Keislaman

Also this morning at the bed next to us the ward was new patient – a very old man. They said he was 110 years old! His sons were attending to him. All 3 of them impressed me as very nice, with good manners, and well educated. Then all of a sudden one of them turned to me and started speaking in fluent Palawano! Totally unexpected – why would any educated Filipino take the time to learn Palawano, the language of the native people, especially since knowing that language doesn’t help anyone further their business or anything like that!

Well, it turned out that they were from one of the neighboring people groups that live down river referred to as “Keislaman” by the mountain people. These are people who had common ancestors with the Palawanos, but they broke away when they became Muslim. Now, many of them are educated, but they speak the same language as the Palawanos in their homes.

According to Palawano legend, they separated back in the days of the ancestors when an old man came down from the hills to visit a young man and his wife, who had just prepared dark sticky rice to eat. According to custom, they fed the old man and visited for some time before he left. When he left, he travelled by a path where the young man had set his pig traps. A few hours after the old man left, the young man went out to check his pig traps, and he had caught a pig in one of his traps. So he brought the pig home, where he and his wife butchered it and ate the initial cut of meat. After eating, they argued about who would take the remains of the pig down to the creek to clean out the intestines (which they would have use for later). The wife won the argument and took the remains down to the creek. When she was cleaning out the intestines, she noticed their contents – dark sticky rice! So she realized that this pig was actually the man who had visited them that morning, and he had turned into a pig and been killed in the pig trap. She got violently ill and threw up, but managed to make it home. She told her husband she could never eat pig again because of what happened, but the husband didn’t agree with that idea, so they separated. She went down to the ocean and re-married, while he went up to the hills and got remarried. Her descendants became the “Keislaman” and his descendants became the Palawano. According to the legend, that is why the Muslims don’t eat pork, but they speak the same language as the Palawano.

I was able to share this Palawano legend with our neighbors in the ward, but I have not confirmed if they share the same story in their culture. They acted a bit surprised at the story, so I have a feeling they might not have heard it before.