MOUNT PULAG. Everyone’s gone home and it’s just the four of us left. We’re here for the second time with Help-Portrait, a nationwide movement of photographers, make-up artists and other volunteers, to help repaint the school.
With a couple of friends, I decide to stay for more adventure, to escape from the city and find peace.
From here, 7,748 feet above sea level, all that is unnecessary disappears in this community who live in the country’s third highest peak, which is on the list of Unesco’s World Heritage Sites and spans the Cordillera Administrative Region and Cagayan Valley.
It’s a dead zone for cellular phones, there are no extra names for streets, not many doors with locks.
We went to a wedding, attended a funeral, tried to eat Watwat (which felt very close to eating raw meat), and merrily drank Tapeuy, a kind of rice wine. We lived as strangers, exchanging what currency we had and wanted to give.
The people smiled at us and we would take their photos. We sang for them, and they invited us into their lives. Here, children have to walk for hours (some for an hour, some for two) just to go to school.
I’ve seen how suddenly the rain comes and how that makes the already difficult trek to school is made even harder. No one complains, though. I don’t know if it’s the height, or the cold, or if what think of as challenges isn’t the same to them.
Here, it is so cold that no one becomes hot-headed. Here, you’re up so high that you start to look at your problems as if they were so small, so manageable. Here, I feel closest to the heavens, no matter how impossible it is for my feet to leave the ground.
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