By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
Like so many others, me and my older sister on my mother side were born in Besao, Mountain Province. We both finished elementary in the public school there . There after my sister went to Baguio City fo finish her high school in one of the many private high schools catering to the burgeoning education needs of fellow Igorots who were migrating to the city. Ten years after her, I followed the path she took to go to a high school in the city.
After high school, my sister wanted to go to a school of nursing. Problem was the Baguio General Hospital school of nursing was already closed to enrollees and the nearest such government school to the Cordillera was the Quezon Memorial School of nursing in Lucena, Quezon Province.
How far was that? You traveled to Manila which took a whole day, then to Laguna where San Pablo City was, then you went even further to Lucena which was not yet a city then. It was a whole day travel by bus from Manila to get there.
She was graduated from there sometime in 1968.
In my case, in 1972, after finishing high school in our village to where I went back to after three years of high school in Baguio City. Going back was the solution to my having become a professional truant during my junior year in high school in the city.
Then I was lured to go to UP Los Banos, Laguna for college. In a way, I followed the footsteps of my older sister to the Southern Tagalog areas.
We are only two siblings on our mother side, both born in Besao, Mountain Province, which borders Abra.
Reminiscing our past, why did we end up in the Southern Tagalog area? All the way from the most remote part of Mountain Province where head hunters used to roam? In a way, we were lucky. My sister now and her family are settled in Canada, after coming from other foreign places, contributing to the international Filipino diaspora.
In my case, our beloved Philippines is the only country I had ever been to. While there had been offers to go abroad to work as a lawyer, I was never interested for various reasons including my aversion to the prospect of having to live in a foreign land.
So, like for so many others, the question keeps coming back, why did we leave the place where we were born to take root in other far places?
While I roamed so many places in the Philippine, why did I come back to the Cordillera when I could have easily settled in one of the islands of Mindanao, or the Visayas, or Metro Manila?
The only reason I could think of is karma. Deep in the distant past, there must be some scores to be settled between me and the this region and some of the people here.
I have heard of so many accounts of some spiritual gurus who could mentally send people back thousands of years ago into their past lives where they could even see the reasons why they got sick of this or that, or why they met their wives or partners in life.
While I would like to meet someone like that to bring me so many years into the distant past, I would not like to find out that “I was only dreaming for there was a guard and a sad old padre.” But certainly, I would still like to see again some of the green grass of home.**
