given way to rocks and pebbly subsoil.

In the subsequent years, as more of the trees were felled and burned, monkeys could be seen no more, the hornbill cries were rarely heard and the orioles were gone. Maybe they had evacuated to the higher and inaccessible slopes of the mountains. But the hawks remained, occasionally raiding the chickens of my parents. And then the crops could no longer grow on the eroded mountain slopes.

When the war was over we moved back to the lowland. My father built a small new house where my first sister, Rosita, was born. My mother nicknamed her Inday, a common Visayan term of endearment which roughly means dear little girl. As the first daughter, Inday was kind of spoiled by my parents. Whenever she and I quarreled, it was usually my fault and I usually got the whipping. But Inday was a lovable girl most parents would like to spoil. The only problem was that at first she did not want to go to school. Every morning during school days, she would pretend to have a stomach ache and my mother had to whip her with a coconut midrib to force her to go to school. But once she broke that initial distaste for school, she ended up liking it, excelling in her classes and graduating with honors.

Cecilia came when Rosita was over a year old. She was a delightful baby, beautiful like an angel. My mother also nicknamed her "Inday Cecilia". But at the age of four months, she became sick and died. No one ever knew what she died of (no doctor, no medicine available) but I vividly remember the few hours before she died. My mother was holding Cecilia in her arms, she was groaning and groaning but not crying. I was beside my mother holding on to her arms and my father was outside the room, helplessly watching his daughter in acute suffering. Sensing that the end was near, my mother asked my father to come near and hold the suffering baby girl. As he approached and attempted to take Cecilia from my mother’s arms, the baby stopped groaning, flashed a very sweet smile, and her tender chest heaved with her last gasp. My father cried like a baby to see his lovely baby girl depart for eternity.

Felisa came over a year later. This time, my mother or maybe my father or both gave her an Americanized nickname: Baby. Baby was a good baby, never making any trouble. My parents considered Baby a bearer of luck to the family because after she was born, some financial prosperity came to the family. My mother put up a store in the front porch of our little house and the store was doing pretty good. The store sold cookies, canned milk, sodas, and a few other things.

That little prosperity benefited my second brother, Eleno. My parents nicknamed him Dodoy. I do not know what the nickname means but I guess anybody born in our family had to have a nickname. Instead of breastfeeding him, my mother fed Dodoy with sweetened condensed milk taken off the store inventory. Dodoy really liked his diet because he was the healthiest and most robust baby in the neighborhood. I did not share much of Dodoy’s growing years because I had left home to study and work. But I remember Dodoy as a very happy boy who loved to sing. One of his favorite songs had these lyrics Around, the world, I search for you, I travel on… .

My youngest sister, Olympia, came about two years after Dodoy. My parents nicknamed her Lym and gave her the same baby diet Dodoy had, sweetened condensed milk taken from the store inventory. What a healthy, happy and pretty baby I heard some people say about Lym. One early memorable thing about Lym was her Christening. My mother invited her business partners from another town as Lym’s Godparents. For the event my parents threw a lavish party, serving lots of food. But more memorable were the festivities that followed after the meal: singing, dancing and poetry jousting that were carried on into the wee hours of the night. One of my father’s uncles, Iyo Tinong, known for his sharp wits and ability to engage in poetry jousting, jousted against the sister of Lym’s Godmother.

The contest was very entertaining as each protagonist ably matched each other’s wits. But as the contest wore on, Iyo Tinong ran out of words to say as his opponent kept on stronger and stronger with more and more rhymed lines to which Iyo Tinong had no answers.

My mother called me Loloy. I believe the term means my darling little boy. People in our place, as is the case for most Filipinos, would not call their elders directly by first name. A term of respect always precedes the first name. For example younger people would call my father, whose first name is Andres, Manong Andes and they would address my mother, whose name is Flora, as Anding Porang. My sisters and brother should have called me Manong Terencio but they call me Loloy instead. And later on, almost everybody in our place called me Loloy also.

My father used to brag about winning my mother’s heart. She was one of the prettiest girls in town, he said. My mother had lovely eyes that kept on smiling even if she was sad. She had a good sense of humor, a nice singing voice and a magnetic ability to get along with people. My parents both descended from generations of illiterate and very poor families. Although they only had third grade education, both of them could read and write very well. My father was good in public speaking while my mother was more effective in business. They seldom quarreled and when they did, only one would be mad while the other would just say nothing. My father had a bad temper; when he was in his foul mode, the best way to get out of trouble was just get out of his way. My mother would vent her foul mood through nagging. I know they loved each other very much.

pic%201.jpg

Flora Andoy Inting and Andres Varquez Sarigumba built a strong family through love, strict discipline, hard work and getting along well with people.

