After my first day, I decided to go explore some more. I spent some time with my host, Dal, who shared a lot about her personal history as an Ifugao woman. Her family owned the rice terraces that were cleared for the Inn I’m staying at for now. It was wonderful to chat with her over a cup of “coffee” (Filipino coffee is a Nescafe blend of dried coffee, creamer and sugar) and hear about her family’s story.

Here’s an excerpt of my chat with her.

Dal has three children under her care, one of which is Kevin, who is adopted. He was actually a love-child between two adults that her father knew—they were working in a province different from their families, and so the families never found out. The mother took medication to try to abort him, but it didn’t work. Ultimately, the parents put him in an orphanage (I think) and Dal’s father took him in. He has a weakness for adopted children since he was one himself. When he was a child, his mother died in childbirth. Since it’s considered a bad omen to have a child in the family that killed its mother, Dal’s father, Moises, was placed in an orphanage, and later adopted by Dal’s Lola (grandmother). Dal’s father gave the child to Dal to take care of.

Here’s Kevin: I asked Dal where the kids were, and she said they were all upstairs sleeping. “Alitheya is upstairs. She keeps brushing her brother’s eyes to get him to wake up but he just pushes her away and goes back to sleep.”
“Is Kevin up there too?” I asked. She nodded. “Does he know that he’s adopted?” I whispered.
She shook her head: “No, he doesn’t know. But he was calling my father Lolo (grandfather), because he heard the other children calling him that. And he was calling me mama too, but I recently taught him to call me manang, which means older sister (like Ate in Tagalog).”
“So will you raise Kevin till he’s an adult?”
She laughed uncomfortably and shook her head. “I don’t know. You see, he is a really energetic boy. They (the elders in their community) think that he is taking the appetite away from my son. You see Moises (her son) hardly eats anything and he’s kind of weak; he has asthma. So, the elders said that he needs to sleep separately from my children. You see, they believe that when children are close in age like they are (Aletheya is 4, Kevin 3, and Moises 2), that they shouldn’t always sleep under the same roof at night. During the day is okay, but at night, no.”
“Why’s that?”
“They believe that Kevin has a stronger blood than my own children. So, if he sleeps with the children at night, he will take their energy away, esp. Moises who has weaker blood. The mumbaki, the local priest, said that we need to keep the children separate at night. So, we moved him into Ate Pinai’s room (her mother) where he sleeps at night, usually. But they can play together during the day and it’s okay.”
“Have you noticed an improvement?”
She laughed again, her eyes wide, and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know! Maybe it’s psychological. But I think maybe it is working. But it’s not just this way with Kevin, there are other rules about this. For example, Beng’s children could sleep and live with us under the same roof because she’s my sister. But my cousin’s children couldn’t. That is also why Kevin needs to stay under another roof.”
She continued. “It’s also an issue because Kevin has so much energy. I complain to my mother sometimes because I can’t complain to my father—he’s too sensitive about the adoption issue. But Kevin is really difficult. I tell her: I am so busy. I hardly have enough time for my own children and the inn, and now I have to take care of Kevin too. This is part of the reason why we have a helper. She spends time with him a lot. He needs a lot of attention.”
Later that morning, I went to my room to write. Kevin came into my apartment with an inflatable Superman and a stick and didn’t want to leave. When I asked him to come back later, he went to my window and started bobbing a thin bamboo reed along the horizon line, finally shoving the reed into the window and onto my computer. Then I shut the window and he took his Superman and bobbed it along the window’s base—I could hear him giggling. He started kicking my door. Then he threw a shoe at the window. Finally I walked Kevin back to Dal’s house and told her what was going on, laughing. Later she told me: “I think maybe the medication his mother took affected him. I think he is ADHD, maybe.

Picture of a local house: “I didn’t used to follow my traditions so much, you know. I used to think they were really impractical. I would ask my mom: Why do we have to kill a chicken for this situation? [It’s common to kill a chicken or slaughter a pig for every ritual.] It seemed like a waste. But once I had a child, and we did some of the pregnancy rituals, and once I lived here for 5 years observing the traditions every day, I began to change my mind. For example, my baby (Aletheya) was very sick when she was born. So, the mumbaki came and did a ritual with her, and eventually I started to see an improvement.
“The Ifugao have traditions for everything. Yesterday a neighbor nearly avoided an accident. So, since he survived his family is having a thanksgiving party to thank his ancestors.” That explained the squealing pig noises I’d heard the evening before from Dal’s kitchen.
“Also our marriages are different. In your culture, when a man and woman get married they tell everyone. But here, we have a ritual first. They slaughter a pig and then the mumbaki looks at the pig’s bile. If it’s on the right (correct) side, then the couple can stay together. If not, they wait awhile and then butcher another pig. If it’s still not on the right side, then they advise the couple to separate and to not get married. They could have problems down the road like maybe they will split up in a year or something. Same thing with pregnancies; we do a ritual to figure out if it will be a difficult pregnancy or not. We have a ritual for every part of the rice season, for when we put the grain in the granary, to when we remove it. When we plant it and when we harvest it. When we build an addition to the house we have a ritual. If we don’t and there is some kind of landslide that ruins the house, an elder will say: ‘See you should have done a ritual. That is why this happened!’

Here’s the Ilob Village Hotel:
“Our house was built on my family’s rice terraces. So, whenever we destroyed some of the rice terrace, we have a ritual to ask forgiveness for destroying the land that they cultivated for hundreds of years.”
I talked for a bit about how important I think the Ifugao are for Westerners. I mentioned that while Westerners are very advanced technologically, the Ifugao (and Filipinos in general) are advanced in some of their values, especially their recognition of the importance of family and community.

Dal responded: “I think that our community and ritual are very related. When we have a ritual, the mumbaki asks all of our ancestors to join us. He is responsible for remembering the genealogy of all of our loved ones. In other towns, people don’t know their genealogy so well because they don’t have the mumbaki who recorded it for them. So, when we practice ritual we ask our ancestors to help and guide us. We invoke them into every ritual we do. I used to not agree with this, but I think it is a good thing to ask our ancestors for help. I think it’s a good thing to continue practicing our traditions. Even if we do kill a pig or chicken every time, we eat it, though we give a share of it to the mumbaki. But it never goes to waste. So, why not practice the traditions? My mother is passing them onto me, and I am passing them onto my children too.”

Here’s me in a totally unrelated picture: The view from the Banaue Hotel

They are kind, talkative people and you relax. You chat for awhile with an anthropologist about the environment, about the importance of taking care of it: “People don’t understand,” he says, “if you give back to the earth, it gives back to you!” He makes a clicking sound at the side of his mouth, and shakes his head. Silver bracelets jingle on his right arm as he gestures.

You nod, exhausted, too tired to say much else. You lean against your suitcase and backpack as they shove into your head when the car winds to the right. You’re wearing your favorite green knit cap; your fleece jacket is zipped over two layers of clothing. It is cold in the van—mostly because the drivers have the air conditioning on full blast though the night is cool outside. You never figure out why they leave it on, even after the other Filipinos in the van also complain as they tighten their blankets around themselves.

The van stops several times. You and the other passengers stumble out into the cool air to the bathroom. You brought tissue with you, thankfully, for there often isn’t any in the Philippines. The two women you are traveling with tease each other, used to this drive. They make it once a month. You feel, as you have felt for the last three days, in some kind of in-between state, in a movie—as if you’re standing nearby, watching your life unfold.

“Over there is a lovely view,” one of the women says. She laughs and adds: “During the daytime anyway.” You walk over, searching for the lovely view, straining your eyes to see past the lights of the building. And you see something vague: a green valley and hills stretching out into the distance. Green. More green than you have seen in a long time, it seems.

After breakfast (fried fish and rice for the fourth day in a row) you drive one more hour to Lagawe, where you’ll meet the municipality leaders of the Ifugao province. You’ll meet the woman who will take you another hour to your new home. But before that, you get in the van again with one of the women from Manila and drive twenty minutes to another town to measure a rock. Your advisor thinks it will be a good opportunity for you to view the rice terraces—more interesting than the meeting the members of their organization have driven the long distance north to attend.

It was a good choice, you think, as you see lowland terraces unfold around you. This is what you have waited almost two years for. You get out of the van and walk with the woman, your friend now, and the van driver who guides the way in flip-flops down a muddy path. You feel steady on your feet—as if you are made for this. You pass by a small home (about ten by ten) and a group of chickens start to squawk, and you hear (and smell) a pig grunting, penned up about twenty feet away.

At some point the path becomes too slippery, so the driver suggests that you walk along a terrace wall, and you are thrilled to feel the slick clay on your bare feet. You make it down to the rock, walking over fresh plants and grasses, and you wade through the base of another terrace and climb on the rock you have driven out to see, a famous rock in Ifugao myth. It stands about six feet high, thirteen feet wide, and has a small dais on top about four by five feet that rises a foot from the surface. It is quite unassuming to the untrained eye.

You get your camera out, excited to take a picture, to show people your feet covered in mud, to take pictures of your first rice terraces—not the ones near where you’ll be living, but terraces nonetheless. You need to take a picture of this rock too, this rock you will help measure for almost two hours. You hear birds calling in the distance, you watch several women in the fields with broad hats that shade their faces. You can hear the faint sound of their voices though they are over a hundred feet away. You turn on your camera. It is out of batteries. You laugh to yourself. Of course it is.

Later you will ask the woman to tell you about this rock, nestled near several others in the terrace waters. She will tell you this story:

A group of women were harvesting rice in the fields. To pass the time they sang songs about Pumbakhayon, a well known rice god. They kept repeating his story over and over again, and each time they did, he’d show up on this rock. As they continued the story, he became repeatedly flustered.
“Every time you sing this song, I have to appear—I’m getting tired of it!” he said. So, he sat down on this rock and told them a new set of stories to sing to while the time away. The women sat and listened to the stories. But what none of them knew was that, hidden in the distance, two small girls were listening to the stories as well.
The women all died that afternoon, but the girls survived. And those stories that were passed on are now called the Hu’dhud, a collection of chants that have been memorized and passed along for centuries.

