A Taste of the Hinterlands

Living in the city is very stressful, least to say very exhausting. A minute of celestial silence is as improbable and far-fetched as the idea of having an oasis in the midst of a bustling and hectic megalopolis. Urban developments such as condominiums, exclusive posh villages, and residential houses with claim-to-fame mantras such as ‘paradise in the city’ and other phony craps are tending to disseminate blatant and impulsive prevarication. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. For this matter, I find rural places and bucolic locations an honest-to-goodness seclusion, an abandon to the horrors of the city, a total dissociation from the monstrous traffic gridlocks, the noxious pollution and the barbaric acts of the unlettered.

A few days ago, my mother attended a seminar at Regency Inn in Davao City, Davao and given her long stay there, she grabbed the chance to revisit her quaint island province of Basilan – one of the many lairs of insurgent ASGs, rebels and commies. The tri-media always project Mindanao as the antithesis of peace and order, a piece of hell extruded upward from below. But when my mother arrived there, it’s not. Or it seems not. Development snowballed around the island; new houses were funded by US aids and sanitation was enjoined to every islander, roads were re-blocked, widened and repaired, coastal lands were reclaimed and nourished with immaculately white sand. PGMA even funded the reconstruction of the local parish church.

But I digress. The contention of this weblog is not to laud PGMA for her fruitful although dogged efforts to sustain development in the remotest islands and places domineered by pseudo politicos. This is just a sidebar. Moving on, my mother recounted that even though development has started to unfold, their traditional way of life is still being observed. The endemic fruit-bearing trees still yield productively. The tranquility of the rural milieu is still extant and indelible.

Having said those, my mother laments how scant the electricity is due to the rotating blackouts in Mindanao, and how her bath time rituals are curbed. Isn’t the absence of electricity a truly distinguishing hallmark of rural life, away from any technological intervention? Drought there is quite incredible, she observes, because the grasses and trees are as verdant as ever, and mind you, it rained there.

When my mother arrived here in Manila, she overwhelmed us with exciting stories back from her precious homeland. She brought pasalubong and some other stuff you can seldom buy in the city. She brought makopa ( Malacca apple) which is called locally as tambis, and purple makopa which tastes like duhat, (Java plum) the fruits just shed off from the branches and disperse profusely on the ground. She also brought agar-agar (seaweed), meat of baboy-ramo (wild boar), dried fishes, squids, small-sized shaddocks, durian macaroons, bukayo, lokot-lokot, and peanut purée. She would have brought home more fruits, had she been not collared in some frivolous air security snarl wherein she was weighed and was required to pay extra. It was totally unfair, she cries foul, because she’s overweight; the hand-carried items and backpacks notwithstanding.