THE CHILDHOOD I NEVER KNEW I WAS MISSING

My Childhood Memories of Nansiakan and Mapayao, Kayapa, Nueva Vizcaya

CHAPTER ONE

A Village Where Everyone Was Family

I grew up in Nansiakan and Mapayao, Kayapa, Nueva Vizcaya, at a time when everyone treated one another like family. It was a time when every mother's friend was called Auntie, whether we were related by blood or not. We didn't need to examine family trees to know who belonged to us. In our community, family was not limited to the people who shared our surnames. It extended to the people who lived around us, worked alongside our parents, and helped us when we needed them.

That was simply how life was.

I was never carried around in a stroller. Instead, I had a much more practical ride: my mother's or grandmother's kayabang, a basket carried on the back with an oyon, the head strap that passed across the forehead to support the weight of the load.

Long before I knew anything about modern conveniences, I knew the comfort of being carried on someone's back. And when I was old enough to walk, the world opened up before me.

Our playground was the rice field, where we followed behind our fathers as they ploughed the land with their water buffaloes. The forests, rivers, hills, bamboo groves, and fruit trees were all part of our playground, too. We didn't need playground equipment or organized recreational activities. Nature had already provided everything we needed.

We built our own tree houses using whatever materials we could find. Banana leaves became our roofing and walling materials, and the trees became the foundations of our little kingdoms. They might not have survived a strong wind, but we were proud of them nonetheless.

We made our own toys, too.

I remember how we fashioned toy guns from bamboo branches, using paper we chewed into little pellets for bullets. We made spinning tops from balanti wood and bibingey, little spinning wheels, from leblebeng fruits.

We didn't need batteries, chargers, or instruction manuals. We simply used our imaginations and whatever the farm or forest provided.

There was no electricity in our homes, let alone television or refrigerators. We had no ice candies, ice cream, or bicycles. We didn't have mobile phones or tablets because such things were not part of our world.

We hardly knew what we were missing.

Our pets were chickens. I grew attached to them, watching them scratch the earth and wander around the yard. But there was always the possibility that a chicken I had grown fond of would eventually become dinner.

When my parents decided that it was time for one of our chickens to be butchered, there was little I could do about it. The family needed food, and that was that.

A special family dinner might consist of chicken boiled with ginger and salt. We didn't need an elaborate menu or fancy presentation. Meat was a treat, and we appreciated it when it was available.

Eggs were mostly reserved for hatching. We rarely ate them unless a hen abandoned an egg or decided it was not mature enough to hatch.

Hotdogs and bacon were not part of my childhood vocabulary. I didn't spend my days wishing for food I had never known.

We ate what was available, whether it was rice or boiled sweet potatoes. We often ate on the floor because we didn't have a dining table. We didn't complain or demand something else.

When food was available, we ate. When there was little, we learned to make do.

But I wasn't just a child who played in the fields. Like many children in our community, I grew up learning responsibility at an early age.

By the time we were around seven years old, we were already trusted to take care of our younger brothers and sisters while our parents worked in farms some distance away from home.

Our parents could leave early in the morning and spend the entire day working in the fields, knowing that we would do our best to manage things at home.

If the baby cried, we had to figure out what was wrong.

If the baby was hungry, we had to feed the child.

We learned how to make a fire, boil rice, and use rice water to feed a baby. If our younger sibling was a toddler, we could prepare porridge.

And if the baby needed breast milk before our mother returned, we knew what to do.

We would carry the baby to a neighbor who was nursing her own child.

"Auntie, the baby is hungry," we might say.

And Auntie would help.

Nobody needed a long explanation. Nobody demanded payment. The baby needed to be fed, and a neighbor was there to help.

That was how our community worked.

By the time I was around ten, our mornings were already full of responsibilities. We were expected to wake up very early, pound rice grains, cook breakfast, sweep the backyard, and prepare to walk to school.

There was no waiting for someone else to do the work. We had to learn to manage our time and contribute to the household.

We did all these things while still being children who wanted to play, explore, and enjoy life.

