In the dim mist of the recently passed rains, a heavy, nearly black storm cloud pregnant with the true torrential downpour of a tropical monsoon that is now making its way ponderously over the bay, to the south and out over the faint, forested mountains of Coron Island, I can see the dull red umbrella shaped dome of a giant flowering tree maybe a quarter of a mile down the mountainside that stands out against the brilliant green in the sinking sun. I'm sitting on the railing of an open gap in the wall of the chapel that sits high above the small village of Malbato; the white steps that lead up winding path to the entrance are lit with a partial glow, giving the scene an almost holy look, and I can see the arcing shadow of the cross above me playing across the giant fronds that begin about three feet after the chapel ends. Far below me, along the main highway, an intermittent ribbon of shining concrete, that, at times can become little more than a treacherous bridge with two sets of warped planks keeping huge trucks and motorbikes alike from plunging into swiftly flowing rivers below, the lights of a late night moped run, probably to the town of Coron, about 17km to the southeast, and its accompanying machine gun patter drift up to my ears and I ease back against the cool stones in a state of almost perfect peace. And then, just as the sun passes behind the last of the clouds that ring the tops of the misty mountains behind me and as I decide that this scene could not become more beautiful, the twinkling of a multitude of fireflies begins to fill the branches of the surrounding trees, hanging for long moments in the air, making it appear as if the trees have stars hanging from their branches in some otherworldly vision of Yggdrasil, the World Tree from Norse myth. I am overcome and cannot even muster a sigh. It is right at this moment that a bat passes within 2 inches of my face, no doubt hunting one of the last mosquitos left after the purging floods from the sky, and I surprise myself by having no reaction whatsoever. It was just too ideal to even respond.
This is where I am living, and where I will be for, give or take about 10 days here and there, the next month, and where I am willing to bet I will be spending quality time over the course of my life. Life here is both quiet and busy, peaceful and always moving; at least that is how the time of this particular foreigner is passing in Malbato. A small village, consisting, according to one of my guides who is probably the best English speaker here, of about 1000 people, including the children (500 adults), Malbato lies on the southern most portion of Busuanga Island, just north of Coron Island and west of Coron, probably the nearest significant dot on big maps which, next year, will upgrade from town status to full blow city, in the Caliaman island group of Palawan, the western arm of islands that constitutes the China Sea border of the Philippines. Busuanga is right at the top of Palawan, making it a prime hit for the typhoons that often blow in from the sea to the West (I managed to show up on the island only hours after a typhoon had hit, flooding homes, uprooting massive palms, and washing the river clear of a lot of rare wildlife, including the elusive freshwater seahorse that I spent an entire day looking for). Thus, sea faring structures tend to be simple and unadorned, thin, elongated canoe like boats with a wide spread of wooden struts that gives the boats unanswerable balance, while homes built out on the ocean, like the Kubo Sa Daggat have thick concrete supports built directly into sea bedrock, with low roofs and clustered structures. All throughout the day, you can see people fishing off of the coast of Malbato, in the bay, where you can sink a line about 5 meters to the muddy bottom below and catch small orange snapper as well as puffer fish (of course, you can't eat these, but their tough meat, when sliced off of the living fish, makes excellent bait for the snapper, as the fish can rarely take the bait without taking the hook as well). Towards the end of the day, when low tide has caused the water's edge to recede about 50 meters off of the sandy shore, old women in shawls, accompanied by barefoot children, and gruff, wiry men casually clutching the curved machete like blade that is the common tool here, take their buckets and plumb the waters for muscles or clams (It's either one or the other; I forgot the word for the object of their searches in Tigalug, but it begins with a "P". Perhaps I will remember later). You can buy fish, clams, and crabs from the fishermen at the waters edge during the day for relatively cheap prices and then grill, fry, or boil them in the fashion of the local cuisine, which, for the Malbatans that I have interacted with, only strays outside of sea food to include large quantities of rice, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as cassava, a few vegetables, and perhaps eggs every now and then.
