Motherly Love in Mountain Province

On the road to Mountain Province

Mountain Province

Accidental shot up the nose!

How can someone begin to explain 3 months of profound transformational experience in one place with the same people? The place is Mountain Province, Luzon, Philippines. Six hours swinging side to side in a bus brought me to Russell Maier’s door in Sabangan just before nightfall. I’m here because Russell invited me to help build a building to house books donated over the course of 2 years to an elementary school in Guina’ang, a village up north and higher up the mountain. I’d spent about 2 weeks here by chance in December, and now I’m back – and totally stoked to be here. Heads-up: this post is a long and eventful one, so grab a cup o’ sea-salted lemon water and do read on!

Bus stop in Sabangan, Mountain Province

Mountain Province is a very special place. More than 150,000 people are spread out over 810 square miles of mostly steep, mountainous terrain (mountains in Mountain Province… go figure). The mountains themselves are home to many different biospheres, and you can clearly see where the lush vegetation from the draws below meets the pine trees above. The border line is at the same altitude so that all of the mountains look like they have spiky hair on their heads or something (I did that hair-do when I went through puberty… what millennium teen didn’t?)

Bontoc, the central hub of the mystic Cordillera Mountains, is 20 km north of Sabangan on the recently constructed Halsema Hwy, also known as the Baguio-Bontoc Trail. A quick google search tells me that the road is 150 km long, one of the few paved roads in the Cordillera Mountains, and one of the most beautiful and dangerous roads in the world. For some pictures and info, check out this site: http://www.dangerousroads.org/philippines/82-halsema-highway-philippines.html. Before it was a highway, people walked this route frequently. It took 3-6 days. Took me 6-7 hours by bus. Not a big difference!  Mountain Province is also home to Sagada, the famous hippie-hangout and weekend escape for Manileños with cars. It’s maybe the only place in the country that weed is tolerated (actually the cops will sometimes pull out extra chairs and offer visitors a joint).

The mountains are carved by rice terraces some of which have earned World Heritage listings. Each terrace is the product of tremendous community effort, specialized skill, and daily maintenance. The harvest of rice requires the same effort, skill, and maintenance, for each and every grain. Little known fact; experts from all over Asia once flocked to the Philippines to learn rice varieties and growing methods from Filipino masters. The entire Igorot culture revolves around these rice terraces. I did my best to be a good anthropologist, entering without judgment or preconception, accepting my entire surroundings, and assuming there’s a healthy balance to it all that I could never understand. 

Russell Maier

How about the people? I’ll start with Russell. Russell is a mandala artist from the Yukon in Canada. Russell rode a bicycle from his childhood home near Alaska all the way to Washington D.C., where he flew to Paris and rode the rest of the way to Berlin. All along the way, people would ask, “Where you headed?” “To Berlin” “Berlin?! You know there’s a continent and an ocean between here and there right?” “Of course.” “Why are you headed to Berlin?” “To be an artist.” “Really? That’s so cool! Here’s $20!”

He had a girlfriend for two years whose dad owned a huge company in Manila. She brought Russell to check it out. But then the business tanked, she dumped him, and he was stranded in the Philippines with very little money. He wandered, allowing the fear of scarcity to tear him apart until he landed in Sagada, Mountain Province. There, he made money by exporting bags woven from plastic chip bags by women in the area. He’d ship them to a distributor to be sent to select stores in Europe and the United States. He was the middle man who set the prices.

Me and my arch

Until he met Sarah. Sarah Queblatin is a mandala artist originally from Cebu. Together, they marveled at the prospect of “co-creation” an ideal they might have pursued into the grave. They were a couple grasping onto that ideal like a lifeline. One of their “co-creations” was the 1library project for an elementary school in Guina’ang. The story goes that Russell got lost hiking in the mountains and stumbled into this magical school. The children and teachers were so full of love and light that he wanted to give back one day. One book at a time, Sarah and Russell collected books for the school. Couchsurfing.org was their main tool. They opened their living space to Couch Surfers, who would often bring books or talk to the children about where they came from. Russell and Sarah split because of this “co-creation” two years ago. After they split up, Russell managed the project, and people began to donate books from overseas. Then people started sending money. Over the course of those two years, Couchsurfers, books, and funding for both school and project steadily increased.

Pi Villaraza and Inner Dance           

Enter Pi. Pi Villaraza is world famous. Not that I knew that at the time. “Pi” is a name that found him when he underwent the spiritual transformation that made him who he is now. He began his original transformation from very successful Manila marketing consultant to spiritual leader by walking around the southernmost island of Mindanao. That was nine years ago. This time, he was walking the once well-trodden trail from Baguio to Bontoc as a way to release some negativity and steep himself in the healing power of walking through nature-abundant lands with strong energy flows. Sarah found Pi after she left Russell. Two years later, knowing that Russell lived right on the Halsema Hwy, she did a simple thing: she told Russell who Pi was and that he was coming. But Pi had ditched his phone. He could pass like a ship in the night. So what did Russell do?

