About Me

People laugh when I tell them that I am an Igorot.

I don't know why; but I guess the sound of my ethnicity is what drives people to laugh.

Do they even know what an Igorot looks like?

Most people think that Igorots are different from other Filipinos; that they have tails and that they live in tree houses.

At this computer age?

Even my grandfather didn't experience living in a tree house.  Yes, they had lived in huts but they didn't live in tree houses.

I have seen my grandfather wearing the G-string when I was a young girl and my mother and other women wearing the "Tapis", a wrap around native skirt.

My mother was that typical Igorot woman who walked with bare breasts around our house when we were kids.  That was in the year 1960s.

I was born 2 weeks before the Inaugural Address of Pres. John F. Kennedy.  That was almost sixty years ago.

But at that time, we lived in a two storey house with glass windows where we viewed the rich nature around us.

Except for the door that was moved to the front, this house which was once our house was a two-story house built with galvanized iron as roofing and lumber for the walls and flooring and with glass windows that allowed us to conveniently view the beautiful nature around. The house has two bedrooms, a sala, a porch that we called "balkon" and a kitchen. Half of the ground floor was utilized to conveniently store the "palay" or rice and other farm crops produced in the kaingin and rice terraces. The other half was where the piles of firewood and the mortar and pestle used for pounding rice were stacked. we were poor but we ate three square meals a day and had a nice dwelling over our heads. 

This is Tadian Central School, the school where I finished my elementary grades. With just a few renovations, it looked just like how it used to be during my elementary days.

Tadian School of Arts and Trades. This building used to be the academic subject's building when I was in high school. There are many other bigger buildings around the area and the school is now a Polytechnic College that produced many great professionals working around the globe.

My rearing was just like the traditional way Filipinos rear their kids.  I grew up climbing the mountains, climbing the guava trees, mango trees, and pine trees.  I experienced being whipped at the bottom when I did something wrong and I played with mud, leaves and empty cans from the streets.

From childhood, I always thought I'd write a book.  My thoughts were always filled with so many things.  Stories that were too long for a young girl to write always sprouted in my mind.  The rain was my silent company in the afternoons by our window.  From there, I would create stories in my mind and ended the late afternoon fully satisfied with what I had done.  Making stories is just like playing to me when I was a little girl.  I remembered my other elder sister who was also a good storyteller.  Perhaps we inherited it from our father who was a very good storyteller.

I have always dreamed of becoming someone else in the future to fight for my people who are always discriminated and looked down, even in my country.  Unfortunately, I haven't achieved many of my dreams; though I am still lucky to have found my place in the writing world where I could freely express how I feel as an Igorot.

I  had my shares of disappointments when I stepped college.  I studied in another town where Igorots that time was looked down like different people.  Discrimination in my own country was something I never thought would happen in my life.  There I was, a young woman with only a few friends because I was an Igorot.  I didn't understand why. 

Truly, it’s not a sin to be born a cultural minority.  But some people seem to miss the point that we are all created equals and for as long as nobody is hurting and abusing no one; everything would be all right.

I have come to believe that this world is full of people who either refuse to look around and see what’s real or too trusting of themselves and think that they know better and live better lives than others.  Well, I’ll excuse them.   But they should know better next time.

Being an Igorot became an obstacle that was so hard to hurdle when I was still studying.  There was discrimination everywhere and I hated it.

This is my blog and whatever I write comes from my opinions and has nothing to do with other people's opinions.  Feel free to comment.
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