The sheer coolness of being born in Benguet

There is a lot to be said about Benguet and its problems, but on this occasion I'd like to pay tribute to the only province I call home.

If princes are lucky to eventually become kings by accident of birth into the right family, then I won the jackpot by being born in the right place.

Growing up in La Trinidad, Kibungan and Baguio (and briefly in Atok) meant I never had to complain about heat strokes or asthma.  My legs are sturdy from all that hiking and walking.  I have tread on carpets of thick moss and I have drank fresh water from unopened pitcher plants growing wild in the forest. I learned at an early age that the earth yields food for the patient planter.  Living farther into the interior taught me it was possible to live simply and with little discontent.  

Going to grade school in several public schools gave me access to competent, solid instruction, playing in wide open fields. More importantly, childhood in Benguet afforded ease in speaking and learning the English language without self-consciousness or the baggage of colonial and class overtones (such things I would later realize in the discourse of lowland universities).  

College life in Baguio in the eighties was a discovery that the city could be as hip, urbane, blase, cultured, diverse and with-it as any world capital. For a fraction of the price too.  Ask anyone who remembers the music of the time. It seemed as if we were just attuned to new wave as London.  Ask anyone who stayed up to the 8 p.m. closing time of St. Louis University's multi-storey library discovering new worlds.  Ask anyone who has fond memories of the cultural ferment of the era.  

When I moved to Metro Manila, I realized that, for many, going home was a carefully budgeted plane trip or a time-consuming sea journey.  For me, it was hopping on an aircon bus that must have cost less than a hundred pesos then.  A former boss once asked me what going home to Baguio was like.  It's like going to another country, I responded.

For me, Benguet's greatest gift is an attitude that has served me well in adventure and misadventure: That I had come out to the wider world, not from a dusty forgotten town or some class-divided lowland center, but from a place made special by its temperature and temperament. Yeah, we are cool, even if you're too dense to know it.