By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
I express my sympathies to the Aoas Family and the Basao Tribe on the passing of the Rev. Luis L. Aoas. That he can no longer take part in the life of the Kalinga community makes his passing not just a loss of the Aoas Family and of the Basao Tribe, but that of the entire province. To the numerous people whose lives he had touched in his several capacities specially those who were honored with his friendship just like me, the loss is profoundly personal.
But while he may no longer be with us, his body of work and legacy shall serve as a challenge and an inspiration to work harder or a rebuke depending on how we stand on the various advocacies and principles he had stood for and the quality of our work. For me, one of his most admirable traits was when he took on cause, he gave it his all and had no patience nor respect for the half-hearted or those who merely go through the motions. It can be said of him that his causes were his life.
As a consequence of that mindset, from my own point of view, Pastor was among those who contributed the most to the cause of peace in the province in the last two decades. It is hard for anyone to match the number hours he had spent and the amount of energy he poured into effort to limit as much as possible conflict specially among the Kalinga tribes and that was true even while his health had began to fail. And that’s not to speak of his personal material resources which he freely invested in the pursuit.
Likewise, the sincerity of his motives is unquestioned as it was very clear that for him, the attainment of peace was not a means to any other goal but the end in itself. When I interviewed him in 2001 while he was the main official peacemaker of the province as executive vice chairman of the Executive Council for Tribal Affair, Peace and Development, the then provincial government’s answer to the then rampant tribal violence, Pastor had confided that some people doubted the motives of his peacemaking efforts suspecting that he had an eye on politics.
The doubters were soon silenced as elections passed without him running but with his peacemaking services remaining uninterrupted. According to his wife Manang Vicky (Victoria), over the years, there were people who had urged him to throw his hat into the ring but he always declined saying that holding a position in government would limit his freedom and effectivity in his work.
Furthermore, his passion for peace was among the main considerations he turned down the standing opportunity to live in the US. Manang Vicky said that during the several times they vacationed with the family of their nurse daughter Stephanie, Pastor had many complaints about life in the US including the cold weather and the different food but over and above his inability to adjust to the US setting, he missed the activity and the challenge of finding the solutions to feuds and hopefully, to bring about permanent peace in the province. He had accepted that the work was not yet done leaving him no choice but to come home.
During the above-cited interview in 2001, he had regretted that Kalingas are set apart from other people by their vindictiveness and their practice of sin of one, sin of all. He had said: “The flaw in the Kalinga character which offsets his good qualities is his obsession with revenge. The moment something happens to a member of the tribe, he could think of nothing but retaliation. Other people also avenge but the Kalingas are different in that they avenge the sin of Juan on any member of his tribe. Most Kalingas do not want this but are prisoners of an age-old practice.”
He had added then: “An avenger is not really motivated by sympathy for the victim but by tribal pride. It is a disgrace to the tribe not to avenge it suffers from outsiders. This is something I still cannot fully understand.”
Happily, however, Pastor had lived to see the slow but progressive weakening of the practice as in recent years, there were already instances when even the fiercest tribes have become open to amicably settling violent incidents which in the past would have automatically sparked tribal wars.**(To be continued)
