I have been preparing for a trip to my Mother Country, and have been thinking a lot of the people who made me who I am.  How many lives have crossed to have me? They have crossed the seas and into mountains. My dad’s father came from a ship in China.  Down my mother’s line somewhere they crossed oceans to fall in love and one day have me. Nobody flew until my first sister. They all came from ships before that.  

Technology has come a long way. The technology of flight is a plane.  We humans, are always trying to defy gravity like the birds born to fly.  Only, humans are not born to fly. We are born to invent and copy. Technology has come a long way, but not for Isabela.

Isabela is a jungle that swallows you whole, and seeing her is like seeing green for the first time.  In her mountains live the Mountain People, Igorot.  There are also the Ilocano people residing in the northwestern seaboard of Luzon.  Their name derives from the meaning “from the bay”.  I wonder what type of pasalubong I should take with me there to that place where time slows down, as the people there still live in their huts, in  some places they still have feathers in their headdress.  I can see my uncle’s duck farm, if he still has one. Once, a typhoon blew in and took his ducks away, and so he had to replace them.

The last time I was there I met a cousin who, like my dad, left and went to college.  There she studied how to bring enough electricity back to introduce a radio. My father sponsored her education and when they saw each other she was filled with so much gratitude and love that we were all drowning in tears.

I am thinking of bringing solar powered lanterns, a hammock, instruments for the children, towels, canned food.  What else? I wish I could afford a hospital for them since it’s so far away from where they are. I wonder if there’s a way to give them internet so we can all stay in touch?  I don’t want my roots to disappear like it did with ancestors before me. I want it to live on with my children to reach far into the future until the world’s end.

This trip will not be the last.