our island home
In past years this is the time when wonder | wander | women usually fly back to spend the holidays in our home island of Negros, in the Philippines.
As we prefer not to risk it in these COVID times, we are made acutely aware of what we are missing. Fortunately, a new website launched recently, highlights major Negrosanon arts and cultures, heritage and handicrafts, people and food.
The Negros Season of Culture is a celebration of our cultural traditions as expressed in various art forms and conveniently accessible online. Feeding our nostalgia with all its featured comfort food and revisited landscapes — we are nourished and sustained.
It includes many of our comfort food, which they have truly raised to an art form in our hometown. Where we gather around the table to share our stories as we trade recipes and secret tidbits.
The site is a messaging platform to tell our story, showcase our rural landscape, and open doors to our local heritage homes — to share and enjoy with the rest of the world.
Back in colonized times all one had to do was ride a horse from dawn until dusk and all the land covered became the individual’s property. Along with all the local structures, people and animals living on the land at the time.
Many records were lost during the occupation and destruction that transpired on our island during the second world war. While we have our previous generation of elders around, they can still recount lost histories for us.
We recently unearthed an old family tree that was commissioned in 1964. Though our family has expanded at least ten times over in the years, it is a wonderful reminder of our roots and lineage.
It only starts with our great-grandfather and his spouse — who fathered 15 children — all raised by a wife who only birthed two of them herself. Lucky for us, she loved them all and raised each as her own.
Our paternal grandmother had ten children in turn, and our father is her fifth child and third son. At the young and tender age of six he was sent to school on another island together with an elder brother, as there was no acceptable educational institution where they lived then.
Gratefully he lived and prospered enough to generate his own family of six children in turn. We have now gone into the world to have families of our own too and continue on.
Then and now, these are our family, homeland, lineage and origins. Blood and bone, land and culture — we are them and they are us.
Originally published at https://wonderwanderwomen.blogspot.com.