He drew a giant chalk mandala in the pavement to catch Pi’s attention, with a trail of smaller and smaller mandalas climbing the steps up to his front door. It worked. Pi followed them to the door – and Russell was home. That was a month before I met Pi in Baguio.

A planter I made from clay, bottle bricks and broken tiles

Pi is the founder of something called Inner Dance (described in a little more detail in my last post). It’s basically energy healing using dim lights and up-down waves of music to bring about a conscious trance. I think it’s better described as Inner Yoga. The body releases emotional and energetic tension intuitively and naturally. The release is voluntary, but how it manifests is mostly involuntary – it can look like singing, crying, dancing, yoga, martial arts, screaming, pounding, convulsion, visions, or sleep. For those whose bodies move, limbs are sometimes described as being pulled by invisible strings or surging with warmth. It’s an easy way to access kundalini energy, and the experience is different for every person, every time.  

Something about the shifts happening back home in Palawan made Pi endeavor to journey through the Cordilleras. That journey led Sarah to contact Russell again. That contact led Pi to Russell’s front door. Their discussions and experiences regarding Igorot culture, permaculture techniques, alternative building techniques, and energy led the current core of Inner Dance up to the mountains. They coalesced in Baguio for an evening, the evening when I met with Russell, Sarah, Pi, Daniw, Maui, Tony, Shiva, Zelli’s daughters, and Ryan at Oh My Gulay. You see? This intricate machine of synchronicity has so many little cogs it’d be impossible to dismantle, let alone reassemble here in story format. I’m stubborn though, so I’m gonna pull out my magnifying glass and keep trying.

After that evening in Baguio, most of the core of people continued north to Mountain Province, just as I had. I was a day behind them. These people work fast, and they leave transformation in their wake. By the time I caught up with them in Guina’ang, Daniw was giving raw foods workshops, Ryan was doing acupuncture and energy healing, Pi had designed a permaculture garden around the soon-to-be “Inspiration Center” meant to house the books Russell had collected, and Sarah had applied mandalic structure and colors and meanings to the Center and surroundings. Yikes! All in a day? Who are these people? I began to discover who they were in the following days, but at the moment, all I could do was recognize that this was something special and soak everything up like a sponge. Time showed me that it wasn’t just the Inner Dance crew who were moving things, but the openness and efforts of the Guina’ang community that moved transformation so quickly. Here's Pi's video about Mountain Province... most of the scenes are from Guina'ang:

The Boarding House

As a group, we slept comfortably on the cold, cement floor of the 3^rd Grade classroom because of plywood, blankets, and pillows provided by the school. The school also provided some vegetables, rice, pots, bowls and utensils, and a place to cook dinner. The teachers were simultaneously always present and helpful, yet always leaving us feeling like we had plenty of space to ourselves with no expectations. That’s just how people are treated in this community, guests especially. How many American elementary schools have beddings, foods, etc on hand for guests? 

Evening Lullabies for the Inner Dance crew

After a day or two, the Inner Dance crew had dispersed, people going their own ways. From them on, only myself, Russell, and occasionally Pi, Sarah or a couple Couchsurfers would stay in Guina’ang. Usually I was on my own. When our numbers had thinned, we were shown a place by the road where we could stay. Coming from my minimalist travel adventures, I felt it was a wonderful space to stay, but I guess by most standards it was pretty meager. There were two rooms and three bunks. No mattresses, but made from plywood, and above ground! And lots of soft blankets! And a toilet! (kind of)! And a shower (a bucket of water and ladle)! And pillows! And a table to cut foods! And camote (Philippine sweet potato) in the garden! And a light to read by! And rain/spring water to drink (at least for the first two months)! It was luxury for me, in any case. 

Sunrise view from the Boarding House

The crisp, clean mountain air was luxury enough. I’m not a fan of tropical heat. Even though I was born and raised in a desert, I’m a cold-weather guy. The fruits totally make the tropics worthwhile, though. This community-owned space we were offered was the boarding house for people who were in transition – folks who were down on their luck, kids moving out of their parents’ house but without their own space, and visitors like us. There were six bedrooms in all, and we occupied the only two that were connected to each other. It was more than generous for the whole town to offer this space to us, and I never did figure out who paid the ghastly electric bill.

Out-of-school boys playing near the pigs behind the Boarding House

Morning stretches with the same trouble-making boys

At one point, after two months there, I returned from almost two weeks away to find the boarding house, exhausted from another project in Sagada. I immediately crashed into bed. But no sleep came that night. While I was away, the mice had moved in. They not only scurried around the floor and tables, but they climbed up and scurried all over me too! No matter what I did, I couldn’t prevent them from clawing over face, feet, and belly. The whole night long I made jarring movements and noises, hammered shut holes in the ceiling, and covered every inch of me in blankets. But I still couldn’t sleep. By sunrise, I had opened the windows and doors in the whole boarding house, and cleaned top to bottom. Halfway through my third sleepless night, my salvation walked through the room: a big healthy cat. Just what I was hoping to attract. It walked through my bedroom three times, and then twenty minutes later – music to my ears. The cat caught a mouse. And then another. And then another. I slept so well the rest of that night. The mice stayed in their holes from then on.  