Our parents didn't give us written schedules or motivational speeches about independence. We learned by watching them and doing what needed to be done.

Responsibility was simply part of growing up.

During planting and harvest seasons, the entire community came together to work in one family's field so that the work could be completed more quickly. This cooperative practice meant that people could depend on one another, knowing that the favor would eventually be returned when another family needed help.

Even we children had our assigned responsibilities.

We watched the babies while their parents worked. They didn't necessarily have to be our siblings, cousins, or relatives. If a baby belonged to someone working alongside our parents, that baby could become our responsibility, too.

We also fetched liting, water from a spring suitable for drinking and cooking. Sometimes we had to walk a few kilometers to collect it. We carried the water back and brought some to the adults working in the fields so they could quench their thirst.

We were small, but we were expected to contribute.

Looking back, I realize how much responsibility was placed on our young shoulders. But at the time, it was simply what we did. We were part of a family, and everyone had a role to play.

We didn't have many material possessions, but we had a way of life that taught us to be resourceful and to care for others.

I didn't know it then, but those ordinary days were shaping the person I would become.

And I had no idea that someday, I would look back on them with so much affection.

CHAPTER TWO

The Things I Ate, the Games I Played, and the Hunger I Remembered

If there is one thing I can say about my childhood, it is that we knew how to make something out of almost nothing.

We didn't wait for someone to buy us toys or invent games for us. We created our own entertainment from whatever we found around us.

A bamboo branch could become a toy gun. A piece of wood could become a spinning top. A fruit could become a toy. A tree could become a playground, a hiding place, or an entire world waiting to be explored.

We were our own entertainers.

I grew up eating sweet potatoes prepared in different ways. Among the traditional preparations I remember are intabak, indamdam, and illo-mog.

Intabak was sweet potato boiled with its skin in the copper cauldron used for cooking pig food. The result had an interesting flavor, one that might surprise someone who had never experienced it.

Indamdam was prepared by burying unpeeled sweet potatoes under the ashes in the fireplace while something else was cooking over the fire. When they were ready, we retrieved them from the ashes and enjoyed their distinctive taste.

Illo-mog was another way of boiling unpeeled sweet potatoes, different from the traditional Kalanguya practice of peeling them before boiling.

These were simple foods, but they were part of the flavors that made my childhood memorable.

We knew where our food came from. We understood that it took work to plant, grow, harvest, and prepare it. We learned to appreciate what the land provided.

I also remember accompanying my grandparents on nighttime adventures beneath the stars. They would spread out their nets and wait silently for fruit bats.

We had to be quiet as we waited for the elusive creatures to appear. The night air was cool, the sky stretched endlessly above us, and the darkness seemed full of secrets.

Our grandparents knew what they were doing, and we watched them with curiosity. If they succeeded in catching fruit bats, we might have meat for breakfast the next day.

Those nights were more than adventures. They were opportunities to spend time with our grandparents and learn from their knowledge of the land and its creatures.

But not every adventure required patience.

Sometimes, all I wanted was to swing from a withered banana leaf still hanging from a tree.

We would grab the leaf and swing as though we were flying. The problem was that the leaf was not always strong enough to hold us.

Sometimes it broke.

And down we went, occasionally tumbling along a slope and hurting ourselves in the process.

Our friends would laugh at us, and we would laugh at our own foolishness. After dusting ourselves off, we would get up and do it all over again.

That was the beauty of being a child. A fall didn't necessarily mean the end of the game. Sometimes it was just another funny story to tell.

We played hide-and-seek in the early evening, using the darkness as our cover. We climbed mango trees, balete trees, and spreading bamboo groves, turning ordinary places into playgrounds.

We gave the classic chasing game a new twist by taking it up into the branches. Why stay on the ground when there were so many places to hide above it?

We didn't need playground slides, swings, or climbing frames. We had trees, and we knew how to use them.

Sleepovers were another adventure. Sometimes, I stayed with cousins whose house was on the other side of a mountain. Walking such distances was part of life, and visiting relatives was worth the journey.

