A girl's long walk home

“What treasures do they hold then/that battalions pursue them in earnest?/ Do not look for treasures,sir, though they have girl-
children of long lashes…./Think instead of how and why there is pain, as children, tall as shrub of one rainfall, trigger the evening watch, gun in hand, a lantern dilating the dark../Think of yourself, my dear friend: profile of an obedient soldier/Honed to stalk and
kill because yours is a career of orders.”
from “They Of Sanchez Mira, After Denise Levertov," in ‘Storya:Collected
Poems, 1980-90

JELYN knew the walk home was going to be long.

But she and 19 of her comrades left at dawn that Tuesday, Feb. 16 and she surmised she could be home by nightfall, which was just all right so that she could sneak into Barangay Mahayahay, in Kitcharao, Agusan del Sur when it was quite dark, step into their family hut and surprise her mother while her friends who took the risk of guiding her home through villages where soldiers abound, could get back to the New People’s Army forest camp quickly.

Two years is a long time to be away from a mother, she realized. She had received word that her Nanay Nita had already given birth to a fourth kid, a boy. And when she left home, her Nanay was not even pregnant yet. She would want to see her sister Inday and her brother Arvin. She wondered what her new brother’s name was. Already it was past noon, and the teenagers had just finished lunch.

She urged them to hurry , and they began to move on, she was quick-stepping in the slight drizzle, her boots stepping on the muddy clay road, the feel of an M16 heavy on her arms. They were now in Barangay Perdida, Alegria in Surigao del Norte, a border village of the town adjacent to her birthplace. She was going home, at long last.

She left the camp with a commendation for having done outstanding work. She was tasked as medic, learning the basics of acupressure and herbal medicine. She also taught old and young people how to read and write, how to count. When I get home, she planned, I should teach my mother how to read and write so I could send her letters when I get back to camp.

Then, the burst of gunfire from above, from everywhere.

Immediately, before she could use her gun, she fell on the roadside. She’s been hit, and she felt a numbness on her lower body, and a hurt that inflamed and swelled. It happened so quickly there was no time to hide among the ferns. What she saw was terrible, the kind of horror that would haunt her sleep, return as nightmares.

Already four of her comrades were dead, the rest rolled down the hillside, scampered to safety, one was dying beside her. She could her him groaning, and, sus, Ginoo, grabe, she thought she too was going to die. She could barely move, she could feel blood oozing from her stomach, from her left hip.

She saw her attackers close in, encircling her. Soldiers in uniform and they were aiming their rifles at her as she squatted in the mud. One of them took a black thing from which a flash like white silent lightning came. Then, another flash; then, another. Then, another. Then, they left her.

Soon, five farmers came by, she pleaded for help. The farmers took turns in carrying her on their backs down to the nearest military detachment of the 20th Infantry Battalion at the Bliss Project, in Kitcharao, 12 kilometers away. There, the soldiers warned her she could die if she won’t tell the names of her comrades and where they were. She shouted for help, shouted for mercy, and when these failed, she shouted the names of two of her comrades.

It was only then that she was brought to the Kitcharao Emergency Hospital, about kilometers away from the 20th IB headquarters. Before the night was over, she was transferred to the a regional hospital in Surigao City, about a 100 kilometers away from Kitcharao, always under guard by soldiers.

Four days later, she was transferred to Camp Evangelista in Cagayan de Oro. There, about 250 kilometers away from home, she was kept in a room, nice and clean, and all her own, and with an air-conditioner. But she hated the constant interrogation, the questions that were repeated over and over again. She hated the flashes of cameras trained on her for no matter how she tried to forget, the sudden white light brought back scenes of the ambush in her mind, no matter how she tried her heart would beat faster after every flash.

NITA Dayong was gathering young camote leaves for supper the night a group of soldiers came and told her daughter Jelyn, who had disappeared two years ago, was at the Kitcharao Emergency Hospital, and she was wounded. Immediately, she rode in the soldier’s jeepney, her three other kids in tow. The soldiers told Nita her daughter was wounded in an encounter, that she was an NPA guerilla.

At first, Nita could not understand. She has heard about the rebels and their causes but she has not seen them yet. But soldiers, all she knew was that for quite a long time now there are so many soldiers in her town.

At the hospital, she saw her daughter. She learned her daughter was on her way home to her. Had the ambush not happened, they would have shared a supper of camote leaves salad and boiled cassava, she had prepared.

Nita had long known she’s got a gem of a daughter. But-an, buotan. (Level-headed, meek) When she was about 12 or 13, she met Jelyn’s father in a boat on her way to Manila. She, a Mamanwa, fell in love with this Bisayan, “a driver of boats,” this Pedro Adlawon from a town called Boljoon in Cebu. She remembered they decided to get back to Kitcharao, and there in a simple tribal ritual over a feast of pig meat and brown rice, they were wed by tribal leaders. Pedro took a job as a security guard at a logging camp in Palapag, Agusan del Sur.

