In Datu Piang: A Family Journeys the Rio Grande de Mindanao to Bury Baby Zaida

Datu Piang, Maguindanao – Silence has fallen on everyone aboard soon as the small motor pumpboat begins crossing the Rio  Grande de Mindanao, a grim journey for the Ponso family who is going home to bury their baby Zaida, who died in an evacuation camp here, back to their village in Datu Saudi Ampatuan town.

The baby was wrapped inside a woven mat being carried in the arms of an uncle, her body shrouded in white linen in accordance with Islamic tradition. Her mother, Tot, heaved muffled sobs a few seats away, her right palm shielding her eyes, as her three children looked on. Still mute with grief, she could not bring herself to be near Zaida and would rather watch her seven-month-old baby from a distance.

War takes a heavy toll on children as fighting drags on

Photo by Rene Lumawag

Munai, Lanao del Norte – Almost lifeless, Baby Hamda was lying peacefully on a mat, his eyes closed, his tiny fingers curled stiff, pale almost bluish. His mother, Meriam Mecaranda, slept by his side, her face one of resignation, as if waiting for the hour when death may strike her little one.

“It has been days already like this, the baby would often stop breathing. But just when we think he is dead, he would come back to life,” said a woman in the adjoining makeshift shelter.

Meriam roused herself from sleep, surprised to see a group of journalists crowding around their packed quarters inside a market stall here turned evacuation center in poblacion Munai.

Cradling him in her arms, she gently tapped the baby’s cheeks several times to wake him up, as if checking whether there remains life within the little bundle. The baby remained motionless.

“The baby is dead,” someone frantically shouted. The crowd fell silent, waiting with bated breath, some had tears in their eyes.

Baby Hamda is just 28 days old. Ever since the day he was born in early October inside the Munai evacuation camp, “nag-aagaw buhay siya lagi,” caught in a constant struggle between life and death, said the woman in the adjoining makeshift.

But just as all seemed without hope, the baby suddenly stirred back to life, breathing once again.

Civilians search for end to war in Central Mindanao

Photo by AKP Images

DATU PIANG, Maguindanao — In the afternoon rain, Raiz Adteg, 16, walked somberly on his way to bury his baby sister, one-year-old Anariza, who died from diarrhea that morning at the evacuation center in the town plaza here.

To shield his sister from the pounding rain, Adteg held a tiny red umbrella over her body, dead only for four hours and wrapped in a malong (ethnic cloth) and a mat tied on each end of two bamboo poles carried on the shoulders of an uncle and cousin.

“We had no money to buy medicine,” he said in hushed tone, his young face dazed and uncomprehending. 

The Road to Pikit: Grim Images of War

PIKIT, North Cotabato –Barefoot, five-year old Mohammad Guianalan has been walking on dusty roads since seven in the morning. In both his hands, he cradles a tiny black-feathered chicken, “his beloved pet,” his mother Amirah, says.

“He does not have any slippers,” Amirah explains.

Her two other children, Norhana, 3, and Sarah, 2, ride on board a
carabao-driven sled manned by their father packed with their
belongings: cooking pots, a plastic gallon for water, mat, pails, some
more chickens, a couple of goats in tow.

Amirah is worried. “We are scared of the buto-buto (explosions) .”

It is now an hour past noon. Here, along the road inside Pikit, little
Mohammad and his family, like scores of others, have been walking
since daybreak this morning to flee “loud explosions” that ripped
through their villages.

The road to the Pikit poblacion is filled with images such as these,
grim scenes of war, families on board carts, motorcycles, carabaos and
cattle. Most of them come from the barangays of Pagangan, Dualing,
Tapodoc, and Dungguan in Aleosan, and Kolambog in Pikit.

‘Warrior of the Light’

The abduction of Professor Octavio Dinampo of the Mindanao State University-Jolo (along with ABS-CBN’s Ces Drilon and her crew) had come as a shock to many of his friends and colleagues in the civil society network. But the shock immediately turned to grave concern when news reports have started implicating “Prof. Octa,” also chair of the Mindanao Peoples Caucus, to the kidnapping. For those who know the well-loved and respected professor and peace advocate, this mere insinuation is outrageous.

It was not too long ago that I had met “Prof. Octa” but he struck me as one of those kindred souls you meet once in a while, whom you know would be teacher and friend, no matter how brief the encounter is.

I met him when he gave a Bangsamoro situationer to one electoral conference I attended last year. The professor’s sharp insights, delivered with clarity and peppered with humor, dispelled the many warped notions, myths and stereotypes about the region and its people. I congratulated him on how well he put the issues in context in clear messages and punch lines. He also maintained a calm presence when rebuked by a clueless Manila-based participant, parrying her stings with his characteristic wit, depth of insight and dignified grace.

