Sunday Ritual

Sunday mornings at the Ormoc market have become almost like ritual to me, something which I do rain or shine. It is my weekly marketing trip, and I have even established a parking space and a route from the parking area through its labyrinth of stalls of vegetables and assorted food items, through the meat stalls where the sight of blood and slaughtered animal flesh keeps me wondering what happened to Gil’s campaign for animal rights. (I hope Gil doesn’t puke when he reads this.) Had those animals been pets of their owners, I’m sure they would have sympathized with Gil, but unfortunately the market is a business place where sympathy for animals is simply out of place and animal rights unheard of.

Pork chop, sir, nipis og tambok! Tiyan, sir, humba! The tinderas that line these stalls call out when I pass by them, knowing my preferences. I have visited practically all their stalls and inspected their meat like a trained cook in the years that I have been doing my weekly marketing trips. Now they know the cuts that I want and the exact sizes of the humba that I prefer. Or which part of the chicken I like better. I have become a regular customer to many of them, a suki whom they must treat with respect because I won’t patronize them if they don’t. I suppose that is how relationships are defined between buyers and sellers.

I have also established a few friendships along my route with whom I exchange banter from time to time. There is Ian, a young meat stall operator who claims affinity to Che Guevarra, the Latin American visionary who was murdered by the CIA. I don’t know if Ian is serious about his claim, although his mother is surnamed Guevarra, but he looks very Filipino to me, probably with very little Spanish blood in his veins. However, I admit that Ian thinks a bit like his revolutionary cousin, as he often rants and rages against corruption in government and the ineptitudes of the system. We agree on a lot of things but we can’t seem to do anything about it. So our short banters often end up with either one of us being frustrated.

In the neighboring stall is Calcal, who used to be a youth organizer in the 90s in Alegria, one of our urban communities. He is still sharp as ever but now topped with a balding head and thinning hair. He gives me small discounts and assures me his vegetable oil exactly measures a lapad, but I know it is always a little short. He agrees with Guevarra’s henchman, especially on issues affecting us, like the oil price hikes and the small rollback given by the oil industry, but shakes his head in frustration most of the time. I see in both of them a creeping attitude of desperation and pessimism.

One feels the pulse of the city here at the market place because one does not only see sections of the middle class stripped to their shorts, sandos and slippers wading through the mass of sweating humanity and counting out wads of bills for choice meat cuts and fresh sea foods. (These sections do not seem to trust their cooking to their helpers that they have usurped the marketing chores that used to be the helper’s duty.)

Cologne spray for men

But if it is any consolation, one sees countless small vendors lining up the sidewalks in the market, farmers who turn fruit and vegetable compradors on Sundays, selling products of other farmers in Ormoc’s uplands. “Laray” is the term used to describe them here, meaning to “line up.” I see in them a thriving agricultural economy that can withstand global economic recessions. They’ll keep on producing camote, bananas, assorted root crops, beans, okra, eggplants, pechay, tomatoes in total disregard of any global phenomenon, and they’ll keep on selling these items so long as Ormoc’s residents have money to buy. This is the sector that won’t go hungry, no matter what global recession they’ll throw at us.