Saturday, May 20, 2017

Taong Bundok Charity Climb May 13, 2017

On May 13, 2017, we joined the Taong Bundok Mountaineering Club to provide school supplies to students from the Dumagat Tribe in Sitio Kabuoan, Brgy Puray, Montalban Rizal.  This is one of the several small communities of this tribe in the mountains of Rizal in the Philippines.  Our purpose is to connect with the people in the communities where we hike.  We want to give back to the communities who have allowed us to enjoy their beautiful surroundings.

To get to Kabuoan from our home in Binan, Laguna, we left at 2:00 a.m. and arrived at 3:00 a.m. to meet our fellow mountaineers at the Jollibee in Cubao.  This is a fast food restaurant in a huge wet market in Manila about an hour from our house.  There are several Jollibees in this complex, so I roamed through the market in the middle of the night as trucks full of giant tuna, other fish and vegetables were being delivered. The butchers were busy slicing up whole pigs in preparation for the big market day.  After checking out one Jollibee, I finally found the right one in an adjacent building.  After rounding up my family, we quickly ate breakfast, bought some chicken for lunch and joined the group.

From Cubao we drove about 1.5 hours to where most of the group abandoned the hired vans and got into small three wheeled motorcycles called tricycles for the next leg of the trip.  We continued in our SUV to the next stop where we registered. At this point, we parked our car and got into one of the tricycles (or as the group called them a “habai habal” ), which is a motorcycle with what could be called a side car.  In this case the side car was a metal cage with two boards put across so four people could sit down. The main job of these vehicles is to transport charcoal and wood out of the mountains. So five of us, plus the driver, took off in this contraption powered by a small cc motorbike.  We bounced for about 45 minutes on dirt roads through a couple of streams and through small rural communities along the road.  The ride was rough and tough on the bottom, as the seats were hard and the road full of deep ruts.  

We finally arrived at the last motorized stop that our bike driver felt comfortable taking us.  We joined our group and walked for another 30 to 45 minutes to the small village of Kabuoan where we would have our distribution of school supplies.  We had supplies for about 70 children, but it was evident that more kids had arrived from the bush than we had school supplies.  We were about 52 volunteers organized into about 4 groups including school supplies, games, publicity and documentation, and cooking team.  Lenore, Katyann and I were on the school supply team.  We got to work organizing the school supplies while the other groups prepared for their task.

The Dumagat tribes are native filipino people who originally lived in the lowlands but migrated to the mountains due to pressure from more aggressive migrants.  Most of the people live in traditional nipa huts made from palm leaves and bamboo.  The Dumagat seem to have very little documented social structure and according to wikipilipinas (http://en.wikipilipinas.org/index.php?title=Dumagat), they tend to move on or split up when conflicts arrive.  Most work for low wages and support their families through hunting and day labor which has become more and more difficult to procure.  The areas that we have visited in Rizal are well deforested.  Even the rivers show few signs of sufficient fish to maintain even a small population.  These people are primarily nomadic, but as their area of habitation gets smaller and smaller, they are have been forced to settle into more permanent communities. On our hike, we saw many carrying out lumber or charcoal from deep in the mountains.  From places even farther in than what we were able to visit.

Although most people in urban areas speak some English, I found that most of the people in Kabuoan did not.  Most of my interaction with the Dumagat were with the children.  They were very interested in me and seemed very affectionate.  I noticed that if I sat down and given the chance children would sit next to me and lean on me or rest there hand on my shoulder in a very friendly and familiar way.  The mothers would let us hold their babies.  Along the public road it was not uncommon to see the mothers breast feeding their babies as the family picked nits out of each other's hair.  I assume that they appreciated our efforts although I noted that it seemed that they were primarily spectators to our efforts. 

I didn’t see many if any of the community members getting involved in delivering our project.  I don’t know what their perspective is on our assistance. The motivation of our group stems from the fact that we love to be in the mountains.  We realize that our presence impacts the residents and we want to be a positive part of the communities where we hike.  Helping children with school supplies should be a great cause.  Since I am not part of the organizers, I do not know what the role of the community was in planning our event.  They seemed very happy that we were there.  Our efforts were focused on the children but we also provided food for everyone.  We brought used clothes that were mainly for children but also some adult clothes.  As our group efforts develop, it will be interesting to see if we can forge partnerships with these communities that can result in protecting the natural environment and encouraging development in a way that also supports efforts to reforest these mountains as well as provides some kind of organic support for the people who live in these mountains.  

The main organizer and visionary who provides these great experiences is Aris Olea.  He is a multimedia specialist during the week and mountaineer, environmentalist, community service specialist extraordinaire.  I asked him how he got started in all these great projects and he replied:

The reason that I have climbed my first mountain is because of a heartbreak. I was about to marry someone (which is my girlfriend for 6 six years that time) when suddenly she broke up with me and decided to marry someone else. I was so devastated and didn't know what to do. My world literally crashed in front of me to the point that I even got tired of breathing.

Then a friend of mine got worried and decided to trick me in climbing Mt.Daraitan. He said that it's just a "walk in the park" and I can shout all my frustrations and pain at the top of the mountain. So I said yes to his invitation... not knowing that 95% of the trails are assault (60-80° slope). I was in bed for two days cursing my friend after that. But it was really an amazing experience. I get to release all my tension and stress when I'm on the top and even though I told to myself that I will never going to try that again, after just a few weeks... there's this strange feeling which they say that it was the mountain that is calling... and I must go.

I got hooked with the thrill and experience. For my initial years of climbing, I was able to climb 13 mountains which is not bad for a 120kgs guy like me. But someone teased me that he has climbed 22, so I challenged myself to climb at least 24 summits/peak in a year. I was able to do 25 last 2016. That was my first new year's resolution that I was able to complete and it felt so good.

Then from there, I asked myself, "so what's next?". I don't usually climb a mountain once I have gone there already, because what's the point of going back? What would be the purpose? And so the #ClimbWithAPurpose was created.”  (Aris Olea)


“Climb with a Purpose” is the slogan and reason behind Taong Bundok.  I am proud to play a small part in these great activities.  Enjoy the photos! Mike Baldwin