Guina’ang

I honestly can’t speak about the Igorot culture as a whole – so many differences in culture, dialect, locale, etc… But I can speak about the culture of Guina’ang. After nearly three months working stone-by-stone with the people of Guina’ang, without a translator or another foreigner in sight, living the same life as them day-by-day, I earned a small place in their community; and thus, a little insight into who they are and how they live. In a word, they’re pure love. They give without expectation; the love always comes back around some way or other. They’re the most warm, hospitable, and welcoming people I’ve ever known. Guina’ang even has its own dialect of the local “Ibontoc” language. By the time I left, I could understand more Guina’ang than Cebuano, Ilocano, or even the national dialect of Tagalog.

A luxury suite compared to the other pig pens

Things have changed fast in Guina’ang. Really fast. Imagine the time it took for the United States to adapt to gasoline, electricity, cement, motor vehicles, industrial production of food and resources, cheap imports from across the country or overseas, regulations for school, environment, health care standards and innovations, etc… Electricity came to Guina’ang 15 years ago – around the same time as GMO vegetable seeds and fertilizers, motor vehicles, industrial mining and logging, destructive soaps and chemicals, packaged junk foods, alcohol, cigarettes, Chinese-made clothes and cookware, paper money, hydrogenated oils, television, American movies and music, and karaoke machines. Globalization literally flooded these people with culture. 

Communities like Guina’ang thrived for so long because they were self-sustained and independent. People helped each other and supported each other. Most tools, foods, and skills came from within the community, and stayed within the community. Specialty items or skills were traded with other villages on the other side of entire mountain ranges. Modern things like cement or rebar weren’t trucked in or loaded on a donkey, every piece was hauled up by hand on the backs of men and women walking through the high-altitude jungle. Villages inter-married, but in general each community was pretty much isolated and on its own. So, everyone was family. Everyone knew each other intimately and supported each other. That’s how it was 50+ years ago! Well within the span of a lifetime. 

As I lived there, community of older, backs-bent, rice-farming hunter-gatherers was trying to reconcile a long history with this new cultural invasion. Suddenly, Guina’ang was tapped into by the central government. It became illegal to divorce, illegal to give birth outside of a health clinic (sometimes a day or two walk away… when your water’s already broken!) illegal for your child to go without vaccination. Suddenly, you needed money to pay for all sorts of things you never needed before – white sugar, breads, gasoline, electricity, rides on the jeepney, plastic this-and-that, school supplies, school tuition, imported white rice from Thailand (in a land of rice terraces!). Suddenly, your kids are diabetic, you have high blood pressure, you’re dying from cancer or heart disease because the diet and food ingredients changed too fast to adapt. And your grandkids have hardly a clue that there was a culture, an existence before, where everything was abundant in the land you lived on and nature made the rules. Suddenly, dependency had reared its beastly head. 

Building a terrace in Guina'ang

I was always conscious of people’s reactions to my presence. Spending so much time in schools with teachers and students, I was living proof that a world like the United States existed. I had white skin, an American accent, a Columbia-brand collared shirt, and a guitar from the imaginary land of Cebu. When I spoke about my desert home in California or climbing a volcano on Negros Island, when I spoke my American English and spoke of the dangers (really?) of Coca Cola, when I sang cowboy songs or taught a 2^nd Grade students to sing “Feliz Navidad” (a Christmas sang from where? Mexico!), when I was anything but local, I inspired imagination of the world outside of Guina’ang, a world that must be bigger, better, and more exciting – captivating the way the movies and songs always romanticized them to be. The influx of materialist culture and Westernized education already made people want to leave in search an outside world that in reality was all in their imagination anyway. I did my best not to contribute to the exodus.  

Strong Igorot Boys

I tempered the tide by pulling myself down off the pedestal they put me on, dousing the deer-in-the-headlights stares by showing I was just as human as they were. Whenever someone apologized for poor English, I’d say my Guina’ang would never be as good as their English. Whenever someone apologized for offering only bread, brewed coffee, Coke and bananas (only!?), I made extra show of my appreciation, always accepting a little of whatever was offered. Whenever someone apologized for not knowing any better about the world, for the meager life or poverty that was around them, I would reassure them that America is the poorest nation in the world, and Guina’ang is one of the richest. It’s all about what’s valued as wealth. If you put a place of people, love, and vast resources in a list based on GDP or access to technology, then Guina’ang is very poor. But richness doesn’t have to be that. I’d explain how in America, people work their lives away to pay for school, houses, jewelry, cars they don’t need, foods that kill them, health-“care” to make them feel better about it all, always looking to the next day, and filling free time with empty addictions and entertainment rather than appreciating the hard-earned pleasures of life. Before they know it, they die having spent hardly any time with friends or family. They’re unhappy, they eat terrible food, and they drink terrible water. The government is the most corrupt system in the world. There are very few jobs available to those who were able to start walking the path to the American dream. Most of the American population is unemployed or “unemployable”. Americans are so blind to all of this they don’t even realize they’ve been swindled out of life itself. In Guina’ang, water, food, family, and shelter flow in abundance. That’s richness! That’s true wealth that can’t even be sold! I’d tell them to hang onto it and remember that money doesn’t dictate value. People understood and truly appreciated these gestures and views, seeming to say, “Actually, that’s all really obvious”. In that way, these people, light-years away from America, understood the world, and life better than Americans themselves. 

Talk of generation gap!

Arts in Guina’ang

Yet somehow, shining through it all was the ever-loving, ever-pervasive spirit of Guina’ang, a beacon for Cordillera communities struggling to maintain even memory of the fading lifestyle they led for millennia. Guina’ang did win the Panagbenga Festival competition and the Php150,000 prize that went with it, meaning financial support for cultural heritage and arts, even if the old clothes, stories, and dances seem silly and outdated compared to movies, cigarettes, and fake Nike T-shirts. 

Conducting the high school graduating class performance

Teaching the high school class

I was invited to help the elementary and high schools learn songs for their graduation ceremonies, which was a magical experience for me, teachers, and students alike. The songs were picked by the teachers and taught by ear. I couldn’t believe how fast they learned these songs! On top of two songs they already knew in two-part harmony, the high school graduating class of 17 students learned two more very difficult songs in just a couple days with the help of myself and the music teacher (who is also the director of the cultural group that won the big festival award). They even learned three-part harmony – unheard of even at the college level. They were a talented group of kids.

Elementary graduating class

Rushing to put gifts around the graduates' necks

The graduation ceremonies were beautiful and revealing in many ways. There, the cultural difference between grandchild and grandparent was striking. Grandma’s duty was to walk their grandchild through the steps of the ceremony. Seeing these kids I’d worked with for music and the library in traditional formalwear, standing next to the elder with added snake bones around her crown, walking back bent on bare feet… Well, it was simply profound. The snake spine is only worn by elder women to ward off bad spirits.

Freeing her daughter from a neckful of gifts, other children waiting for their share like puppies

House-Hopping Celebrations

After graduation, I was invited to join the teachers to make the rounds. Where in America do you invite every single teacher who contributed to your child’s education into your home to say thank you? In Guina’ang, the teachers walk from house to house to visit the parents of students who invited them to come celebrate. No need for addresses or directions. Everyone knows everyone, and the teachers themselves grew up running the same walkways. 

Graduation day house-hopping with the teachers

We visited 7 homes. You have to eat at every house. If someone offers you something to eat, you accept and eat because refusing means you don’t like the other person in the worst possible way. Every house serves the same food. The universal menu on graduation day was white rice, pancit noodles, chicken adobo, and macaroni salad (sweet condensed milk, sugar, super-starchy macaroni noodles, gelatin pieces, and maybe some cooked banana or other fruit). Then everybody washed it all down with soft drinks like Coke or orange soda. I had a little bit of everything at every house. I’m vegan, but there are certain social situations where the people you’re with are more important than health or diet. It’s not like abstaining would’ve saved the animals from slaughter, and the chickens were basically wild. So I forgave myself and let the love flow!

High school graduates and elders

The rice terraces are central to everything that happens here. There are still youths tending to the fields with their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, whose backs are permanently bent, and whose toes are wide and open from standing in the deep mud. I got to plant some rice in the ancestral terraces of a friend of ours, and the expertise of the old women next to me was obvious. The clay in this field was (thankfully) super-deep, coming mid-way up my thigh at the deepest. Then I didn’t have to bend over so far. It’s easy to see how 12-15 hours in the fields 6-7 days a week for the majority of your life can have body-altering effects.

It was a lot of fun planting rice with these elders!

Ceremonies celebrate rice planting and harvesting seasons. Apoy celebrates the end of planting season. Time to slaughter the pigs and chickens! Every animal that is slaughtered is honored with a long ceremony to thank it for its life. But, the pigs are kept in small pens that compromise the sanitation of the whole village. Chickens are mostly wild but some are fed GMO feed to keep them coming home to roost. The pigs are made into etag (salted, sun-dried pork). The chickens are made into pinikpikan, which involves holding a live chicken upside-down and beating it with a stick to get the blood to rush to the extremities, then cutting its throat, burning the feathers off in a fire or with a blow-torch, and cooking far beyond necessary in very salty water flavored with a little garlic. Tufu is sticky rice cooked inside woven sugar cane leaves (not sweet at all). It’s mostly just a handy way to hand out rice. No vegetables or fruits.

A sacred stone in one large rice terrace

Apoy is similar to Graduation Day, where you visit a bunch of houses, but combined with Halloween. You wander around after dark with a group of giggling people visiting one house at a time, but for an hour or two per house. Instead of flashlights or lightsabers, people carry strips of a special oily pine wood that burn for a long time. Instead of a pumpkin-shaped bucket, you bring plastic bags to hold your treats. Instead of candy, you get several pieces of each dish – etag, pinikpikan, and tufu. You’re supposed to eat some there at the house, and bring some home with you. The thing is, everyone makes the same foods, and everyone is wandering around, so basically you’re bringing home the same food you made and handed out. SO MUCH FOOD! Who knows how many chickens or pigs per house were served? I brought my guitar (Josephine) around with me and played music to show my appreciation. It was a blast singing, eating, and joking with everyone. Such hearty laughter and warm love! By the time I had wandered to all of the houses that wanted me to visit, the sun was rising.  