My mother spoiled us children with her love and affection. We felt so precious in her arms. When we were sick, she would not leave us alone; she would stay by our side, comforting us with her loving arms and her songs. One song I remember very well. I know how to sing it but every time I do, I cry. The song, in Cebuano, goes as follows:

My mother strongly adhered to family traditions. Every year she decorated a Christmas tree using a dried-up maguey flower, Japanese crepe paper and other materials. I learned to make a lantern and this added color of our Christmas celebrations. Every year she gave each of us children a birthday party, mine being the most elaborate. I did not hear my brother and sisters complain, probably because they accepted it as my privilege for being the eldest in the family.

A devout Catholic, my mother required that a birthday celebration must include attending the Mass in the morning. According to her, a birthday was both a celebration and a thanksgiving for the blessings of life. On my birthday (April 10), I would always go, after the Mass, up the altar tabernacle to pay homage to the patron saint of our town, the Virgin Mary of the Village (Santa Maria Del Villar). The devotion always strengthened my faith and instilled optimism in my hopes and dreams. From Church, the celebration would continue with a Rosary or a novena at the house where eating and tuba drinking were usually part of the program. Occasionally, a small rondalla would be available to sustain music for a nightlong program and dancing.

pic%202.jpg

The house my father built where we all grew up in Cancatac, Corella, Bohol

We were a happy family but the images of poverty dominate the memories of my youth. I seldom had new clothing to wear, no pair of shoes. Food was very limited and I remember always being hungry. I also remember always waiting for something, something to happen, something to arrive. The road route connecting the capital town of Tagbilaran and the towns of Corella and Sikatuna was served by the Bohol Land Transportation Company, called "boholan" by the local folks, with a passenger bus stopping by near our house every daylight hour. Whenever I heard a passenger bus coming, I would rush to the roadside to see if those who were coming off had some good tidings for me to cheer about. Most of the time, passengers would get off and proceed on their way, unmindful of the look of hunger and longing in my face.

One time, while I was playing with the neighborhood kids, we heard the sound of a vehicle coming. This time, however, the sound was different. It was a horrifying sound that made us think it was from a monster that was going to devour us. Instead of rushing to the roadside, we fled to the hillside and hid under the bushes, scared to death. From where we were hiding we saw passing by a weird-looking vehicle making a lot of reverberating sound. When the monster was gone, we emerged from our hiding places as a "boholan" bus was stopping. We heard passengers who were getting off saying that the thing we thought was a monster was actually a Caterpillar road grader as indicated by the surface scrapings along the roadside.

Early on, life in poverty appeared to be an inevitable fate with no way out. Looking at those blessed with better economic conditions than our family would make me wonder if things would ever change, if the future was going to be better, for me and our family. But I did not stop longing for an abundant life with lots of things to eat, new clothing to wear. It could just have been an impossible dream, but I kept on wishing that someday I would go somewhere and become somebody different from my poor parents and relatives. In the meantime, I had to deal with the reality of life that was nothing but just a journey on rugged paths full of hardships and constant struggles.

On Mondays, the market day, people in Corella, Bohol, would head to town to buy and sell things. On one of those Mondays, I went with my mother to go shopping in the town. I walked behind her as she moved from one market stall to another looking for a good bargain of dried and salted fish. After making her last purchase of the day, a ganta of bugas mais (milled corn grits) we headed home, squeezing inside an overloaded passenger bus.

At home, my mother boiled a portion of the just purchased bugas mais, grilled a few pieces of dried fish and soaked ginamos (salted fish) in home made vinegar on an earthen stove (dapog). My younger brother and three younger sisters enjoyed the meal, taking in their meager shares manually. The family, like most families in our barrio, Cancatac, did not use forks and spoons during meals. Whatever silverware our family had was only to be used on special occasion, like having guests of some important stature. I ate my food reluctantly. My father would chastise me for being finicky. But I was not being finicky. Boiled milled corn was rough and not very appealing to the taste buds. I wished we had rice. But we could only have rice during a few weeks following rice harvest seasons (twice a year). A couple of days later, as we were down to our last handfuls of food, my mother turned to my father and muttered, I don’t know where we will get our next meals.

