Hopes of Hamoraon

The sky and sea were grey, separated by a deeper shade of grey, when I sat on the edge of a long bench made of hamoraon that lay outside a house in ruins facing the Ragay Gulf. A weak intensity of orange crawled behind Itangon on the far left end of the beach while the rest of the sky turned pale blue. On the left end of this appeared the different shades of grey: Bagaposo, Bical, Daruanak and Sarimao. Amidst the changing colors of the sky, the February full moon still hung, undeterred by the sun about to rise from the other side. Below the moon and the sky was the most tranquil sea I had ever seen. Its tranquility calmed my heart and spirit after some days of hard work and stress.

The sun had risen, commencing my second day in Hamoraon, the farthest barangay in Minalabac from the city. I went there for the community immersion of freshmen students of Ateneo as volunteer-assistant to NSTP teacher Ma’am Jude to help her monitor the safety and behavior of students during their pakikihimanwa. The beach and the idea of watching sunrises and sunsets while there further motivated me to leave the City for a while and continue the volunteer work which I had already been doing for the past six years. I remembered when, three years ago, my boss Fr. Ritche took me and my colleagues to an area visit in Bagolatao to assess its potentials as an eco-photography site. I found the beach interesting not only because the water was so clear but also because the shore was covered with white pebbles instead of either black or white fine sand. The locals we met there at that time encouraged us to visit the beach in Hamoraon, which is of the same shoreline as Bagolatao’s but offers additional features that spelled adventure like cave spelunking. We were quite intrigued by this, but a sudden downpour drove us back to the car.  As we were leaving Minalabac, I remembered repeatedly uttering the word “Hamoraon,” which had a tender and deeply romantic appeal to my ears, so that I would not forget the place.

Being there again finally made those three years feel like a moment.  And being there by the shore and at sunrise, I embraced solitude, tried to clear my mind of anything that could spoil the moment, and just allowed myself to be awed by the picturesque view before me. My eyes were so fixed on the sea when my attention was caught by a vessel that gently sliced through the waters, growing larger before my eyes until it finally reached the shore. An old man in his bandana and faded striped polo shirt walked out of the boat on bare feet and singlehandedly carried the small vessel to the shore. I approached him, greeted him “Marhay na aga po,” and curiously asked him how many fishes he had caught.  As I was a stranger to him, he answered in mixed Rinconada and Bikol-Naga dialects that the catch proved to be frustrating and that he would not, in fact, be able to sell what he had caught. He took out from a small galon a few pieces of bisugo dangling from a tansi chain, some of them smaller than the others. Very soon, a grey-haired woman in duster came to receive the fish that he had brought with him, her facial expressions attempting to complain but breaking into a laugh instead as she nodded at me.

The fisherman, Basilio, went to the part of the beach where a net spread, its two ends tied to wooden posts in the sands. I followed him and saw many tiny lifeless fish scattered on the sand around the net. I learned that they were leftovers of the sinsoro fishing done the night before. He picked up the dilis one by one, careful not to include the tikong which was darker in color. He said he would use them as bait as he would try his luck in the sea again because what he had caught was not enough for his family to survive that day. By the time he paddled back into the offing, the sun had already brightened up the entire landscape in front of me.

The owner of the sinsoro net, Dionisio, was sewing the parts of the net that had already become detached from the frame when I approached him. He recognized me as a volunteer and told me that his family was hosting two students. He said that I should not worry about the safety of the students as Hamoraon had been peaceful for the past years, contrary to what people had labeled their place to be. In the 80s and 90s, he admitted, fear and isolation characterized their community.  The fear was coming from the tensions between the between the rebels and the military that reaulted in the two parties’ occasional firefights. He even recalled instances when the armed rebels occupied his boat and asked him to transport them to as far as Pasacao for free. But when a military detachment was installed in Salingogon, a neighboring barangay, the tensions neutralized. The isolation, which had been happening since even far back, was caused by the lack of paved roads that could have effectively connected them to other towns and facilitated development for them. For the longest time, however, crossing the sea was their only means of transportation as the roads came in late 80s. But amidst all these concerns, he had spent his youth, raised a family, and grown old as a fisherman.

When I asked him how the sinsoro turned out the last night, he said that his group caught only a bañera of iliw (flying fish) and some kanoos (squid) which were distributed among those who helped draw the seine ashore. “Bulanon kaya,” he blamed the full moon and looked forward to dark nights when their net would harvest schools of fishes. His eyes glowed as he recounted that they had caught bountiful dilis in previous weeks.  A butanding even got trapped in the net, but they set it free as they knew it was prohibited to catch or kill the whale shark. My eyes widened upon learning that there was a season when some whale sharks and even dolphins would be spotted straying in Ragay Gulf.

When Dionisio was finished with the net, he lit a cigarette, sat on the pebbles, and engaged further in our conversation. He said that he wished he had a big trawler and high-wattage superlight that he could drop into the sea to attract more fish regularly and bring his family fortune. But he laughed as he remembered that the local government had banned the big boats that used superlights before from fishing in Ragay Gulf.

