Native kindness

[caption id="attachment_835" align="aligncenter" width="414" caption="The man in black on the left is Datu Mamayas"][/caption]

“Travel,” Mark Twain wrote, “is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

That we need to travel to unlearn our prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness is true. I've proven this to myself some years back when my classmates and I went to Sitio Namnam, a place situated deep into the hinterlands of East Marahan, Marilog District.

For someone like me who lives in the city, I only have little knowledge on the indigenous people. What do they look like in person? How do they live? What language do they use when speaking?

Most of my knowledge on them merely came from a lesson I learned when, in my first year in high school, we studied, almost perfunctorily, the history of Davao and the different natives living here.

But the times we spent among the Matigsalug in Sitio Namnam enabled me to acquire what Mark Twain called "broad, wholesome, charitable views of men…,” or something close to that.

It was not by sheer accident that we found ourselves in the company of the natives. The airplane we were riding didn’t crash into a secluded place and we, wounded and all, were rescued by the good-hearted natives. No, it didn't happen to us. That is the stuff movies like “Castaway” is made of.

We went there to have our fieldwork for our Anthropology class, in the hope that we could learn as many things as possible overnight. There were seven of us, three girls and four boys. Yet none of us exactly knew just what awaited us, except that we were to interview the Matigsalug, the indigenous people who have been living there since the beginning of the 19th century.

I was very anxious even before the trip. Will the natives treat us nicely? Are they savage? My anxiety was even amplified when I remembered a story I read in Fr. Miguel Bernad’s book, “The Great Island: Studies in the Exploration and Evangelization of Mindanao.” In the centuries now past, the story went, the Bagobo who lived near Mount Apo, the highest mountain in the Philippines, used to offer human sacrifices.

“Each year at stated intervals or whenever there was any calamity, public or private, or when they had to approach the mountain,” Fr. Bernad wrote, “they would placate the wrath of Mandarangan [the god of gore] with the blood of a human victim, usually a slave whom they had captured or brought from the Sarangani Bay area.”

When we arrived in the place and came face-to-face with the Chieftain, however, my anxiety waned. The Chieftain, Datu Mamayas, was gentle, soft-spoken, and accommodating—a far cry from the image I conceived.

We were indeed well-received in the place. When the son of Datu Mamayas, Fernando, found out that we would be staying overnight and that we didn’t bring a tent, he offered us the vacant classroom he’s charged to look after.

The following morning, unable to find firewood, one of my companions asked a man who was standing across the classroom and sipping his coffee, where can he find firewood.

“Firewood?” the man said. “I have plenty. Just wait.”

The man went inside his house and came back bringing plenty of firewood. He could have led my companion to where he could find plenty of firewood, but he did not. He offered instead his own, which he could use in the future.

I seldom see such acts of kindness in the city where men sometimes poison each other for a knot of banana. But with the people living in the countryside, away from the oftentimes viral influences of urban life, it is as if kindness is the most natural thing for them to do.