June 30, Baler
All day, the TV stations are covering Philippine President Duterte’s inauguration speech. He doesn’t smile much, but he comes across as earnest and tough. I think Filipinos are excited to see what he will do.
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When I was a kid, I remember our family traveling to Bataan and having some tires changed out partway through when they went flat. I thought of that today when Wesley asked, “What is ‘vulcanizing’?” It is basically tire service. Today, no worries about vulcanizing our tires. Our hired Grandia van moves at a smooth, fast clip, taking on the roads smoothly, thanks in no small part to Mang Bernie, our driver’s, skills.
Today was spent mainly visiting Sierra’s friends in Baler, a town famous for surfing. Baler is in east central Luzon, has a coastal feel to it, lots of surf shops catering to tourists especially along Sabang Beach, the main surfing strip of the city. It has the same narrow streets as other cities, interspersed with coconut farms (one of their main industries) and huts where most of Sierra’s friends live. Some muddy trails, but it’s okay. Simple lang, as Sierra would say. These are the highlights:
*As it is typhoon season (in fact, a couple of days before we got to Baler, they had been under typhoon warning – this is the place that flooded while Sierra served there), we don’t worry about having advanced reservations. So, crossing our fingers, we check for a vacancy in a pretty guest house owned by a member, Sister Wilma, and it is available. It has two rooms, a living room, a little tower, and you can hear the powerful surf outside at night. I am super excited to see the beach tomorrow morning. This afternoon, we plan to mainly visit Sierra’s friends.
*We visit Sister Carol, who is overcome with emotion seeing Sierra and who tells us, in Tagalog, “She taught me how to love.” She lives in a simple home, a little house made of corrugated metal and wood. There is laundry hung outside, a puppy looking for its mom, little shoes lined up as though defying the mud, a flimsy hammock made of a rice sack…but there is so much love here. A little boy comes walking up to the hut balancing a bowl of soup and plate of rice, presumably the family’s meal for the night. Later, his sister leaves the hut with the bowl emptied and taken back wherever it came from. As I sit there swatting mosquitoes, I listen to Sierra bear her testimony powerfully to this family. My worries about my house back in the States burning down or being ransacked by thieves – my pressing fear on vacations, fall away. Those are just things. Even if something bad were to happen to our material things, we would be fine, and a weight falls off my shoulders.
*It so happened that while we are there, a family is holding a wake for their eight year old son who succumbed to leukemia. They are investigators. When the mother sees Sierra, she embraces her tightly and cries on her shoulder. The dad stands up and goes over to tend the pot over a fire, fighting back tears. The child’s coffin is white, clean and beautiful. There are three lights plugged in over it, a gold cross, and a smiling boy’s photo. We sing “I am a child of God” and “Families can be together forever”. Our voices carry into the deepening dusk.
*One of my favorite pictures is of Sierra surrounded by three smiling kids who were at Sister Anicia’s t-shirt stall at the hanging bridge. To me, the kids here are resilient. They play with little, they make do with what they have, their smiles are given freely to others, they laugh and run, and they have no worries. For several minutes, young boys played in the brackish water that transitioned from the river to the sea, and they were there with their father for a long time, just splashing around.
*You don’t need a lot to be happy. You can be happy where you are. The comforts of life are just that, comforts, but they are not necessary to one’s happiness or success. At Sister Carol’s the wall was covered with certificates. They have pride here, for their kids, in their kids’ successes. They are wonderful people, and I have forgotten that beneath the surface of the Filipino’s hard life, is a gift that many in the world do not ever discover. You cut grasses outside the forest with hope and faith that your efforts will be rewarded. Somehow you eke out a existence doing what you can to feed your family. When you have little, you don’t live with fear. You live with gratitude. <3
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