What I wanted to do while in Mindanao was
to take pictures:
A man standing on the curb of a busy street,
the sunset and a mosque somewhere behind him;
a shiny red umbrella left open and alone on
a spot of very green grass; a child's plastic
toy shovel, stuck on a destroyed sand castle
on the beach.
All these the news camera guy described as
"very National Geographic." Or as I want
to call them, rejects from photography
class.
My first full day out on research, it poured.
We were in Polomolok, in South Cotabato--
land of Norberto Manero, brain eater;
resting ground for MILFs, MNLFs, NPAs and
all other manners of acronyms whose meanings
I don't fully understand. All around us were
mountains, and huge open fields of cogon,
coconuts, empty plains. And though it was
raining, my shirt stuck to my skin drenched
with sweat. We encountered a middle-aged lady
whose idea of assistance was to have 30 pages
of public domain documents sorted and xeroxed,
each page stamped and signed with her slow,
slow hands. It took her 3 hours. I felt a battle ax
lodged on my forehead.
The following days I left my camera in the hotel.
We did a story on a group of streetchildren,
dubbed in those parts as the tun-og, or morning
dew. These kids as young as 8 or 9 roamed the
streets at night, hanging by the beach, peddling
their bodies for small change, a cup of coffee,
a hot meal, a quick fix of hardware shop rugby.
On idle moments, they comforted each other in
abandoned boat sheds by the creek, and in the
process giving each other STDs. All these at
age 9.
The tun-og belong to different gangs with names
like Utol Sama Ka Hanggang sa Sementeryo--Brother, Accompany Me to Our Grave--and Spice Girls Unite. We asked them to show us where they hung out. We were lead to the very end of a dike's walkway.
Going there was a balance between not falling
and not breathing. On the edge of the walkway
were rows and rows of human waste drying out under the sun. The villagers must have had nowhere
else to run and pulled down their pants and
pushed. Each time the breeze blew in from the
creek, I felt a churning down in the pit of my
stomach. Half a mile. Under the scorching sun.
Half a mile the relentless stink of human decay.
These are unphotographable.
In my last day, I had a whole roll of film left.
I took pictures inside our hotel rooms, on the
shore going to the pretty "island garden city"
of something, and everyone posed merrily under
colorful, breeze-thrown strips of cloth, at the
airport while we waited to be transported back
to our paltry boring mundane lives. These were
quite easy to take: point, click, shoot. We
shopped for bolts of cloth and purses and stinky
spiky fruits that can't be found anywhere
back in our city. We planned to come back, because
we hadn't really seen much of the place. We
could do something for those kids.
Yeah, I said. We must come back, I haven't
taken any National Geographic pictures yet.
Everything was unphotographable.
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