07.19.07 kulturnatib

Capitan Maldo

Two Friday's ago while we were getting ready for the following day's celebration of Earth Calling Cebu, another group of friends and colleagues started off, from where we were making our preparations, to head to where the call of the earth issued from her deep and dark recesses.

That group, members of the Cebu Speleological Association were on their way to the municipality of Tabuelan, north Cebu. They were going there for further mapping and exploration of a cave system named Himaroto Cave, in Barangay Kanluhangan that Saturday. After this, the following day, a Sunday, they were to present their findings and recommendations to the community in an assembly organized by the Barangay Captain.

They met this village official last year when a smaller reconnaissance group were scouting for caves to explore that they had heard were plentiful in that municipality. They were eventually led to Himaroto Cave and to Romualdo Montecalvo, 56, the Barangay Captain.

The village chief was welcoming enough, while the rest of the community had their suspicions. Treasure hunters, were what they thought of the group. Not surprising for a community tucked away in the mountains where to get there takes some special effort and an even more special incentive to go there at all.

The group were indeed treasure hunters but not of the kind imagined by the community. But it didn't help that on that first ever venture into the cave primarily to map it, they were seen to leave – in a hurry, it was said -- with big soggy sacks.

Indeed. But the sacks were to better carry their ropes and other caving equipment that had become wet, hence, heavier, by the water in the cave and the rain outside as well.

But more than the sacks they carried out, they left with the conviction that this was a cave well worth studying. More, they found the Captain to be sympathetic to their overtures about cave conservation as well as conservation of cave creatures particularly the bats who lived in the cave and whose droppings or guano was an important link in the cave's food chain. They were also useful for plant life outside the cave.

True enough, they found the cave system teeming with life. Some they could not readily identify. Not even with the help of leading local biologists connected with the Cebu Biodiversity Conservation Foundation to whom they showed pictures and described the creatures.

These same biologists, Lisa Marie Paguntalan and Godfrey Jakosalem, accompanied the group in their last inspection of the cave system to have a first hand look and they also spoke to the community during the assembly.

Up until this writing some of these creatures remain to be identified definitively.

Through those initial visits and in subsequent ones, the group got to know Capitan Maldo. He was a simple subsistence farmer, unschooled but who understood the underlying connections of life and the need for environmental conservation for there to be any life at all. They had no children except for all the children in the village. He was respected, looked up to. For this, he earned a number of leadership and governance awards from local civic and development organizations.

The group was looking forward to fruitful relationship with the community led by their Barangay Captain. The Barangay Council had been getting ready to pass a cave conservation ordinance with, among others, plans of deputizing the owner of the land where Himaroto Cave was located.

Then last Monday the group woke up to tragic news. Capitan Maldo and four others had been stabbed dead the previous afternoon by a deranged villager who went on a stabbing rampage, even wounding a responding policeman, a cousin of the Captain.

Like the community, the group was stunned. An emergency meeting was called. It was decided that they would attend the wake and the funeral of Capitan Maldo and the rest of the fatalities as a show of support and solidarity not only for the bereaved but also for the entire community. It was also agreed that a wall on the main entrance chamber to the Himaroto Cave shall be officially identified in the maps as the Capitan Maldo Wall.

Though not explicitly mentioned during the meeting, there was also the silent consensus that the group will continue to support the community, support the leadership of the First Councilor who, by law, is the successor to Capitan and support these first steps of this community towards being better stewards of their resources.