“So this rock is where the god sat, you know, in the myth,” she says pointing to the dais. “There are supposed to be marks where his feet were and where he planted his spear, as well as where his butt-cheeks rested.” You both look at the dais behind her. You find no such discerning marks.

You drive back to the meeting, muddy feet cleaned off by a driver with a hose on the side of the road. As you sit down at the table, your advisor introduces you to the municipality leaders, all ten of them. You smile and nod.

“Would you like to tell everyone a bit about your project?” your advisor asks. You don’t want to, really, because you realize suddenly that your project was never approved by this committee and you wonder what they’ll think. You say something general like: “I’ll be in Banaue for six months, writing a book about the Ifugao, especially about how they’re being affected by modernization.” You nod again, hoping they’ll return back to their meeting.

But they don’t. One of the municipality leaders, described by your advisor as “the most important man to talk to about Ifugao history” clears his throat and leans back in his chair. “William Scott lived and researched for 20 years in the Philippines, Conklin lived for 16 years in the Philippines doing his research, and ___ (some other anthropologist) lived here for 24 years, and married here as well, I believe.” He pauses, and you wonder where he’s headed with this line of thinking. He clears his throat again. “That’s how long each of them lived in the Philippines before writing a book, and you plan to write a book in just six months?”

You sit there, your face suddenly hot. “I understand your point,” you say, “but I’m not an anthropologist. I’m not doing a comprehensive anthropological study on the Ifugao. If I were, I would expect to be here much longer than six months. I will be here for six months to write about my experience here, to conduct interviews, and I will, of course, be talking with each of you. Hopefully that will be enough for what I’m working on.”

He crosses his arms over his chest, considering, never looking at you directly.

“What he is saying,” your advisor says, smiling gently, aware that you are embarrassed, “is that he wishes you could stay longer.”

The man uncrosses his arms. “Six months should be enough,” he says, “you should be able to get enough information I think.” You breathe a sigh of relief. “We’ve had many people come up here for a couple days or weeks and write some article like they think they know everything about the Ifugao. We are tired of being misrepresented.”

His comment does not go unheard. You must remember to stay sensitive, to honor the people here. You must be humble when you represent another, you know this, but it is an important reminder. What he doesn’t understand is that most people don’t read anthropological books, they want narratives, they want compelling story telling, and this is what you are trained to do. You want others, especially Westerners, to know about these people, but that will only happen if they are lured in by a story, invested somehow to find out information about these people. But this is not the time or place to justify yourself.

The meeting continues, but that moment stays with you, stinging like a slap in the face.

After the meeting you go with one of the municipality leaders, you don’t even have time to say goodbye to the group of friends you came up with. She will take you up north to Banaue, where her family owns the hotel you’ll stay in. The van you’re in winds up the road quickly and you look around each bend for the majestic mountain terraces you’ve been waiting so long to see. You talk a bit about her role in the meeting you just attended, as well as the focus of your book: how the Ifugao are being affected by modernization, which, at the moment, you wonder about.

She nods and says: “You know, the Ifugao are a friendly people. We are open to suggestions. But what we don’t like is when people tell us what to do. Like for example, one time the mayor of Banaue got a phone call from (a government official) that had a German tourist in his office. The tourist had gotten angry and stormed into the official’s office complaining. Apparently he was mad that he’d driven so many hours to visit these “indigenous people” but they didn’t have the traditional roofs, they had metal ones. Apparently, it wasn’t what he expected.
“So the (official) told the governor that they needed to change the roofs back to the traditional way and try to change the buildings so that they look more like tourists expect they will. But the mayor said, ‘Sir, I understand, but we can’t change the roofs back, it’s not convenient. The traditional roofs have to be changed every few years, but the metal ones last a long time. It’s just not practical.’” She continued to say, “They talked about putting up an example traditional village. The houses would be traditional native houses and people would live the traditional way. That way the tourists could see what it was once like.”

Here’s a picture of the metal covered hut:

You arrive at your room and it is much smaller than you thought—not just the rooms, but the furniture too.

You had heard that the hotel was right in a village, and you pictures something pastoral: nipa huts, green rice terraces surrounding them, a creek running nearby. And while those components are there, it’s also surrounded by run-down buildings with the terraces just out of reach.

Some houses near mine:

“Where are you going?” a heavy-lidded teenager asks as he walks alongside you. “There are many drunk out tonight, let me be your guide.”
You look away and say, “No thanks,” and continue walking.
“Okay ma’am, I love you,” he calls out into the wet night. You don’t turn back.

The sky has darkened, and the hotel lights shine dimly in front of you. You walk up to your room, take one look back, and see the town lights shivering in the air. You open your door, turn on the light, and shut the door as the night falls in a curtain of mist behind you.