by Rembrandt Ramilo

Walking alongside the road, I see some children are not cared for, you find them with no slippers in the streets. A number of tricycles, parking by the roadside, are means of livelihood. Teenagers are busy enjoying the billiard while others are playing basketball on a well paved whole court. Adult fishermen are seen drinking liquor in a group also by the roadside.

The light brown waves are strong, you see them as you approach this old lake port. Looking up, the rusty roof with holes that you can see the sunlight passing through them. Several fishermen sitting on the cemented floor, repairing their fishnets as the children walk around nearby.

It is a quiet noon, the winds strong and beating, all you can hear are waves hitting the shoreline. Several hundreds of meters from where you are, gazing toward the lake, are thousands of circling bamboos standing , serving as frameworks for the large black nets where fish are fenced and raised and several destroyed nipa huts in the middle of them. Green water lilies are scattered surrounding the bamboos.

There is only one small manual old-time water pump that I see, where children clean and wash their things. Tens of old green and red “bancas” anchored along the lakeshore.  Twelve concrete columns at about more than fifteen feet in height, serving as the main supporting structure of the port. Ten cemented benches ,three of them are more or less already ruined ,from which the bended rusty iron skeletons appear when the cement breaks out.

A toilet facility and two small one-storey buildings at the background ,yet they look unattractive. Observing the houses along the lake bank, the “kubos” are worn out and sub-standard. One fish stall is there at one place in the corner.

Across the lake, the view of the long white pipeline of the hydro- electric plant climbing upward the blue mountain as the white birds interrupts your vision when they fly below the clouds.