Manog-hilot

When I was a little girl, I fell out of a neighbor's bugnay tree. The branch I was hanging from broke with a sharp crack and I landed flat on my back, gasping for air like a catfish on the chopping block.


The next day I was running a high fever and had the hoarse raspy cough of a veteran smoker. My parents brought me over to Tyo Gunding, a silver-haired man with a brown seamed face and a nearly toothless grin. Tyo Gunding enclosed my thin wrist with two knobby fingers and felt my pulse for a second or two, questing for a “kibit”. He laid me face down on his lap, and with his gnarled hands did something twisty to my back. I felt a mild uncomfortable snap, and then he let me up gently. The fever left me that very afternoon.


Through the years of various childhood mishaps, my siblings and I were Tyo Gunding's frequent customers. On some visits, I even came face to face with some kids from school who were there for the very same reasons I was. Tyo Gunding was obviously a manog-hilot of great reknown.

I never really thought deeply upon this phenomenon. The Tyo Gundings of my world were as accepted as rubbing Acete de alcamporado and binding the tummy of a colicky baby, or calling out “tabi-tabi” to unseen spirits when transversing an area of heavy vegetation.


It was a time when adults would append the requisite “puwera buyag” to every sentence someone would utter in praise of their younglings. And when these same younglings came down with fevers oddly coupled by cold clammy palms and soles, they would send for a “manog luy-a”, usually a female healer who would rub key areas of the child's body with a piece of ginger, blowing on it at intervals while uttering strange hispanic-sounding incantations. I vaguely remember a “manog luy-a” working on me once. As far as I know, this is done still.


I grew up and had kids of my own. When Woog was a rowdy toddler trotting faster than his equilibrium could keep up, falls were a frequent occurrence. Some of his more spectacular acrobatic performances were followed by a fever and dry hoarse coughing the next day. Without any second thoughts, we would bring him to Tyo Jimmy, an elderly man who owned an aquarium in which swam the ugliest fish I have ever seen.


Tyo Jimmy would briefly take Woog's wrist. It always intrigued me how the manog-hilots could tell something was wrong, some vein misaligned or pinned between a bone or cartilege, simply by taking the child's pulse.


Tyo Jimmy's next step involved either rotating Woog's arms from the shoulders, or stretching his legs backwards at the socket, depending on where the “kibit” was. He always ended each session by rubbing Vicks Vapor-rub front and back. “No baths until tomorrow,” he would say, “and no air-conditioning for at least an hour.”


We would thank him profusely and drop a twenty-peso bill in a small bowl in front of the hideous fish. He never touched the money himself. Nor did he ever specify his exact charge in “medical” fees. At any given time, the bowl would contain a motley collection of fifties, twenties, and coins of various denominations. I suspect if you offered him a loaf of good bread or a tray of eggs, he would gladly have accepted them, too.


And within the next few hours, like clockwork, Woog's fever always disappeared. The coughing, within the next day or so. When Eli would take sick from performing magnificent stunts of his own, we brought him to Tyo Jimmy, too.


They were almost always elderly men or women, these manog-hilots. Some say they were born with the gift of touch, others say they apprenticed for a long period of time under older healers before they could practice their craft. It seems they followed a code that disallowed them from charging a monetary fee for their services. It is said that if they did, they would lose their gift. Probably the reason for Tyo Jimmy's hands-off-on-money policy.


Needless to say, my sisters-in-law, both doctors, disapproved of our visits to these local chiropractors. “No scientific basis whatsoever”, they would say, or “of course your body aches when you have the flu, the manog-hilot massages it a little to make it feel better, is all.“


Yes, I suppose taking our febrile kids to the manog-hilot does take a stretch of faith. Why risk your children's bodies to someone with no formal medical schooling when there are hundreds of over-the-counter chemicals to pour into them, right?


But how do you argue with what may just be thousands of years of efficiency and effectiveness? Or with wide-spread word of mouth? And its not as if these manog-hilots dance around a bonfire in the dark of night, shaking an annointed palm branch over our kids and chanting all manner of satanic summons to raise the malignant spirits.


