FEB-A-6
OUR SUNDAY DAY OF REST AMONG THE
TBOLI:
A CULTURAL IMMERSION IN MUSIC DANCE AND HOSPITATLITY
FEB. 3, 2002
With a little help from jet lag, and a lot more help from a crazy commercial boom box that had set up the most screeching heavy metal beat and incessant blasting all night long only a short distance from me in my improvised office bedroom, I got up before dawn to hear the dogs barking and the birds singing—and soon Don Van Weynen getting up to entertain and be entertained by me as well. When such a rare visitor as I comes by, one must take full advantage of the potential for news and views of the outside world. So, I had tried to be alone for a while to record events on our only morning of leisure, and had told Richard, the captain of the army un it that is my personal bodyguard staked out on a regular watch scheme around Don and Vivien’s house that they had “reconned” last night before bunking out in hammocks suspended from trees at four points around the house, that I wanted to run today. He asked if it would be at 0600 hours. If so, he would have to arrange the vehicles to pursue and precede me along the roads, since I am not to be in a position in which any hostage seeking terrorist could try to pull off an embarrassment of the biggest benefactor they have—the USA. One of them had asked me if I were sent here by the US Government, and I told him, “No, the US Government would probably prefer that I not be here at all.”
“You mean someone else is paying for all this?”
“Yes, I think you are looking at the benefactor and beneficiary at the same time.”
I am not sure that would translate well. In any event, the running guard could not be mobilized, and Don had a few songs he wanted me to listen to and do so in rapt attention without doing anything else—which is not the reason I got up early, so he went off to stamp on the floor and call out to the nurses, to wake them up. They were alarmed and thought we were under attack, which they were in a manner of speaking, and they were frightened into getting ready quickly, only to learn that the reasons they were being mobilized early is so that they could have the first of two breakfasts before church services and the vehicle that would pick us up before 8:00 AM.
PAN DE SAL BREAKFAST NUMBER ONE,
DON, IN HIS ELEMENT WITH A CAPTIVE “SAUL IN PRISON”
MODE,
ENTERTAINING THE SOLDIERS BY SPINNING HIS TOPS,
AS I ENTERTAIN THE TROOPS WITH THE WONDERS OF GPS
A little kid walked down the road with a two-tone flute, which alerts the neighborhood that he is ready to sell “Pan De Sal” –sweet bread rolls, which the boy’s mother baked starting at midnight. So we had fresh breakfast breads—our first, before our second breakfast at Dr. Bing’s, which included dried fish. Don was looking for still other audiences for his top spinning since I had busied myself in typing, and the soldiers were the first of the innocents who had not yet participated in the simple pleasures of this simple tool.
Speaking of the fascination with “simple tools,” I was showing Salvi my GPS, and telling him about location systems and the uses it might be designed around it—like navigation and smart weapons. Richard, the soldier festooned with grenades, could not get over this device, and wants m y name and address, for me to get him one. So, each of us has different toys which fascinate those less familiar with them than we may be, and we were to tell our tale to make others envy the possession of such knowledge—and, in the alternative, just get the materials themselves with or without the understanding that makes them useful.
So, they were slow to mobilize, and we got to the home of Bing and Salvi to find them rather casual and starting up late. We got back in the ambulance with Richard and a mobile guard, and with our entourage in full battle dress and loaded clips, we went down the road to the village of Edwards, and crossed the new cement bridge that replaced the suspension bridge that had intrigued me last time.