At night, our grandmothers told us stories.

Some of the stories were about the Second World War, when our people fled to the mountains to escape the Japanese soldiers. These were not stories about distant lands or imaginary characters. They were painful memories of events our elders had actually experienced.

I listened as my grandmother described those frightening times.

But sometimes, the memories became too painful for her to continue.

When she reached a point where she no longer wanted to revisit the past, we would ask her to tell us a fable instead.

We didn't mind hearing the same fable for the thousandth time. We were children, and familiar stories had their own kind of magic.

We also looked forward to the return of our uncle who was studying in the lowlands. Whenever he came home, we were eager to hear his stories about the world beyond our mountains.

There were no mobile phones to keep us connected with people who were far away. Stories traveled through the people who came home and shared their experiences with us.

And when we weren't listening to stories, we were busy making some of our own.

One of my favorite childhood tricks involved a simple instruction from my mother.

"Go and fetch water."

I could become surprisingly enthusiastic about that chore.

It wasn't necessarily because I loved carrying water. It was because the trip gave me an opportunity to sneak away and go swimming in the river.

What began as a household responsibility could turn into an hour or two of skinny-dipping and playing in the water.

Time seemed to disappear when we were at the river.

We forgot about our containers, our mothers, and the work waiting at home. We were too busy enjoying ourselves.

Eventually, we would remember that we still had a chore to finish.

We would fetch the water and head home, sometimes bringing little stone crabs from the river to our mothers, hoping our gifts would distract them from asking why we had taken so long.

Whether the strategy worked depended on the mother.

We knew we might get into trouble, but the river was worth the risk.

Of course, we were not always innocent victims of childhood mischief. Sometimes, we were the ones causing trouble.

One of our favorite fables was the story of the monkey and the turtle.

The monkey and the turtle divided an uprooted banana tree between them. The turtle took the root end, while the monkey took the leafy end.

The turtle's portion grew and bore fruit, but the turtle could not climb the tree to harvest the bananas.

The monkey offered to climb for him, and the turtle happily agreed. Unfortunately, the monkey ate the bananas and refused to share even one.

The turtle decided to teach the monkey a lesson.

He collected thorns from a nearby pomelo tree and planted them sharp-end up along the banana trunk and on the ground. Then he shouted that rain was coming.

The monkey hurried down.

And discovered the turtle's unpleasant surprise.

We remembered that story very well.

Perhaps a little too well.

Whenever we fought with other children, we sometimes lodok our enemies with pomelo thorns, borrowing the turtle's trick to get even.

It wasn't exactly the most peaceful way to resolve a disagreement.

But our quarrels rarely lasted very long.

The next day, we could be playing together again, laughing as though nothing had happened. Sometimes, we even pierced one another's ears with pomelo thorns as a kind of reconciliation pact.

We were mischievous children, and we certainly knew how to get into trouble. But we also knew how to move on.

Not every memory from my childhood, however, makes me laugh.

In 1981, we experienced a drought that lasted far too long.

The land dried up, crops failed, and food became scarce. Eventually, there was almost nothing left to eat except tongpop, bamboo shoots, and ama-ton-bila, the trunk of the taro plant.

That was when I learned what famine meant.

Hunger was no longer just the discomfort of waiting for the next meal. It became the uncertainty of not knowing what food would be available.

The land that usually provided for us could no longer give us what we needed.

We had always been accustomed to making do with little, but the drought showed us that there were limits to what resourcefulness alone could accomplish.

Our parents continued to work and do what they could to keep our families going. We children did not always understand the full weight of their worries. We knew only that food was scarce and that we had to eat what was available.

We survived those difficult days.

But the experience left its mark on my memory.

When I look back on my childhood, I don't want to romanticize hunger or pretend that poverty was easy. There were hardships that no child should have to experience.

Yet those difficult years were also part of the life that shaped me.

They taught me that food was precious, that circumstances could change unexpectedly, and that people had to find ways to endure when life became difficult.

