Elyong Damogo

BENCHWARMER

Ramon Dacawi

The thought comes each time news on the inevitable  comes along or shows up on the cellphone text screen. Last Thursday morning, the message was from fellow Baguio newsman March  Fianza,  March  seems to always get  the news first, making you feel he still lives in that magical past, when Baguio and Benguet were still one neighborhood, not divided into over two hundred, barangays, 128 in the city and 140 in the province.

“Napanen ni Elyong Damogo id irabii,” he texted, referring to a common friend, a forester and former officemate of Forester Rex Sapla of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources regional office here. At the wake in North Sanitary Camp, I learned Rex was at the hospital when  doctors were trying to work on a miracle and texted March when the Damogo siblings had to let their youngest finally rest after two years of suffering the complications of diabetes.

I was close to Eliong because we shared laughter and fun, planted trees and guided kids together in their exploration of the forest and urban landscape in Baguio and beyond.  Together with Forester Manny Pogeyed, we shared and protested our common affliction  and status  of being sugar magnates  but without the hacienda.   

At 51, Elyong was one of the youngest  volunteer foresters who were looped into Eco—walk, an environmental awareness program s that somehow helped contain our sugar count while leading kids through what remains of our watersheds and pine forests.

Back to the urban  landscape, he would now and then prepare a common food for kids at the end of their walk –through of the city’s main streets for on-site  answers  to  how Session Road got its name, why the Baguio Convention Center was built and why Casa Vallejo and Baden Powell Hall are  symbols of their city’s founding as a “Hill Station” its American colonial fathers.

Generous as he was, Elyong was ready to dish out P20s and P50s as rewards to kids who could recall a soldier’s name from  the roster of Filipino war heroes on the wall of the Veterans Park, why then city mayor Alfonso Tabora had the city’s main park lined up with eucalyptus trees or what” Chanum”, “Chugum”, “Kayang” and “Otek”, the Ibaloy names of some of their city’s streets, mean.

In-between these experiential, sugar-burning encounters with kids, between his work as member of the DENR task force against illegal logging, and later as head of the department’s clonal nursery at Pacdal,  Eliong would silently throw questions up the blue yonder, questions we all feel we have all the right to ask about our morbidity and mortality.

Elyong will be rested this Monday at the Pyramid Memorial Park in Buyagan, La Trinidad, after the funeral mass at 9:00 a.m. at the San Jose Church in the capital town. His remains lie in state at the family home at No. 13 North Sanitary Camp.

He is survived by his wife Herminia (nee Allasiw), daughters Aiko Ella, Aira May and Aivelyn Joy; sisters Betty Toledo, Pacita and Corazon; and brothers Peter, Manuel and Patricio Jr. Another brother, Menardo, passed on earlier.

The thought recurs as a balm,  as it did last year when we lost Manong Vic Laoyan, perhaps the best mayor La Trinidad never had, and Dr. Charles Cheng, a respected Filipino-Chinese physician and an Igorot by choice who devoted his life to healing, researching and propping up this upland region’s sports development in the grassroots level. :

This journey to the grave called life, set into motion by birth, matters not how long but how. (e-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments.)