Plowing in Sabangan terraces

The morning after opening night, Apoy celebration continues. People aren’t allowed to leave their family house-clusters for three days after opening night, a long-practiced tradition to ensure people spend this time relaxing with family. You’re exempt if you live near the road or if you’re a visitor (other villages don’t celebrate Apoy at the same time or the same way). In the morning, more etag and pinikpikan is handed out, left from the night before, plus soft drinks and halo-halo (mix-mix – multicolored gelatin pieces, noodles, maybe some fruit, mixed into condensed milk and shaved ice as a spoon-able drink). Apoy was near the end of my stay in Guina’ang, and by then, I was adept at appearing to eat a lot of what was offered but actually having very little. I saved all of the food I was given (my plastic bags were full to the brim of each dish). All of the meat went to roving dogs, and the tufu came down the mountain with me on a jeep to Bontoc. Once in Bontoc, the tufu went to some poor kids wandering near the market. It took a while for them to catch on that I was giving away free food, but in 3 minutes I parted with more than 40 rice bundles, one per kid. After all the other kids grabbed one and ran away laughing shyly, the very last kid looked up into my eyes and said, “Thank you, sir.”

The Road to Guina’ang

The Road

Speaking of the jeep up the mountain, Guina’ang is 12 steep km up the mountain from Bontoc, the central city of the Cordillera provinces. There are 2-3 jeeps each day. They go down from Guina’ang in the early morning, and come back up in the afternoon. Those are the only rides here or there. The only reason there are even so many rides is because the only other village along the road, Mainit, has a bountiful copper mine. The mining companies also helped build and maintain the road in the first place. That’s another trouble in itself. Suffice it to say that Mainit, a centuries-old community, is in a tough spot and may not even exist after the resources are extracted and the mine closes.

Guina’ang is home to two bakers, and travelers to and from Mainit stopped to buy breads from tables at the main store along the road (called the co-op). A select few vegetables were also sold at the co-op tables – China-grown cabbages, tomatoes, sayote, green beans, etc, but usually no fruit except Indian mango (a small green mango with less flesh than the “Philippine table mango”, but very tasty). With ripe fruits being scarce, if my sweet-tooth ever chimed in, it was sweet breads for dinner! My favorites were cinnamon bread, bichu bichu (sugary, crisp-fried twists), bootsi (baked, filled with sweet black bean filling), and the good ol’ donut. But eating this stuff is pretty desperate because the flour is horrible, the only milk is milk powder or fake condensed milk, the sugar is always white sugar, and the oil is about as bad for you as oil can be (hydrogenated, used a hundred times, filtered, dyed, resold, and reused by most everyone in the Philippines, rich or poor). After a while, you become addicted until you get sick of them. 

Ma'am Carmen, owner of the old bakery

I once got to see inside one of the bakeries, and omigosh, it was the most rustic, down-home, shady place I’ve seen. The cramped space, super old equipment, and light shining through smoke-stained windows to cut beams into the flour-filled air made it something out of a dream. The rickety shelves were full of warm, fresh-baked goods, each piece only P2 each and sold in packs of 6. Musky as it was, the energy in that bakery was clear, warm, and loving, and I didn’t want to ever leave. If I were traveling home by jeep, I’d want to stop for some bread-treats for myself and my guests too.

Third Graders stuffing bottle bricks and playing with rags made from plastic bags

One day there was a real character on the jeep. Usually only women, children, or foreigners sat inside the jeep. Men usually rode on top or hung off the back. But that day there was room for one other man and me inside. He was drunk and chewing momma - his teeth were destroyed from the habit. Momma is another word for betel nut, which is a tough tree seed that excretes a corrosive, red narcotic when chewed. I tried it once but I don’t think I chewed it right… I didn’t feel as much as others seemed to feel. It makes people a little high. He was trying his very best to convince me (and all of the elderly women inside the jeepney) that chewing momma makes men more attractive to women and stronger on the job. We all had a good laugh at this poor guy making a fool of himself. 

Filipinos never laugh with hatred towards someone. I was bullied as a kid, and until I came to the Philippines, laughter always felt like something negative directed towards me. Now I’m not so traumatized by laughter, funny as it sounds. Here, people find every possible reason to laugh because laughter is fun! The same was true about this man. People laughed not to make fun of him but because his ridiculous intoxicated comments were cause for laughter! Still, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy because he was too far gone to see how silly he was acting. He went on like that for the whole 2-hour jeep ride and wouldn’t stop until we all disembarked two hours later.

View of Bontoc from the road... a flat grass field on the right!?