And somehow, even during the hardships, there was still room for laughter.

There were still trees to climb, friends to play with, stories to hear, and rivers to visit.

We were children, and whenever we had the chance, we returned to being children.

CHAPTER THREE

The Things We Never Had to Say

There were many things I did not have growing up.

There was no electricity in our home, no television to watch, no refrigerator to keep food cold, and no mobile phone to connect me to the outside world.

I didn't have ice cream or ice candies waiting for me on a hot afternoon. I didn't have a bicycle to ride around the village.

In fact, I never wore shoes until I reached high school.

Before then, I walked to school in my flip-flops, often removing them when the path became muddy. I wanted to make them last longer, and knee-deep mud could easily ruin them.

During the rainy season, we used taro leaves as umbrellas.

We learned to improvise because we had to.

School was mandatory, but that didn't mean I was always eager to attend every lesson. Like other children, I sometimes skipped a class or two.

There were days when the fields, rivers, and forests seemed much more inviting than the classroom.

Still, I went to school on foot, as we all did, making the best of what we had.

We weren't afraid of many things, but we had our weaknesses.

One of mine was the needle.

Whenever health professionals came to administer our BCG boosters, some of us would jump out of classroom windows to escape the dreaded injections.

We would rather risk a fall than face that needle.

And then there was Aralen.

When malaria became prevalent in our area, we were given these tablets, which tasted unbelievably bitter and nasty. Some of us would pretend we were perfectly fine, hoping we could avoid taking them.

But malaria was no joke. Some of our classmates began shivering at around four o'clock every afternoon, day after day, for weeks.

We were children who climbed trees, swam in rivers, walked long distances, and played fearlessly in the dark.

Yet the sight of a needle or the taste of a bitter tablet could make us desperate to escape.

Even the bravest children have their limits.

Our curfew was simple: we had to be home by sunset, or whenever our mothers called our names.

When our mothers shouted, we knew it was time to stop playing.

We also knew better than to talk back to our elders. Disrespect could earn us a sharp reprimand, a belt from our fathers, or an oyon from our mothers.

The oyon was the head strap used to carry a heavy kayabang, but in the hands of an angry mother, it could serve a very different purpose.

We learned to respect our parents and elders, sometimes the hard way.

But beyond discipline and household responsibilities, there were other lessons I learned simply by watching the people around me.

One of the most important was that a community was supposed to care for its own.

When someone became seriously ill and needed to be brought to town for hospitalization, our fathers would help carry the sick person in a hammock for part of the journey.

They did not wait for someone to pay them or promise to return the favor. Someone needed help, and they helped.

That was what a community did.

I grew up seeing how people depended on one another. If one family was in need, others stepped in. If someone needed assistance, neighbors did what they could.

We understood that the same people who helped us today might need our help tomorrow.

We did not see kindness as a business transaction. It was simply part of belonging to a community.

Trust was another thing I learned early in life.

Houses were often left unlocked. When we traveled long distances on foot, we sometimes became hungry along the way.

If we came across the house of someone we knew and the owners were not around, it was acceptable in our community to enter and borrow plates and spoons so we could eat the food we had brought with us.

We might drink some of their liting, the spring water suitable for drinking and cooking. If cooked sweet potatoes were available, we might eat some of those, too.

Afterward, we washed the dishes, returned them to their proper places, and continued our journey.

We did not consider it an extraordinary privilege.

It was part of the trust that existed among people who understood that they belonged to one another.

Even our words for water reflected how well we knew our surroundings.

Liting was water collected from a spring that was good for drinking and cooking human food.

He-leb, on the other hand, referred to water from sources such as rice fields or rivers, suitable for washing muddy clothes or rubber boots and for cooking pig food.

We knew which water to use and for what purpose. We understood our environment because our everyday lives depended on that knowledge.

I also grew up with a different understanding of gratitude.

We did not usually say "thank you" when someone gave us something or did us a favor. It wasn't because we were ungrateful or didn't appreciate the kindness.

Rather, we understood that helping one another was part of the way we lived.

