And then the sun rises on another day. I’ve been here several days now, and since it’s rained almost every day, the sun’s appearance certainly lightens the day in more sense than one.

Here’s the view from my window:

After my first day, I decided to go explore some more. I spent some time with my host, Dal, who shared a lot about her personal history as an Ifugao woman. Her family owned the rice terraces that were cleared for the Inn I’m staying at for now. It was wonderful to chat with her over a cup of “coffee” (Filipino coffee is a Nescafe blend of dried coffee, creamer and sugar) and hear about her family’s story.

Here’s an excerpt of my chat with her.

Dal has three children under her care, one of which is Kevin, who is adopted. He was actually a love-child between two adults that her father knew—they were working in a province different from their families, and so the families never found out. The mother took medication to try to abort him, but it didn’t work. Ultimately, the parents put him in an orphanage (I think) and Dal’s father took him in. He has a weakness for adopted children since he was one himself. When he was a child, his mother died in childbirth. Since it’s considered a bad omen to have a child in the family that killed its mother, Dal’s father, Moises, was placed in an orphanage, and later adopted by Dal’s Lola (grandmother). Dal’s father gave the child to Dal to take care of.

Here's Kevin: I asked Dal where the kids were, and she said they were all upstairs sleeping. “Alitheya is upstairs. She keeps brushing her brother’s eyes to get him to wake up but he just pushes her away and goes back to sleep.”
"Is Kevin up there too?” I asked. She nodded. “Does he know that he’s adopted?” I whispered.
She shook her head: “No, he doesn’t know. But he was calling my father Lolo (grandfather), because he heard the other children calling him that. And he was calling me mama too, but I recently taught him to call me manang, which means older sister (like Ate in Tagalog).”
“So will you raise Kevin till he’s an adult?”
She laughed uncomfortably and shook her head. “I don’t know. You see, he is a really energetic boy. They (the elders in their community) think that he is taking the appetite away from my son. You see Moises (her son) hardly eats anything and he’s kind of weak; he has asthma. So, the elders said that he needs to sleep separately from my children. You see, they believe that when children are close in age like they are (Aletheya is 4, Kevin 3, and Moises 2), that they shouldn’t always sleep under the same roof at night. During the day is okay, but at night, no.”
“Why’s that?”
“They believe that Kevin has a stronger blood than my own children. So, if he sleeps with the children at night, he will take their energy away, esp. Moises who has weaker blood. The mumbaki, the local priest, said that we need to keep the children separate at night. So, we moved him into Ate Pinai’s room (her mother) where he sleeps at night, usually. But they can play together during the day and it’s okay.”
“Have you noticed an improvement?”
She laughed again, her eyes wide, and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know! Maybe it’s psychological. But I think maybe it is working. But it’s not just this way with Kevin, there are other rules about this. For example, Beng’s children could sleep and live with us under the same roof because she’s my sister. But my cousin’s children couldn’t. That is also why Kevin needs to stay under another roof.”
She continued. “It’s also an issue because Kevin has so much energy. I complain to my mother sometimes because I can’t complain to my father—he’s too sensitive about the adoption issue. But Kevin is really difficult. I tell her: I am so busy. I hardly have enough time for my own children and the inn, and now I have to take care of Kevin too. This is part of the reason why we have a helper. She spends time with him a lot. He needs a lot of attention.”
Later that morning, I went to my room to write. Kevin came into my apartment with an inflatable Superman and a stick and didn’t want to leave. When I asked him to come back later, he went to my window and started bobbing a thin bamboo reed along the horizon line, finally shoving the reed into the window and onto my computer. Then I shut the window and he took his Superman and bobbed it along the window’s base—I could hear him giggling. He started kicking my door. Then he threw a shoe at the window. Finally I walked Kevin back to Dal’s house and told her what was going on, laughing. Later she told me: “I think maybe the medication his mother took affected him. I think he is ADHD, maybe.

Picture of a local house: “I didn’t used to follow my traditions so much, you know. I used to think they were really impractical. I would ask my mom: Why do we have to kill a chicken for this situation? [It’s common to kill a chicken or slaughter a pig for every ritual.] It seemed like a waste. But once I had a child, and we did some of the pregnancy rituals, and once I lived here for 5 years observing the traditions every day, I began to change my mind. For example, my baby (Aletheya) was very sick when she was born. So, the mumbaki came and did a ritual with her, and eventually I started to see an improvement.
“The Ifugao have traditions for everything. Yesterday a neighbor nearly avoided an accident. So, since he survived his family is having a thanksgiving party to thank his ancestors.” That explained the squealing pig noises I’d heard the evening before from Dal’s kitchen.
“Also our marriages are different. In your culture, when a man and woman get married they tell everyone. But here, we have a ritual first. They slaughter a pig and then the mumbaki looks at the pig’s bile. If it’s on the right (correct) side, then the couple can stay together. If not, they wait awhile and then butcher another pig. If it’s still not on the right side, then they advise the couple to separate and to not get married. They could have problems down the road like maybe they will split up in a year or something. Same thing with pregnancies; we do a ritual to figure out if it will be a difficult pregnancy or not. We have a ritual for every part of the rice season, for when we put the grain in the granary, to when we remove it. When we plant it and when we harvest it. When we build an addition to the house we have a ritual. If we don’t and there is some kind of landslide that ruins the house, an elder will say: ‘See you should have done a ritual. That is why this happened!’

Here's the Ilob Village Hotel:
“Our house was built on my family’s rice terraces. So, whenever we destroyed some of the rice terrace, we have a ritual to ask forgiveness for destroying the land that they cultivated for hundreds of years.”
I talked for a bit about how important I think the Ifugao are for Westerners. I mentioned that while Westerners are very advanced technologically, the Ifugao (and Filipinos in general) are advanced in some of their values, especially their recognition of the importance of family and community.

Dal responded: “I think that our community and ritual are very related. When we have a ritual, the mumbaki asks all of our ancestors to join us. He is responsible for remembering the genealogy of all of our loved ones. In other towns, people don’t know their genealogy so well because they don’t have the mumbaki who recorded it for them. So, when we practice ritual we ask our ancestors to help and guide us. We invoke them into every ritual we do. I used to not agree with this, but I think it is a good thing to ask our ancestors for help. I think it’s a good thing to continue practicing our traditions. Even if we do kill a pig or chicken every time, we eat it, though we give a share of it to the mumbaki. But it never goes to waste. So, why not practice the traditions? My mother is passing them onto me, and I am passing them onto my children too.”

Here's me in a totally unrelated picture: The view from the Banaue Hotel