‘Sa bawat hagupit ng pagsubok,
ikaw ay di nalulugmok.’
KIDAPAWAN CITY (MindaNews / 13 December)—Many who grew up in Kidapawan sang those two lines during flag ceremonies without sparing them (or the entirety of the Kidapawan Hymn) a thought.
But in 2019, the lines suddenly become more meaningful to the town like they never did before.
A series of strong earthquakes from late November to early December that year struck large parts of the Greater Kidapawan Area and nearby Davao del Sur. Kidapawan did not see the deaths that other affected areas saw, but the damage to property was immense, and the aftershocks continued in the heads of people well into the middle of 2020.
When Mary Jane Dizon wrote those lines in the Kidapawan hymn’s lyrics in the late 1990s, she probably did not have any particular “pagsubok” in mind—just a recycled cliché, most likely, something generic to say in order to convey “strength in adversity.” Nobody’s experience in particular, phrased in this foreign Tagalog we only ever read in textbooks or hear on mass media (if you used “hagupit,” “pagsubok,” “nalulugmok,” and even “ay” in ordinary conversation in Kidapawan, people might giggle at you).
But when the earthquakes struck, the lines suddenly acquired a poignancy it did not have before. The disaster threw into relief the fact that a city is more than just its roads and buildings, it is its people. A strong sense of camaraderie emerged, first for those badly affected within Kidapawan then towards the even more severely hit in the nearby towns, the daughter municipality of Makilala and the granddaughter town of Tulunan.
(And I take the occasion to pay tribute to one person who offered his life showing this sense of community—18-year-old Rommel S. Galicia of Luayon, Makilala died when a tree fell on him after an earthquake suddenly struck. He was helping clear a road blocked by landslides.)
Kidapawan is a town whose people have the prodigious talent of making what is foreign and generic uniquely their own. The town grows on things, like moss growing on the rocks that DepEd painted orange. The two lines in the hymn that the people of the town only ever memorized suddenly became ripe for use, articulating both the town’s sudden misery and our determination to get over it.
As another series of earthquakes is rocking Mindanao four years later, it will be inevitable that memories of the 2019 earthquakes will resurface.
What were the lessons that should have been learned in that historic disaster? And have these lessons been learned?
Perhaps one of the most visible things that became immediately apparent after the 2019 earthquakes was the sheer quality of buildings constructed in the past (and the apparent inferiority of more recent structures).
The vast majority of damaged infrastructure from those earthquakes was on recently constructed buildings. The most iconic image of the earthquakes was the ruined Eva’s Hotel just in front of the city center, a fairly recent building hardly a decade old.
In contrast, none of Kidapawan’s heritage houses saw damage, from the wooden houses of the 1950s to the adobe and terrazoed homes of the 1960s and early 1970s.
There has clearly been a decline in the quality of construction. The earthquakes only served to foreground this. Since the earthquakes there has been growing interest in seeing what made these old, seemingly fragile buildings much sturdier than the more recent concrete structures that crumbled with the tremors.
It is a trend I highly encourage, and it is one manifestation of the relevance of cultural properties in other domains (in this case, to architecture and industrial design).
One problem that arose as the earthquakes damaged the Water District’s infrastructure is on how reliant the city has become to the water system. Alternative and natural sources of water—from rivers and streams to artesian wells—have been on a marked decline.
As donations from as far away as CdO started including supplies of water, it looked like decades of pollution on the rivers—including the city’s central Nuangan River—started coming back to haunt Kidapawan.
After the earthquakes there had been efforts to clean the downtown rivers, with a series of clean up drives in the Nuangan and other rivers. Mayor Paolo Evangelista has also initiated Canopy 21, a massive tree planting initiative intended to start nipping the looming problem of water shortage in the bud.
The attempts by the city government to remove the Monuvu from earthquake-vulnerable areas within their ancestral domain in the upland barangays of Kidapawan after the quakes sparked an interesting legal debate, and in the end the relocation was not entirely successful, with many returning and building in areas that had been declared no-build zones.
A major cause of tension had been the dynamics by which the city government approached the Monuvu. Citing extant Philippine laws to justify its well-meaning actions, the local authorities only ended up coming across as condescending, only adding to the generations of accumulated resentment from a community that had long been marginalized and antagonized by the Municipio.
There had been improvements in communication, but as lately as earlier this year I could still sense how the Monuvu are wary of dealing with anyone associated with the city (as I had been)—“magluto man gud sila og inilaha didto sa baba,” said one datu in a poignant metaphor, “unya ipakaon nila sa amo diri, unya ignan me nga amoa daw tong nilutuan.”
There is a need to better communicate the value of the law—and where it could be adjusted to accommodate and make the best of indigenous ways. As the threat of another series of earthquakes looms, it is vital that this miscommunication is resolved.
Because when the law is implemented right, it can do wonders, as the 2019 earthquakes also foregrounded. Kidapawan had, as mentioned, zero deaths despite the intensity of the earthquakes. This is thanks in large part to how seriously then-mayor Joseph Evangelista took disaster preparedness. The City Disaster and Risk Reduction Management Office, led by Psalmer Bernalte, diligently ensured earthquake readiness in the months leading to the earthquake, with drills regularly conducted and equipment constantly checked.
The hope is that Kidapawan’s daughter and granddaughter towns—especially those badly hit in the last earthquakes like Makilala and Tulunan—have picked up lessons from Kidapawan.
The particular lesson that needs to be learned is the continued need to take care of mental health. Months after the earthquake, Marciano Adlaon, a 47-year-old farmer from Malasila, Makilala, hanged himself from a tree near his father’s ruined house. He had left behind a wife and eight children whom the earthquakes had rendered him incapable of feeding.
If Adlaon had received mental health treatment, perhaps he would still be alive today. The question remains if we will see more such suicides as a new wave of earthquakes rocks us.
The collective body of our skills in construction, our water resources and the practices which keep them clean, our city’s indigenous wellspring, and the strength of our sense of community—all these are part of Kidapawan’s intangible infrastructure. And no matter what disaster strikes, if this infrastructure remains strong, then indeed no trial can bring the city down.
Buildings may crack and crumble in the wake of earthquakes, but no tremor can dent the soul of a town that knows itself.
[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Karlo Antonio G. David has been writing the history of Kidapawan City for the past thirteen years. He has documented seven previously unrecorded civilian massacres, the lives of many local historical figures, and the details of dozens of forgotten historical incidents in Kidapawan. He was invested by the Obo Monuvu of Kidapawan as “Datu Pontivug,” with the Gaa (traditional epithet) of “Piyak nod Pobpohangon nod Kotuwig don od Ukaa” (Hatchling with a large Cockscomb, Already Gifted at Crowing). The Don Carlos Palanca and Nick Joaquin Literary Awardee has seen print in Mindanao, Cebu, Dumaguete, Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, and Tokyo. His first collection of short stories, “Proclivities: Stories from Kidapawan,” came out in 2022.]
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On this section of Moppiyon Kahi diid Patoy, we remember important dates and incidents that took place in Kidapawan history.
10 December, 1955 – the Municipal Government of Kidapawan donated land in what is today Barangay Sudapin to the Philippine Constabulary, a site that would become their barracks (it is still informally called “Old PC Barracks” today). The transfer of the property from its original owners, the Bangcas family, to the Municipio and then to the PC was mired with controversy due to poor documentation of transactions.