I grew up in the 1990s in Magmag-an, Upper Uma, Lubuagan, a tiny village in Kalinga in the Cordillera Administrative Region. We didn’t have electricity in my earliest days, and there was no road back then to connect us to the main town in the region. Most of the villagers had never been to a clinic or a hospital, and of course we had to walk to school along a footpath across a mountain, which took more than an hour each way. It was fine in the dry season but when it rained, we’d often slip and arrive for classes covered in mud. From the age of five until I finished primary school, I never missed a day, and I was never once late. I loved going there and learning all I could.
As soon as I got home from school, I’d change out of my uniform and rush outside to play with my friends. I never had a Barbie doll or any other kind of toy. We just made our own toys out of mud or plastic or invented games from stories told to us by the old folks. And our playground went all the way into the forest: the village acre, the dusty clearing, the coffee plantation, our backyard, the pavement — they were all ours.
The pavement in the village was until then the first and only government project made to benefit us, and it went right by our house. It was close enough that, if you were sitting on the balcony at our front door, you could hear and see the children playing.
We didn’t always play games. We were also business-minded children. Some kids sold bubble gum and candies at the school, but that market was saturated, so we had to think of something else. On Saturdays, we’d join the bigger boys who went to harvest wild forest fruits. We collected our pickings in a bag, and what we didn’t eat we sold to a middle-man vendor. I split the profit with my two sisters and we’d get the equivalent of P20 each, which to us was a lot of money. For extra income, we collected snails from the rice fields, which we sold to the same vendor.
One time, metal dealers arrived in the village looking for any scrap. We asked the elders where the old blacksmith workplaces had been and went to dig in that area. To our surprise, we found a lot. Every kid in the village dug like crazy as if hunting for pirate treasure. In the end we could barely carry all those pieces of rusty metal back to our homes, and we were overjoyed with the big money we earned that way.
Then one summer news came to us that the government would construct a classroom in the village. These were exciting times. It seemed we wouldn’t have to walk to school anymore. Even better, the school’s construction meant more business opportunities for us. I had my heart set on buying school supplies, which was my true joy.
The materials for the classroom construction were transported from the main town of Tabuk and dropped off alongside the road at the nearest point below the village. But the stuff still had to be carried all the way up the mountain, which required an hour of trekking each way. We all got hired for the job, adults and children. I could only carry one building rod at a time, but I could do two trips in a day and one rod was worth P20. Big money! I earned a fortune from the rod hauling business and saved it all.
When that job was finished, we turned to stone breaking. One can of gravel, a biscuit can as big as a bucket, was worth about P5. We broke the stones with hammers. This was equal opportunity employment. When it came to money there was no such thing as boys-only work. Everybody wanted to earn.
The money I earned hauling rods and breaking rocks I spent on a carton of Fortune cigarettes and five bottles of San Miguel gin in town. In those days, nobody cared how old you were when you wanted to buy alcohol and tobacco. I sold these goods to the men building the classroom and made about P10 profit on every item.
My small business was thriving, but it didn’t last long because I spent the capital on new clothes and school supplies for the school year. Sadly, although we had a new school classroom in time for classes, the education authorities never supplied us with a teacher. The classroom has stayed empty to this day!
Even so, along with all the other children in the village, we managed to finish school. I graduated in 2012 with a BS in Development Communications degree from Kalinga State University, and am currently an enlisted servicewoman in the Philippine Air Force, AFP, ranked Air Woman First Class.
On reflection, I realized that there was so much to tell about those days in the village. So, I decided to write my own story about life in the 1990s growing up there. I compiled the stories into a book, Stories from Kalinga: Memoir of a Village Girl, and I self-published it in 2024. It’s composed of 20 stories that tell of a vanishing past, our path to modernity, our struggles to survive and how our communally shared values and culture created our character and identity. Most importantly, the stories explore the wisdom, depth, warmth, and inherent traditional knowledge of our indigenous communities. The book was selected by Brylle Suralta of Esquire Magazine as one of his top 25 favorite Filipino books for 2024.
But I had more to tell. I also wrote and self-published a collection of folktales that were told often in the evenings in the community during my childhood in the time before TV. I called my second book, Folktales from a Kalinga Village. The book is a grantee of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts Competitive Grants Program 2025.
Both works were displayed in the Philippines pavilion at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2024 in Frankfurt, Germany.
I write to inspire others to share their stories, to enrich the Kalinga culture and traditions, especially the values that we need to pass on to younger and future generations.
My ultimate aim is to build a new classroom with a library in our village so that the children need not walk one hour each way to school.
This March, I will publish my third book, a collection for children that brings to print the real-life conditions and experiences shared by millions of rural Filipinos who remember how things were in generations past.
I will have an official booth for my works at the Philippine Book Festival on March 13-16, 2025, at the Megatrade Hall, SM Megamall.
For copies of the book, I have a Facebook page called BREWtiful Jo, dedicated to my love of my people and the local coffee, where readers can place orders. – Rappler.com