JAN-C-2
THE
NAVAJO FLIGHT FROM SURALLAH IN SOUTH COTABATO, MINDANAO
TO
BUKIDNON PROVINCE AND MALAYBALAY AT BBH
TO
BEGIN THE STAY IN BETHEL BAPTIST HOSPITAL GUEST HOUSE
ON
ITS FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
January
18, 2003
This morning I had packed up all my stuff including the Dream Weaver books I had bought on the arrival day in Manila, then had packed up the extra Tboli souvenirs I had bought as genuine art forms from the people who made them at the heart of the culture that is indigenous here in South Cotabato, Mindanao. In addition to the very precious genuine heirloom of the handmade T’nalak straight from the loom of Lang Dulang, the Philippine National Treasure, I had been brought two T’nalaks by Marisa, her granddaughter, the total output of her mother’s handicraft. I had taken pictures of her mother at work in the long house overlooking the lake in the mountains and was honored to have the second generation T’nalak as well. I was surprised to learn that one was eleven meters and the other twelve meters. This would mean a major investment, since the quality T’nalaks are priced at 500 pesos per meter, and there are fifty pesos per dollar, so about ten dollars a yard when translated for both measures in currency and length. So, 23 meters sounds like a lot of specialty tapestry of this very special kind, and $230 might be a large souvenir investment on top of the many T’nalaks I had bought in my first year and last year from the whole village’s output, but I considered that I had paid almost the same for the second order craftsmanship of just the reporting on the art in the books and videos of the Dream Weavers, and now I had a special chance to carry back a unique souvenir. I bought everything that the Lang Dulang family had produced this year in their adjacent bamboo platform long houses through the tedious art from that produces such a dreamy and yet resilient abaca fiber product. The Philippines were always known for the production of this sisal or hemp fiber, which made good rope—in fact, you know the term “Manila rope” from this earlier use of the hemp fibers, not to add the later illegal use of the hemp in smoking it. It may produce dreaminess for several reasons, legal and otherwise. So, I am now weighted down to my limit in original art work souvenir T’nalaks, with a correspondingly lightened wallet.
Vivien and Don had come over late last night to have dinner with us at takeoff, disappointed that we were not able to visit every day as we once did when we stayed with them at their house with the armed guards swinging in the hammocks strung from trees on each of the four sides of the house for twenty-four hour guard duty on their distinguished guests. (The term “VIP Escort” I had coined the “Very Insecure Persons” was re-phrased by the emcee at the previous night’s farewell ceremony to stand for “Very Incredible Persons.) We talked and had dinner together. Vivien had brought over some necklaces made by the women in her adult literacy classes, which were strung together in groups for sale, made of colorful, handmade beads. “How many would you like?” Vivien had asked me. “I will take, as always, all of them,” I replied. So, I have the T’boli peoples’ handiwork ready to carry back in the suitcase that is now too heavy to travel with me by air up to Malaybalay but will have to come along by road later, with the three patients we had selected for plastic reconstruction last year, Lilly, Josephine and the Captain, each of whom had undertaken their first stage repair of severe facial defects last year. Josephine came to see me off this morning and I also waved to Lilly in the crowd of well-wishers as we packed up our kit and loaded the vehicles with all the military contingent and national police in vehicles in the convoy fore and aft.
We arrived in the abandoned, but not yet closed, paved airstrip at Surallah, the “Valley of Allah” South Cotabato. The special use of the SIL plane for this purpose allows us the landing rights on this airstrip, where only the presidential plane and helicopter can land other than the mission plane that carries us in. With the curious crowd of kids and military guarding us, the Navajo piloted by Ken VanHuizen, born in Linden Washington, but grown up in Grand Rapids Michigan, with his wife here (maiden name Leep) from Cutlerville, Michigan, the plane rolled up and the luggage that would come on the second flight later was weighed on the runway. After we had figured ou t how much could go and how much had to stay, we boarded and strapped in for the flight.
On the takeoff roll, we aborted the roll since there was encroaching traffic on the airstrip—lots of kids and a motorbike “Skylab” with seven persons on board, with four Zebu cattle standing close enough to be spooked into random flight by the roar of the passing engines. On the second takeoff roll, we cleared the small sign that announces the name of this dis-used airport, and took off after a slow VR speed was reached. We climbed over a lot of rice paddies in full flooded irrigation just now, and also a Lake Balon, filled with the log booms that separate different aquaculture tanks as Tilapia are grown.
As we climbed on this slope up over the central mountains of Mindanao, going from the 700 foot level at Tboli land to the 700 meter level of Nasuli, we got through clouds and admired the volcanic peak of Mount Apo, tallest mountain in the Philippines. We could see this rainforest ringed mountain that had a cloud ring around it. I must get up there some day!
We saw some other sights, not on the standard flight-seeing circuit. Down below, in clearings in the mountains, are the camps of the MILF—Moro Islamic Liberation Front. This is as close as we get to the big troubles of the Philippines, and, by extension, to the rest of the world by terrorism in separatist organizations funded through radical elements. We operated on quite a few Moslem patients, usually proudly identified by their Moslem cap or their tattoos or other emblems of their faith, culture or genetic heritage. They were indistinguishably grateful, as were the other patients, and sat through the sermonettes and singing of the evangelists at TECH with perhaps as much comprehension and acceptance as the Christian or traditional religions also in the captive audience. This was the only visible evidence of our threat, which was not as imposing as our far more militant security guard that bristled heavy munitions in a perimeter around us. Now, when we had waved to our friends and saluted our military and police guard in farewell, in a light unarmed plane flown by a missionary pilot, we see our first militant camps of the MILF from a low altitude overflight.