“Ma-Tag-init naman. Madarakol na naman ang sira,” he said with a confident voice and a smile, the lines on his forehead and under his eyes deep.

I went back to the house of Kap Nono, who had generously allowed us, the Ateneo staff, to stay with his family. The househelp, Grace, invited me to the kitchen to follow Ma’am Jude and a fellow volunteer, Kinno and Kap’s wife, Tess, who were conversing there over coffee. As soon as I joined them, the househelp served medium-sized kanoos cooked in its own ink with vinegar and soy sauce for breakfast. Apparently, the squids had come from Dionisio’s sinsoro. They told me that Kap had left early to meet with his political partymates as he was busy preparing for his bid for municipal councilor in the midterm elections in May. Kap comes from one of the biggest families in the barangay and a political one at that. His brother had served as captain before him; his nephew is the Sangguniang Kabataan chairman, and his sister-in-law, the barangay secretary. The clan had high hopes that his constituents and influence in the village and the backing of his party would deliver him the votes that he needed to win the election. Ironically, Tess used to work for the government, too, until ‘politics’ had allegedly forced her to leave work and work instead in Singapore. In fact, she was just home for vacation. Before the summer ends, she would return overseas to help secure the education of their two children.

Already full and perked up by coffee, we later decided to walk around and visit the students who had been distributed to different host families so as to check if anyone had health or security concerns. When we reached the barangay basketball court, we met Tatay Roberto stirring with a rake the unhusked rice that covered one-third of the court. He enthusiastically invited us to his house and told us that the students were alright. A row of beige fibers and piles of firewood outside his house greeted us. He explained to us that he had stopped fishing but had raised two of his sons as fishermen. With God’s mercy, he said, his family has survived with his meager earnings as a palay and abaca farmer and, sometimes, as a worker in a coprahan in Zone 1. At 71, he still works very hard because he has children and grandchildren who depend on him.

He said that people in the barangay considered him so lucky to have four of his six children working abroad. Three of them were welders in Riyadh. The other one had just recently left to work in Qatar. I teased him that he must be rich now, what with all the remittances coming in from overseas. But he said that his three welder-sons, though enjoying good salaries, had their own families. So he did not receive any assistance from them. He still hopes to retire from farming and have a concrete house one day so he does not have to worry when storms ravage their community. This hope now rests on his youngest son, who just left the country last weekend. He would sometimes get jealous, he intimated, whenever he saw the big concrete houses in the barangay that were built through the support of overseas contract workers. As we continued our routine roving, I easily recognized the houses that Ernesto was referring to. They were usually two-storey concrete houses that stood out from the rows of nipa shacks. The other big houses at the beachfront were said to be owned by foreigners, one an Italian and another a Norweigian, both rumored to have plans of developing resorts in the area. Some locals liked this idea as they believed that tourism would bring in more employment opportunities and boost their livelihood. Others, particularly the fishermen, expressed the pessimistic view that the presence of resorts would limit their fishing activities, especially the sinsoro operations.

It was late afternoon when, after long walks and conversations with mothers, fathers, and children in the community, we settled on the shore of white pebbles. We just sat there, silent, with our aching leg muscles stretched across the shore while feeling the cold stones underneath and our hands supporting the weight of our backs. The waves were different that afternoon. They rushed to the shore furiously, seemingly echoing the beat of my heart. Yet,  this eventually did not matter to me as my eyes glowingly followed the sun sliding from the blue sky and patches of yellow-shaded clouds, quickly sinking into the sea, and leaving a brilliant reddish light. Then the horizon and the sea became homogeneous grey and then dark. I was calmed.

A few fishermen had just finished loading their nets into their bigger boat when Dionisio stood from a smaller boat, ready to begin the sinsoro activity. Not far from them was Basilio, who lit a kerosene-fueled gauze lamp, also ready for his solitary journey. Then one by one, they paddled away from the shore until all that I could see were their lamps that looked like fireflies floating on the sea.

There was a bonfire along the shore from which some children lit their dried palapa which they then waved as they ran along the beach. They left behind them golden glitters that seemed to compete with the stars that started to light up the heavens.  In their dancelike-ritual, they seemed to be asking the gods to protect their fathers from the dangers of the sea and give them luck.

Then the students came in small groups, gathered around the same bonfire, fueled it with more wood, and were determined to enjoy their last night of immersion in Hamoraon. As I watched them, I wondered whether they had met Basilio, Dionisio, or Roberto and heard their stories, their frustrations, their dreams. I wondered whether they had seen the sun as it rose and set with the same eyes as mine. I wondered whether they had seen connections between the realities in this place and development issues in education, environment, and livelihood which their Ateneo education had taught them. I wondered whether they had truly immersed themselves into the lives of the people in Hamoraon.

Amidst the chatter, singing, and boisterous laughter that blended with the sound of waves, my eyes were fixed on the ‘fireflies,’ which at that time, were scanning the sea and trying to attract luck. They might return home frustrated again but tomorrow, when the sun rises, the sea of Hamoraon, the same sea that frustrated them, would bring ashore still another wave of hope.