Yagting Connection

When I was in Banton last Holy Week, I did a preventive maintenance to our personal computer. As I was scanning  all the files, a filename tunggo.doc caught my attention. I opened it and I found out that it is a poem encoded by my mother – huh! She knows now how to operate the PC using Microsoft Word. It is a beautiful poem with personal touch and one of the many Bantoanon poems she had written. Below is the poem describing Bantoanons’ virtue of frugality and ingenuity.

For our text generation youths here is an added trivia about tunggo.  It is an irregularly shaped naturally formed concave in a flat-surface rock – prevalent or trademark of Banton – that can hold sufficient amount of water good for household consumption. Usually the smaller tunggo can collect rainwater more or less ten liters and the bigger ones can collect many gallons. When I was a child, I used to float paper boats in my grandmother’s tunggo in Guyangan. She had four tunggos that can collect rainwater suitable for a week’s consumption. Water then in Guyangan was as precious as matchstick and kerosene. When there is no rain you have to fetch water one kilometer away to our open well in Sitio Bugo, Barangay Toctoc. Just imagine how our ancestors living in Guyangan survived when the island was hit by a year long drought.  During those times there were no plastic containers for fetching water. The mode of fetching water was by bamboo pole usually five to six feet in length and six inches in diameter.  The way of the cross was literally carried on by them in another fashion – the way of the bamboo pole - an uphill climb not just for a day but for the whole span of their lives.

Going back to tunggo, do you know that not only our ancestors depended on this natural rain collector but also animals and birds? From the smallest mosquitoes to birds especially the crow to the water consuming beasts like cows and carabaos – they are also aware of existing tunggos in a particular place. So what our forefathers did, they fenced the surroundings to protect the tunggos from these animals. Nevertheless, the crow will always be farmers’ enemy number one. In the cornfields it is annoying, much so in the barn when the hen had a week-old hatchlings, and more, as a partaker of tunggo water. Ever heard of an idiomatic expression – ligong uwak?

I had the opportunity or shall I call it an ethnic privilege to taste and drink a natural mineral water fetched from a tunggo. Even though I personally float  paper boats in it, it is only peanuts compared to all the foreign materials floating above, swimming and crawling underwater sans the decaying leaves fallen from trees. Name it you have it: tadpoles – anyway this is an exotic delicacy when it becomes a matured frog; beetles, house lizards – anyway these can be found in tuba untold by mayanggiteros and unminded by tuba drinkers; mosquito wrigglers – just an ordinary thing for barrio folks, during those times there was no dengue fever; earthworms – not as nasty as you think, it is used as substitute for meat nowadays; fallen feathers of birds – no worry, I never heard of a bird’s flu epidemic in the island. For all these creatures that depend on tunggo water and co-exist with our forefathers, still they are an envy to me (our forefathers not the creatures).  They lived a long life as attested by our grandparents who are still alive today in Banton. Do you have grandparents in their sixties or seventies? Ask them about tunggo, pasok, panligis, sagurang, tikudan and many more. These are the things of the past yet very dear to them. As my mother calls it - katumoy it pangabuhian – companions in life

Picture
courtesy of Faigao Museum,
Banton, Romblon