On the run with the Lumads

Slow down,” I shouted to the front in Bisaya, as I gestured for the Lumad teenagers to stop running, “the group’s splitting up.”

They turned around grinning, telling jokes about those who were lagging behind our pack. “Truth is that, kuya,” one of them said to me, “we’re happy that we’re running. Because in Compostela, if the soldiers saw us running this fast, they’d say we were members of the NPA.” The six other teenagers laughed in agreement. They all spoke at the same time about how strange the soldiers’ ways were.

“And then what happens?” I asked them.

“And then they do things to us,” the lumad said without a smile on his face.

“Lumad” is a general term for the different indigenous peoples in Mindanao. Roughly 800 Lumads from different ethnolinguistic groups arrived in UP Diliman last Monday evening. They had come from a month-long journey from their lands in Surigao, Agusan, Davao, Compostela Valley, and Bukidnon, riding buses over land and taking ferries over sea. In populated areas, they walked on the road, carrying banners, chanting their demands, and telling their stories to the people they met along the way. Their goal was to arrive in Manila, the seat of government and of power, and give faces to the claims they made of harassment, rape, and murder by the military.

12-hour relay run

A friend of mine contacted me several weeks before the Lumads arrived in Manila, asking if we could organize a 12-hour relay run with the Lumads. He was an avid runner around UP Diliman’s Academic Oval. He thought running with our lumad counterparts would be a great way to make people aware of their cause. It would also serve as an opportunity for the community to somehow interact with our lumad brothers and sisters—to run not only for them, but with them.

There were UP alumni, professors, students, runners, mountaineers, and passersby who joined us. We carried flags bearing the words “Stop Lumad Killings”, “Save Our Schools”, and “Respect Lumad Rights”. For our buena mano, one of the participants carrying a flag was questioned by a lady in her mid-fifties, “Why shouldn’t we kill them? Aren’t they rebels?”

The Lumad teenagers ran only in their slippers, but they outran the best of us. At the start, when I could still keep up with them, the Lumad behind me said to his companion, “His shoes must be helping him run fast.” I turned around and laughed, and told him that I could hardly run beside them. Shocked that I understood him, he told me that I was very lucky to have “nice shoes.”

“If we had shoes like that, they’d say we were NPA,” he said. “If we had a nice body—if we were healthy — they would wonder where we got our training and suspect us to be NPAs.”

Stopped by the military

“My relatives tried putting up a sari-sari store in our community but were stopped by the military,” another one said, “the soldiers accused them of being suppliers for the NPA. You can’t hope for a better life where we live.” Our short conversations about their lives happened as we ran. I didn’t need to ask questions.

As we were taking a break from the noontime sun, one of the Lumad teenagers recounted to us a method which the military used in their community to smoke a rat. First, he said, the men in uniform observed a household. If they noticed the husband to be gone for days, they suspected him for a member of the NPA. So in order to plant hatred in him, they raped his wife and gang raped his children, both male and female.

Upon their father’s return, and after he had found out what had happened in his absence, the enraged husband would then lose all inhibition and be coerced to take revenge. In his bloodlust, he would be forced to fight the military, making him instantly “a member of the NPA.” It was a chicken and egg argument. It was preposterous logic and there was no point in trying to understanding it.

When we proceeded to run later in the afternoon, some of us were already drained. I had to cough every now and to bring life back to my lungs. On the other hand, the Lumads ran (sprinted, really) effortlessly, the plik! and plak! of their slippers hitting hard on the asphalt. When they noticed that I coughed more frequently, they began coughing as well, chanting, and then marching in unison.

“That’s how the soldiers did it,” one of them told me. “We hear them exercising every morning. They’re so fit, like they weren’t drinking the night before.” The Lumads said that the combating troops (which were different from the “TF’s” or the “task force” soldiers who put up checkpoints on the roads) set up camp just a few steps down their tribe’s village. I was later told that they took pictures of the soldiers sleeping under their houses and in trenches behind the schools. The pictures were duly disposed of by the military.

The Silence

On our final lap, before we finally joined the rally, I ran beside a Lumad who was in his late twenties, at the back of the pack. His skin was dry, wrinkles showing on his cheeks, and his eyes were small and sunken. He wore a scarf, a bonnet, and a jacket. He sweated profusely but refused to take off his extra layers of clothing. The Lumad was quiet, maybe even unsure of how to act beside me. It was this silence that brought me back to the reality I live in every day.

In my reality, I wouldn’t hear those gruesome stories or even read about them online or in the newspapers. On any other day, running would be a privilege which I do only for health and vanity. On a regular day, runs would be quiet, and I would barely have a clue of how cruel we, “civilized people,” can be.

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