A little further and we crossed the Paling River, which has a hydroelectric dam with three penstocks on it. We could see sugar mills and the direction of the banana plantation just before Mount Kitanglad—the second highest peak of the Philippines—a place we will visit, again, tomorrow.
On touchdown at Nasuli, we rolled up the grass runway to see the red Cessna that was Martin Branham’s plane of the New Tribes Mission. Martin and Gracia Burnham were the center of attention for a year ending six months ago, when the Philippine Army crossed the still smoking camps of the Abu Sayeff who had captured them and had held them for ransom for over a year. In the firefight that resulted, Martin was shot and killed and Gracia was shot and wounded. She is now in Wichita Kansas with her children, and planning to come back with all the notoriety of martyrdom those missionaries of the kind that JAARS had run into in South America where all the men of the Wycliffe group were killed by the Auca Indians on their first contact. One of the widows went back and has written a book, “: Through Gates of Splendor” about such an experience, and it seems that Gracia will return for this Philippine field work.
“MIRABLE DICTU!”
I SAUNTERED OVER TO THE INTERNET CAFÉ THAT HAD CAUSED ME FITS LAST
YEAR,
AND DIRECTLY AND SWIFTLY ACCOMPLISHED THE EMAILNG OF THE TBOLI
EXPERIENCE,
AND EVEN REVIEWED MY LAST
MONTH’S EMAIL AT THE GWUMC ACCOUNT
I cannot believe it! It is almost like it was designed to work this way! I got a lot of the backlog cleared and also, I hope, sent the reports of my Tboli experience as attachments. This was the first miracle of modernity, without even one power failure.
Second, I scanned the incoming emails from the last several weeks (around 500 emails messages, most of them automatically generated, and pulled down the following: I will not be going to Las Vegas on May 17 for NIFA. Consequently, I will be probably going out for the Tibetan settlements Himalayan tour on that date, which will be after I return from Malawi. The pediatrician residents and two of the medical students will be going out to Malawi early and returning early so that they will have to be covered by George Poehlman and not by me since I will not be there until April 22 or after, the date by which most of them will have left. I am then invited to lead a tour of the larger pre-medical student delegation on May 31 to June 15 to China.
One of the more surprising messages I got was from Dave Vander Hart who is still reeling in shock from the tax assessment they just received on their new house, which went up by 40%, so he did a quick survey of all the county properties he could find, including each of our Derwood neighbors, and also noted my Aurora Drive assessment went up by 61%, not knowing I had sold it two days before he sent the message. Surprising to him, is that Kipling Road tax assessment increased by only 15% since it is not revalued this year but will be next year on the county’s 3-year tax cycle. So, he wants to avoid the consequences of a March 15 hit of capital gains tax for his purchase of his house, so he will have to have a check for an amount he designates by March 15 with stipulations that I pay all the costs of the transaction he is in such a hurry to carry out for his advantage. I, too, would like to be rid of them, and this settlement would accomplish that, but the gall of them to insist that I pay their own requirement to bail them out is rather extraordinary for most, but fits a pattern. And the further imbalances are attributed to the “rent” I would have paid for living in my house since they moved out on their own volition, saying nothing about the several years when they were in my house with me gone in places like a full year in Africa and dominating its space and use in the times even when I was not gone. Nonetheless, this is an opportunity to have them gone out of my hair forever, but hardly on terms that they—the ones in a fire sale hurry—are in a position to dictate to me. I can look into this when I am back, and will see what comes of this with the pressures on them trying to make me do something on their schedule once again, when I am forced, of course, to do nothing. Time is their enemy, not mine, so they should pay that premium, not me.
And, while we are at it, you will register half of all the taxes you paid to be credited to us, even though we never paid them! Well, they at least have put down their opening bargaining starting point, without much of a bargaining position on their side!
It is strange to be looking at this quagmire of local little concerns from the perspective of such a distance, when I have most recently been dealing with a woman with an enormous goiter from an untreatable malignant disease, who came to the grateful patients’ farewell ceremony to celebrate and rejoice in the good fortune of her neighbors who are so lucky as to have been treated for their goiters for which she had such high hopes for her own!
AND RETURNING TO OUR DAILY BREAD--FRUIT
I came back for one of Willie and Betty’s (our hosts at the Guest House) superb dinners. We had a variety of vegetables and tropical fruits as well as a Shepherd’s pie and fired chicken with pumpkin bread, followed by dessert. The dessert may look like ice cream, and is cold, but does not melt into a watery slurry. It is white and swirled purple blue. The purple color is from a root crop “Obie”. This is like cassava, from a tuber deep in the ground. The white that would be in the equivalent position of the vanilla ice cream it represents is a special variety of coconut, grown especially for this purpose. It is solid, not hollow and has no milk, but the sweet pulp makes for the kind of swirled ice cream appearance. We have eaten well and often!