Jegs and I had been thinking of
revisiting Batanes, and this was made more urgent by two reasons. First, Jegs is working on her PhD
dissertation in environmental science and she has decided to do research on
ecotourism in Batanes. Second, the High
School Class of 1963 had been planning to celebrate its golden anniversary as
graduates of the Batanes High School; I was invited Graduation Speaker by the
Batanes National Science High School and by the Batanes State College.
My high school classmate, Eddie Puño,
was organizing and coordinating the subevents relative to the second reason
that’s why said events came to be. He
asked me to be present in the homecoming of BHS Class 1963 but I told him I
needed more reason to come home to Batanes.
He told our classmates to think of some kind of “work” that they would
assign to me while in Basco. Therefore,
Eddie came up with this idea of finding out if the BNSHS would want to invite
me to be Graduation Speaker since I would be coming home as a Golden
Jubillarian of BHS, the forerunner of BNSHS.
He also mentioned to the Batanes State College that I would be around
during the last two weeks of March 2013 so may be they should find out if I
would agree to be their Graduation Speaker.
I’d say, Eddie did a fine job on these.
So Jegs and I booked (online) our
flight to Basco. I didn’t realize it has
become very expensive to get to Batanes.
We paid P33T for the two of us for roundtrip flights, and this didn’t
include inland expenses for two weeks in Batanes.
We got to Basco at 7:00 a.m. March 18th. We were a bit tired because we had to leave
Los Baños 2:30 a.m. to catch our flight at 5:30a.m. (which was actually 6:30), so
we took a quick nap when we got to Brandon’s Lodging, where we were to stay the
whole time. It was so nice getting to
sleep with windows open because of the very comfortable ventilation (cool air
circulation in the room). Even outdoors
was cool and comfortable. In the
afternoon we walked around town a bit then proceeded to the capitol building
where we had brief chat with Governor Vic Gato and provincial tourism officer
Gel Valones.
The Governor was supposed to have
flown to Tuguegarao, noon today (18th), on his way to Ilagan in
Isabela, to attend the meeting of the Regional Development Council of Region 2,
but the airplane he was supposed to ride, when it arrived earlier in the
morning, developed mechanical problem in its landing gear, so it didn’t fly out
of Basco anymore. This provided us with
the opportunity to formally discuss with the Governor the research project Jegs
was undertaking and find out if the provincial government could provide some
sort of assistance. The Governor said he
was willing to provide some assistance (such as transport while we went from
possible ecotourism site to another making evaluations), but clarified that he
could not commit any provincial funds because the province did not have funds
for this purpose and it was election time and he didn’t like to commit
financial resources the action of which could be misinterpreted by political
foes.
***
By the way, it’s an interesting
phenomenon that a seating governor, who has always been working in
collaboration with the current Congressional Representative, is running as an
independent while the seating Congressional Representative has withdrawn
support for him. This seems a significant
issue Ivatans are concerned about, my fellow Golden Jubillarians of BHS are
telling me. They pointed out to me that
the Governor used to support the Representative of Batanes, twice in fact and
in both cases the Representative won.
Now that same Representative has withdrawn support to Gov. Gato and
shifted that support to a lady candidate who, a few months earlier promised
publicly, through radio broadcasts, that she would never run for governor
against Gov. Gato. The grapevine among
Ivatans in Metro-Manila with whom I’ve had accidental contacts recently say the
current Representative has withdrawn support for the governor because “he’s old,”
which people say is a ridiculous reason.
I’m not making any personal statements about this, though, except to say
that even politics in Batanes has become a bit unpleasant. I hope the Ivatans are reading these
signals more accurately.
***
Anyway, back to Jegs’ research mission
on Batan Island. The week before the
Holy Week, Jegs has scheduled FGDs with respondents from various sectors. We’ve done some reconnoitering to identify
the places we’d visit and evaluate more thoroughly next week.
We’ll be doing simple inventorying of
plant species along routes to and possible ecotourism sites on Batan
Island. I believe I still know the local
names of most of the plant species, but I have forgotten their scientific names. We’ll have to do creative pictorial
documentation so that we could ask taxonomists at UPLB to help provide the
scientific names. It’s unfortunate that
the DENR here in Batanes does not have taxonomists, and said office doesn’t
have an updated inventory of plant species on the islands.
***
My main chores in Basco were to
address the graduating classes of the Batanes National Science High School
(March 20), and the Batanes State College (March 23). I met a lot of young men and women in those
two graduating classes. Of course, these
guys didn’t know me personally. But some
of their grandparents were my classmates in high school.
An interesting phenomenon I learned
was that some of those graduating from BSC came from other provinces such as
Cagayan, and even as far as Agusan del Sur in Mindanao. There were about seven of these
students. When I asked the President of
the BSC Alumni Association, he informed me that those were actually hired as
household helpers from other provinces but who studied at the same time while
being household helpers. I was informed
that Ivatans no longer want to be hired as household helpers. They have become the hirers rather than the hires.. The interesting thing in this phenomenon is
to find out if these are able to find jobs (most college graduates in the
country don’t get jobs the salary of which is commensurate with their training)
or do they simply go back to being household hands?
We capped the week by finishing off the activities (photo
documentation of plant species in the town of Basco) we have started in the
previous days.
###
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