Community oriented. Simple fun.
We spent New Year’s Eve watching a movie — Die Hard 4.0, of all things — and then setting off some fireworks at midnight. From the family house, you could see other fireworks going off around the mountainside. A cloudy night and lights from the city below kept the hills in smoky silhouettes.
Mostly, the community celebration took place on New Year’s day at the sitio (community) basketball court where all the local kids participated in games. I watched, but since I don’t understand the Visayan language well enough, I really couldn’t tell what was going on, although everyone was laughing. The teenagers stuck to the other end of the court, shooting hoops, while many of the men sat around drinking Tanduay rum with tea or Sparkle (the local Sprite/7 Up).
The games wrapped up around 4 PM, and then we headed back down the mountain to the city, winding around the muddy roads, some of which were no wider than the truck and overlooked steep hillside into the valleys below. There was a town called Agsagnot along the way, and Juvy tried to get me to pronounce the Visayan combination of “ngo” which takes the tongue to the top and back of the throat to make. I couldn’t do it right, making her and her brother laugh.