Of people and places

Two hours ago, a bus took our Anthropology class from Manila to the quiet municipality of Botolan, Zambales for a two-day field trip. We are staying in a wooden hut beside our foster family’s small house. As it gets dark, we prepare dinner for Nanay Loreta, her daughter and her husband, and their three children. They are pure Aetas, and Nanay Loreta has lived and raised her family here since the whole Aeta community in Botolan was relocated to the sides of the mountain after the violent eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991.

With only one dim light bulb to aid our visions and firewood and an old pot to cook our food (fish, their usual diet, and meat, a rarity for them), we use the time to learn about their family and the community. Their house is small and square, built with cinder blocks, with holes in the sides for windows. I look for a bed, but I only find one that is broken and used to store their few belongings instead in one corner. Then I notice that half of the floor is about a foot higher than the rest, and the grandchildren run up to the elevated area, sweep it with their feet, and sit in a small circle. I realize this is where they sleep; this elevated area is their bed. Outside the house, there is nothing but a few other small houses, trees leading up all the way to the top of the mountain, and the reddish brown clay and mud.

This is my first time to not only see an entire Aeta community, but to live with and like them. Two days is not nearly enough to grasp what it is like to live as an Aeta in a now-highly industrialized country, to thrive without the technology that I have grown extremely comfortable with in the cities of Manila, where I go to college, and Butuan, my hometown. But I look at this Aeta family that has been so warm in welcoming us into their home and sharing their stories with us, and realize that this is what Filipino strength looks like. These Aeta families have stayed strong throughout the volcano eruption, survived with little electricity in their vulnerable houses on the side of the mountain, little money to spend from what little black sand they gather and sell. All I could see around them were the lack of basic utilities, health and sanitation practices, and other basic needs, but on their faces I see nothing but smiles, the look of satisfaction, love for their families and their entire community, the strength of their longstanding culture, and the resilience of true Filipinos.