International Sagada hosts the good and ugly

SAGADA, PHILIPPINES-A peaceful and friendly community, discrimination is alien here as locals accept visitors alike in all shades, colors, professions, and vocations.

This tourist town hosted and continues to host a number of one-day tourists to ten year resident-visitors since the backpacking tourists started coming in the 1970s. Through the years, people here came to encounter people from different countries with their different accents, smell, language, and behavior.

The early backpacking tourists, mostly from Canada, Switzerland, Germany and Israel came with tanned skin, long hair and light and peaceful disposition. Being one with nature, you can sense their respect to mother earth, respect to themselves and to people whom they found.

They came and enjoyed the clean air and scenery of an invigorating Sagada, ate with locals and enjoyed evening bonfires with them when the mission compound was then not prohibited for lighting bonfires. Bonfires lasted till the early hours of the mornings with guitar music, a bottle of gin or rum and coke, heavenly puffs of smoke and light happy chats which progressed on to heavy political discussions depending on the mood of the bonfire congregants.

The tourists came back with more friends, different friends and advertised Sagada for what it is—friendly, a low-cost place to live in, and a place where you can relax, be one with nature and have wholesome fun.

Restrictions were not imposed as people and the tourists alike observed respect and courtesy to the other. No brawls, no stealing, no taking advantage of the other. Life was good and people co-existed peacefully.

The tourists came and went and “took nothing but pictures and left nothing but footprints” and Sagadians treated and continue to treat them like they are part of the family. Some locals though, especially the guys, eventually married lady tourists who came here.

Through the years, tourists and resident tourists alike shared their good minds and hearts to the people of this most visited tourist town. Contributions and sharing of what is good ranged from what is educational, spiritual, physical, musical, environmental to tasty good cooking.

Among them include two Americans, Judy Wallace and Marge Moran from the Summer Institute of Linguistics who stayed in Sagada from the ‘80s through the ‘90s. With the help of local Jocelyn Navarro who served as translator, the two American linguists translated the Christian Bible to Sagada dialect.

Local visitors including Manila-based artist and businessman Boy Yuchengco, a good friend of former town mayor and now Presidential Assistant for Cordillera Affairs Tom Killip, had an immense contribution in the re-building of St Mary’s School in the 1980s after the wooden school building was razed down the ground in 1975. The school building stands now as it is, a U-shaped concrete two story building which houses at least 10 classrooms including a library, an auditorium and administration offices.

Now SMS principal Dennis Faustino, former vice principal of the International School in Manila and a music and stage director, had come here in Sagada in the 80’s through the 90’s and taught music to students while playing Santa to kids every Christmas day.

A number of concerts from local students and from the Glee Club of IS were performed where proceeds went to SMS. He also directed plays with cast from the community itself, among the noted plays included the classic Fiddler on the Roof and Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Resident artist Janet Eason from Australia now teaches art to students of SMS while
American Kent Sinkey also teaches computer technology to students here. We have English artist and potter David Fowler who stayed here since the early 1990s, shared his skills in pottery, and eventually married a Sagadan native. They are blessed now with a son.

Other foreign potters also who contributed to the interest on ceramics here include artist and potter Jaime de Guzman and his wife who stayed here with their children in the early 1990s. American Anglican missionary Rev. Fr Archie Stapleton’s son, Archie who was born and lived here in Sagada in the 1960s, came back from the US and shared and supported Sagada ceramic local enthusiasts Lope Bosaing, Alma Bawing-Bagano, Siegrid Bangyay, Tessie Baldo among others, do more pottery designs and hold their own exhibits.

Resident visitor – musicians also contributed what music means. National artist and musician Aster Teczon who stayed here also in the early 1990s taught children how to play the guitar. While a number of local and foreign musicians as well including painter-musician Diokno, artist-musician Memra, writer-musician Steve Rogers regaled locals with their reggae and folk music along with local musicians.

Australian soccer player Steve Jackson who comes and goes to Australia and back to Sagada trained high school boys on soccer which made some local soccer team players earn titles in their respective tournaments. This is to mention Sagada Little League Ganduyan Bucks which gained national awards, supported by Manila-based businesswoman Bingirl Clemente who visits Sagada now and then.

Married to a Bontoc native, Bing, also an environmentalist, supported Sagada with its recycling waste and Materials Recovery Facility program. This further let this clean and green community gain awards in a nationwide search for best environmentally attended municipalities.

This tourist town which accommodates at least 15,000 tourists a year with sudden leaps noted during Christmas and Lenten season, also accommodates cooks and bakers. French cook and baker Philippe named “Aklay” by locals here who stayed here since the 1990s, specially does good tasty cooking for few to a hundred diners. His yummy delicious bread is specially sold at restaurants in town.

While most tourists were good and friendly, stories were also heard about burial caves being vandalized reportedly by some visitors. These stories heard through the grapevine in the ‘80s stayed and the culprits were never found yet the bones of the dead remained vandalized and missing.

As years passed by and tourism reached the later years of 2000, changes were seen in the behavior of some tourists, a far cry from the tourists of yesteryears.

This town recently is host to an abusive Austrian tourist who presently lives now with his Filipina partner at Bitin, Ambasing. Based from documented stories of the residents at Sitio Bitin and Barangay Ambasing, the tourist’s disrespectful and inconsiderate behavior had gone beyond what is acceptable which led the people to declare him persona non grata and wanted him out of the village.

Stories have also been heard of a Filipina wife of a foreigner who stayed in town a year ago. This woman named Paz Villanueva-Ballou was charged in court for eight counts of child abuse for reportedly physically mishandling the daughter of Sagada resident and complainant, Luz Badongen. Her child, Megan Badongen, 9, is the classmate of the daughter of Villanueva who took her Grade 3 education at Sagada Central School. A warrant of arrest was issued but Paz Villanueva-Ballou couldn’t be found.

What is perplexing is this story. Long time Sagada resident Jennylyn Bacarisas Stavely from Talisay, Cebu suddenly died of heart failure March 19 last year in Baguio City and was reportedly cremated. This was after her husband, John Stavely from England, accompanied her to Baguio to have her treated of her sickness, police reports say. Sometime later, an anonymous email was received by the Department of Social Welfare and Development that Stavely is reportedly abusing his wife physically.

Tourists have experienced their own miseries here especially noted the recent years. The police blotter has a number of reports of theft done to foreign visitors and an isolated case of mugging and robbery.

Sagada is becoming exposed to circumstances and incidents which goes beyond what is normally and regularly acceptable. It takes a vigilant community to guard and nurture its age-old and sound values both to protect the locals and the visitors alike in order that camaraderie and sharing between and amongst locals and visitors continue mutually and peacefully.