I take a bath once a day, that is, if I feel like doing it at all. But with this heat, doing it twice feels like the right thing to do. Perspiration mixed with dust triggers an allergy that the body signals as itching. House dust is one of the materials that a test showed I am allergic to. Prolonged exposure to it causes a runny nose with mucus that eventually lodges in the lungs and results in asthma. That was one of the things I learned while roaming the mountains and trying to prevent having episodes of it growing up.
Childhood Asthma Prevention
Farmers often used mats to dry corn grains that were later milled for eating. Then they dust the mats off and keep them away to be used when a visitor comes around. My nose became a radar for this setup and when I started coughing and my nose became runny, I often decided to sleep outside without the mat and with only the fresh and cool night air to embrace me. That was my usual asthma prevention move. It was effective.
Coping with the Heat
Aside from the twice-a-day bath, I would walk around top naked and open the windows and doors to let the cool air in. This partly answered one of the questions I asked when I was a student: why did our ancestors wear bahag or loincloths and were mostly naked every day? Because we live in the tropics, where the heat becomes unbearable when the sun goes up.
Our ancestors lived near the sea or river and took a bath as often as they could. Partly for cleanliness' sake and partly because of the heat. They also tattooed their bodies and tattoos can't be seen under clothes, only when one is naked.
The Hot Spell and Filipino Philosophy
Meteorologists have, of course, told us about the hot spell or El Niño and it has come. But it's not that the rain has not fallen. It did. What I fear most, though, is a typhoon hitting because I don't have money for recovery purposes. Which brings me to another of our beliefs: the bahala na philosophy. We entrust our future to fate or to God. Bahala na.
Culture Shaped by Environment
Our culture and customs have evolved through time. They were shaped by the kind of environment we are in. The Philippines is archipelagic and this limits our ability to forge civilizations that only grow in wide plains, even if those plains are deserts. Because of that, we are a seafaring people and live independently as a community. Our kingdoms are small and we don't have major or popular castles.
I recently googled the word ruins because I remembered those ruins on the beach of Argao town where we once lived when the soft drinks firm where my father worked assigned him there. Those ruins were called baluarte and built to repel the Moros, who raided the islands ever so often to seize slaves and other valuables. Those structures were built for protection and these didn't survive the onslaught of colonialism.
Rediscovering Filipino Identity
There are actually many things that years of historiography failed to teach us about us as Filipinos. Many of us have forgotten, for example, that we have always been warlike rather than the docile people that we now believe we are. And we have always faced the tests, like the hot spells, like the resilient people we are.
