Microphone in the Mud

Microphone in the Mud by Laura C. Robinson with Gary Robinson LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION AND CONSERVATION SPECIAL PUBLICATION NO. 6 PUBLISHED AS A SPECIAL PUBLICATION OF LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION & CONSERVATION LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION & CONSERVATION Department of Linguistics, UHM Moore Hall 569 1890 East-West Road Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822 USA http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS 2840 Kolowalu Street Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888 USA © All text and images are copyright to the authors, 2013 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Cover design by Laura C. Robinson Cover photograph of the author working with Agta speakers in Isabela province Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data ISBN 978-0-9856211-3-1 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4578 PREFACE All of the events in this book are true. Although about half of it was written while it took place, and the rest is based on meticulous notes, some of the dialogue and detailed descriptions are necessarily approximations. In addition, some of the timeline has been condensed (for example, combining the events of two days into one) to preserve narrative flow. Finally, the names of many characters have been changed. In a few cases, identifying details have also been changed to preserve anonymity. Gary Robinson, my father, did much of the work of editing the journal entries I kept into book form. He also helped edit much of the text, injecting his own experiences based on his three-week trip which takes place in the middle of this narrative. He was able to meet the majority of the characters and visit most of the places where the action of the book takes place. i A young woman battles armed terrorists, a kidnapper, malaria, a tsunami, and dial-up Internet as she documents the endangered languages of hunter-gatherers in the jungles of the Philippines. iii iv 1 CAGAYAN HONEYCOMBS He led me away from the Agta camp into the jungle, using his machete to slice through the thick-veined vines that lay across our path. Two small children, excited and laughing, followed barefoot in their shorts and T- shirts. A bush with sharp thorns I hadn’t seen cut a straight line on my thigh that turned red beneath my walking shorts as the little girls scrambled past me and over a boulder. “Awan kam magbuyot; singatan kam,” he said in Agta to the girls. Don’t run. You’ll get stung. He sent me ahead and took their hands to return to camp. I watched them evaporate behind me into the foliage, and when I turned back all I could see were branches and dense green vegetation. I was already lost. “Gregory!” He reappeared with the girls in hand, and we continued. He climbed a large rock and jumped a gap. I scrambled behind him and gasped at a ten- foot drop, but the little girls were already over it. We stopped on a ledge. Two Agta men stood near a pile of cut bushes, tree limbs, and dry sticks circling a tree trunk. Gregory pointed up into the tree. “Makitam?” Do you see it? He asked in Ilokano. “Awan bi a mag’enta,” I answered in my broken Agta. I can’t see it. I handed Gregory my digital camera to take a picture of the beehive for me. “Bassit lang.” It’s very small, he said as he looked at the digital screen and held the camera in his hand like a precious stone. He continued, “The ugden have cameras you can see through.” Ugden is the Agta word for the non- Agta people of the Philippines. Gregory insisted that the girls and I return to camp so that we wouldn’t get stung. I tossed my lighter down to one of the men by the tree, who caught it as lightly as a baseball player. Gregory, the girls, and I walked back on the invisible path. I had droplets of blood on both of my legs now but 1 MICROPHONE IN THE MUD the three Agta were fine. I squatted in the shade at the edge of the camp—four lean-to huts with thatched roofs in a grassy clearing—and waited. Smoke began to rise above the jungle. There were thrashing noises, and the men yelled for buckets, their voices loud—they couldn’t be more than a hundred yards away. Gregory scooped up a black cooking pot and the bucket used for cleaning dishes and washed them in the nearby river. Judging that they were clean enough, he hurried into the thick brush. Ten minutes later the three men emerged smiling, displaying the pot and bucket loaded with golden honeycombs and swirls of dark chocolate-brown honey. Each Agta family brought its own pot and received a share. Gregory’s wife Sisi washed out the Tupperware container I had brought to the camp that morning with our lunch and gave me a honeycomb. I sat on the bamboo floor of Gregory and Sisi’s hut as he showed me how to chew a piece of the comb then spit out the wax. The intense wild honey taste, the best I had ever had, was a mixture of sweet and tart flavors as complicated as that of a fine wine. Gregory was in his mid-thirties, a short, handsome man with dark skin and black curly hair. He had a well-trimmed beard and wore khaki shorts and no shoes. I grabbed my notebook and wrote the Agta words for bee egg, sinaga, and honey, habu. Gregory asked if I had ever eaten this before. I said that I’d had honey but never honeycomb. “Does that honey come from Cagayan?” he asked me. “No. We have lots of bees in my place. In America. But I’m from the city and I never ate honeycomb. Only honey.” Gregory was amazed. “You have bees in America?” Gregory’s sister and brother-in-law gave us some of the fish they were cooking and I offered them the rice I had brought, which we ate along with the honeycomb as the light faded. I turned on my digital recorder, and Gregory told a story about a young Agta man who went into the forest and caught a wild pig and then found a beehive, took the honey, and came back and traded it for rice. Then he taught me a new Dupaningan Agta word. “An ibay is a non- Agta person.” “Like ugden?” “Yes,” he said, “But an ugden who is friendly with the Agta.” He was my friend, and he became my protector while I was in the jungle, and that is why it was such a shock when he later betrayed me to a kidnapper. 2 2 THE PAPER WITH THE NAMES AND NUMBERS Two months earlier and five thousand miles away from Cagayan Province, I sat in the Honolulu airport lobby waiting for my flight to the Philippines. I was on my way to document an endangered language spoken by only fifteen hundred hunter-gathers in a region so remote that the latest research on the language was almost twenty years old. I didn’t know if the Agta people in Cagayan still lived in the rain forest or if they continued to speak their language. There was another worry. My professors told me that the communist New People’s Army, or NPA, terrorists were still active in Cagayan, in the eastern and northern Luzon Island. Over the years they had lost their political ideology and mostly became thugs. Their main activity now was kidnapping local politicians and rich people for ransom. But Jason, a leftist graduate student I met in Honolulu and who was now studying in the Philippines, told me I shouldn’t be too concerned about them because he was sure they wouldn’t kidnap Americans. I hoped he was right. In the weeks before I left, my friends gave me more good advice than I could ever use. My ex-boyfriend Sean, a short, rugged, tattooed Aussie with a lifetime of military experience at 35, had so many survival tips that I forgot most of them while he was speaking. He’d carefully studied the equipment that would take me through the next eleven months and said, “You’ve got to replace that water purifier.” When he saw me in the aisle of the sports store in Honolulu with the new one, I thought he would break down right there and cry. All Sean could do was hug me and thank me for buying it because he was sure it would keep me safe. He said, “I can drink water from the toilet with that good filter tomorrow to prove to you how well it works.” It was no surprise that he failed to follow through on that promise. Sean was unable to say good-bye, and he was mysteriously absent on my last day, leaving me with a feeling of emptiness as I waited for the plane. 3 MICROPHONE IN THE MUD *** The cab had a dented fender and a long scrape on one side. I slid into the back seat and we took off. The shocks in the antique vehicle had long since broken and as we raced through the traffic, the car banged into an enormous pothole, sending me flying toward the roof. My hair grazed it, but my head was safe, and I landed with a thud in the unyielding seat.

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