If you miss the last jeep of the day, you don’t have many options. For half of my time in Guina’ang, there weren’t even jeeps running because of road construction. I walked up or down the road a handful of times, and if you’re not prepared, it can be really tough. Carry too much stuff, forget the water bottle, wear broken shoes, and it could be a hell of a long walk. Some of my clearest memories were from walking that road. I walked a couple times with Russell, but walking it alone was powerful. Lots of locals walk the entire length of the road too. They walked before there was a road for cars, so why not? I carried a heavy load of produce once, with no good way to carry them. My arms, neck, and back were really sore the next day. This road is literally climbing a mountain, after all. Several times I walked most of the distance in the dark. The sounds of frogs, stars touching the pine-spike-heads of the mountains, and the fireflies hovering around specific trees were broken only by the sounds of my own footsteps and the cool breeze on my face.

Bright moondogs one night on the road

One night, it rained after I’d finished the first few steep kilometers. I huddled under a small cement wait shed (built for just such an occasion by some politician with his name plastered all over it). With thick clouds above and no buildings or lights nearby, it was very dark. What a typically Filipino moment, I thought, sitting under a waitshed for the rain to pass. Once the rain stopped, I moved on. Only ten minutes later, I passed by the cell tower, but something was different than before It was shrouded in a bubble of fog. I don’t mean the fog was thicker there, I mean there was no fog anywhere else, but there was a bubble so thick around this cell tower that even the bright lights from within its security compound could barely penetrate the mist. With a light drizzle pit-patting around me, I approached was looked like a wall of fog so thick I could’ve knocked on it like a door. I passed through and was immediately swallowed by it. I couldn’t see a thing. I trusted my feet and what little I could see from the bright tower lights. Then I passed through to the other side. It was the most bizarre thing but the cause was so obvious. The cell tower must’ve emitted vibrations that made the water from the fresh rain condense around it. People in the mountains told stories about how bad cell towers were and that they didn’t want them anywhere in sight. Chickens couldn’t lay eggs, human babies were born with one eye, etc… We know they’re unnatural at the very least. When I finally made it to Guina’ang, the place felt unreal, like the dream-world and waking-world switched places. The faint sounds of laughter, the smell of pigs, the arcing light peering out from doors and windows of the village reaching down into the draw – it all seemed like a Dali painting, the definition of surreal. I was exhausted when I arrived at the boarding house. A cold ladel of water over the head and a warm bed to snuggle into never felt so good after a long hard climb up the mountain.

A bed of bottle bricks

Building – Sabangan, Inspiration Center

Why am I in Guina’ang again? Oh yea, to build stuff. Funny how usually an intention ends up to only be the gateway to other, more important plans. Thank you universe! Russell had invited me up to the mountains to build a building from trash-filled 1.5L PET bottles and clay. What happened to that?

Things made from trash by students at Xijen College in Bontoc, Mt Province

Mountain Province is just now figuring out how to manage trash. Junk foods, plastics, industrial wastes, toxic materials for vehicles and hospitals are all recent additions to the region. Much of the world buys something off the shelf, uses it for its stated purpose, then puts it in the trash bin trusting that someone that knows about trash will do something with it. Out of sight, out of mind. In Mountain Province, there is no trash bin, no trash collector, and no trash dump. You throw your trash into the grass, or you burn it. It’s a serious problem. Actually, human waste is a serious problem all around the world, but in Mountain Province it’s in your face everywhere you go. So what have the villages done about trash? Well, they’ve rethought what trash is. 

Table-top hot pad for a pot

 

Children on a snake bench made of bottle bricks

Every thing has a life. It’s born by nature or by humans, it lives, learns, feels, moves, experiences many events, and then it transitions back into the pool of energy that things are born from. In The Republic, Plato describes humans and objects as having one and only one job they were born to do: shoemaker, consumer, mother, leader, inventor, engineer, writer, soft drink can, writing utensil, thing to sit on, thing to scrub teeth with, paper to wipe your ass or nose with, prepositions to end sentences with. You get the idea. We’re currently living in a world derived from his Republic in many ways. But what if there were a place where objects could serve more than just the purpose they were designed for? What if humans could live happier, connected, cooperative lives because each individual had many different skills, ideas, and methods to share with all of the other individuals in a community? Well, you’d be in a place more like Guina’ang than Los Angeles!

Sorting bottle bricks for the stock room

Jemimah, who lived above us in the boarding house, with a bag of woven plastic

People here have been self-sufficient since time immemorial, and every person is a jack-/jane-of-all-trades. Zero waste has always been a central cultural tenet – a fact of life. Here, trash doesn’t poison someone else’s water, it poisons the very river they drink. So objects are used in as many ways possible until they have no more uses. Russell first started making money by selling bags woven from plastic chip bags. There are many many ways to use a magazine or chip bag for something other than its original purpose. This culture of re-use inspired Russell to make furniture from square-shaped gin bottles, solar-powered USB charger/flashlights, light fixtures from plastic bottles filled with food coloring, pillows made from flour sacks filled with shredded plastics, all sorts of things. Then came the idea to stuff Coke bottles with plastics. 

