Pray once more, forester, for your childhood playgrounds (Part 3)

BY A SURPRISING turn of events, however, the grandiose plan I just described never took off. Put another way, its implementation has been postponed – indefinitely for now.

This was because the DENR’s Forestland Management Project (FMP) came to my town and included Palabotan, the village that nurtured my childhood since I was three years old up to when I finished high school and left Dupax to take up the B.S. in Forestry at UPLB. So how could I say no?

As a game-changer, the FMP made me happy because it brought bright prospects for better government and community attention, at last, to the hills needing proper management and to the rivers whose health depends much on what happens to those hills.

It was my mother who broke the news to me. One day in 2013, I had just arrived from Baguio when she said, “Inka kitaen ni Lindo ta adda kano projectyo idiay pasto.” (Go see Lindo because you have a project in the pasto.)

Lindo is my cousin Erlindo Pudiquet (his father and my mother were siblings). And by pasto (the local term for cattle ranch), I knew my mother was referring to the hilly area on the southern part of Palabotan that my apong Pedro Pudiquet, along with his Miranda nephews, fenced off in the 1950s to raise dozens of cows.

The area was covered by a Pasture Lease Agreement. In the 1980s, Apong Pedro handed over its stewardship to my Uncle Atong (Liberato Pudiquet). For many years, I also had a number of my own cattle (branded C² on one hip and Dpx on the other) grazing there up to the mid-1990s. But perhaps because the lease had reached the 50 years maximum (or maybe for other reasons I have yet to know), the permit has not been renewed.

In early 2013 the DENR initiated the formation of a people’s organization as part of the first phase of the FMP’s implementation in Palobotan, and I was listed as member along with my sisters.

IT CAME OUT that Insan Lindo was elected as head of the Palabotan Agroforest Development Association Inc., one of the four people’s organizations in Dupax del Sur with whom the DENR is working closely to achieve its FMP’s goals. It initially had more than 200 members but over the years almost half shied away from the association’s activities because of difficulty with their annual dues.

 In PADAI’s first general meeting, Presidente Lindo asked me to give a talk. I introduced myself as a "playing coach" for the association and someone who was already in Palabotan when it was not yet a barangay but merely a sitio called I-iyo.

I mentioned that my father was a pioneer teacher in the local school when it was still only for a few Grades 1 and 2 pupils and, recalling my father’s stories, the classroom was a kamarin (hut bigger than a kalapaw) with thatched cogon roof, walls of tinidtid a kawayan, and bamboo benches instead of wooden desks.

I also went into an animated remembering of the Palabotan  that I knew while growing up. The big and haunted pakak (antipolo) tree and the anaw (anahaw) palm over there… the birds like the tariktik that laughed on top of the kallautit (kalumpit) tree above the Raza sisters’ house… the dadapilan (carabao-powered sugarcane crusher) on the spot where the barangay hall now stands… how my Apong Pedro didn’t have to go too far to find wood for making into carabao yoke and al-o (pestle for pounding rice)… and how I often went with my grandmother Feliza (who I called Inang) to get roots of a shrub on a hill near the pasto to use as pannig-an (prophylactic infusion) for the mothers who would seek her expertise as the only barefoot midwife in the village.

Venue of the meeting was the barangay hall the window of which offered a view of the hills in the ballasiw (other side of the river) and, luckily, I also remembered an interesting thing. So, pointing to the hills, I told the audience that when I was small the hills over there were kalbo. Why? Because they had been burned every summer to renew the pan-aw, tanglad and other grasses for cows and carabaos. But now the hills look beautiful because of the efforts of Manong Sixto Badua, a fellow forester who planted rambutan, coffee, lukban, mangga, langka. “Adda pay durian, sir!” added one of the P.O.’s officers.

I think I also mentioned that if Sixto could do that, there should be no reason why we could not also do it in our part of Palabotan. I added that when the trees would grow big and bear fruits, who else will benefit from them but the children of Palabotan?

 [CONTINUED ON PART 4]