A Walk with Amy Astoveza of Dumagats
Xiaojun Wang A Walk with Amy Astoveza of Dumagats - Wang Xiaojun, People of Asia for Climate Solutions (PACS)
A bag of rice, probably around 5 kilogrammes, on my head, and a box of 2 dozen eggs in my arms, I was hiking through muddy roads in Sierra Madre. It was almost five oâclock in the afternoon, Aug 17th, 2019, and my destination for that night was Sitio Baycuran, a tiny cluster of less than 200 indigenous Dumagats people. I wanted to get there before it got totally dark.
Sitio is one of the Spanish words left behind in the Filipino language by the colonialists. It means âa siteâ, not of any particular reason. Just a site. Today, in Tagalog, it means âa unit even smaller than a barangay, or villageâ. Most sitios are far from everything, even from each other. Many are not marked on Google Map, or any map. I, a Chinese man, was only there because my friend, a Filipino journalist, had told me that Dumagats people in