When my boys are grown and have kids of their own who are wont to slide down bannisters, tumble from headboards, or fall from trees, I hope they remember manog-hilots like Tyo Gunding and Tyo Jimmy. I certainly do.



Glossary of terms:

kibit – term used by the manog-hilot to describe a vein trapped between two bones, or between a bone and its cartilege after having been misaligned from its usual position due to sudden forceful movement.

manog-hilot – term used for a local chiropractor who heals through touch therapy.

Acete de alcamporado – camphor oil

tabi-tabi – literally “excuse me”. A phrase used to beg passage from unseen spirits who are believed to inhabit heavily wooded or grassy areas. It is said that harming these unseen entities by inadvertently stepping on one will bring unexplainable bodily harm and sickness.

puwera buyag – a superstitious phrase used to ward off “buyag” or “usog”. Buyag or usog is used to define a mysterious weakness or sickness accompanied by fever, excessive yawning or a tummy ache that come over a child when caused by a comment directed at that child by a person with “isog dungan”, or an overpowering personality.

manog-luy-a – a healer who negates the effects of “buyag” or “usog” by performing a ritual that includes rubbing a piece of ginger on parts of a child's body, blowing at the ginger and at the child's head, and chanting Spanish prayers.

"Samson" Gets A Haircut

What an itchy summer. The heat has been getting to us in a huge way. Waves and waves of it hit us first thing in the morning as we get up out of bed, shading our eyes from the treacherous sun that has gotten in through the blinds. And at night, we toss and turn despite the air-conditioning, our nightclothes sticking to our sweaty skin.

Woog has raised bumps and welts on the folds of his elbows and knees. Atch has had a major upsurge of flat warts on his neck, red and angry like adolescent acne. And Eli, poor Eli with his shock of Afro curls. Not even the mini-scrunchies give him relief from his sauna-inducing hair.

Krusty the Clown

At night, he dug his already short fingernails above his ears where his hair ticklishly fell, giving rise to red scratches on his delicate baby skin. So we decided to give "Samson" a haircut.

In the ordinary course of events, this is no big deal. It's hot. Give the kid a haircut. But this is third-world superstitious Philippines, and the kid is three months shy of his first birthday.

Way back when we gave an 8-month old Woog his first haircut, also for the same reasons (and he had even longer hair then), we never heard the end of it: "But he isn't even a year old!" "Think of what the evil spirits might do!" "Your son is going to be sick, mark my words."

For the same reason that in certain Moslem countries, a male child is left bareheaded except for a thick knot of hair on the top of his head (easy access for Allah to pull him up to heaven when the time was right), children in the Philippines are not given haircuts until they reach a year old. Well, at least in the most superstitious of communities they are not. A haircut before the child reaches that crucial first year is supposed to render said child vulnerable to a host of malicious spirits who will endow the child with all sorts of sickness and general ill-health. So no haircut.

Which is all well and good if you happen to be a bald sparse-haired baby. Unfortunately, Eli is not. He has inherited the thick curly hair from both sets of ancestors, which will continue to grow and thicken until he reaches his thirties, when said curly luxuriant mane shall start to copiously shed both front and center (also genetically predetermined, poor boy).

Before this post goes all off-tangent into the realm of premature balding (and totally bald) family members, suffice it to say that Eli did get his first haircut: kicking, screaming and frantically twisting, nearly giving his mother a heart-attack after several near misses of neck and ears.

The result was a fringey, choppy, uneven Friar Tuck do which we all laughed at, including "Friar Tuck" himself, who giggled in relief at finally being set free:

Samson does a "Friar Tuck"

So we showed him off and waited for the usual barrage of doomsday prophecies. But none came. Even my mother who led the naysayers during Woog's first haircut years ago was surprisingly silent. Well, ok, she did say "Wow Eli, you're so gwapo!" And for a woman who prominently displays Feng Shui bric-a-bracs along with statuettes of her favorite Catholic saints in her house, that's saying a lot.

The whole upside of the situation is, Eli is faring wonderfully better in this heat. He no longer scratches, he no longer whines. And he's so gwapo!