A devoted father and husband but a very strict disciplinarian, my father was a hard-working man. He toiled on a farm that was owned by an absentee landlord who twice a year would show up in our town to claim his fifty percent share of the farm produce. Farming in Cancatac, growing rice on latiritic rain fed paddies and corn, sweet potato and yam on eroded hillsides (kaingin), was a backbreaking daily grind. With sufficient rain during the growing season, my father’s farming effort would turn in some produce that could feed the family, though not sufficiently, through the next harvest season. On certain years, however, droughts would set in and further reduce an already very low food supply. I remember being hungry most of the time and few occasions when there was good and sufficient food would seem to give me a taste of heaven, if ever one knew how heaven felt like to be in. However, though hungry and malnourished most of the time, nobody in our town, as far as I knew, ever died of starvation.

My father diversified his occupation with "tuba" gathering. Tuba, a slightly alcoholic drink, is produced by bleeding the coconut inflorescence and collecting the sap into a specially crafted bamboo tube (called sawod) laced at the bottom with crushed tanbark, a preservative, to slow down the fermentation. A tuba-tapped coconut tree is called sanggutan and a sanggutan operator was called a mananggite. My father inherited the calling from his ancestors who were farmers and mananggite themselves.

To make the sap flow continuously, the inflorescence wound must be kept fresh by thinly slicing it at the tip with a scythe three times a day. Each coconut tree, about 50 to 70 feet in height, had to be climbed three times a day with no ladder involved. Climbing, always barefooted, was made on a series of steps, called hak-hak, that were hacked, using a machete, into the tree trunk. Early in the morning before sunrise, my father would collect the sap from the sawod and empty it into a bigger bamboo tube called kawit. A productive coconut tree would yield about one quart of tuba every day. In his most productive days, my father would collect about two gallons of tuba per day, keeping about two quarts of his daily production for his own drinking pleasure and selling the rest to a dealer who would accumulate a truckload of containers with tuba from other mananggites and distribute it to retailers. The mananggite did the labor to produce the commodity, the distributor and the retailer made the profits.

pic%2005.jpg

My father, the mananggite, sitting atop the sanggutan, removing the sawod, transferring the tuba to his kawit, thoroughly cleaning the sawod, adding freshly ground tungog (tanbark, a preservative), slicing the end of the bent and unopened inflorescence to freshen the wound and replacing the sawod. Like father, like son, me, the former mananggite, with kawit and sa’d (scythe), attempting in 2004 to climb the sanggutan and, being limber no more and suffering from alto phobia, managing to negotiate only two hak-haks.

I understood why my father, and as a matter of fact, all men in our town, liked tuba. It tasted good, especially when taken fresh from the sawod. As an alcoholic drink, more than three glasses of the thing could make one really drunk. I liked tuba myself, especially the one my father produced. It was the best in town.

Like father, like son, I also diversified to tuba gathering or pananggot. During his most active days, my father maintained about ten trees or sanggutans. In the beginning, Father would let me spell him on the tree-climbing chore: slicing the inflorescence, cleaning the sawod, and collecting the tuba into the kawit. Gradually, I took over the chore and my father, starting to slow down with age, was more than glad to turn over the responsibility to me.

Doing the sanggutans was a highly dangerous job. A slip here or there could mean a fatal fall from atop the coconut tree. One time, as I went over the crown top and started to sit on one of the palms, a snake swung in front of me. I did not know what kind of snake that was, sort of dark brown in color. It bent in an apparent attempt to strike. Instinctively, I pulled the scythe from its sheath and cleanly cut its head off. The headless body squirted blood and dropped to the ground. For a while I remained sitting on the palm, unnerved and still shaken with fright. Other than the terrifying experience, I found maintaining the sanggutans very challenging. I tried to make my tuba taste better than my father’s and I increased my number of sanggutans to twenty trees.

To supplement my father’s meager farm production, my mother would go around to other farmers, especially those with better farm production, and bartered some of my father’s tuba for freshly threshed rice. This barter system was called mamagat. I used to tag along with my mother doing the mamagat and watch her business practice, making sure she got the maximum scoops of threshed rice for every cup of tuba. Most of the farmers, especially those who were tired and thirsty and could use a drinking break, were generous. Once a sip or two of the tuba got into their system, they would perk up and get ready to resume the threshing.

