An island’s transformation

I grew up in a transitioning Boracay island — from a paradise for backpackers who stayed for months and lived like the locals, to the concrete jungle it is now. I saw how it has been cruel to the poor and uneducated. But the most heartbreaking of all was losing the community it used to have.

When fishermen returned from the sea, they would rest by taking out their guitars and singing their hearts out by the bonfire on the beach, waiting for the sunset, and being mesmerized by clouds of bats flying from Yapak to Angol. That was how laid-back Boracay was.

Usually the town plaza or the market place was where people would catch up with their friends. We had them in my childhood, but in addition, we also had the Station 3 gazebo where there was a small ticket booth inside for the boat and which also served as a meeting place for people.

One day I was with my father sitting inside the gazebo when a friend of his told him that he no longer needed to work hard because we already had a wooden haul boat servicing people from Caticlan to Boracay and vice versa. But my father replied that while it was a stable source of income, weather conditions could be very unpredictable, engine and boat maintenance was expensive, and people with money would always look for the next big thing.

My father also said he would sell our boat once all of his children graduated from college. I never understood what he said then, and little did I know that it would be a relevant point in our family’s story 20 years later.

After Boracay was closed for a six-month rehabilitation program, it was again promoted as a paradise destination. But truth to tell, the “paradise” it once was will never come back. The many hotel buildings and the sudden influx of workers who also brought their families to live on the island have all made significant changes.

The paradise island people call Boracay is very different now from what I had in my childhood. When I was growing up, I already knew that the island would not stay the same for long, because so many people wanted to have a piece of that paradise.

When I was about eight or nine years old, I strolled between Stations 1 and 2 to see the new resorts being constructed. I was alone, and when I got home my mother asked what I saw. I was confused and asked her how she knew where I had been. She replied that this was a small island and people from different resorts knew me. That was how secure my mother felt, because what we had was a small community where everybody knew everybody else.

As I enjoyed many lazy afternoons swimming and watching the sunset, I wondered until when I would have the freedom of enjoying the island all to myself. But change was already at our doorstep. Little by little, family-owned resorts were being bought out by corporations and land-grabbing was becoming more common, until the community of the island where I grew up changed before my eyes.

I was 13 when we had to leave the resort my mother managed; it had served as my childhood home. We settled at the back area of the island where there were no orange sunsets, only bright yellow sunrises. This time, I knew nothing could make us leave, because we were living in the land my maternal grandmother had inherited from her father. I thought that the land inherited from our forefathers could give us security from the grasping hand of development. But, boy, was I wrong. Money truly rattles everyone with the promise of a good life.

And my father’s plan to sell the boat? It turned out it was already too late to sell it, because wooden boats were being replaced by fiberglass ones. It was hard to accept that after all those years of hardships and building dreams for the future of his children, that was how it would end for my father. The consolation is, out of his four children, he now only has his youngest to send to school.

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Anafel Vevelin S. del Rosario, 29, works as operations manager in their family-owned restaurant.

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