I was sold, but I am not a soldier

In Lanao del Norte 30,000 people still live under tarps and sleep on the concrete, afraid to return home for fear of the fighting.  When we arrived there in October, we had little comfort for them- sacks of rice and packets of noodles, the hands of doctors and the minds of counselors.  I hefted the sacks on the shoulder; my brawn attempting to make up for my helplessness, our helplessness.  Thirty thousand is too many to make a difference and fighting that’s lasted decades and decades has no hope of waning.  The government says “No peace until disarmament” and the rebels say “No disarmament until justice.”  No one can hear what the people are saying- their voices are eaten in gunfire.

I took pictures of women and children, soldiers and Muslims.  I washed my hair in the pouring rain and noticed the beauty of the mountains.  The pictures seemed to say that something was happening even as the burned out homes said that something was over.  The babies in Barangay Munai were dehydrated and weary from diarrhea.  I covered my head and rolled down my sleeves.  Sometimes that’s all you can do.

A week after we returned I read in the paper that a measles outbreak killed fifteen children in Munai.  There were only a hundred or so in that place, so as I scroll through my pictures, I wonder which ones.  Who did I capture a last time?  Who among them now can only be seen in my camera?  There wasn’t money for inoculations, there was barely money for rice.  This is just the collateral damage of war, the collateral damage of a “supply/demand” system allows drug companies to charge whatever the hell they want because that’s the free market.  ”Free to choose,” capitalists say.  I guess these children just forgot to decide.  

For my part, I see the US Government has been generous to send guns to the Philippines, like this M-16 pictured above.  This child may be among the dead.  At the very least he lost a sibling, cousin or friend.  I wonder if he would have traded one of those bullets for a measles shot.  The price of production would have been about the same.  But the only shots that protect Western interests and foreign investment in Mindanao are those fired by soldiers.

When the Lord passed over the banana trees

That morning we left well before dawn.  We loaded into the back of the flatbed and stood shoulder to shoulder, back to stomach, feet on the edge.  Our walking sandals were strapped on our feet, theirs brown, mine white.  In a different time we would have carried walking staffs, but on that morning we all had our packs strapped to ourselves or the truck and our sarongs and hijabs wrapped around our heads to keep out the cold.  When the Lord passes over the Philippines, he does not dictate his people to make unleaven bread, but we did brew corn coffee on a fire under the stars and sipped it out of metal mugs, praising God with our slurps and silence.

Orion turned on his feet above us while we floated through the dark.  I could feel the cold migrating through my nose to my cheeks, my eyes turned up to the sky thinking of anything other than malnutrition and military occupation.  God moves the stars above all those things and the headlights of the truck pull us across the island below them.  Banana trees lined the road to the bridge- in the dark they looked like creatures trudging through a swamp, their massive leaves crowns of shadows over bodies bearing gifts of fruit for the Lord.  They told us the spirit of God rested on the other side of the bridge and we did not dispute.  Trees are not like people.  They are upright and true.

Inside my hiking sandals, my feet fell asleep and my pack wore a pain on the shoulder but my eyes did not come down from the sky and I did not blink when the cloud moved over us.  The fog was thin, merely a veil on the stars that gradually faded in the east, and it only took a breath before it floated into our past.  Can air still be cold when it’s inside the lungs?  Can clouds grab light and hurl it into space?  On that morning the whole universe revolved around a tiny valley on a tiny island in a vast ocean in an unending space.  And so the spirit of the Lord came down and blessed the valley with its cold breath.  Because banana trees are reborn each season, they have a better understanding of the world.  They were not surprised to see the Lord- they had their offerings out and ready to bless the cloud as it passed.  God’s children, on the other hand, still had sleep in their eyes and coffee on their lips.  

The Spirit isn’t bothered with details, it loves us all differently.  The cold kiss stayed on my nose until the sun rose a few hours later.

A space between

On my way home from a brief stay in a cloistered convent in Digos City, the bus took a path between the mountains and the sea.  We rode the space between, the land rising on our left and disappearing on our right, for a good two hours as we passed through massive crowds out to mourn their dead.  November first is the space between, when the Filipinos grieve who they have lost and not yet found; celebrating the sureness of death with ice cream and Coca Cola, packed in hobo tents in festive cemeteries.  Over the grave of a four-year-old girl I offered sugared breads and ready-made cookies.  I ate cold tuna with rice and vinegar and munched on Western style cornchips while I gossiped with coworkers.

November is a space between.  I am still here on Mindanao but I am already lonely for what I will miss.  My parents count down the days and prepare the fatted calf for their wayward daughter and at night I lay awake thinking of pumpkin pie and snowfall.  In some ways the tropics has consumed me but in others it has only driven me further into America: Here I have found a place that I love but it’s far from the place that makes me who I am.

But that’s not America either.  It’s the space between the earth and the sky, the room inside each cell of our being.  We are created by that moments in between the big moments because just like elections, life isn’t won on the night of the victory.  The real battle happens in the silence when no one is watching, when we’re just cruising along the water in a seat by ourselves.  November for me is just in between, but that’s all it ever is, really..  We’re just pages in between the beginning and end- filler in book whose cover we never glimpse but is all we ever know.  We’re trapped in the middle of something we don’t really understand.

I leaned back in my seat on the road from Digos and watched the mourners on the streets.  They had their candles lit high in the air and their bottles of Coke were tucked under their arms.  The smell of the sea mingled with their barbeque and rice and the moutains reached up to the sky.