“TAMAK” AND BUKO-PANDAN
February 12th 2009 00:00
If anyone ever wonders how a strange word (tamak) and a concoction (buko-pandan) ended up in the travel section of Orble, here’s my explanation: people always consider travel as part of an educational process...
Well, yeah, I picked up the word “Tamak” from one of my travels. I suppose tamak is not a regular word. It is more like a street lingo used by a group of people in a town in the Province of Quezon here in the Philippines invigorated by a newly constructed concrete road that made the town more accessible to the rest of the world.
Okay, people from the urban centers might choose to describe the town as “remote” for brevity (and they will be right) but hey, why court the ire of the people who treated me nicely – and earn the disgraceful title “Tamak”, eh?
To give you an idea what that word means, think of a person whose skin layer in his face has the thickness of a bomb shelter. Impenetrable. Don’t consider it as a physical attribute. Instead, associate it with the word “shame” as in “shameless” and you’ll come pretty close to its meaning.
“Tamak” therefore is a person of ill repute who is not affected by shameful comments or snide remarks, not because he is not guilty of the accusations but because he is immune to those comments and not bothered by his conscience.
Why in the world did I waste my time learning that word? I didn’t it just stuck to my mind after reading a lot of Wall Street stories these days. And of those top U.S. bank officials too!
What about Buko-Pandan?
Now, there’s a delicious story. We’re still in travel section right? Oh, but, don’t expect a nice travel where you can go in luxury and see the best places in the world!
It is not something like that.
If you’ve read this blog before, and you’ve chanced upon that piece I did which mentioned about the atrocities committed by some rebel groups in Mindanao, the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front), then you’ve had a glimpse of the setting here. A rebel infested area. The provinces of Lanao del Sur, Lanao del Norte, Maguindanao, etc.
How I ended up there? Well, pretty much like the way I got mixed up with that thing about the Presidential Management Staff that I posted in this blog sometime back. A small, unimportant cog that needed to do a job no matter how insignificant, you know…
This time, I got embroiled in the promotion of a Telco product (no, I’m not in sales) and while I knew where we were going, I didn’t know we were going to pass this way.
Wait, let me go back a bit, lest I’ll lose my way around my main topic. I am not writing about rebellion or who is winning that war here in the Philippines. I am writing about Buko-Pandan, a name that used to evoke images of young, fresh coconut (Buko) meat or juice mixed with extracts from a leafy plant locally called “Pandan.”
I am not a scientist or an herbalist so, please, don’t expect me to give other useful uses of Pandan. Suffice it to say that if you put a portion of a Pandan leaf into a pot of steamed rice while you are cooking it, it gives that kind of aroma that makes you want to eat everything on the dining table when it is chow time – rice, viands, etc. including the pot. (I’m kidding, but only about the pot).
So we were traversing the Lanao del Norte – Lanao del Sur – Maguindanao route, in a car, where military checkpoints are like less than a kilometer apart in some points due to the notoriety of the place, when my traveling companion suggested that we take a rest for a while in a forested area in Matling, Lanao del Sur where nary but a single hut with two coolers standing inside.
There were four women in the hut, one was chopping something. Beside the hut, a few meters to the right, were a group of uniformed men - armed to the teeth. Some of them looked like they were resting but the others were standing ready holding their m-16s with their trigger fingers pressed against the trigger guards.
In these parts, uniforms are meaningless. Those armed men could either be rebels or soldiers and an untrained eye can’t tell the difference. But there’s a reason why my traveling companion is the one on the wheels, driving, and not me. He is not from here either. But he is familiar with the area.
“Relax, those are government soldiers,” he said while handing me a cold, young, fresh coconut fruit chopped at the top with a straw sticking out. I sipped, expecting the familiar refreshing taste of young coconut juice.
“What the…?” I blurted out in surprise. “This thing taste’s like…”
“Buko-Pandan! I was telling you about it during the last five kilometers or so” my companion said.
Obviously, I wasn’t listening. I was soaking in the unfamiliar surrounding. But having been jolted by it, I was just too happy to soak my intestines with the delicious tasting beverage… (and later on, it’s fresh meat, which tastes like buko-pandan too!)
But, no, it’s not a beverage. This thing is fresh. It wasn’t a brew. It was just harvested. I don’t know how they did it. But here’s a picture of two bunches of them. They are real. And they are not a concoction!
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