Casey Cruz shares a short reflective story from the memory and notes of her ethnographic research in Barangay Patungan back in 2017, which was facing a decade long land grabbing case.
“Do you know how to swim?”
“Yes, I do.”, I would answer.
For years now, that question has carried me back to the same brown shore, to the December I spent in a fishing village where the children asked it of me almost every day, half-curious and half-daring, squinting up at me from the sand.