If someone shared food with us today, we might share our own food with them tomorrow. If someone helped our family during an emergency, we would be ready to help when they needed us.

We did not feel that every act of kindness required a formal acknowledgment.

We simply accepted the kindness and passed it along when we had the opportunity.

The same was true of apologies.

We did not have a direct equivalent of the English word "sorry" in the way it is commonly used.

When we fought with someone, we might simply smile at that person.

If they smiled back, we knew we were all right again.

No long explanation was necessary.

A smile could mean that the anger had passed, that the friendship remained, and that we were ready to play together again.

Of course, we were not perfect. We hurt one another, quarreled, and sometimes behaved badly.

But we also learned to make peace.

We understood that friendship and community were more important than winning every argument.

Looking back, I can see that the world I grew up in was very different from the one children experience today.

Modern conveniences have brought many benefits, and I would never wish the hunger, malaria, or hardships of the 1981 drought on another generation.

Nor would I pretend that it was easy for a young child to care for babies, cook meals, and take on responsibilities while parents worked far from home.

There were real hardships in our lives, and I do not want to erase them by turning the past into a fairy tale.

But when I think about my childhood, hardship is not the only thing I remember.

I remember my grandparents telling stories beneath the stars.

I remember the rice fields where we played while our fathers worked.

I remember the rivers where we swam when we were supposed to be fetching water.

I remember our tree houses, bamboo toy guns, spinning tops, and games played in the gathering darkness.

I remember the taste of sweet potatoes cooked beneath ashes and the excitement of a special family dinner when a chicken was prepared with ginger and salt.

I remember the long walks to school, the muddy paths, and the taro leaves we held over our heads when it rained.

I remember the neighbors who helped feed hungry babies and the men who carried sick people in hammocks.

I remember the relatives who welcomed us into their homes and the people who shared what they had without expecting anything in return.

I remember a time when a favor did not need to be repaid immediately, when gratitude was expressed through actions, and when a smile could restore a friendship.

I remember a village where everyone was family.

Those memories have stayed with me because they remind me of the values I grew up with: resourcefulness, responsibility, generosity, trust, and the importance of community.

We did not have words like resilience or mutual support to describe our way of life.

We simply lived it.

We worked when work needed to be done. We helped when someone needed help. We played whenever we had the opportunity, and we found ways to laugh even when life was difficult.

I never spent my childhood wishing for a television, a refrigerator, a bicycle, or a mobile phone. I couldn't miss what I had never known.

I was too busy living.

I had mountains to cross, rivers to swim in, trees to climb, cousins to visit, and friends to play with.

I had elders whose stories connected me to our people's history.

I had a community that taught me that I was never entirely alone.

And although we did not have much in the way of material possessions, I never felt that my childhood was empty.

Today, when I look back on those years, I recognize that there were things we lacked that would have made life easier and safer. I also recognize that there were things we had that cannot be measured in material possessions.

We had a sense of belonging.

We had people we could depend on.

We had the freedom to turn ordinary things into extraordinary adventures.

We had a way of life in which sharing was natural and kindness was part of our daily existence.

Most of all, I had a childhood filled with memories that remain vivid even after all these years.

Perhaps someone looking at our lives from the outside would say that we were deprived.

Perhaps they would count the things we did not have and wonder how we managed.

But that is not how I remember my childhood.

I remember a life that was sometimes difficult, often mischievous, and always full of lessons.

I remember the people who helped shape me, the places that formed my world, and the experiences that taught me what it meant to belong.

I remember being a child in Nansiakan and Mapayao, Kayapa, Nueva Vizcaya, surrounded by people who treated one another like family.

And I remember that I was happy.

Not because life was easy, but because I had learned to live within the life I was given.

I grew up with very little, but I never knew I was missing anything.

I had my family, my community, the mountains, the rivers, the rice fields, and the freedom to create adventures from the simplest things.

I had people who would help me when I needed them and whom I could help in return.

I had a childhood that belonged to me.

And that, to me, was more than enough.