Jackie

Jackie

Ongoing since last week (May 21-23; May 26-28), Mindanews’s editors and writers have been going back to school, this time, to train for narrative reporting under Janet Steele, an American professor from George Washington University, and Andreas Harsono, an Indonesian journalist working for Pantau, a media training organization operating in Jakarta, Banda Aceh and Ende. (For more on this, see www.mindanews.com and clicked on the 1st Mindanao Summer Institute of Journalism icon). One writing exercise required of us was to use the “I” in a two-page double-spaced story. Below is my ‘attempt’ submitted last May 23:

“Mom, we need to bring Jackie to the doctor today. He looks weak.” My ten-year-old son Xandro cried out, his large brown eyes starting to get misty with tears, as he anxiously paced back and forth in front of me. I looked at him and asked, “Why, what happened?”

“Jackie is seven years old – but aren’t dogs supposed to live for ten years?” he asked, a silent plea in his voice, begging me to please do something, ‘not to let Jackie die’. Jackie is a dachshund and he first came to us seven years ago when Xandro was only three. My son, who is an only child, practically grew up with Jackie, his beloved playmate.

Wanderlust

Wanderlust: “a strong or unconquerable longing for or impulse towards wandering“

Years back, while I was still teaching journalism and essay writing at the university, I chanced upon Salon.com’s ‘Wanderlust’, a collection of wonderful, elegant prose dedicated to “putting the romance and the passion – the ‘unconquerable longing’ – back into travel writing,” as editor Don George wrote in the introduction. Ever since then, I was hooked and would often scour for travel articles written by Pico Iyer, Bruce Chatwin, Isabel Allende, and a few others more whose writing Salon.com had described as having that “combined sense of courage, passion and wonder.”

Back then, I could only dream about going out, exploring the world, and getting into travel writing as my life merely spun around the usual classroom and university work that went on for about five years. A so-called ‘quiet life’ as a teacher came more as a matter of choice so I would have more time to care for my little child at that time. I had just then left a job as a lawyer in a government office that required lots of travel time. The choice came one day when I was caught in a storm somewhere in a resort in Dipolog where I was attending a week-long conference, just when I needed to rush home to tend to my toddler who had a sudden bout of fever, and it took me all of two days to get to Davao. I took the first bus out but later on in my rush, as I embarked on the pier, I almost jumped into a ferry boat that was already slowly moving outwards to the sea. I would have made it, yet it would also have turned disastrous, were it not for a kindly stranger who stopped me in time by gently holding both my shoulders from behind me.

Epiphanies On the Road to Someplace Else

Mae Hong Son's serene lake

Journeys along the Thailand-Burma Border

“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over- a burning desire to go , to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any here.” – John Steinbeck in “The Urge to be Someplace Else”

And so it was that I found myself one cold December morning riding at the back of an open pickup truck, the wind on my face, up through the misty mountain trails of Mae Hong Son at the Thai-Burmese border. There we were all seated on a mat spread across the floor of the truck, shivering at every burst of moist wind that only gets chillier as we climbed our way up the slopes. To shield my face from the cold, I draped it with a shawl that I kept holding on tightly lest it gets blown about by the wind. Yet, after a while, I decided to let go of it gladly, no matter how biting the cold is, and let myself be swept in by the wind and sunshine, and the stirring beauty of mist and green.

There, before me, are verdant mountains rising up to the sky filled with ferns and pine trees, and here and there are bamboo groves lying hidden on patches of shadows swathed across the valley. As we moved deeper into the mountains, there would be more other shadows I would see and, too, I would learn that amidst this tender beauty, the forest has held secrets and borne witness to deep and abiding sorrows.

Moments before, we rode pass by villagers on single file hunched on the ground, their bodies in synchronized motion toiling the rice paddies, and every so often we see gaudily-painted Buddhist shrines on the roadside where smoke from burning incense sticks would waft through the air. We have set out from the town at eight in the morning, while it was still draped in slumber and fog, and as whiffs of mist drifted over on to the nearby lake and up across Wat Jong Kham and Wat Jong Klang, the twin temples of the Buddhist monks in saffron robes, some of whom as young as six or seven, whose heads are shaven, and who at nighttime would fly lanterns with lit candles shooting up into the sky in blazing flares to the cheers of the crowd.

Duty and Context of Remembering

For former Ambassador Henrietta de Villa, the snapshot of images from the May 26 special polls in Lanao del Sur remains clear in her memory, kept alive by a conscious telling and retelling and one that she returns to constantly like a pilgrimage in her mind. “Sample ballots strewn like carpet on the floor, secrecy folders thrown to the winds, wads of envelopes with money brazenly handed to voters, youngsters of 16 and 17 casting ballots.”

It is with a voice of passion and quiet restraint that De Villa, chair of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting PCRV), recounts in a dream-like sequence the images that still sear her memory. “And oh, the pandemonium, shouting, pushing, fist fights inside the polling precincts, gunshots.”

Reporting from the Field

Just got back from a twenty-day assignment and finding myself back to doing basic news reporting, yeah, the hard news stuff. Digging out facts, double-checking data, “accuracy, accuracy, accuracy”, and writing the story fast so it could be carried to tomorrow’s news.

I had forgotten how tedious the work could be as it was more than a decade ago since I was in the field. Particularly when upon writing the story, you realize the questions that should have been asked, the facts that should have been verified, and how that basic background info should have been available, pronto, because deadline is just an hour away.