Foot and Fire

I was happy that I was able to spend time with the Panay Bukidnon in 2015. One of the good things I miss there is the Saturday school of children being taught chanting. Panay Bukidnon is known for their oral tradition and the Sugidanon or epic, among others. See of my blog posts on the Epic that was published by UP Press.  Funded by NCCA as I learned later, Teacher Romulo “Amang Baoy” Caballero taught the children chanting and it was fun listening to them. Aside from the chnating of the epic, I heard them sang a folk song on domestic life that's both funny and tragic. I wished I can go back and enjoyed more.

Submersion of Panay Bukidnons: A Call for Salvage Aside from the imminent fact that the Jalaur River Dam shall submerge portions of their ancestral domain, the Panay Bukidnon's cultural heritage also faces submersion Sunburn, scratches from blades of grasses, and scars from insect bites are among the souvenirs I and a friend got from our three-day immersion with the Panay Bukidnons of Brgy. Garangan, Calinog, Iloilo. We slept and lived with them in order to hear stories about stars and gather recipes of their traditional cooking but we ended up hearing more pressing matters, about the dam project and the struggle to keep the heritage vis-a-vis the daily needs for survival. On our second morning, we traversed the mountainside planted among others with coffee and cacao trees owned by our host family, with the end of reaching Jalaur River where a megadam project is to be implemented. Along the way, we traversed at least ten live streams including Karangayan and Bukay Ng...