This is the menu for those who eat simply, but prominently featured at regular intervals along the highway, right outside of Kingfisher Park, and in vast multitudes in Coron, are small shops that have wire windows heavily adorned with colorful sweets and crisps (That's chips in America; I just felt like being UK there for aesthetics. Don't ask me why.) where you can buy bags of small rolls and hot dog buns, as well as more practical things, like bottles of water and petrol for your motor scooter (OK; I'm done now.). It would be the kind of thing that would prompt me to thing "Food Desert" at first thought, and without knowing how the community works, with fresh foods and kilo upon kilo of rice moving silently into homes by means that are, only with painstaking investigation, becoming apparent to me, you couldn't be blamed for thinking this. The equivalent of these shops in the US, the "quick shoppe" and "stop and go", and I suppose vending machines (though more complicated, because here you have to learn another language to order something), and their position across areas of the country where they represent the only accessible source of food for residents is one of the targets of an national outcry, the "food revolution", and the subject of many undergraduate research reports, as well it should be. But here I am not so sure. People sell candy bars everywhere, but I've actually yet to see a kid eating one.
And here, there are children galore. During the day, I return to my small house by the road that takes me past a number of houses with covered benches were men and women will sometimes sit for what seems like all day, moving slowly in the shade, every now and then saying something to each other and laughing softly, always turning to look at me as I pass and returning my wave with the familiar, leer-like, smile that I have come to expect (And understand as friendly), sometimes watching me until I am out of sight. This scene is inevitably accompanied by gaggles of children, small boys and girls, often with nothing on but dirty undershirts, running down the path, chasing each other, playing with the house monkey that is tied up at one of the homes, staring at my white skin with wide eyes in the same way that I know I've often stared at things like jaguars and eagles, and generally being the object of what sound like remonstrances from their parents. There are so many of them, and they are so densely packed; every time I encounter one small child, I unconsciously expect to see several more soon following, and I am rarely disappointed. The older children attend the grade school that lies at the foot of the same mountain where the chapel perches, and as one walks the path up towards the school, the scene becomes dominated by kids who mostly look ten to twelve, though it is hard for me to judge age with Philippinos; I am often underguessing the age, and I blame it on reasonably healthy lifestyles as well as the population trend to stop growing at around 5'6" or 5'7". I've seen plenty of residents here that I thought were my age, who later were revealed as thirty and forty year olds, and I might have pegged Lorenzo, my primary guide, as still in his teens, before I found out that he had two years on me.
The opposite side of the spectrum, the older residents of Malbato are plentiful as well. I have taken the custom of referring to them as Maam or Maan, always giving a smile when I pass through the steamy rice fields next to a dark, wizened, wry man, carrying wicker and supplies on his back. My travels into more remote regions of Kingfisher Park, going far into the jungle trails, often puts me in the small dirt yards of the thatch homes that scatter the land (A result of agri-reform land portioning says Yayo), where chicken will run underfoot as I try to avoid stepping on tomatoes and cassava while Lorenzo calls out, "Dupas?!" to the dark interiors of the house, asking off hand if the two of us can pass through. Getting closer to the house, dim figures materialize in the windows and poke wrinkled heads out of the open ends of the bamboo and palm woven walls, calling out something else in slow and soft voices, to which Lorenzo will give a quick, usually one word, response, and I will hear the soft laughter form the house following us as we move on down the trail. And this is a place of laughter, in the best sense. The older generations that we interact with, walking into houses and asking for permission to go somewhere, to rent a boat to go out to the hot springs hot tub, or one of the many other tasks that are handled by extended chat sessions in foyers and in the shade, are always quite pleased to see us, sometimes even going so far as to give me free cassava when I said that the little six peso melon strips that I bought from one grandmother were some of the best things that I had ever tasted. Walking around the village, catching the eyes of kids as you pass them at a leisurely pace down the main highway, waving to people cutting things with their machetes while riding by on one of the cannondales that Kingfisher owns, you catch smiles, twinkling eyes, laughter, and wide grins. And if you can utter a word or phrase in Tigalug every now and then, the inhabitants of Malbato will go crazy.