I was also intrigued to see a development on the banks of the river the old bridge had, and the new bridge now, crosses. There is a stylish collection of riverbank mat walled houses on stilts, looking better than any of the village houses of the Tboli. There in big letters is a sign, which would be ludicrous, if it were not a sign of the times, and a development that is probably NOT for the better: Tboli Leisure Resort, Owner, Mr. and Mrs. Gerry and Lydia Chen. Lydia is the graceful sylph who is the professional Tboli dancer, who had been on tour when she attracted the attention of a wealth Chinese businessman in Taiwan. No matter that he had already got a Taiwanese wife, he married Lydia, and he comes to this area of Edwards to visit in his big house here with Lydia long enough to produce several children, and now, start up this housing development. He sells chemical fertilizer to the farmers at very high prices against the title to their land, and they cannot get enough return to cover their fertilizer expense alone, so they had forfeited their land holding s to him. He is already the largest landholder and soon will control it all. For this, he has undertaken this “development” which is, in essence, a retreat for wealthy business men of Marbel (Konandal) to come to the quiet Tboli countryside and “retreat” with the mistresses they, to date, have brought from Marbel, but may be furnished later from among the young lovelies of the Edwards area of the Tboli youth. In essence, Lydia’s wealthy Chinese businessman husband has created a fine money making enterprise here in community development with a rather old-fashioned name and industry---a brothel! This has been a source of consternation between Lydia and her husband, and Lydia’s father was so upset about it that it caused him illness, and he died last week.
With that as just a part of a background—showing that no place on earth is as pure and simple as any unfallen race one may encounter in an isolated place such as Tboli land, and that there is always a dynamic of “Culture, Contact, Change” among the inequities of the very different populations with variable access to resources, we entered a world that seems little changed from the early descriptions of Pacific Islanders and their “council meeting houses” in which group decisions and community support for anything that befell any other individual was the rule. I saw a lot of that at work upfront and personal as the “participant/observer” anthropologist in the services in the elevated bamboo platform of the church meeting house and ceremonial place today—recording it on a notepad, recorded audiotape and several kinds of film.
What I saw under the surface of a beautiful, placid, carefree “happy natives in their remote environment” was a powerful, not-to-be oversimplified dynamic of struggle with common human problems and extraordinary ones brought upon them by uneven match of outside economic power against non-participants in the world economy, without a cash crop of any interest in the outside world except as a strategically isolated region as a base for someone else’s’ ideologies.
On the women’s side of the church, sitting on the split bamboo floor or bench around the matted walls (which, in this elevated building with a thatched roof lets in a surprisingly cool breeze, making it a quite comfortable “long house” or community meeting hall, even when packed with people, and even when those people are exercising vigorously at dancing or playing their drums or gongs or other unique musical instruments) the most compelling stories were stated quite simply and effectively, so that I only needed minimal translation to understand what was happening.
There were two women who had suffered the loss of a husband in the week just past, and one of them was in shock as well as grief, since her husband had sat right next to her in last week’s church service, enjoying the testimonies and had eaten a big meal with gusto. On Tuesday he was taken to Marbel and died the same day of causes no one has explained. This was a story told with no bravado, but with a few sobs, and a voice muffled by the scarf over her face. The others simply nodded and suffered solemnly with her. An old man who had been here when Vivien herself had first come to this area 45 years ago and was a source for her translation work that built this whole community around her written word, said that he had thought he was going to be the first to die since he had been ill last week, and his friend who was well had died before him.
The other woman also had things to say about the unknown cause of the death of her husband who had been working his fields shortly before—but there was no source of the rage against the unknown, or an inquest or a search for answers, since we all know that all will die, the lingering frustration was “Why now? ---Just when needed or when things seemed to be going almost all right, with no margin for this kind of loss?
Lydia herself, with a broken voice could now ask some things of herself and her community, since her father had died, leaving her alone with a husband to whom she has to be loyal, of course, but with whom she has had some serious fights over what he seems to be doing to a community he is taking over for a very directed profit motive. She has been absorbed in her role as a performing artist and as a teacher of the young aspiring dancers, musicians and “Tboli role model women” and much of what is happening now seems to be heading toward the destruction of that life and art and reducing the youth to servants of outside wealth and pimping after any cash resource, which now seems to be coming down to their bodies alone.
One of the young men related an episode in which he was having a nightmare, and was choking with a large demon that was sitting on his chest constricting his breathing, and covering his mouth and throat so that he could not get air. When he was feeling like he was most choked and dying, he bolted upright and called out, while striking his wife, and this caused her to wake him up, with instant relief that this was just a bad dream. This would be called an acute anxiety attack in other parts of the world and he would have been given a nearly specific tranquilizer advertised for this problem. Here the Rx was his ventilation about this, as others comforted him, saying that they, too, had had this same feeling.
