As a teenager, I spent several summers in Surigao del Sur, in Mangagoy in the town of Bislig, where an uncle worked for a logging company. From Manila, my siblings, cousins and I took the FS 167 or the FS 176, small inter-island vessels that docked in Bislig to deliver supplies to that remote logging town on the eastern coast of Mindanao. Summers in Bislig were slow and lazy and wonderful. We would spend our days lying or rolling on a grassy hill, or playing billiards and jumping into the pool in the officers’ club. We would also go down to the beach or the log pond where skipping from log to log was a skill to be learned if one was to keep up with the other children.
It was the Fifties and Sixties and no one was aware that logging was a major threat to the environment. To me, Bislig was my happy summer place, and its forest, a place of endless adventure with its ancient trees and wild birds, beautiful waterfalls and swimming holes.
When I graduated from college, another uncle who worked for another logging company invited me to teach for a year in his logging camp in Diatagon on Lianga Bay, several towns north of Bislig. I landed in Butuan early morning where I was met by a local resident who flew me to Diatagon in his Piper Cub. That was the easy way to get there. At other times, from Butuan, I had to take a jeepney where, as the teacher, I was mercifully given the front seat beside the driver. The so-called Pan Philippine Highway was not a highway as I knew it. It was a bad unpaved road and the ride was bumpy and dusty.
Along the way, with my city-eyes, I realized that the tiny huts and lean-tos on the roadside were places where people actually lived, loved and died. How privileged I had been, how distant my reality was from that of the people I would meet and work with in Mindanao.
The jeepney would stop in San Francisco, a dusty junction where travelers took their lunch in small huts and used the toilet — a smelly outhouse. I would reach Lianga Bay late afternoon were I had to take a pumpboat for another bumpy ride across the bay to Diatagon.
Lianga Bay was not at all like Bislig. While Bislig had modern American-style executive housing and was set up like a resort, Lianga Bay was a haphazardly laid out frontier town with faded wooden clapboard houses and offices, and logging roads that turned to slush when it rained. The schoolhouse outside the camp was a two-storey wooden structure built by the company on a clearing in the barrio, with a waterlogged yard covered with tree bark and an outhouse for a toilet.
My assignment was to teach English grammar and literature to high school students who had little or no foundation in the language. Our grammar lessons were pathetic but something to write home about. “Da prag jams,” wrote one fourth year high school student. “Da hor jumps”, wrote another, explaining that if she used “horse,” she would have to say, “The horse jump”. At least, she got the principle right. When I used the word “lizard” in a sentence, the class responded in unison, “Lisud!” (which is Visayan for “difficult”), laughing about how learning English was giving them a massive nose-bleed.
When the superintendent from the Department of Education came to chart the progress of the students, I had little to show by way of their compositions. With such an impossible assignment, my classes and I spent a lot of time story-telling the literature they were supposed to read, and talking about their teenage concerns.
Leaving Diatagon, I knew part of my heart would forever be in Surigao. When I went back 20 years later, the area had become a hotbed of the insurgency. I wondered if some of my students ended up with the New People’s Army. As a Human Rights commissioner, I went to investigate what was known as the Marihatag Massacre where members of the AFP’s Special Forces on patrol were ambushed and killed by the New People’s Army. The Pan Pacific Highway was still a dusty dirt road, the people still lived poorly, and Diatagon, where an army camp was located, looked like it was frozen in time. Still decrepit — the houses, office buildings, gym, chapel and makeshift bridge were still standing, but in various stages of disrepair, as if everyone left in hurry and never returned.
I was back again a few years later, for the proclamation of Sitio Mahaba, an isolated, miserably poor community in the back hills of Marihatag, as a zone of peace. I clambered up steep, rocky, muddy paths, while the natives flitted past me with babies strapped to their chests and supplies balanced on their heads. When we got to the place, I was totally wasted and muddy from my sneakers to my once-white T-shirt.
I was in back in Surigao recently and I did not recognize the place. The area has boomed. The Pan Pacific Highway now looks like a real highway efficiently connecting the towns along the coastline. Stores, restaurants, SUVs, air-con buses, computers, smartphones and tourist resorts are now part of the lifestyle. I also visited Sitio Mahaba, which is now accessible by four-wheel drive through a dirt road.
The insurgency still rules the forests of Surigao, where large-scale logging has been replaced by large-scale mining. But the progress in the lowlands shows an area rising from the doldrums of under-development. A strong energy is in place pulling its people out of poverty and stagnation.
As a Surigaonon at heart, I am delighted to see how far my adopted province has progressed. May all its development always be for the benefit of the people of Surigao.