Sa Cauayan

Permanent pigment ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board.

In the island of Negros, where I was born, there is a town in the province of Negros Occidental, called Cauayan or Kawayan. The name means two different things depending on the accent. Ca-ua-yan means Bamboo while Caua-yan' means Bamboo grove. The town used to be filled with bamboo groves. I don't know if it is still covered with bamboo groves.

This is a drawing I made for Illustration Friday's acrobat theme but I just finished it yesterday.

When we were children, we played a lot of games inside and outside our homes. We also observed the things that happened in the neighborhood. We knew everyone in our neighborhood, from grandparents to grandchildren. We hardly watched television, first of all because my family did not own a television set until I was in high school. By then, we did not care much for it. So as a kid, we watched television only on Saturdays at five in the afternoon at our friend's house. We had to study during the weekdays. In the summer, we attended catechism classes and advanced English classes or creative writing classes just for fun. We also had yo-yo tournaments. The rest of the time, to entertain ourselves, we read inside our house and under the shade, we caught dragonflies, grasshoppers and beetles; we had spider fighting tournaments; we played with rubber bands, marbles and cowries. We ate fruits, we ran around and sometimes we fought. We climbed trees, a lot of trees; we gathered seashells, we rode on the firewood cart.

The firewood cart (oh I need to draw that) was a wooden cart stacked with firewood and fagots several layers high and pulled by a carabao. Sometimes it was a push cart. The neighborhood's firewood man was Tio Diego Tigulang (Diego the Old man) not Tio Diego Libat (Diego the Cross-eyed man).

Below, is a drawing I did on my Moleskine pocket notebook with a ballpoint pen. You may read the story here. It was the time I confronted Junior, The Bully. Notice the bamboo groves in the background. My younger sister is holding a fried plantain banana, the same type the little boy on the top drawing is doing (third from left, sitting on the rock).

Ballpoint pen on Moleskine 9"x12" notebook centerfold.