Limbuhan, also known as Pio V. Corpus, lies on the southeastern coast of Masbate. Next to Esperanza, it is the closest town to the northern tip of Cebu. We speak Cebuano, and naturally so. Our ancestors are migrants from Cebu.
I left town in 1967. During my first two years in college, I’d go home during the semester, Christmas and summer breaks. Then I began working in 1969 and the trips became less frequent. Less frequent turned to rare after I became a lawyer. I must have gone home only little more than a dozen times during the last 50 years. Every now and then I would ask myself why.
I have vivid memories of my town, good and bad in almost equal measure. I remember climbing guava trees with my sister and our cousins. Papi, my dog, the backyard vegetable garden that my father and I tended, my farmer mother’s callused but gentle hands, the pride on my parents’ faces when we went up the stage to receive my ribbons, the love letters that I wrote for my classmates for a fee and the first stirrings of manhood. All these I remember with a smile.
But I also have not forgotten that night a top provincial official, accompanied by a 6x6 truckload of Philippine Constabulary (PC) soldiers, threateningly told my father that he can burn our house anytime he wanted and that there was nothing we could do to stop him, and my father replied with a plea to spare the house for the sake of us, his children.
I wept silently behind the curtain that kept us out of view from the living room in anger at my father’s meek reply and out of frustration over our helplessness.
I also remember the many times I had to stand before the flag pole in high school while my classmates were taking the periodical examinations because my parents could not pay my tuition fees; and the snide remarks from townmates when they heard that I wanted to become a lawyer. Poverty seemed to always precede me wherever I went.
These memories came rushing in as I sat alone in a pew at the church in Limbuhan, where I once served as sacristan, one early morning last week. I had gone home at the prodding of a friend to attend our fiesta celebration, my first after 50 years. I am glad I did. I found the reason for my ambivalence towards a homecoming and, with it, inner peace. At 74.
I have come to realize, even appreciate, the fact I am who I am because my town shaped me, that I should be glad that while there were people who starved me, there many others who nourished me by just being around and that the joy and the pain that I went through were the ebb and flow of being alive.
Thank you, Limbuhan. I’m coming home to you. Again and again.