Boatless Badjaos

(Note: I wrote this as a three-part piece for my regular “Pathless Travels” column in Northern Dispatch Weekly three years ago. I’m reposting it here as an abridged and slightly revised two-part piece, because to me it feels as fresh as ever.) I was just telling my Baguio neighbor here, Kabsat Kandu, about a chance encounter I had with a Badjao beggar family who were stranded in Metro Manila’s flooded urban streets, minus their boat. It was a balmy morning, and I was gulping down my second cup of coffee in a rush to catch an appointment, when someone banged on the steel gate of the printing press house in Quezon City where I was staying. The woman at the gate was waving a letter and shouting in an unfamiliar language. The noisy machine drowned her out, and that early in the morning, no one else in the house wanted to indulge a visibly desperate beggar. “My lucky day,” I thought, with no trace of irony. “Your lucky day? Didn’t you say you had to rush to a meeting?” Kabsat Kandu wondered. “Busy people wouldn’t give these beggars the time of day or even a passing glance, much less drop a coin into their grimy palms. What’s got into you?” “Ah, but I beg to differ, my friend,” I told Kandu. There’s a simple and productive way to deal with ambulant beggars. I smile at them like long-lost friends, I chat with them for a few minutes. If I have time, I interview them as intently as I would a respectable official or celebrity. Then, and only then, do I give them a few coins. Food for work. Cash for info. Quid pro quo, as they say. The exchange gives me a stronger high than a P10 cup of vending-machine coffee. “Works every time, I tell you.” I chide Kandu for being insensitive to a pauper’s plight – never mind that my own tactic is also used cold-bloodedly by jaded reporters, prowling photo opportunists, and undercover cops. And so I invited the beggar woman and her daughter to come in. They had barely sat down on the garden bench when I peppered them with buckshot questions: “What’s your name? Where are you from? Have you eaten? Why are you begging? Where’s your family? Where are you staying? How will you eat for lunch? Did you walk all the way here? Is there someone who collects the money that people give you? Have you asked the help of the church or government?” The woman and her child answered my questions as fast as their halting speech would let them. Here’s their story, told in broken Tagalog: Sutea and her 10-year-old daughter Sarah arrived with a boatload of Badjao refugees from Lamitan, Basilan. Armed men said to be Abu Sayyaf had killed her husband, a pearl diver and peddler, and left her with four small children. For some vague reason, the refugee boat landed in Manila and quietly dumped them into the urban jungle. Now boatless, Sutea said they are sheltered with around 40 other Badjao families in the Baclaran churchyard. They had tried to get help from “SUD” (I think she meant DSWD) but the people there shooed them away. “Mabaho daw kami (They told us we stank).” Some priests gave them clothes, which they wore in bizarre combinations. (They should drive Parisian designers insane.) The Badjao know some farming and weaving, lots of sea-faring, fishing and pearl-diving – “Alam ko kumuha ng perlas sa dagat (I know how to get pearls from the sea),” boasts her daughter Sarah – but these are skills that one wouldn’t wisely put on a job resume, or practice in flooded streets. So, finding no jobs, they had no choice but to beg for their daily food. “Hey! What’s that in today’s news?” Kandu says as he peers over my Internet café screen. “It’s reporting exactly your concern, about giving jobs to itinerant Badjao. Mat-making for export, hmm. Good idea.” Well, mat-making is better than begging, obviously. But something in my gut tells me that many of the Badjao miss their traditional lifeways sailing up and down our Southern coasts, and would like to improve their lot without having to become refugees, beggars and bonded laborers in other people’s lands. Any public or private initiative to help the Badjao refugee-beggars that we increasingly find on the streets of Davao, Cebu, Manila, and even smaller cities further up north like Baguio, must never presume that they are doing the Badjao a favor by giving them a job, any job, anywhere. So I continue educating Kabsat Kandu, who belongs to a minority people himself but who tends to look down on other minorities, especially “if they smell strange.” Well, I told my Ibaloi friend, “you’d smell strange too if you’d been roaming the city streets for days without access to a washroom.” I tell my friend that the name Badjao (or Bajau) is a Malay-Bornean word that means “people of the seas.” So, it’s understandable that Kandu, a mountain boy, should find their ways strange. “But I’m sure they take daily baths more often than you do,” I gently scold him. Actually, Badjao is a name that’s applied to a variety of boat-dwelling and sea-faring peoples with scattered settlements across Southeast Asia: from the Philippines, through eastern and northern Borneo; and from Sulawesi and the Little Sunda Islands of Indonesia, to the Mergui Archipelago off southern Myanmar. This is why Western observers and textbooks have tagged them “sea gypsies.” “You mean to say, the Badjao were the first OFWs?” Kabsat Kandu asks. “They were already working overseas hundreds of years ago?” “Not exactly,” I say, chuckling at Kandu’s studied naivete. Strictly speaking, the Badjao are not just one people of Philippine origin. They are spread out across Southeast Asia, speaking different languages and practicing different lifeways. In that sense, they are like the Negritos, who are also scattered throughout South and Southeast Asia. “So which Badjao are we talking about now?” Kandu asks. There are two major groups of Badjao in the Philippines. First is the Bajau Kagayan, also called Jama Mapun, who live in the Cagayan de Sulu and Bugsuk islands between Palawan and Sulu. Second is the Badjao who call themselves Sama Laut or Sama Dilaut (Sea Sama), which I’m now discussing. The Jama Mapun and the Sama Dilaut belong to a wider language group called Sama, related to Tausug, which in turn is related to Tagalog as a language. The Sama are scattered from the central Philippines to the eastern shore of Borneo, and throughout the Indonesian islands. “You mean there’s more where they came from? What if all of them come here to Baguio to beg?” asks Kandu with some alarm. No, of course not, I assure my friend. Most Badjao have their own lives to live. Don’t forget, these people are sea nomads by tradition. They travel by boat from one island to the next, to fish, to dive for pearl and sea cucumber, to trade. But, yes, they are scattered over a very wide geographic area. They now tend to disperse more and more, and their numbers are dwindling. Of the entire Sama population, about 30,000 clearly belong to Sama Dilaut, divided into about 20 subgroups. The government cannot count them accurately, since like the Ayta, they are highly mobile and dispersed. And since the Sama and the Tausug are related, we Tagalog landlubbers shouldn’t feel so smug when we see our Tausug and Badjao cousins eke out some livelihood in Manila’s flooded streets. We should in fact welcome and embrace them as long-lost kin. Kabsat Kandu, the mountain tribesman, is speechless as paradigms shift silently inside his head.