Turning to Salt

Missed my gas station. Though I have contentedly been somewhat up to date on my posts, there had been topics and ideas that warranted a post but there simply wasn't time. Oh well...

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Once upon a time, I lived for a while in a small town called San Manuel, Pangasinan, right underneath the shadow of the daunting yet then still to be finished San Roque Dam. What was I doing there? Fieldwork in completion of my studies in college. The organization that I worked for was adamantly against the behemoth, and I together with a small group of students, were doing advocacy and organizing work to make the people in the area aware of this impending disaster.

Well, I have to confess that my presence there was rather forced in the beginning. I would have preferred staying with my previous group advocating women's rights and furthering the development and installation of a Barangay Women's Desk at Bagong Silang, Caloocan. That went pfft with this new assignment. The first month was a harsh reality check on what Community Development work was all about. No longer would I have the option of going home to my cozy bed, spending time with friends and running around an area in close proximity to malls and other urban fare. Instead, I would live in various small houses, without the benefit of running water nor electricity, sleeping on the floor or on the bamboo "papag". The dirt road leading to the town proper was dusty when the sun shone, and muddy when the afternoon rains hit. Transportation was considerably more expensive, meaning a lot of walking through rice paddies and all weather roads was called for.

Living like turtles, we carried all our possessions on our backs while we traversed different barangays depending on what our scheduled tasks called for. This was also my introduction to the now familiar chore called the laundry... huddling around a running stream or the singular deepwell together with most of the village folk. After a month of washing in hard water, my tidy whities were transformed to an off-white color and I've developed calluses on my knuckles and palms.

If the college wanted me to experience new things and adapt to a rural environment, they couldn't have picked a better assignment. Being the only other non-Ilocano speakers in the group of 7, I had to learn the dialect in a hurry or risk being forever the subject of practical jokes. There was also the matter of learning what the "movement" was all about, as well as throwing away the existing paradigms I had and embrace this strange new one.

Four months after first stepping off the bus, I graduated, and was soon relearning my old life. My promise of going back to the rice paddies to check up on the work was long forgotten, and the whole experience seemed like another rite of passage that was to be experienced no longer. Eventually the dam was finished, and I sure enough went back to the area as a sell-out. I wanted to do business with the dam-folks, part of the challenges of my new life. Maybe we were wrong that time, maybe progress was being made and that we were so naive, brainwashed to think of it as a ticking time-bomb.

A few days ago, I opened the newspaper to learn that the places that I traversed so many years ago was now underwater. The dam, in an act of self-preservation, had opened its floodgates, flooding the region. I guess back then, we were doing the right thing, sadly though, not doing it well enough. I could only shudder when I try to think of the people who we left behind when we graduated. The families who sheltered, fed and tolerated our presence. Where were they now? Huddled in some evacuation shelter, thoughts on their lost harvest and homes? Hopefully some of them have gone on to better lives, migrated to the city, afforded themselves a better quality of existence. I try not to think of the other alternative, but not thinking about it does not necessarily guarantee that it didn't happen.

It would be convenient to say "I told you so.". Or that we tried our best but we were powerless to stop it. At one point or another, each one of us in the group had lapses, doubting the work, wondering if we were doing the right thing or merely being puppets to a conflict that started a generation before us. Maybe if we hadn't the outcome would be different? Had we been too concerned about our own inconveniences to have been more effective doing the work we were supposed to do? No one can tell, not now anyway.