Manaolan

I was only three months old when Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. In minutes they were flying over Philippines skies and bombing airfields and major targets.

As soon as the first bombs hit the Mandurriao airport in Iloilo, thousands of refugees left the city of Iloilo where I was born. My uncle Nono worked in the bridge project in Janiuay and I believe it was he who helped us to find the safety of Manaolan, tucked in the hills of Janiuay. Manaolan is now part of Badiangan town.

My parents didn't tell me how we survived in Manaolan, but being a carpenter I am sure my father found odd jobs such as repairing plows, sharpening farm implements, etc. He wasn't a farmer, however, and even if he did the small plots of family farms were owned by local families. But I was told we had our own hut and in one of my visits my aunt Ramona pointed out the site.

In 1944 or 1945 my father decided to return to La Paz.

As a small boy I would revisit Manaolan again and again, spending summer vacations there. Manang Tiba (Primitiva Paris) is now almost part of our family and took good care of me. At first she accompanied me on these visits but later I went by myself (before I was ten I was travelling to Negros and Manaolan without any difficulty). Manang Tiba had a brother named Laureano who mas married to Honor, and a sister, Remedios or Meding, the one that got raped and died. In the early 50's when communists were spreading in the countryside, Laureano was being recruited but my father dissuaded him.

My Uncle Nono, my mother's brother died during the war, not by the Japanese but by guerrillas who had a bad reputation among ordinary civilians. As usual in war civilians are pitted between the belligerents. Manang Tiba thought maybe his beard had something to do with it. It gave him the look that both Japanese and guerrillas would suspect and in war people get killed and explanations given later. In Nono's case there wasn't any explanation.

So perhaps it is this distaste for killing that made my father to discourage the headstrong Laureano.

Manang Tiba lived with her old parents (and a grandmother who was blind). Her house stood on a hillside over looking the valley where she tended a small farm. The house was made of bamboo but had grass rather than nipa (palm leaf) for a roof. Cogon grass is beautiful and lasts longer but also harbors centipedes and scorpions and the glowworm we called atipalo. I haven't seen glowworms ever since after childhood. We used to play with them in the dark but killed them afterwards because my mother said it glowworms crawl into children's ears at night. Like other houses during that period her house was a one room affair, less than a meter from the ground but had benches near the windows. This was the only furniture in the house.

We ate twice a day, once in the morning at 9, after the farm work (farmers usually start working before dawn then retire when the sun is too hot) and then at 5 in the evening. We ate on woven bamboo plates called tubo. These were square in shape, ten inches on each side and about two inches deep. We all sat on the floor and usually the rice wasjust heaped on a large banana leaf or a larger tubo. Usually you eat rice with dried fish or salted pork. Sometimes they didn't put enough salt and the pork had a rancid smell. But you get used to it. I discovered, however, that egpplant boiled in water with a little bit of pork oil is quite tasty, so it added variety to our otherwise unchanging routine of rice and dried fish.

There isn't much to do after sun down except to sleep, so we seldom even used lamps at night.

Most houses there didn't have toilets. The people just went to the bushes to relieve themselves. In Manang Tiba's house the toilet was a branch that protruded from the side of the hill some ten meters away from the house. I hadn't seen any one using it so I concluded they use it only after dark.

There were two large mangoes overshadowing the house. It filled the place with its sweet smell during mango blossom time and when the young mangoes fell. People didn't use insecticides during those times. and I would gather the fallen mangles and bring home to mother to pickle called mangaritsada or litsada in short. The best way to pickle is to slit the mango on one side, remove the seed and fill it with the aromatic langkawas (lenquas in Malay), a root similar to ginger. Put enough salt and water to the level of the mangoes.

I had a friend Islao (short for Estanislao) slightly older than I was who knew where all the awang were located, these are abandoned wells only used by carabaos but perfect for diving. One day he showed me a hole in the trunk of a tree. He told me to poke my hand into the hole and a bird bit my hand, it was the nest of a kingfisher and my hand stank so bad even soap couldn't erase it. I shouldn't have done that because some of those holes have a far more dangerous creature inside -- snakes.

There is a ditty about people named Islao: Islao, kabilao, kanding, karbaw (Islao, like a cabilao fish, like a goat, like a water buffalo).

The main produce of Manaolan were rice and corn (maize), bananas, mangoes and tobacco. They also grew a lot of buyo leaves for those who practice the awful habit of betel nut chewing. (Later I would learn that betel nut chewing was generally practices in the Philippines by rich and poor alike. The ingredients are the same, betel nut, buyo, tobacco, and lime paste. The difference lies in the container where these ingredients are ground, put into a betel leaf and carefully placed deep between the upper and lower molars. Putting the betel leaf with its content deep into the mouth is kind of like an art form. But the constant spitting afterwards is what makes betel nut chewing such a messy and dirty habit. At least, however, the odor is mitigated by the lime. In the case of pure tobacco chewing, the final gooey effluent smells like a dead rat. And it is expertly expelled from the mouth into a spittoon (by the rich) or into the spaces between the slats of the bamboo floor (by the poor).

In the mid-90's Sonia and I ran a mission school in Iloilo. Two of our students came from Manaolan. Manuel Colacion brought me back to Manaolan for a visit. We walked on the talaytay (the ridge of the hill) to where the old house of Manang Tiba stood. The mango trees were still there. There were more crops, primarily buyo, and I saw some of Manang Tiba's relatives. They weren't too old and they remembered me.

The image of Manaolan that lingers most in my mind is when the heavy rains come. The valley would fill with water and become a lake. When the fog rises in the morning the scenery resembles those Chinese water color landscapes, dreamy and mysterious.