Dreams

I used to wonder where have all my high school friends gone because I’ve not seen or bumped into them for years. I would later know several of them have flown out of the country.

Many of my friends are now in Toronto, Dubai, Doha, London, California, New York, etc. Some have left for good, never coming back. I feel like I’m the only one left.

Not that I’m bothered really, but it’s queer feeling that you’re getting old and your peers are nowhere because they’ve left.

You find new friends but you can’t really replace those you grew up with. They are like a map of one’s journey through life. You trace the contours of your own winding journey through adolescence and beyond looking at their faces.

I studied high school at St. Scho in Talisay under the unforgettably progressive Benedictine nuns. Later in life, I toyed with the idea of entering the religious life by becoming a Benedictine monk.

If I did and would be writing history like what I occasionally do here, that would prove my friend Insoy (a.k.a Missing Filemon’s Lorenzo Niñal) more than priestly; he’d be prophetic. He likens me to the monk Ambeth Ocampo who writes a history column for the Inquirer.

So much for dreams of what I’d rather be. People are leaving the country at frenzied pace. In Cebu, art departments have been raided clean of graphic designers. They’re all holed up in Dubai. The few of us left are enticed to go, now and then.

It’s not easy leaving when you’ve got kids already. But who knows?

Our ancestors were globetrotters as early as the 19th Century. With money from trade with foreign markets, they were sent to study in Manila, Hongkong, Europe and some to the US.

Cebu opened to the world market in 1860. That changed the course of the city’s history. After centuries of sluggish growth, it shot up to become the country’s second premier city, overtaking Iloilo City (which after Legaspi left Cebu and before he went to Manila, became the Spanish seat of power.)

Cebu became an entrepot, a trading center and a busy port where local products, usually agricultural, were sent off to foreign buyers who had agents set up brokerage firms here. These firms helped fund the local elite’s economic enterprises.

Being a mountainous island yet with excellent ports, Cebu became a core with commercial and service functions that processed the products from the peripheral islands. There was a considerable agricultural activity though in Talisay, Minglanilla, Banilad, Carcar and Carmen where lands were planted with cash crops by the Parian elite for export to the world market.

In Carmen the Ralloses had an hacienda (which was recently bought by the Lhuillers - talk of the rise and rise of the local elites.) In Minglanilla, a long stretch of land adjoining the national highway was a Velez farmland, now subdivided into villages for low and medium cost housing.

It would be a lie if I say I’m not inclined to leave myself. Well, there’s a time for everything under the heavens.

In the meantime, I’m waiting for my dream machine, the Mac mini to hit the market in Cebu and see how it wipes out the PC. Everybody leaves, the Mac lands.

I’ll be riding the next wave of IT revolution, now with the real McCoy that started it – the Macintosh and see where it will land me; or like my ancestors, trade with the rest of the world, not with cash crops anymore but with IT services maybe.

Dream on, friends. It’s a new world unfolding.