One pretty woman had told that she had planted all of her corn field alone and had been so exhausted that she could not walk home, and here she now is dancing and performing for us, recovered. Another had reported that she was slashing and burring her fields as she burned over the cutover field, the fire got so big and roaring under the dry wind that she was sure she would see it consume all her neighbors field s and huts as well. She would be responsible for the fire getting out of control And SHE would have to pay for the banana palms and other crop damages of her neighbors if any were lost due to the fire she perpetrated upon them. She prayed, and somehow, miraculously, the fire stopped short after burning her fields, never jumping over the firebreak to any other fields and injuring not a single crop plant from any neighbors plat.
It seems that women are the stalwarts and heavy lifters of this society although not the only worriers. One woman said through tears that her baby had really bad diarrhea and nausea and vomiting all night, and she had not slept. All in just one nigh, the child had gone from being a healthy kid to one that was shrunken and collapsed and near death Just as abruptly, the problem cleared by morning, so here she was in church to give thanks that she still had her daughter, when she knows of others who had not had the same outcome from the same problem prologue.
Then came the introductions of the visitors: there were two contingents of visitors, easily distinguished not by the color of their skin or the clothes they wore, but by the large lump in their neck or its absence. These were the bearers of goiters and those who stamped out goiters. There were five men on the men’s side of the church that had come in with an itinerant pastor who had found them in his travels high up in the mountains. He had heard that the same professor was coming that had been here last year who was interested in going up to where the patients live, and who had expressed an interest in these very remote villages and peoples such as the Tasaday and the remote forest Tboli. He had brought down these five men and three women from villages and areas which were not at all safe for such an American to visit, and had marked out the others that would have been safer for him to visit and he could guide him up there since he heard the doctor was a fit mountaineer and did not need luxury accommodations.
The other visitors were we, the medical team. Vivien introduced me, telling the people that I have been allover the world treating problems like this one, and had been in Africa and Nepal, and had done these missions since 1966. The people all said that they were very grateful that I could have come from America and that I was not killed in the horrific things they had seen and heard had happened to the USA with the attacks on the citizens from folk who are also troubling parts of Philippines. I said through Vivien that I was glad they had this response, especially since I was an eyewitness of the attack on Washington DC, and had even photographed the Pentagon’s direct hit on the instant of the attack. They were quite impressed with this, not knowing that I had actually been involved indirectly in what is a disaster known worldwide.
The others were also introduced and the numbers of MMI missions they had been on were listed. The MMI term was explained, and how the participants paid their own expenses and those of the patients treated as well. They were impressed that the nurses and others who came from all kinds of US environments, and here they were –a very long way away from home, essentially doing this on their own from their own gratitude.
One man was present and two others were back at TECH that had also come in with the itinerant pastor, and each of whom had prostatism. It seems we will have to treat a few of these folk with suprapubic prostatectomies, so we will add those on to the schedules. Two women came up saying they had goiters, and they sure enough did—but they had two or more of the Lipiodal injections already, and they thought that the goiters had got bigger rather than shrinking under the treatment. I showed them also the Janet, and we added them on the schedule for Tuesday and Wednesday.
So, we had a church service, a community health survey, and then an immersion in Tboli culture from the musical, dancing, instruments, costumes and talent show. Lydia, of course, was a star performer. We had to break in the mid-point in order that the “beguinage” of four women who had been preparing a feast for us could serve us the food and drink, and then we could go back to hear more of the musical performances and the dancing
It was in mid-afternoon and it was both hot and humid when we got to leave, as the performers and their audience of Tboli people stayed in rapt attention to watch still m ore of the artists at work in their cultural performances. They are never weary of the same stylized movements and the dance themes, a culture attuned without MTV—a healthier fixation on performing arts here over the mass pop culture dissemination of Over There.