In Malbato, almost everyone is Christian, most being Catholic and attending the chapel in which I've now spent a significant amount of time staring down at this place that I'm slowly beginning to know. One of the older couples that I encountered very far out of the way, close to the Kaluluwang area which is about 10km back into the jungle along the river trail where I searched for the seahorse, was spotted on a Saturday morning, moving about 20 meters in front of me, far from their home. I was told that they were of the Back To Christ Church, making the long trek into the village each Saturday, their holy day. Throughout the rest of the Philippines, there are a number of other religions, many of them Christian denominations, but also a large Muslim contingent in Mindanao and the followers of what Lorenzo translated for me as "The Old Way," which, as things like that usually go, caused me to perk up in excitement with the prospect of learning a new mythos of the islands. It is unclear whether or not anyone here in Malbato is of the Old Way, but presence of "local peoples", the indigenous population of the area, has now been mentioned more than once and has made its way to my docket for the next month.
The night is now an inky blackness, and I can see the lights of several fires burning below, and I'm reminded that whatever picturesque scenes I am experiencing here at the top of my mountain, there are real problems here that lie beneath the surface and are not entirely clear to me because of my positive experience here; those flickering flames are a tell tale sign. The second day I was here, I smelled something terrible just as I was laying down for a late afternoon nap, and I walked out to see Dinah burning the day's trash in a pile outside my door, which included a bunch of melting plastic bags. I was about to call out to her not to do that; I mean, didn't she know the harm form burning plastics? But then I stopped, realizing that the plan of action I was considering proposing to her was to take the waste to the proper waste removal area, and it was most likely that this village didn't have any kind of sanitation whatsoever. So I just stood there, with my sleeve over my nose and mouth as a filter, and watched the bottles and bags burn, thinking to myself that, as someone who is here to observe I can't demand things I know nothing about, even if my room does smell like crap now. I'm an active participant here, consuming, connecting, and enjoying life and company with the residents of Malbato, but always turning are the cranks of evaluation, seeking to find the nuances that make this village what it is, both the good and the bad, considering how I, with my environmentally inclined ideals, might be able to improve conditions here in Malbato, and address the needs of a community where poverty is evident and education, for those who want it, is hard to come by. The underlying problems, primarily poverty from what my initial information can gather, however are not as evident here as other places I have been, and it is difficult, when seeing people that sound content with their lives, to tell what can be done. The poverty here is not as evident as it is in communities in Africa, where streets can turn to war zones, or even in the places I have worked in Belize; at one point, I was attempting to balance while walking quickly across the London Bridges in San Mateo (Belize) that held me precariously above septic and lethal waters below, some locals passed quickly behind me, laughing at my efforts and telling me, "This is our life." The outspoken poverty is not here, or at least not in the short time that I have been here thus far. Who knows? As the community and my guides become more used to me, it might reveal itself more blatantly, but for now, it is only what I can see in the material wealth, and not in the people. I'm keeping my ear to the wall in any case.
Bats are all around me now, and I decide to head back, pulling the little broken headlamp out of my satchel and walking down the steps without turning it on at first, navigating the white path by the star and firefly light above, then switching the light on as soon as I reach the ground. The spitting cobras that live here come out at night and sometimes lay across the path. It's only safe to have a light with you when you think you might be coming back in the dark. I pass the decaying stump of a coconut palm as I near my house, its center hollowed out by water and termites, and in the darkness, I see something that catches my eye on the outside of the rotting wood. I turn my light on the stump and see nothing, waiting for a few seconds to be sure and then turning away, only to snap back to the stump and shut off my light. The stump is still illuminated; phosphorescent fungi, bright white in the daylight, are glowing dully on the outside and the inside of the stump, and as I look into the center, the fungi's faint radiance makes is seem like I am peering into a hole stretching down for miles into the gloom. And that does it. I let out a whoop, thinking that this truly is Pandora now, and turn the final corner to my house, where the power is out, but where candles burn with bright orange flames in the windows.
At least I won't be able to do much tonight. Maybe I'll calm down and get some sleep.
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