Wala problema dito! (There Are No Problems Here!)

I just got back last night from spending the weekend with my friend Megin in a little place called Baras, in the Southern part of the island of Guimaras (Visayas). It was so amazingly beautiful and peaceful! My heart felt so full upon arriving and during my time there. In fact, the night before leaving, Megin and I went to a bar in Quezon City to listen to music and hang out with Jeng and Ron, and it was really fun. The beauty of the weekend started there. Remember the balut? The aborted chicken? Well, I finally tried it, as you will be able to see in the pictures below. It was really good, although I am not convinced by the texture. Although my head was cut off in several of them, I think that the pictures show my reactions to the delicacy very well. It was a wonderful night full of great music and even better conversation.

The following morning Megin and I showed up in the Manila airport and told the agent that we wanted two tickets to go to Iloilo, the closest airport to Guimaras. Few hours later we were on our way. Plane, taxi, ferry, jeepney, boat, and finally Baras Beach! By the time we got there it was already dark and the tide was really low, so we had to get off the boat and walk on the rocks to be able to reach the shore. The place where we stayed was composed of 8 cabins, with little balconies, simple beds, and mosquito nets. There was only electricity during four hours a day (in the evening) and there was no road communication. You can only reach it by boat or hiking. I am not even going to try to describe it because I know that I wouldn’t do it justice. The only dark moment of the weekend: a couple of hours before leaving I was badly stung by a jellyfish. Nasty, painful, and scary. I am actually writing from bed because I can hardly walk. Thanks a lot of Megin, Jeng, Dr. Dator, and everyone in Baras for taking such good care of me!

Although Saturday was a challenging day full of travel and uncertainty, I was so glad that I made it all the way there… Saturday was one of those days when your heart swollens and you have no idea of what it will look like when it goes back to “normality.” The only thing that you know is that there are parts that have been changed for good, even if you don’t really know how yet. Jeng told me that Guimaras has one of the lowest average income in the country, and poverty is indeed obvious once you are there. I don’t want to underestimate that, even much less I want to romanticize it, but what I really liked about Guimaras is that it doesn’t have the pretentiousness of Boracay or so many parts of Manila. It stills remains quite untouched by development, and local people continue to “live” off the agriculture and fishing. Ruben, one of the many people that we met there, told us that everyone that goes to Baras, once they swim in those waters, they forget about all their problems: Wala problema dito! I refuse to accept that there are no problems in Baras, but I think that the message that Ruben was sending was that it is important to stay present, to appreciate beautiful and tranquillity, and to focus only on what is really important. It worked, I spent the whole weekend very peacefully and wanting to absorb everything around me. At the same time, though, I kept wondering, more than ever maybe, on where is the Philippines heading. Even if Guimaras is the perfect place to hide, at least it was for me, it is also a place where the contradictions become blatant and visible, where they cannot be hidden from an attentive witness anymore. And of course, I cannot even start to wonder about the path of the Philippines without starting to ask about my own. Where I am heading? What I am going to do with my energy and my passion?

Someone I admire told me last weekend that folks in the Philippines have an advantage over me. If they get tired of playing the “game,” of following the rules, they can always retreat to the mountains and challenge the system from there. To join the armed struggle. In fact, there are many people who have been doing that for a long time. He looked at me and said, “you don’t have that choice.” My first reaction to his comment was of sinking. Of thinking that he is right. Of feeling really hopeless. However, now I want to think that he may actually be wrong. I want him to be wrong. It is hard to run into serious political opposition in Europe or in the United States, but it does exist, we just need to find it. And if it is not enough we continue to create it. It may be very different (and harder) from resistance in the Philippines, but it has to be there. I just cannot accept that history is over for us. History never stops, and who knows where the Philippines or I will be twenty years down the road.

A dear friend told me recently that I represent hope and future, and I feel that these are actually the two main gifts that I take with me from the Philippines: I carry with me a renewed hope in the future because I have been touched by people who are already imagining it, and giving everything they have in order to get there. I hope that, whatever they have within them, whatever it is that keeps them going, is contagious, and we allow ourselves to learn from it.