The Green Years: Summers in Bawa

I was born in the 60s in a farming village that ran smack  beside the Bikol River on the eastern side. I remember it as a place where summers were long, where time was measured not in hours, but by seasons, and so time sometimes seemed to stretch forever. Summer, for me, was the best of all because it was vacation time, and I get to visit my birthplace.

Thick hedges of gumamela and bougainvillea separated the houses and many were built of wood and concrete, though most residences had roofs made of nipa or banahaw. The roads were paved with bugitis, crushed shells, so that you felt like you were walking on the beach all the time; although it did get muddy when it rained and a carabao sled would etch deep marks of muddy brown along the long stretch of road that led to the school houses and the wide rice fields beyond. I remember it as a thriving place although there weren’t too many houses and everyone knew each other, who was sired by whom and who their relatives were.

The place had one big tractor at the time, one that was owned by an uncle who won it in a raffle draw sponsored by a bus company, Alatco, I think it was called then, and that company would survive through the seventies until the new millennium to be called Philtranco. Tata Vicente was lucky that year. Shortly after winning the draw held at the Plaza Kiosko (now more popularly known as Plaza Quezon) in Naga City, he went home one day with a lovely Vietnamese wife, one of hundreds of thousands who washed ashore in the Philippines on overloaded, rickety boats at the end of the Vietnam war in the mid-70s, known collectively all over as the “boat people”.

Summer was a special time. We lived in the city but I would spend the summer there when school was off. It was the old-school way of bringing up young boys. Go to the barrio, learn about life there.

And so this “slo-put“(a term that can only translate to “slow footed”), awkward and quiet little city boy, learned how to use two types of sickle, one for harvest and another for gleaning (hilamon), tripped along rice paddies while bearing on his shoulder a sack of harvested rice stalks, and to beat these with sticks to separate the grain, winnow, bring the produce to the miller, and more. I got to keep whatever I earned, which was understandably not much, but felt like a bonanza just the same.

Betel nut hanging from a tree. Photo credit https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jkadavoor

Nay Bebang and Tatay, like most farming folks had brown faces creased and lined by the sun. Nay Bebang, our name for our grandmother, tended a sari-sari store, while Tatay spent most of his time in the rice fields. The neighborhood convenience shop sold, aside from regular grocery items, things needed by those fond of betel-nut chewing, including the nuts, tobacco leaves, and lime. Lit by a kereosene-powered lamp that everyone called Petromax, the store provided the night-life for the locals who traded tall tales, jokes, and gossip over jars of tuba (coconut wine) or ‘cuatro cantos’, four-sided bottles of Ginebra San Miguel, the only gin in town. Others would squat on the ground in a semi-circle, sharing betel nuts (nganga) which were pounded and mixed with lime, then wrapped in tobacco leaf, chewed and spat out as chrimson saliva. The nights were short-lived, however, and soon after the lamp ran out of kerosene, it would be closing time.

It was in the mid-’70s when heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides was introduced by the government in a bid to increase rice production under the Marcos-initiated Masagana 99. The chemical fertilizers and pesticides would eventually find their way to the river and kill the fish and other lifeforms in it. I would remember hearing Tatay also complaining about the golden kuhol (apple snails) which the government, a few years into the program, forced the farmers to put into the rice farms as source of additional food, but which instead multiplied uncontrollably and had become pests that destroyed most of the crops overnight.

My last contact with Bawa (known formally as San Francisco) although in a rather indirect way, was when I facilitated a workshop of sorts for Sumaro sa Sulog (SULOG) to collect memories of experiences and remembered tales related to the Bicol River. Participants were from Bawa and other villages belonging to Canaman. One of the participants, a man in his 60s, remembered me as the ring bearer in his wedding. It was a serendipitous meeting, but he couldn’t stay long as he had to rush to Manila to attend the wedding of his daughter.

As the members of the focus group, all belonging to the senior citizen’s groups in the area, related stories about the river from times during and shortly after World War II, I too had flashbacks. Vivid images of the sun splashing and sparkling off the hull of a motorized boat that regularly plied the route from Naga to river towns  woke up in my memory. I imagined them to be river fairies that accompanied the boat, dancing in the surf.

A visit to my hometown a few years before was a bit of a disappointment. The creek where we used to go to wash the laundry, fetch pails of water for the earthen jars (tapayan), had dried up, there was no longer any sign of the clear pool of water fed by a nearby spring that was a key landmark of the village.

A cemented road now connects Bawa to the rest of the municipality of Canaman, in the province of Camarines Sur. While it made motorized transport easier, it also had the effect of killing river traffic. Few people in the area now owned baroto (boats), and the motor boats that plied the river have all but disappeared, their former owners selling them to merchants upstream. Costs for transporting products had risen and dipped with the price of fuel.

Eating a cold glass of halo-halo from a stand near a public school building, I took a look across the empty stretch of road towards the row of houses where my grandmother’s house was located. The store was now barred, though the benches placed on each side of store front remain. I spotted a dish antenna at one of the sheds at another residence, the only sign of modernity in a place where time moved slowly, except that it felt like it had sagged in places, like the face of an old man looking blankly at some distant point.

Viewed from above, a grid of two parallel roads bisects the village. The longest part led straight to the school area, a shorter one led to the chapel. In October, during the Feast of St. Francis of Assissi, the village patron, and in May, when the  Lagaylay was celebrated, it would be decorated with palm fronds and multi-colored buntings and other adornments made from crepe paper and cloth, contrasting with predominantly white vestments at the altar. Local artists would carve fleur-de-lis shapes and flourishes on banana trunks, which formed the pillars of welcome archs. Lagaylay was a long-held tradition where women danced on the chapel square while chanting prayers to the Holy Cross. A priest, who was brought to the area by boat, would officiate a Holy Mass as part of the festivities, which was also an opportunity for the residents to have their children baptized. These were among the few occasions when the village stirred up from its sleepy demeanor and put up a festive air.  I am not sure if the Lagaylay rite is still observed in Bawa today.

We left on the same afternoon on a car via the Fundado Road, a concrete highway that replaced the river as the main artery connecting the village to the rest of the world. On the way back, I watched vast expanses of green rice fields waving in the sun and listened as the car’s wheels crunched against gravel and cement. I would have preferred to ride the passenger motorboat once more, to watch again the fairies of my youth, frolicking on a river lined with thick nipa fronds and bamboo groves, as the boat chugged serenely towards home.