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Saturday, October 7, 2023 Vol. 18 No. 355
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3RD GOLD MEDAL FOR PHL Annie Ramirez breaks into tears after beating Kazakhstan’s Galina Duvanova in jiu-jitsu’s women’s -57 kgs final on Friday for the Philippines’ third gold medal in the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou. NONIE REYES
LEIANZY MAMITES is the lone child weaver of the BagoboKlata community outside Bansalan town, Davao del Sur.
THE ‘DREAM
WEAVER’
Girl keeps tribal handloom weaving craft alive–and still fashionable–in Mindanao
F
By Manuel Cayon
YOUNG Leianzy Mamites diligently weaving at the loom.
the Philippines, and pageant representatives of the tribes in Davao City sent the appeal to the younger tribal generation to help revive the art of weaving.
Lone child weaver
LEIANZY was a media sensation at the sidelines of a recent summit of artists, digital creators, performing artists and businesspersons
DOE outlines challenges, costs to PHL’s shift to low-carbon energy future
ENERGY Secretary Raphael Lotilla
By Lenie Lectura
D
EVELOPING countries, such as the Philippines, would need financial assistance from industrialized countries in order to fully enforce energy transition plans towards a sustainable and low-carbon energy future, Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla said.
OR years, eight-year-old Leianzy Mamites would be staring and observing her grandmother weave the abaca threads into a cloth with intricate patterns of colored lines, diamond shapes and squares inked from natural colors from bushes, barks and leaves.
When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world and locked the population into their homes, Leianzy had more time to be around her Lola Vivencia Mamites, 58, in her gaballanan, a manual traditional hand loom which the Mamiteses owned. Her grandmother deemed it time to let Leianzy immerse herself in to the wooden loom and learn the craft of the tribe’s weaving chores. Leianzy adapted well and quickly into the weaving lesson, and just in her second session with the loom, she was already on her own. She would be continuing the weaving of the cloth left unfinished by Vivencia, who would commonly finish a three-meter by onemeter cloth in one week. This would be the main material of women’s skirts noted for their pattern of deep maroon, red and brown colors identified with the Bagobo-Klata tribe, one of the 18 ethnolinguistic tribes of Mindanao. Ironically, abaca and cloth weaving is waning, even a dying art of the indigenous peoples in
BIG COSTS FOR ENERGY R.E.SET
organized by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) at the Philippine Women’s University. She demonstrated her improving skill at arranging the threads and sliding the wooden stick through the string of threads to form the tightly knit cloth. Like all tribal weavers, Leianzy would be seen with a meticulous eye for detail and indicators of errors. “She would last, at most, for one hour before she would disengage from the loom,” Vivencia told the BusinessMirror. It turns out that Leianzy is the lone child weaver of the BagoboKlata community outside Bansalan town, Davao del Sur. “We are awed and inspired to develop our own next line of weavers,” said Jennifer Tomarokon, one of the cloth and cotton weavers of the Kagan tribe, one of the 11 Moro tribes in Mindanao, and who inhabit the municipality of San Isidro, Davao Oriental. Jennifer and another Kagan weaver also put up their own weaving loom beside that of the Mami-
teses, who were all helped by the DTI train their women and establish their own weaving and tribal center in their localities. The Kagans’ more sophisticated woven loom produces a softer cloth of synthetic fibers with colors of blue, red, white and yellow, “the colors of our flag,” she said. Currently, there are only three weavers in their community, including Jennifer. “Fifteen were actually trained during the pandemic. Unfortunately, they lost interest,” she said. Leianzy could become the blooming symbol that inspires tribal youth everywhere to take a second, interested look at the art of weaving, she said. Her grandmother Vivencia is optimistic of the inspiration Leianzy has brought to her classmates and village mates to revive interest in the tribal art of weaving. “You can see the sparkle and awe in the eyes of her school mates and other village children when Leianzy demonstrates her skills.”
The Philippines is committed to bring in more clean energy fuels and technologies for the next 17 years; specifically, 35 percent of renewable energy (RE) should comprise the country’s power generation mix by 2030 and 50 percent in 2040. “Any transition is going to en-
tail costs. And this means therefore additional cost not only for the developed countries but also even for developing countries like the Philippines. I am glad that this is a concern common to Asean. But since most of the Asean countries are not the ones Continued on A2
Continued on A2
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 56.6320 n JAPAN 0.3814 n UK 69.0684 n HK 7.2326 n CHINA 7.7440 n SINGAPORE 41.4401 n AUSTRALIA 36.0633 n EU 59.7524 n KOREA 0.0421 n SAUDI ARABIA 15.0998 Source: BSP (October 6, 2023)