Jagjag na?*

Ask anyone who had gotten back to Sulu, how is the old hometown? And they will tell you: Wayna. Jagjag na. Hopeless.

It is still my hometown, a middle-aged woman just home from the Middle East, said to Lunsad. She and her family lived for a little while in the KSA, he as an engineer, she as a nurse. Her husband has remained there, to make a little more money, she takes care of the three children now to study in a private grade school in Zamboanga. She is faring well, now with a nice house in the city and some savings in the bank. Her relatives back in Jolo are still there in Asturias, but cannot welcome them home in the islands. She is told not to go there, not even for a short vacation, they say there’s nothing to see there anymore. So for a couple of decades now, she has not stepped back on her hometown and it angers her so, she says, for even if she and her family were doing well abroad, Jolo is still her home; abroad and elsewhere she will always be a stranger and an exile.

Such stories, we can say, are found anywhere else in the country—the countryside being pillaged by politicians and businessmen, the heirs to the land and its workers and legitimate occupants nailed down in poverty or are forced to leave and find other shores. The better-off send their sons and daughters to the cities; the sons and daughters raise their own families in the cities. So what remains are less than what we all are and could be as a nation.

The more one sees of Jolo, the less one hopes. The food scarcity is at its worst. Talipao, the province’s food basket once, now tagged an Abu Sayyaf lair, is host to the military’s so-called surgical operation, making agricultural production next to impossible. The local town executives, with advise from the same military, has moreover imposed a curfew on the fishing villages. After eleven in the evening the fishermen could no longer fish. Eleven o’ clock is when the military deploy their spy planes. If one is sighted at sea or anywhere else outside of one’s house after eleven o’ clock, they are contraband and, ergo, open target.

The curfew, of course, only applies to small fishers. The trawlers scouring the deep are exempt. So are the helicopters nloading men and equipment for the ongoing oil drillings. Bud Datu, Bud Bagsak and Bud Tumatangis are now host to sophisticated, and strategically positioned, defense structures and facilities.

US military presence in the Sulu Islands is placed at around 200 GIs, excluding the engineering and medical divisions which have orders to stay in camp. In the Bud Datu base where around 50 GIs are housed, the military base is erected in what used to be burial grounds of Muslim missionaries. Massacres had been committed here as well. At present, the place has been virtually converted into a spa garden complete with sports facilities and state-of-the-art binoculars with separate quarters for Moro soldiers and women soldiers. On good days, prostitutes would be brought in, either from Manila or Zamboanga, sometimes aboard helicopters carrying the officers.

These American GIs take part not only in intelligence work but also in military combat. More importantly, they are there to secure the ongoing oil drillings in the islands. Now and then we get news from Jolo saying US soldiers died from malaria or from drowning when the truth is they actually died in encounters they are not supposed to take part in.

But of course, it is always easier to critique the world than to change it. And those of us who are stuck in the islands seeing it all and living it as well –including the flood, the water scarcity, the endless power interruptions, the thefts in the offices, the  insurmountability of it all-- have our one foot to the door. Surely, there is a better world elsewhere?

We each are either part of the problem, or part of the solution.

*In a complete state of ruin