In one of our mamagat stops, the farmer teasingly asked me to take over the threshing while he was having a drinking break. Thinking that it was an easy job, I stepped on the sheaf of rice stalks that was laid on the mat and started churning with my lanky legs. But with lack of weight and leg strength I could barely knock off a grain. I had to give up the attempt when the sharp point of a grain of rice pricked into my sole and made it bleed. Having had his drinking break, the farmer told me to move aside so he could demonstrate the process.

You need to know how to do this, he said, you are now seven years old and in a few years you should be helping your father do the threshing.

He stepped on the end of the sheaf and, while leaning against the bamboo bar, folded the stalks back and forth and squeezed them with considerable pressure with his bare feet. The grains were easily knocked off the stalks with his thickly calloused bare feet. His years of walking bare footed assured him of the thick callous. I did learn the threshing process years later but my foot callous was not thick enough and would not last more than two days of threshing. When my foot callous would disappear, the skin of my sole would get rubbed so thin and bleeding would ensue. But there would be no stopping the work unless the job was done. With blood and sweat the threshing must continue from start to finish.

My father did not want me to grow up as a spoiled child so he did not spare the rod. I could remember him whipping me, not with a belt but with a half-inch limb of a guava bush, his favorite rod. I suffered some whipping from my mother too but she rarely physically punished me. When she got mad at me, she would pick three midribs from a broom and chip my behind. Those midribs did not quite hurt as bad as the guava limb but they delivered a lot of sting as well.

While I helped my father on the farm, I also helped my mother do household work: polishing the floor, sweeping the yard, feeding the pigs, hand washing clothes, and, being the eldest in the family, helping take care of my sisters and brother. Hand washing clothes was no big deal but washing baby diapers heavily soiled by baby poop was something else. Diapers were derived from empty flour sacks (called harinahan) that were cut into pieces big enough to prevent the poop and urine from spilling. Freshly soiled diapers were easier to wash but those that had been sitting for days were more difficult to handle because the feces had hardened. To soften the stain, my mother showed me a technique: soak the diapers in a big vat in water and soap. After an hour, the soaked material would be retrieved from the vat and beaten up with a wooden paddle (palo) on top of a flat rock.

One day, while I was washing diapers and other pieces of clothing at the bank of a brook, some men came by and laughed at me, calling me a sissy. Other boys who overheard the taunt joined in the jeering:

Sissy, sissy!

One of the women who were washing clothes and bathing nearby consoled me:

Don’t pay attention to those devils, you are a good boy. I wish I have a son like you.

I was not aware if other boys my age helped their mothers do household chores like I did. Not many boys could label me sissy though because in manly activities (farm work or sports) not many guys my age could outdo me. And even with my lanky build, I was tough in occasional fistfights. One time I got engaged in a gloved boxing match against a bigger and taller opponent. He was beating me handily but I did not surrender easily. Then an uppercut landed against my left rib cage. I did not get knocked down but I almost passed out. Realizing that I was hurt, my opponent, named Cosme, shook off his gloves and helped me straighten up. Later, he became one of my closest friends and would help me against bullies who continued to call me a sissy. The impact of Cosme’s uppercut persisted for many years.

Passage to Manhood

The early rites of manhood involved circumcision. There was nothing Biblical about my understanding of the need to do it. In our place each male had to go through the ritual because not being circumcised was sort of pariah. An uncircumcised male would be an object of derision: "Pisot, pisot!!!" It was a disgrace for a normal male to be derided as pisot.

I was eight years old when I went through the operation. My cousin, who was seven years old, and I agreed to do the ritual at the same time. We walked about two kilometers to the house of a circumciser and requested for his service. After telling us the price of the operation, the circumciser took out his big knife (but smaller than the sundang my father used to kill the hawo) and sharpened it like a razor. He carved out a short pole (half the length of a baseball bat) from a coconut palm and cut a branched limb of a guava tree. He planted the branched guava limb on the ground to serve as a tripod on which he placed the knife with its blade up.

My cousin volunteered to have his operation done first. He sat on the bare ground in front of the guava limb tripod. The circumciser opened up the tip of the tiny penis and inserted the tip of the knife. He asked my cousin to look up and, using the coconut palm bat, hit the foreskin. Whack! At the first hit, my cousin jerked his butt forward in response to the pain. Two more whacks were needed to completely sever the foreskin. My cousin was obviously in pain but he did not cry. You’re brave, you’re really a man! the circumciser praised him. The circumciser then scraped some powdery material from the base of a coconut palm and sprinkled it over the slightly bleeding cut. He then wrapped the wounded pecker with banana shoot and told my cousin to put on his bahag (G-string).

