The View from a Hill

 May 20, 1989

The View from a Hill

Where I try to do my centering every other month or so is atop this small hill amidst rolling fields in the shadow of Mt. Kitanlad in Bukidnon. The Transfiguration is a young community of Benedictine monks whose lives revolve around two basic activities: Ora, prayer, chanted dawn to dusk seven times a day, and Labora, work, which in this instance entails farming a 40-hectare tract planted to coffee, corn, peanuts, rice and bananas.

Launched only eight years ago, this monastic experiment has thrived because vocations have been plentiful and donations generous. In the interim membership has trebled and the number of buildings on site has doubled. Coaxing the land to produce, however, has been slower going.

This particular farm is no del Monte or BUSCO of Nieto-Zubiri fame. Seven kilometres from Malaybalay the landscape and the living is rural and rudimentary. The soil is rocky and acidic. There is water, but it must be sourced far beneath the surface. Rainfall is abundant but with the nearby mountains balding difficult to retain.

The monks are not trained farmers and cannot yet afford machines. Thus everything in the field must be done manually, a back-breaking and time-consuming process. Nevertheless soiling their hands is an absolute necessity because as a not so jovial note appended to a list of field assignments on their bulletin board warns, ”If you do not work, you do not eat!”

For the monks farming in these parts and in this fashion quite often becomes an exercise in frustration. So far only half of the land has been brought under cultivation. When the rains falter the crops wither on their stalks. The cash from corn and peanuts might keep a nuclear family from starving but will not indefinitely sustain 17 full-grown men.

There is barely enough rice for the community’s meals that are 80 per cent staple and 20 per cent viand, but the monks can no more complain about this than they can begrudge that most of their bananas are stolen for if they are vowed to poverty, their neighbours are fated to it, both of them for life.

Coffee which grows well in Bukidnon is a way out of this common destiny. The trees the monks planted four or five years ago are now starting to bear fruit. Last year the beans grossed them less than P100,000. This year they had hoped to do better, but with supply temporarily exceeding demand, Filipro, which controls the market in the area, will pay only P28 a kilo for their produce.

So far for now the monks have 40 large sacks of dried, husked coffee beans that aren’t going anywhere. They will not spoil, but in the meantime there are mounting farm expenses (for lime, fertilizers, water, seedlings) and a sizeable payroll to support. The payroll is for farmhands in the community’s employ, to save them from certain hunger.

And likely mischief. On the next hill shanties have sprouted belonging to former labourers who have been dismissed for thievery and worse offenses. They squat on government property that the monks have applied for to reforest at their own expense to keep the erosion problem under control.

For many months now the monks’ application with the DENR has languished, shunted from one office to another thanks to bureaucratic red tape. As Mr. Factoran’s high rhetoric fails to be matched by his subalterns’ uncertain zeal for nature conservancy, the squatters have grown bolder, refusing to budge, harassing their neighbours and freely living off the fat of other people’s land.

One suspects, in fact, that they and their ilk are up to worse a little further off. Two or three kilometers from the monastery the mountains begin. But three to four years ago they were covered thick top to bottom with towering pine trees, but no longer. There are mysterious bonfires on these mountains almost every afternoon and evening now, swaths of charred timber and ugly gashes the morning after.

But is this any more tragic than what now goes on right at the foot of these mountains? There, in the last two months since my last visit, some unknown Chinaman’s bulldozers and tractors have cleared a vast tract. He will be planting sugarcane.

In a replay of what has been happening on both sides of the highway from Manolo Fortich to Valencia, he has gobbled up many small and medium-sized landholdings, dispossessed numerous farmers and sharecroppers, and uprooted tubers, cereals and fruit-bearing trees wholesale to replace them with the crop that has turned Negros into a hotbed-basketcase.

Vagrants and squatters today, sacadas and insurgents tomorrow. Bountiful soil now, a veritable wasteland by the time this century closes as sugarcane, pineapple, ramie and such steadily sap the earth of its nutrients. Truly grim on final reckoning will be the wages of carelessness and greed in Bukidnon, once thrice-blessed and happy country.

Fuga, tace, quiesce. The monks have come here to seek true freedom of spirit in silence and repose, but the hill on which they pray can no more be isolated from the troubled world below, it seems, than their petitions can ignore the pain and sorrow those who inhabit it are heir to.

But herein precisely lies the very meaning of their monkhood. For in the end theirs is a sign of contradiction. By being in the world though not of it, their seemingly useless, helpless lives bear quiet, gentle witness to that divine mercy which alone avails, transforming human weakness into perfect grace.