Tectonic Blues

The recent magnitude 6.9 earthquake that hit Negros and Cebu islands in the Visayas and which caused several dozen deaths and extensive infrastructure damage has forced many people here in Lianga to rethink and reevaluate their community's vulnerability to a calamity of a similar nature happening here.

Lianga, in living memory, has not been the victim of a major earthquake or any of its attendant destructive effects like tsunamis and landslides.  Yet it is no stranger to smaller earth tremors and nary does a month go by here without at least one or two noticeable quakes being felt by the local population.  In the latter part of last year, a series of quakes, one of them measuring at least a magnitude 5, did shake up much of the province of Surigao del Sur and the Caraga region.  No major damage was, however, reported.

In the two decades I have resided in Lianga, I have personally experienced more than a couple of strong tremors at one time or the other.  Most involve just a sudden, unexpected shaking of the ground lasting a few seconds  or more.  A few were really strong quakes which rattled walls or toppled books and other knickknacks on shelves especially on the second floor of the house.  One or two of these, I could clearly recall, were preceded by a loud rushing, screeching sound like a runaway train locomotive passing by.

Corona's Travails

By some misguided sense of intellectual disdain and arrogance, I had automatically assumed that our household would be one among the few in Lianga who would spare the time (when they can) to tune in their television sets on most afternoons to the live coverage of the impeachment trial of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona which happens to be on its 14th day today.  Just by asking around, I learned, to my shame, that there are many individuals and even families, much more than few I had thought, who were interested enough to watch portions, if not the entirety, of the proceedings on an almost daily basis.

Of course, the reasons why people here are willing to spend hours watching legal experts argue legal questions and technicalities in what amounts to a quasi-judicial proceeding varies from person to person. The lawyers, would-be lawyers, and self-proclaimed legal pundits see the impeachment trial as a chance to observe the best legal minds in the country strut their stuff live on national television.  They revel in the legal posturing and maneuvering, the arcane technical language and procedures, and, most of all, in the thrusting and parrying of what can be seen as gladiatorial combat albeit on a more mental and logical level yet no less as fierce and deadly or as physically demanding as the original life and death contests of the ancient Roman arena.

The less legally attuned minds here are more fascinated by the high drama and spectacle of this event cut into daily episodes served piecemeal everyday like their favorite prime time telenovelas or television soap operas.  There is constant discussion and commentary on what can be seen and heard by the cameras - both inside and outside the Senate building,  All and everything are fertile subjects for discussion and criticism.

Flood Waters

If there ever was a clear, consistent memory I have of my childhood days in Lianga, it would have to be of how predictably rainy and stormy were the months of December and January. I can easily recall many instances when my siblings and I would be huddled together most of the time for days on end in the living room of the family house, shivering from the delicious cold despite having thick blankets wrapped around us while outside the tightly closed window shutters the winds howled madly and the rain poured down in vicious and seemingly never ending torrents.

During those days in the early 1970's and until just a couple of years ago, the primitive gravel roads and the wooden timber bridges that were the norm in this part of the country were extremely vulnerable to harsh weather conditions and floods.  That meant that travelling around the province and the region was not only hazardous but prone to long delays as excessive rainfall turned gravel roads to viscous mud traps and flash floods washed away bridges or caused landslides that would block critical road sections for days.

Going back to school in Cebu after the Christmas holidays at that time was, more often than not, a logistically troublesome and dicey proposition as well as mind-numbing, physically challenging ordeal.  Not only has one have to deal with flooded roads and washed out bridges but also with cancelled airplane flights and, if one really had no choice but to endure it, a wave tossed and stormy night at sea on-board any of the small inter-island ferry ships brave enough to make the sea crossing to the Visayas.

No Dingy, Little Town

A dingy, little town.  That was exactly, word for word, how a foreigner acquaintance of mine who was on a whirlwind tour of the Caraga region called Lianga when he passed by my town recently.  I stared at the e-mail on the computer screen and had almost made up my mind to reply with a blistering defense of my hometown when I decided to hold off for a moment and reflect for a moment if this visitor's description had any merit at all.

I have always considered Lianga to be quaintly beautiful in its own way, if not exactly picturesque (although many locals will certainly disagree with me on this point).  Like many truly old, coastal towns all over the country, its real charms are not patently or immediately obvious.  Its old houses and narrow streets do not come out well in most photographs.  "Just like another tired, third world, ramshackle town," wrote a reader of this blog from Europe not long ago after looking over some of my pictures of this town.

Lianga has to be experienced in order to be fully appreciated.  One has to walk its streets and alleyways, amble through its marketplace and public places, seek refuge in the blessed coolness of its lovely, old church, loiter in the rickety yet historied corridors of its schools or walk barefoot on its lovely beaches before the real magic sets in.  It is definitely not one of those touristy show towns where one glance is enough to convince a visitor to kick off his shoes, rush into sandals and shorts then start running for the nearest hotel resort.

Stormy Endings

December has always been traditionally considered a month for wet and stormy weather by the local people here in Lianga.  But as as 2011 drew to a close barely two weeks ago, we here had to admit that we did not expect the last month to be more stormy, in more ways than one, than we had bargained for.

First, Typhoon Sendong (international name Washii) caught us by surprise when it made landfall late afternoon on Dec. 16 near Hinatuan town on Surigao del Sur's southern tip. Hinatuan is just over an hour's drive from Lianga and the typhoon, packing winds of at least 60 kph near its center, struck our area hard just as dusk was gathering.  Power lines snapped and electric posts toppled over plunging much of the whole province into darkness.

Many coastal houses especially those built with light materials sustained damage and at least one motorized boat was reported missing at sea.  Last minute voluntary evacuation, however, by many local people living in coastal areas vulnerable to storm surges and heavy seas did prevent the great toll in human lives and massive damage to properties that the cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan would suffer later in that night.

Most Lianga residents were spared the worst of the gale force winds and flooding that ravaged many areas in Mindanao along the typhoon's track that veered north and west of Surigao del Sur.  For most of the local folks, the storm only inflicted the inconvenience of going through almost a day and a half without electricity, clean water and mobile telecommunications as all mobile cellphone service were cut off almost immediately during the initial onslaught of the storm.

Left Behind

Only in recent years has it become obviously and painfully clear to many of the people here in Lianga that that if there was one industry that could help the town lift itself out of years of economic apathy and stagnation, it would have to be foreign and domestic tourism. I remember just a few years ago one foreigner friend gazing in wonder at the thundering surf at one of the local beaches, his bare feet half buried in the white sand. "My God!" he exclaimed. "You live in a tropical paradise yet you don't make money out of it.  How can you all be so blind?" He then shook his head in exasperation and disbelief.

For decades now, town leaders here have looked towards some form of industrialization as Lianga's ticket to economic progress.  Memories of the heyday of the logging industry in the 1960's when the Lianga Bay Logging Company was the engine powering the town's then rapid growth and economic expansion remained obstinately fixed in their collective minds.  There were grandiose plans to reactivate the logging franchise which had folded up in the 1970's.  The plans included proposals for a seaport (two were built but both remained unused to this very day) which would hopefully turn Lianga into a shipping and marketing hub for this part of Mindanao.

None of these proposals in the wake of present day economic realities, despite all the rhetoric, effort and money wasted on them, amounted to anything significant and it was only recently when the obvious became, well, glaringly apparent.  Build on the town's strengths.  Capitalize on what it already has.  And what it had, by the grace of Mother Nature, were plenty of was white sand beaches and spectacular seascapes that local and foreign tourists could not get enough of.