“The Return of The Native”

I have returned to my homeland, in a mountain village in Langin, Ronda, Cebu, after 63 years. I left in 1962 and am home in 2025.

With apologies to English novelist Thomas Hardy, this is the title of his most successful novel, in six volumes, written in England in 1878, even before my grandparents were born. It is a nice story of some natives who migrated to Paris and elsewhere when they were hard up and returned as diamond merchants. If success were to be measured based on wealth, those natives were successful.

I find inspiration from Hardy's work because I too am a native of a far-flung and outlying village remotely nestled in the mountains and valleys that separate the small municipality of Ronda in the southwest and the huge town of Argao in the southeast of Cebu. The hilly village of the Davides (Chief Justice Manong Jun Davide Jr and Vice Governor Junjun Davide III) in Colawin is just a glance away from the mountainous terrain of my ancestral village in Pusodsawa. Many of my kins have also left our village and never came back.

There are about 12 million Filipinos from all over the Philippines who left our country and many of them do send money but never return, as if migration is their mode of salvation from poverty and loneliness. There are more than five million Filipinos in the US, more than a million in Saudi Arabia and the rest in Asia, the rest of the Middle East, Europe, Oceania, Africa, and in South America. I lived in Malaysia for three years, in Kuwait for two years, and in Taiwan for another two years as a labor diplomat. I travelled to more than 100 countries.

I left our mountain village in Sitio Pusodsawa, Barangay Langin, Ronda, Cebu in the year 1962 and this week I have come back with my wife from Nueva Ecija, three sons, two daughters, three daughters-in law, one son-in- law, six grandchildren and many cousins. We came home to Cebu from different places all over the world, from the seven continents, to attend the Sinulog and to have a reunion that I organized to be held tomorrow. There will be a singing contest and a beauty and brains search for the princess of our clan, the Birondo Clan which originated from Argao, along with my other ancestors with family names of Sara, Sarmiento, Aballe, Omboy, Susas, Blanco from my mother's side.

The other day, I brought all my 17 immediate family members to climb the mountain of Pusodsawa which is a historic site because the ancestral home of my maternal grandparents was used by the Filipino guerilla warriors as a camp and headquarters. That land including some neighboring properties were purchased by me in installments over a period of 30 years and I put my children as the buyers and new owners. This week, I am bringing them here to identify their respective boundaries so that they will know which hill, which valley, which creek and which river bank belongs to whom. I also brought them to Lusno Falls because the land adjacent to it was also purchased by me for my children.

I am the native son who left 63 years ago, and now at age 75, I am climbing up again to the mountain which was my home from 1950 to 1962. I am constructing a small home up there where I shall spend my last years, and a small chapel down the valley near the road that Vice Governor Davide constructed for my people. I am excited to meet my relatives and friends who never left the village. They considered me successful and told me that I am the first lawyer from our village and the first world traveler. But I do not measure success on this basis. It gradually dawns on me that success is true friendship, peace of mind, good health and strong family relations.

I feel that these people are more successful. They have no high blood, no diabetes. They do not worry about cholesterol and sugar levels. They are happy and they laugh and giggle at the most trivial nuances of life. I still have to analyze, evaluate and overthink about the most mundane problems of this crazy world.

Perhaps, I should not have left my mountain village 63 years ago. But then again, there would not have been the instant return of this native.