Letters home

BENCHWARMER
Ramon Dacawi

BAGUIO CITY a-- Three expatriates last week reconnected home through e-mails. Notwithstanding their medium, the e-mails read like snail mail. They were like hand-written letters with a soul, the sensitivity of which rekindled my sense of local history, identity and posterity.

From Canada, former sports editor Jogin Tamayo of the Baguio Midland Courier corrected my piece last Sunday about the endangered patch of pine growing beside the Baguio Convention Center. I had written: “The trees, balled when they were young to provide the Baguio ambience for the 1998 Anatoly Karpov-Viktor Korchnoi World Chess Championship, are now in danger of being lost.” Jogin wrote: “It was 1978, not 1998, hehe.”

Hu hu. My mistake was too glaring for Baguio boys and girls with a sense of history to let pass. My consolation is knowing that two people read this weekly column – Jogin and the one who writes it. Just in case there’s a third reader, the thousand or so pine trees were planned to be cut or balled again and transferred, to give way to “Baguio Air Residences”, a four-building multi-storeycondotel-complex under a tie-up of the Government Service Insurance System and mall giant Shoemart. Relief came last year when the new GSIS leadership assured city mayor Mauricio Domogan that the tree patch would be preserved. GSIS, its chairman and general manager stressed, must, however, be eventually paid its money’s worth for the lot. GSIS, however, didn’t purchase the lot. Then President Marcos just assigned it and an adjoining one for the insurance system to build the Baguio Convention Center as venue for the chess championship.

In recent years, the city agreed with GSIS and the Bases Conversion Development Authority to buy the center using the city’s share from the lease rentals in the development of Camp John Hay under the BCDA. The Camp John Hay Development Corp., however, defaulted in rental payment , prompting the city to shell out the payment for the Convention Center and the surcharges GSIS imposed as a result.
***
From Maryland, U.S. of A., Manong AlexFangonil, wrote of his recent visit back home to Baguio:
“I was very pleased to visit the Baguio cemetery and for the first time saw the graves of Mayor (Eusebius J.) Halsema and wife Marie.

The site broke my heart! I would join the city or any organization to upgrade the grave-site and among others to restore the original bronze tombstone which reads ‘Baguio Is His Monument’. We have touched this subject during our short conversation. Jim Halsema (the mayor’s son) should be proud had he been around ( he passed) and having no relatives in Baguio to take care, it would be our civic-duty to do so. The beautiful cemetery shrine of Mateo Carino and SiocoCarino nearby is an excellent example.

“I was able to visit Mrs. Cecille Afable, the living icon, in her home at Padre Burgos. She is still strong and her memory is sharp. She recalls tidbits of my Dad and Mom, their U.P. days in Manila, and she even dreamt about me in my medical missions a day before my visit! We drank Benguet coffee, no whisky tapnosaan kami ngamabartekcano, haha.

“I was hoping to spend more time in Baguio but the mission in Pangasinan has to be done. I was very much impressed with their progress under Governor Espino. The missioners would vouch this in the newsletter.”

Manong Alex, son of the late Baguio Vice-Mayor and Judge Sinforoso Fangonil, is a physician based in Maryland. He served as president of the Association of Filipino Physicians in America which regularly holds medical missions to this archipelago.

His passion for Baguio and Cordillera history recently took him to the city cemetery to verify that, indeed, Mayor Halsema’s epitaph was changed to “The Mayor Who Engineered Baguio City”. I feel with Manong Alex that the original marker – “Baguio Is His Monument” – is more fitting for Baguio’s first mayor who served for 17 years. Among others, Halsema built the city’s water and electric systems, including the Asin hydroelectric plants that continue to function today.

Ironically, he was killed when the now Notre Dame de Chartres Hospital was bombed by American planes to clear the way for the city’s liberation from the Japanese forces in March, 1945. The venerable Mrs. Afable is, of course, the ageless editor-in-chief of the venerable Baguio Midland Courier and the mother of Patricia Afable of the Smithsonian Institution. Patricia and Manong Alex were classmates at the dear old Baguio City High.
****
From the Netherlands, Yvonne Belen, my chemistry teacher at the University of Baguio Science High (it would be a sin to say when), shared the news that a book entitled “Igorot by Heart” will be launched during the 9th Igorot International Consultation in April at the Baguio Country Club.
June last year, Yvonne alerted BIBAK Switzerland on the entry of Ifugao rock carver Gilbert Alberto at the Morges International Sculpture Competition in Morges Castle. B IB AK is the organization of Igorots by heart in Europe trooped to cheer Gilbert and he responded by winning the Audience Prize and finishing second in the Jury Prize topped by a Swiss artist.

The book is a compilation of keynote speeches and selected presentations from the eight previous biennial consultations of the Igorot Global Organization. In accordance with the vision of its pioneer president, the late Rex Botengan, IGO serves as a sounding board on issues affecting the Cordillera homeland and Igorots by birth, blood, sentiment, heart and choice.

It helps them respond to these issues which are raised and discussed during the IGO conferences held every other year. Among the presentations featured in the book were those of Dr. Albert Bacdayan, policeman-lawyer-turned-business tycoon Richard Stone Pooten of London, the late Jesuit Bishop Francisco Claver, Kate ChollipasBotengan, Alexander Wandag Sr., Patricia Afable and Mark Sabas Leo. The book was edited by Belen, John Dyte, Gloria OdiBawaan-Simon, Carolyn Weygan-Hildebrand, Dalisay Leones, Jocelyn Noe and Philian Louise Weygan-Allan.

Working within a local’s givens, I quietly slipped into the second consultation at the Green Valley Country Club here as an observer and then registered at the seventh in Banaue, Ifugao after the planners waived my conference fee on condition I’d share some Ifugao jokes, which I did before an afternoon session.

At Green Valley, delegates from abroad spent hours debating whether they should be called Igorots. The spirited discussions sobered up somehow when film maker Eric de Guia, a.k.a. KidlatTahimik and Cabbigat, Igorot by choice and adoption who wears an Ifugao-string inside his pants, quoted Shakespeare - “A rose by another name would smell as sweet”.

At the 2nd Consultation, then Mayor Basilio Wandag of Tabuk, Kalinga, reviewed the list of speakers, paper presenters, presiding officers and moderators. He then rose to state: “This is not an Igorot consultation, it is a Besao consultation.”. It so happened that most of the speakers trace their roots to Besao.

London-based Engr. Edmund Bugnosen and I helped the Banaue conference formulate a resolution urging the GSIS to cancel its plan to turn over the patch of balled pine beside the Baguio Convention Center to Shoemart for the latter to build condotels.

As conference chair Juan Ngalob asked, I drafted and read the resolution at the plenary session. . It was unanimously adopted after someone reminded it was not my task but that of the style committee to draft the resolution.

We hope IGO’s sentiment for pine would be reiterated this April at the posh Baguio Country Club. Personally, I wish IGO President Cesar Castro, who’ll come in from Vancouver, Canada, would accept some more jokes in lieu of my conference fee. That arrangement would allow me to see and thank some expat Cordilleransand Igorots who opened their car doors and homes during studies and conferences sponsored by environmental and heritage organizations and schools. – e-mail:mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments.