Among my works, the
story of a girl who did not know it was her birthday has got to be my personal
favorite.
I went to Subic for a
workshop organized by professional Filipino photographers. During the fourth
day of the workshop, the participants were asked to make a photo story about
the residents living in a village or sitio
called Agusuhin. The sitio was mostly composed of families which experienced a
series of displacements after a shipbuilding facility from South Korea took
over their lands.
The challenge for the
participants was to find little stories inside the larger context, which was
the issue of demolition. So I went around the community and the first person I
talked with was Junito, a fisherman.
I remember asking him
if he knew a family in Agusuhin with an interesting story. Funny because it was
probably wrong to ask those kinds of questions and I must have said it in an
insincere manner. I do have good intentions; I just had poor research skills.
“We all have
interesting stories here,” he said to me.
To tell you the truth,
I was kind of embarrassed, so after that I made sure we would about his life. But
first, I told him the reason I had a camera slung around my neck. I told him
about the workshop, and after that I told him I was interested to know the
story of his family.
There was one thing we
were briefed about before we begun to ask around the sitio. We had to know if the family or the issue we were going to
present in the photo story is related to the Agusuhin demolition. After talking
with him for around half an hour, I learned that his family had experienced
being displaced four times. He said he was hoping that their current settlement
was going to be permanent.
When we went near the
beach, Junito pointed at her daughter, Angel, playing alone under an inverted
wrecked boat. He said it was his daughter’s birthday, but they don’t have money
to celebrate that’s why he and his wife chose to keep mum about it. To make it
up to Angel, who turned six that day, they allowed her to skip school and play
at the beach instead.
And I got affected by
the story—the innocence of the child against the harsh realities that
surrounded her. So I considered the
option of taking portraits of her daughter. One thing that bothered me of
course was the thought of making it meaningful and visually good amid no real
tension going on and having only around eight hours to make a decent photo
story. But I guess I just got lucky because while I was taking photos of her,
the activities she had, the things she drew, the actions she made— the way she
showed affection to her family — were dramatic and intriguing, and I thought they
would make good portraits.
Few months after the
workshop, the houses of the residents were demolished once again. I have very
little idea of what they must have been experiencing now, but I would really like
to meet Junito’s family again to catch up.
For me, the issue of
demolition is absolute injustice. Injustice because no one deserves to be
forcibly evicted from their ancestral lands or be forced to live under
extremely poor conditions, while few wealthy families own huge tracts of land
and many of their homes almost empty. We seldom realize that most families of
farmers and fishermen, who work hard for the food we eat, cannot even have a
decent meal. And in some cases, they opt not to tell their children their
birthdays just to keep their hopes low so they don’t get disappointed.# Richard Dy
