A Surigao Childhood
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By Tara FT Sering
There is a Bisaya song that my auntie sings whenever plans of a visit to Surigao come up:
Surigao mapa-garbuhun
Surigao pirmi bagyuhun...
In
grade five, when we had just moved to Manila, I would
sing this song to my classmates, making the considerate
effort of explaining it without being asked to: the
reason typhoons ravage the province at a head-spinning
rate is because of its admittedly 
obnoxious
people. My classmates found the idea of a place mocking
itself in song quite comic and charming, but with
half-smiles they would always ask: "Where's that
again?"
It had been asked of me so often that at one point I wanted to say: "Yes, well, I didn't know what was around here either until we moved." But instead I said, "Oh, you should go visit it sometime."
For years being on a plane destined for my hometown was itself the beginning of a homecoming. We would know more than half the people in the small Philippine Airlines plane, the rest being the cabin crew, and a handful more who were to take a bus from Surigao City to nearby towns.
Surigao City is a coastal city, a very small one, lying brave-faced against the sea. It is a temperamental sea, calm when it wants to be, and at most times violent, lapping waves proclaiming the coming of a storm. The tallest structure was the bell tower of the Surigao Cathedral until a businessman put up a five-story building with the city's then-largest supermarket on the groundfloor. Four rows and two cashiers big. I was in grade three when the much-awaited structure was completed, and my friends and I would walk to it from the public school we attended after class hours to cool off with ice drops.
Perhaps it is the year-round stormy weather that has discouraged investment in taller buildings that take time to construct. To this day the city is a low-lying one. Among the tallest structures feebly rising off the face of the earth are schools-San Nicolas College, a private school run by the Paulinian Sisters where my grandmother has taught English for the last 30 years, and the Northeastern Mindanao College (NEMCO). This last building is so old and decrepit that I have heard of a student falling through the rickety stairs after a wooden slat gave way beneath her.
Another of the few taller buildings houses a drugstore and a pawnshop. Word has once gone around that when my grandmother's friend had pawned her pearl necklace she could easily slip it over her head; it refused to come down her head again when she redeemed it.
There are from three to four small hotels now, but for years the only-therefore the best-was that owned by a grandaunt once removed. A low, two-story building, the Tavern Hotel sits at the lip of the coast and looks out at the dim silhouette of the nearest island, Nonoc. Nonoc is the first of a series of islands that dot the sea away from the mainland. These little islands with white sand beaches are the pride of the province, helpless little frontiers that they are, bravely but vainly guarding the city against the year-round onslaught of tropical depressions.
Being at the northern tip of Mindanao, Surigao is the typhoons' southern gateway into the country. This geographic situation leaves the city, and the entire province, in a state of constant disrepair. There is barely any time to rebuild in between calamities. The year-round downpour, which floods the city, is an easy excuse for people to keep indoors where they would sleep, watch TV or drink with friends. In the summer, the city sizzles with noonday heat for about two hours, until it rains again.
There is very little entertainment in Surigao relative to most cities in the country. There are perhaps two discos, two or three karaoke bars, a few pool halls, but most people content themselves with a quick trip to chicken barbecue canteens. The recent boom in chicken barbecue stands right outside the gates of the port, and in the few hotels that there are, has eclipsed the fact that in Surigao, one can get the finest seafoods--fish, shrimp and crab so fresh they crawl off the plates.
When we were little there wasn't a day when we weren't enjoying fresh seafood well beyond gluttony (except when typhoons struck and we had to make do with poultry). The sea had been so stirred that the disoriented sea creatures were probably floating in Indonesian waters. Once a week we had barbecued chicken at the Tavern hotel where we would sit by the huge windows and take in the sea breeze, looking out at the few lights lining Nonoc Island, dreaming of the smaller islands beyond (accessible by overloaded pumpboat in the summer's calm sea), knowing that even beyond that was the Philippine Deep, the toes of the mighty Pacific Ocean.
We were taught this right at grade one: this is where you are. I would learn of neighboring provinces and the rest of the country only much later, in a class called Geography which I would learn to appreciate even later. But in grade one, it was Surigao and the Pacific Ocean where the typhoons come from. And it was the fish and the shells and the crabs and clams and the giant corals in my grandmother's house and her mother's pearls which had been promised to me.
Thinking of it all now is as lonely, and as lovely, as an early evening viewing of the sea.
Tara FT Sering is from the University of the Philippines and is the author of a collection of non-fiction narratives Mad Scrambling in the Corner.
