Mindanao’s promises

FOR DAYS I had been on the road with my son, and I was relieved to be able to check into this new hotel. I looked out our window and there it was—Davao City’s changing skyline, with high-rise buildings everywhere. Then I looked down to the ground and there it was—a small slum colony reminding me of Mindanao’s many unfulfilled promises.

I spent many childhood summers in Davao City. My paternal grandfather was one of many Chinese who migrated to Mindanao from the dirt-poor province of Fujian in China. He died young—in 1928—leaving behind two families to be raised by this Chinese wife with the tiny bound feet.

In 1977, shortly after I graduated from college, I took up a job with the Catholic Church’s social action secretariat, enticed in part by the prospects of being based in Davao City. The work meant going around the provinces promoting community-based health programs. I would fall asleep in the bus on long trips, waking up hearing Cebuano spoken in one town, Hiligaynon in another, Ilokano in yet another. Those were the languages of the new settlers, but there were many others of the Lumad (indigenous peoples) and Muslims.

There were poverty and strife all around, stories of land-grabbing and of the Ilaga (“rats”—a term applied to paramilitary forces), but always there was hope.

My stint in Mindanao was brief but I returned almost every year to see my grandmother in Davao City, until she died in 1990. Then the visits became infrequent—often made to talk at a convention, flying in and out in the same day.

Returning ‘home’

This latest trip was still brief—a total of five days—with an agenda of rediscovering my roots, with my son. I was not disappointed; I left Mindanao animated with new ideas, new hopes.

We were based in Davao del Norte, hosted by a friend who had migrated from Panabo to Manila and who challenged me to return “home.”

I listened to stories from his clan, also descended from a Chinese migrant, but no one could remember their hometown there. His grandfather had married a Boholana migrant and time had diluted their Chinese roots. But I met one of his uncles, who spoke near-perfect Mandarin, acquired while working in Taiwan.

He pointed to a house across the street where his cousins lived, descended from another branch with an Arab grandfather. Where from, I asked, and he shrugged his shoulders.

Mindanao was, and still is, a melting pot.

We stayed with his mother, a schoolteacher, twice-widowed and locked in debt because of medical expenses, her ATM card pawned to moneylenders. She had a master’s degree in education from the University of the Philippines’ Open University, and while she loved her work, she was looking forward to early retirement.

My son adapted to his surroundings almost immediately, going off with new friends to bike and coming back sweating and telling stories of what he saw, while drinking from a P1 plastic bag of water. Mindanao is the land of the tingi, of sub-retailing, which speaks to some extent of the continuing poverty.

My friend would tell me not to worry about my son. He was clearly proud of Panabo and its strict enforcement of laws—anti-smoking, anti-littering, and a curfew that kept young people at home at night.

He was proud, too, of Rodrigo Duterte, and talked of how Davao City’s reforms had spread to Panabo and adjoining areas. When I finally settled into Davao City for the last leg of my trip, I was to hear more of Mayor Duterte. People told me of how you couldn’t buy liquor after 2 a.m., which you’d have to consume at home, or in a bar. “Tambay” drinking—or groups drinking outdoors—was not allowed, to prevent fighting in the streets.

Laws are indeed enforced, and some are becoming stricter. On our Bachelor bus from Panabo to Davao we had to stop at a checkpoint. All adult passengers were told to get off so soldiers could board for a security check. My friend was surprised: “It used to be only the men were required to get off. Now the women are, too.”

Ambivalence

I was to see more of the Duterte “magic,” and ambivalence. Those opposed to Duterte would still have some grudging support for his less-controversial accomplishments, like speed limits which are miraculously well-enforced, or the stricture against smoking and littering. When I spotted the slum colony from my hotel room, I was struck by how clean it was, with no mounds of garbage to be seen.

Duterte seems to have mobilized a sense of pride in Davao City, a crucial development in any community development effort, where people themselves take up social responsibilities. There’s a sense that the government gets things done, so the citizens should do their share.

That sense of citizenship needs time to build. In Davao City I would see traffic jams at street intersections, with drivers unwilling to give way. Duterte enforces laws well, but what happens when you need civility?

“Luzon will never understand him,” one professor from UP Mindanao told me in a familiar refrain, “and we need him here in Mindanao.” I was struck by how “Davao” was replaced by “Mindanao.” Wouldn’t it be ironic if a longer Duterte stint in Davao City actually builds civility and citizenship, rather than a reliance on the iron fist?

I did visit our sprawling UP campus in Mintal, Davao City, and I thought about the crucial role of this campus for Mindanao to help bring people—settlers, Lumad, Muslims—the still unfulfilled promises with its courses in the sciences, arts, management, architecture and human kinetics. I thought of how UP Mindanao could serve the national politic by launching a study to analyze Mindanao’s public policies and governance.

“We’re a frontier area, so we can get new ideas off the ground,” one professor told me. It was exactly what I heard back in the 1970s when I was working there. Our community health programs, where we trained peasants in healthcare, spread much more quickly than in Luzon and the Visayas.

The Duterte vision seems to go beyond the man, and comes from a sense that years of broken promises have to be reversed through years of sustained commitment to new ideas.

I dropped by the Malagos farm for lunch, and it was bustling with visitors as well as media people interviewing members of the Puentespina family about their organic farming and waste management. In many places in Davao, you don’t just hear of but also see the alternatives being implemented in farming, environmentalism, small entrepreneurship, even the arts. (I’ll need another column to write about an afternoon with artist and School of Living Traditions advocate Kublai Millan.)

Next year’s elections are making Filipinos think hard of leadership. It is a pity that the Duterte appeal is thought of mainly as an endorsement of vigilantism and violations of human rights. If Duterte appeals to the public, it is because the broken promises of Mindanao apply to the entire country and people want an alternative. The difference is that the people in Mindanao are more patient, more filled with hope, some in Duterte, others in a larger vision.

“We go slower,” Kublai Millan told me, explaining the 60-kph maximum speed on Davao’s highways. And I would have completed the sentence: “slower, but safer and surer.” We’ve lived too long on reckless promises.
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