Dear Sir Joel, founder and head of Xijen College, Bontoc

Ma'am Manuela swelling with snails - pests of the rice terraces and also a delicacy

Ma'am Manuela leading a procession up the last steps to the site

Maybe the most important character in this Mountain Province saga is Ma’am Manuela Lomasoc. She’s the Head Teacher (principal) of Guina’ang Elementary School. Manuela is an unassuming woman who somehow makes everything happen – without anyone noticing she’s done anything at all. She welcomed Russell and cared for him after he stumbled into the school yard after being lost in the mountains. The collection of books and school art supplies was her idea. So was the Inspiration Center to house indigenous wisdom and donated books alike. Even the bottle brick was her idea. Russell mentioned 1.5L coke bottles, and she immediately pointed out all of the trash lining the pathways and pooling in piles near the bathrooms, suggesting they stuff the bottles with trash instead. She picked the building site, mobilized people, found support from the Parent-Teachers Association for construction, the Bontoc Market Vendors Association for bottle-stuffing, and the Mayor of Bontoc for funding and special tools like a dump truck to haul stones and tires up to the construction site. She also begged the Barangay Captain to let Russell, me and other volunteers to stay in the boarding house for free. She did a hell of a lot of begging for us and for the project, and the begging always comes back around your way. She’s racked up quite a tab in the community.

Ma'am Manuela, Sarah Queblatin, and Ma'am Janet, Grade 2 teacher

Ma'am Manuela and the Bontoc Market Vendors who stuffed 1,000 bricks!

But the community is taking it easy on her. She cares deeply for the young children of Guina’ang, finds the most important details to the community in a lake of government bullshit, and has enough love left over to go around for everyone she meets, thinking always of others. Plus, she’s lost two children and a nephew in one year’s time. Her teenage son was hacked to death last by drunk men with machetes. Her nephew died in the next town while I was working in Guina’ang, and as I write this in August 2013, her college-student daughter fell down some stairs last week and died from internal hemorrhage. Ma’am Manuela has had a rough year. Send her some love and prayer if you can.

Mud-clot wall

 In this, the land of rice terraces, Ma’am Manuela mobilized the parents and students to begin a terrace for a building. By the time I got there, the steep mountain face was already cut into and the beginnings of a level surface had already formed. Terraces throughout the province are lined with either clay or stones. During the first week or two, the kids and I began to line the edge of the terrace using mud clots while Manuela was busy manifesting stones, the only way to make sure the terrace would be strong enough to hold a building.  

Resting na!

Carrying stones to the school

Every once in a while, there was a big work day. Lots of parents and children volunteered to help, and the school provided food in exchange for their labor – breads and brewed coffee for mid-morning “merienda”, a hearty lunch, and sometimes extra snacks for afternoon “siesta”. Filipinos know how to work. Work when you’re energized, and rest when you’re tired. Simple as that. Minimizes injury, builds relationships, and leaves room for happiness in the equation. The women made up songs about the people they were working with on those days, and even the children helped move sacks of soil or stone. The Igorot are a people genetically adapted for physical work. They’d built terraces and villages in some of the most challenging landscape. I saw children lifting one desk in each hand and performing feats of strength I could only marvel at. In the mine up the road, children carry 20-30kg sacks of ore, the women 50-60kg, and the men 80-100kg of ore. These people are deceptively strong. Even elder women often walked with massive loads on the tops of their heads. 

Ma'am Manuela serving lunch on a big work day.

A big work day: rip-wrapping the terrace we were making

When the stones began to arrive, we carried each and every stone from the drop off to the school. Then several fathers – skilled “rip-wrappers” – wrapped the terrace in stones. Wrapping a part of the terrace counted as a big work day for everyone, food. The stones were heavy as hell. I carried some that were 30-50kg on my shoulders. It took two men to lift it up there in the first place. I used a pair of jeans to hold smaller stones piggy-back style and almost as heavy combined. When I got tired, I would carry stones American-style, like a pile of wood in my arms in front of me. The women laughed and joked that I was carrying a baby to the worksite. There was something really special about working hard with these people at something their ancestors had done for millennia – building terraces in this very manner. Those surges of help from the community eventually thinned out, and a heavier work load was spread out over longer stretches of time. Things always take longer than they’re expected to. I originally thought I’d be working on this project for 3 weeks at most. But that turned into 3 months!

There's 20kg of rocks in those jeans!

Out of school youth following along with my morning exercises

Most days I worked with the same handful of women, mothers of children at the school. I’d wake up with the sun, meditate, stretch, eat fruit, and walk from the boarding house to the school between 8 and 9am. Sometimes the out-of-school boys would join in my morning rituals or play near the pigs. At first, I was gun-ho, working far too fast, like a typical American male. But eventually I fell into the same rhythm as the other women. I no longer pushed to end the day or the job, but enjoyed every moment of every day with each of these amazing people. I even brought my guitar later on so we could sing “cowboy” songs during merienda. Work or rest was always full of laughs. At least once a day I was encouraged to court a girl from Guina’ang.

Laying a wall of tires with tools that were totally not up to the task

The weather was usually hot and dry, but as summer neared, the afternoon rains came more and more often, around the time our water supply at the boarding house stopped flowing. The rains pooled on the terrace, which threatened to slide through the support wall. We needed drainage and something a little more robust for the wall, so I found and transported 50+ used tires up from Bontoc to Guina’ang. Not easy. Once in Guina’ang, the tires were rolled to the school by children and then carried to the site. Those kids have never been to a playground. The trees, rocks, slopes, etc are fun enough. And did they ever play when those tires arrived! They were like kids who’d never received a toy (maybe some hadn’t!). Eventually, the tires were laid as support walls for the terrace and firmly packed with soil. You could build a building out of those walls; elsewhere in the world, people have. 

Toxic algae in the polluted Chico River

Once word of the Inspiration Center reached Bontoc, the idea spread like wildfire. While I was in Mountain Province, the Municipality of Bontoc was being sued by Kalinga Province down river. Bontoc had dumped a smoking heap of trash next to the Chico River, the lifeline of the Cordilleras. The city had six months to clean up the dump and develop a new waste management protocol. Talk about incentive to make use of trash! Vendors at the market spent their spare time packing bricks with hand-shredded plastics. The head of the Xijen College flooded the IT classrooms with trash to use as artistic medium. The mayor provided an extra worker or two and a truck to haul up bricks. In one day, more than 1,000 bottle bricks were brought up to Guina’ang, where we set up a stock room to hold them. 

Where's Wally? Can you find the person walking up Bontoc's Smoky Mountain by the river?

 Of course this project spawned others that I also took part in. Bottle brick demonstrations, experimentations, and other school projects lured me away from Guina’ang a handful of times. The last was a giant, bottle brick play-bench in the shape of a snake. On the first day after it dried, children were loving it. But still, I spent most of my days in Guina’ang, which by the end felt became home.

Bottle brick snake bench

Farewell to the Mothers of Guina’ang

The women I worked with every day were very shy, full of smiles, and looking for any excuse to laugh. Two days before I was supposed to leave, the idea of a farewell party was tossed up to the group; a despidida. Instantly, imaginations went wild, preparations were made, and 24 hours later, party we did. We took the whole afternoon off. 

Merienda with the women after hauling stones

I had prepared almost all of the food. After fried potato wedges and peanuts as appetizers, seven or eight dishes all came out at the same time from a three-burner stove. Thank you universe! Ma’am Manuela made champorado (sticky rice porridge with cocoa and roasted peanuts) and Laing Guinataan (taro root and leaves with coconut milk, but without bago-ong shrimp paste). A couple of raw food dishes even made it into the mix!

A big pot of champorado. My favorite!

 The night before, I wrote them a song with lots of inside jokes. I was really excited to surprise them. But little did I know that they had done the same thing for me! We sang a few work songs and cowboy songs, and then we sang the songs we had written for each other. Here are the precious moments: I can’t not mention that Russell, after many weeks of absence, showed up right in the middle of the women singing their song for me. I was only able to record the second half (the English half, thankfully).

Carrying stones

Once before, I stayed too late cooking at the school, robbing the teachers of their time to go home before dark to cook for their family. But at my despidida, we stayed, we laughed, we sang, and we ate until after 10pm! After dinner and our song exchange, we settled into digestion-conversation mode. By the end of the evening, the shyness had washed away into the flow of reckless fun and love, and these women blossomed before my eyes. Hearty laughter traveled in a chain reaction. Whoever could breathe long enough to speak gave the next jolt of energy, and on it would go until everyone was literally on the floor and no one had breath left to make the next joke. Some of these women adopted me, even calling me son. Ma'am Jacqueline in particular, became "Mom" or "Mother" Jacqueline.

Two hard-working women

The two youngest women were single and fond of me, and though they tried to conceal it, jokes from the other women had made their feelings obvious long before. Somehow, the deep trust and love that had bloomed that evening turned into competition. We all blushed as they took turns proclaiming the lengths they would go to be the one to leave Guina’ang with me in the morning. One slapped a calf muscle and say, “See these? I’ll carry your things down the mountain at 6am, meet you at the jeep stop, and walk you to the bus.” And the other would say, “I’ll walk down at 3am and carry you to the bus!” I could scarcely believe these were the same ladies I’d worked with for 3 months.  

Next morning, most of them came by to see me off on the jeep. A wet-eyed moment for all. Sitting on my pack on top of the jeepney, I waved goodbye. As I looked at the faces around me, I realized I recognized every one of them. I’d been in that village a long time. I never thought that anything like it would’ve happened when I set out to visit the Philippines. I felt supercharged with love, knowing deep down I’d never felt better. The last 24 hours had been the best in my life. Still, it was time to move on. I was intending to meet Sarah and Roselynne in Cebu City, and then Pi in Mindanao to work on a totally different project. But as always, the universe has a way of scattering intentions onto the floor to see what new pattern can be made…

There are two more stories from those three months in the mountains that merit their own blog posts, so keep an eye out in the next few days!

Bonus video about the bottle brick project in Guina'ang:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOBBnXU29ew 
(There's a little bit more of me in this one)

Bonus photos from a hike up Mt Kaliawitan on my day off:

Our group from Manila... I joined along

Hunter's warning: Boobie traps down this path!

My two hiking buddies