Seeking Sibonga

Typhoon Hagupit/Ruby caught me in the middle of a documentation tour of southern towns of Cebu. We were afraid that the road trip would be postponed as schedules for work were tight in the lead up to the Christmas break. The good thing was that the storm was not as destructive as Yolanda last year.

Despite the wind and rain we mostly escaped the trauma of last year’s loss of lives and damage to property. This was because of heightened awareness of disaster risk and better preparedness for pre-typhoon evacuation and refuge, as well as post-typhoon relief.

Our documentation project involved the heritage towns of southern Cebu, covering Naga, San Fernando, Carcar, Sibonga, Argao, Dalaguete, Alcoy, Boljoon and Oslob. I was born in Argao and spent summers in Sibonga. It was a great opportunity to see how much has changed… or not changed since my boyhood close to 50 years ago.

One of the things that struck me of the towns and their heritage was the size of their churches and associated open spaces of plazas and parks. The churches and their bell towers served not only to cater to the towns peoples’ religious needs but also their physical wellbeing.

The churches served as refuge in times of typhoons and invasions of pirates. Their churches all faced the sea and, from kilometers out, their bell-tower silhouette was visible (tall lighthouses were a late Spanish-era addition). In modern times, the schoolhouses took over some of the refuge functions. It was great to find that most of the Gabaldon-type schoolhouses were still I good condition. As we travelled south we found them gearing up to take on possible refugees from Ruby.

I spent the most time of my summer vacation time as a youth in Sibonga, a small town about 50 kilometers from Cebu City. My uncle Patricio was the parish priest (he has since retired as a monsignor).  I remember the old musty convent beside the  church. This was where I stayed, often with my grandmother who took the opportunity to help my uncle prepare the church for May fiestas. I recall the convent’s cavernous silong and equally commodious main dining spaces, all creepy spaces to a young child who grew up in the city.

I would while away my time watching the cooks sweat over fires in the tall-ceilinged kitchen to one side. The rest of the time I would spend playing in the huge plaza and park right in front of the church and convent complex. At about three hectares the space was my playground. I would end the day praying the angelus in the park as the bells rung from the church.

On this trip I was happy to see that most of this complex was intact.  The church of Nuestra Senora del Pilar, with its wonderful mural ceilings, and its adjoining convent was as exactly how they looked like in the 1960s. The park and plaza fronting the municipal hall were both still intact with just one corner gone since they built a covered basketball gymnasium cum multi-purpose pavilion. The market and the tennis courts were also still there, although I seem to recall the courts were clay and not the concrete they are today.

What had changed were the trees. The large acacias of my youth had matured to humongous size, forming a canopy over the main road; actually the national highway that connected Sibonga with Carcar in the north and my hometown, Argao, in the south.  There were reports that a number of sections of this highway were to be widened and dozens of these magnificent trees were going to be lost. Thankfully the DPWH was persuaded to work around these and the trees (for now) are safe.

I never realized how big the plaza and park was until we flew our aerial drone to document the place. The space was close to three hectares, an area unheard of in modern towns. The pattern of the walks was formal. Similar patterns were to be found in all the towns we visited. Their plazas and parks were also large but not as whole or conserved as Sibongas.

I do hope to feature the plazas and parks of the other towns in future articles. We were kept quite busy and harassed in this trip as we were trying to outrun typhoon clouds. By the time we hit Boljoon further south, the sun had come out and from that point, Ruby was already heading north. It thankfully avoided Cebu altogether except for the northernmost points.

One other immediate realization was that all these towns’ heritage and structures, even from the American colonial period (like the school houses), were robustly built and survived a century or more of typhoons and calamities. Some of the heritage houses of Sibonga, Carcar, and other towns were still there although many had disappeared or deteriorated beyond repair.

We should recover the old way of building. We must aim to conserve what we have and plan for the future. All this with the view to creating structures and spaces of beauty and amenity — elegant buildings and pleasant spaces that we can rely on for rescue during storms, respite from the stresses of life, and inspiration to build communities, towns and cities we can be proud of.

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Feedback is welcome. Please email the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.