I was stricken with fear watching the bloody process but I had to prove that I also was brave and really a man. Only one whack was needed to split my foreskin. My cousin and I each paid the surgeon ten centavos, which at the time was equivalent to a nickel, and walked our way home. Along the way, the women prudishly avoided paying attention to our predicament but the men approvingly acknowledged our passage: two little men limping in their bloody bahags. After three days, the wounds started to heal and we were able to put on our pants again and back to work.

I helped my father with his farming work: hand weeding, plowing, planting and harvesting rice (which included threshing). Plowing the paddies in preparation for planting rice was a very challenging process. It involved steering a heavy wooden plow as it was pulled by a carabao (water buffalo). Being able to operate a plow was another tacit symbol of manhood.

At age 11, I thought I was ready to be a man; I wanted to learn how to operate the wooden plow. One day, without my father’s knowledge, I surreptitiously hitched the plow to the carabao, a big unruly bull. A boy and a bull and a wooden plow between them eased down the rice paddies to plow. Holding up the wooden plow, which was almost twice my height, I tugged the rope, which was tied to the nostrils of the bull, to tell him to start pulling. He pulled hard and fast. My boyish gaits proved to be no match to the bull’s long and strong strides and I almost stumbled into the mud. To gain control, I tilted the plow up and it sank deep into the clayey ground, making it very difficult for the bull to pull. Probably challenged by the difficulty, the bull pulled harder and broke the plow.

I started to cry not knowing what to do. As if nature was sympathizing with me, it started to rain, washing down my sweat and tears that were commingling on my face. And then a brilliant rainbow appeared. From my perspective, one end of the rainbow emanated from one corner of the field and its magnificent arc projected upward to the clouds. Tears gave way to panic. Myths had it that rainbows could chase and kill people with its fire, especially in the presence of a body of water. Then my father arrived, fuming mad that I damaged his new plow and much angrier that I tried the process without prior training. For that infraction, I suffered a good whipping. Later, my father showed me how to operate the plow and the carabao. I mastered the process after a couple of rice planting seasons.

During those long dry spells, rice fields, streams, lakes and drinking wells would all dry up. People in our community were saved from dying of thirst because about two kilometers from our place there was a spring that would never dry up. There, people would flock to bathe, to wash clothes and fetch drinking water. Community bathing was a common phenomenon in the morning; bathers of both sexes lined around the spring each with a bucket and pouring water over them with a dipper.

Fetching drinking water was a matter of strength and art. Some people used big, long bamboo tubes called sag-ob. Others, especially the men, used the ulay-ulay, a contraption consisting of two empty kerosene cans, about ten galloons in capacity, attached to the ends of a pole device made of bamboo slats tied together in staggered lengths. The pole device would then be slung over the shoulder of the carrier. A kerosene can, when filled with water, was quite a load especially when carried over two kilometers. The pole device would act like a spring, the ends bouncing up and down with the gaits of the carrier. The system helped the carrier as the upward bounce would lighten the weight. Nevertheless, only the strong could easily manage twenty galloons of weight on the ulay-ulay.

My father managed the fully-loaded ulay-ulay very well, walking with the load nimbly up and down the terrain over two kilometers. Before I became a teenager, I tested my strength on the ulay-ulay. I almost damaged my right shoulder. Later on, having grown some muscles and learned the proper carrying technique, fetching water on the ulay-ulay was one of the regular things I could do to help our family during dry seasons.

Primary and Elementary Schools

Because of the war, I was already eight years old when I started first grade. We lived at the edge of our barrio (Cancatac) and near the school of the neighboring town, Sikatuna. As a rule, however, I had to go the school of our barrio. The school was a good distance from home, a three-kilometer barefoot walk on dikes across rice paddies and stony trails. During rainy days, the dikes would become muddy, slippery and very difficult to walk over. During heavy rains, flooding would submerge the dikes and render them impassable. Probably due to being undernourished and underweight, I was a frail and sickly first grader. So, because of bad weather and poor health, I missed many days of school. I have no recollection of my teachers name and I don’t even remember how he or she looked