I will never risk myself in Carbon to get mugged!

For years, since I started working here in Metro Cebu in 1999, that was the preposterous conjecture, sticking like a fly on the paper trap. Don’t misunderstand me.

All these changed last Sunday. (This is my second post as an off-beaten tracker, drifting into the innards of Cebu).

Fresh from his Sinulog 2008 photo contest debut win (a first prize guy), Melvin Tezon invited me to tag along with him.

“Clee, let’s go to Carbon tomorrow!” He prodded.

“Why? I asked him in our YM chat. “What for?”

Those were forever questions acting as smokescreen — for fear of the inevitable. And I was a walking and breathing contradiction. Call it paranoia: You’ll never get me to stay there even for a minute. The mere utterance of “Colon” will drive my playful mind to indulge to a kind of a vicious, present danger: pickpockets, isolated crimes, what have you.

“No, we just shoot. We hit early around 5am.”

“What theme?”

“Anything!”

I must have looked meteoric. Excitement and fear looked like two siblings, side by side. One’s a bastard.

The next day we decided to meet at the Mabolo Parish Church. I was late by an hour and a half! There, he introduced me to his other friend, Carbon Drifter, Aldo Nelbert Banaynal, a lone wolf himself in shooting places like Carbon, he assured us everything will be fine.

I was still not convinced. Not with risking for our cameras and cellphones.

I know.

Our goal was to shoot anything sundry in four hours.

The crazy thoughts never seemed to be over. All of those fiery what-ifs. My camera, my phone, my bag… my soul?

We reached there past 6 a.m.

I pulled my eyes and ears eagerly, scanning for the potential mugger around; perhaps, a knife-brandishing drunk or something worst. I would remember nothing of it anymore.

No matter how nervous I get, we were greeted with curious, smiling humanity. The marvelous thing that is painless in Carbon is when you absolutely know that it has a soft heart.

Simple people. Simple lives. Talking is the easiest with them; a smile back means time has communed with the most profound message of all — friendship.

I stayed on, together with my new friends, under the hot morning in Carbon. I could not breathe (not because the place lay in decrepit and the stench of a market place was beyond comprehension), but at the epic existence of survival; people whose meager incomes scream for a decent livelihood. Above all, it’s down to the basics: a plethora of food and merchandise. Bring a couple of a hundred-peso bills, and you’ll have to balance your way home with loads of goodies in both hands.

(Click photos to see larger pop-in versions. Click again to revert their sizes.).

Forget unpleasantness; that there were a lot of people of all sizes and scents (that most of us will frown upon them or we quickly scamper away when they get close to us); and the hardships our countrymen undergo on a day-to-day basis. I had to stop right in my tracks and contemplate at this sheer existence…

This story might seemed to be over. However, the photos do not. I have learned from my shortcomings, my shallow humanity, and what it is to be selfish, cold and ignorant sometimes.

(Click here to view Aldo Nelbert’s Carbon Chronicles).

The Carbon Experience was fun! I literally forgot about my apprehension of the place. Together with Melvin, Aldo and Rachel “Ching” Villalon, I merged into the crowd and joined the throng of life.

(And what a small world indeed. Ching and I worked together as volunteers way back at President Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity in Dumaguete City).

 

 

 

This is my anesthetic viewpoint; I share my ironic realitize, now, as I
reminisce what the Cuban-French author, Anaïs Nin, wrote (and I quote her): “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

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