When Jelyn was a year old, Pedro disappeared, and since then until seven years ago when she married Narsing, her second husband and the father of her three kids, she had poured her attention and care on her first daughter. Already, she was 15 and had just finished grade five, when she and her husband decided to arrange a marriage between her and a neighbor. Jelyn defied the decision, saying she most wanted to finish school rather than care for a husband and have a child. She tried to explain to her about their Mamanwa tribe’s tradition of marrying early and with someone chosen by her parents. But, already, her education had taught her to ask for every act that she does : Unsay tumong? (For what purpose?).

Nitang regretted having forced her daughter to follow the Mamanwa tradition. She acknowledged part of her is of lowlander’s blood. Besides, unlike her and most of her
family, Jelyn knows how to read and write and talk before a crowd. The first mother-daughter reunion was two months ago. And , until now, they are still from home and most often far from each other.

On April 5, 44 days after her detention, after the military officials at Camp Evangelista sent word that they were ready to release the girl, she rushed to Cagayan de Oro with a group called Karapatan.

“I asked for help from them when I learned way back in March about their concern for people like us,” Nitang said. Three days ago, she was assured it was only a matter of time before she’d get her child home. Saturday before that, she had visited her child at the camp hospital. She learned through the lawyers of Karapatan that no case was filed against her so she is free to go anytime.

But instead, when they came to the military camp, they were told her daughter was to be turned over to the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD)-10 here. Now, the DSWD, invoking their mandate under Republic Act 7610 and Executive Order No. 56, filed a petition for protective custody of the minor “as she has been found to have been used, neglected and exploited.” These are charges that bleed Nitang’s heart.

“ I cared for my daughter alone for 13 years. Even if we are poor, I taught her to be respectful, to think always of our kind, to be content with what we have, and now they say I can’t take her back because a neglected her?” Nita asked.

A social worker thrust money into her hands when she came to visit her daughter at the Home for Girls. She refused to accept it. She was assured it was legitimate, the government’s financial aid to her family. But she saw it as a bribe, in exchange for her daughter’s freedom.
Nitang’s firm refusal to accept the handout from DSWD is exceptional. Most of her relatives who had Kitcharao and had settled in Cagayan de Oro had turned to begging in the city streets. From Barangay Mahayahay (meaning, “comfortable”) in Kitcharao, her kin, including an aunt and sister, had moved to Barangay Kauswagan (meaning, “progress”) where they live in a shelter under the bridge.

“We are ashamed to beg. I learned from my mother that we must plant and work so we can eat,” she said at a press conference last April 14.

“It is true, what you know about the Mamanwas. The Mamanwas are poorest of tribes. And I am a Mamanwa and we are poor. And my parents maybe cannot always provide my needs. But I believe my mother can still help, I do not believe she is not able to provide,” Jelyn said, about two hours later in a separate press conference.

The DSWD offered her family limitless accommodation at the DSWD compound while her daughter was at the compound. “We were told they would give us more clothes. I told them I did not come for clothes, I came for my daughter,” she said.

Nitang has taken the stand of the human rights group Karapatan that there is something more sinister to the moves of the military and the DSWD.

She said that she has learned that both she and her daughter has been used by the military as witnesses, without their knowledge in a case filed before the Commission on Human Rights in Caraga against the New People’s Army for the crime of recruiting minors. The case is now pending before the Department of Justice for prosecution, according to CHR Regiomnal Director Marylin Pintor.

“How could I have signed a statement? I cannot read and cannot write. Besides, the military never asked me to testify,” she said.

“I want to go home to my mother,” Jelyn said last April 3 and April 5 while she was still at the military camp, this time the shattered hipbone made her limp. And again, when she was presented before the media last April 15, she said the same thing, even adding “for a long time, I have long wanted to be home.”

The way the kid stated her constant desire, now still unrealized, reminded us of Save the Children’s Michael Dorris words as he described a child that had about her, “an air of distilled dignity, as if, denied of all other possession, had quietly retained possession of herself.”
***********

The tug-o-war for the custody of the Nitang’s daughter came in the heels of a worldwide campaign to push for an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The objectives, among others,
include to examine ways and means of ensuring respect for standards
by armed opposition groups; and to promote the adoption of the
Optional Protocol.

The Optional Protocol, also known as “the straight 18s protocol”
aims to raise the minimum age from 15 to 18 years old for recruitment
and participation in all forms of hostilities. The minimum age is set
presently at 15 years old by Article 38 of the Convention on the
Rights of the Child.

Child-combatants, according to the United Nations, number between
250,000 to half a million worldwide. In a landmark 1996 study on the
impact of armed conflict on children, Lawyer Graca Machel included
the Philippines among those which have teenage armies, mostly
recruited by armed groups opposing the government. **************

The excerpt is from a poem written by the reporter in 1984.

Postcript: Jelyn Dayong is now, again, a soldier -- of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. This part of a much longer journey will have to be told.