BUHAWEN, San Marcelino, Zambales—All that remains now of the old village of Buhawen is the spire of the Bajaoen church, a giant stairway of white concrete topped by a rusty-colored iron cross that sticks out of the calm Mapanuepe Lake.
If you looked closely enough, you can see faintly part of the church’s nave under the deep green water, but the other features of the once-bustling village seem to have been permanently erased from view when it was entombed in watery lahar after the Mount Pinatubo eruption 25 years ago.
“Wala na. That’s all you can see,” boatman Ernie Barron gestured at the spire, as we crossed the Mapanuepe Lake one recent Saturday. He said there were some people who tried to take underwater pictures, but failed to get good results because the water was murky.
Facing the church steeple, one can see in the distance the scarred remains of Cullen Peak, where mining companies dug out gold-bearing ore two decades ago. Nearer the lake were a series of dams supposed to contain the mine tailings and prevent them from spilling into the village.
Buhawen, one of the 18 barangays of San Marcelino, was a thriving community of farmers and miners, and home to the Benguet-Dizon gold and copper mines, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in June 1991.
The village, about 25 kilometers deep into the mountains of San Marcelino, was among the upland communities heavily damaged by ash, sand and other volcanic debris spewed by Pinatubo.
But it was only during the ensuing rainy season that Buhawen really fell. As rains washed down the volcanic materials from the surrounding slopes, the debris dammed the Mapanuepe River downstream and soon flooded the Mapanuepe Valley, where the villages of Buhawen and Aglao were located.
Despite the heavy odds, residents here have not only survived the Pinatubo eruption; they have prevailed.
Today, a new Buhawen stands at Sitio Pili, growing back at the old hillside site where miners were allotted their living quarters by Benguet Corp., which then operated the Dizon mines.
Retaining the order at the old corporate village, Buhawen now looks like a model community with a gated entrance, an orderly row of houses mostly surrounded by small flower gardens, and paved roads lined on the sides by painted stones. At the village plaza, happy-looking children played tag that rainy Saturday, sheltered by the roof of the covered basketball court.
“Maybe because we’re a resilient lot,” said Mylene, a store owner, who offered to cook our lunch of boiled rice and dry pork adobo during our visit. She said the old folks—mostly of Ilocano stock that intermarried with native Zambals and some members of the Aeta tribe—experienced a lot of hardship, “but they’re used to the hard life so they adapted well.”
Mylene was born at the new Buhawen after the eruption, but she can recall the stories her parents and other relatives told about the evacuation and their subsequent return to Pili when it was already safe.
She learned that, after the eruption, the Buhawen residents took on odd jobs—mostly serving as laborers in construction sites in town, planting and harvesting rice in lowland barangays. In between jobs, they cleared their old lots in Pili, scraping 1 to 3 feet of Pinatubo sand off their property, until it was again habitable.
With a new home, the residents of Buhawen said life soon returned to normal.
That Saturday when we visited Pili, Ernie Barron and Joel Linggay had just returned from plowing their farm in Aglao across the lake. That is where most of the farms are, Ernie said, because Pili is a hilly area and permits little farming.
Most of the local farmers grow palay, vegetables and root crops, like sweet camote and cassava, which they sell at the town market.
Aside from farming, Buhawen residents now mostly earn their livelihood from working out of town. Her husband, for example, works at the Hanjin shipyard in Subic town. Some have found work in Manila, and not a few “more fortunate” residents have secured well-paying jobs abroad, mostly in the Middle East, Mylene said.
Still others earned their keep by engaging in black-sand mining, using magnets mano-a-mano to separate magnetite from the tons and tons of sand deposited by Pinatubo eruption on the Santo Tomas River. This activity, however, was only possible during the rainy season, when the strong river current churned the sand, making it easy to separate the light volcanic deposits from the heavier magnetite.
Then lately, Mylene added, more and more locals have turned their attention to what was apparently the Buhawen residents’ first love—gold mining.
As a mining community, Buhawen was famous for its mineral deposits that included gold, silver, copper and chromite.
In the heyday of the Benguet-Dizon mining concession, it was estimated that at least 500 hectares of the mountain in Buhawen, specifically its three sitios of Naban, Tikis and Sayasay, have been exploited by the mining firms.
That time, the employees were paid about P15 per hour, making them one of the highest-paid workers in the province, said Edward Barron, 41, whose father worked as all-around equipment operator at the Benguet mines.
After Benguet Corp. ceased operations in 1997, some locals scavenged for silver-copper concentrates at the old mine sites, Edward said. “But later on, we learned from Igorot natives who were miners here about small-scale mining and, since then, we have been mining on our own.”
As of now, Edward said about 40 percent of the menfolk in Buhawen engage in this rediscovered passion—digging for gold.
“Those who are not into farming, and those who have no permanent jobs, naturally turn to mining,” Edward noted.
Small-scale mining in Buhawen seems to be an easier alternative for local menfolk, most of whom are children of former workers at the Benguet mines or former miners themselves.
Along the road to Camalca, another Buhawen sitio farther east of Ipil, are the easily recognizable entrances to small mine shafts, most of them shored by timber and barred with makeshift gates made of tree branches.
These lead down to small one-man tunnels from where the brown-colored gold-bearing rocks are pried out.
In front of these entrances are parked the motor scooters of miners, the choice means of transportation that allows them easy movement along the dirt road. Also seen are some small trucks that collect sacks of gold rocks from the small mine sites and bring them to makeshift mills that grind the rocks to bring out the gold inside.
Small-scale mining is hard work, and bereft of any scientific survey, it is mostly depended on luck, said Noel Antonio, 39, one of the locals digging along the Camalca road.
“Tsamba-tsamba lang [We operate on pure luck],” Noel said. “Oftentimes, we make an average of P250 to P300 a day, but there are times when we earn less than P50 a week.”
Tunneling for gold is also a dangerous occupation, said Vilmer Caceres, a 56-year-old former Benguet worker who was a tunnel worker for 20 years.
At Camalca, Vilmer has his own tunnel, but he advises against digging too deep.
“Delikado ang mahabang tunnel dito kasi malambot ang lupa,” he said. “Mahaba na iyong 20 meters.”
At a makeshift ore mill in Pili, Hermie Dagun, 39, was washing the crushed ore with water to remove the mud-like detritus and allow the heavier gold-bearing grains to settle.
Hermie, the son of another former mine worker, also works with a gang to mine gold-bearing rocks in Camalca, and here they pay the mill owner P500 to crush their 15 sacks of rocks they have collected.
The 15 sacks take about two hours to grind, but with just a few sacks done, Hermie already had some grains to show, although the small shiny grains hardly looked like the gold everyone at Buhawen seemed to be crazy about.
But the small grains of gold, upon reaching a weight of 1 gram, would fetch him P1,000, Hermie said.
Image credits: Henry Empeño