by Jose Torres Jr. and Iris Cecilia Gonzales

MALUSO, BASILAN— In one of the houses on stilts along the shore of Teheman, beyond the mangrove trees in this coastal town in Mindanao, a mother is singing to her six-month-old daughter. But as the child is lulled to sleep, another listener is moved to tears.

Beautiful Hanang cries as she curls up on her colorful bridal mat. Her neighbor Furaydah's songs of lost love have brought on memories of Misdal, her husband, who left months ago to join the pirates and never returned. Just this afternoon, Hanang, all of 14, had an abortion. Although her eyes are filled with tears, she says it is all for the best, since she would have been unable to feed her fatherless baby.

"It would be a shame for her to have a child without a father," agrees Hanang's mother. "The child will just die because we will not be able to feed it. It would just be a problem for us later. We don't have any burial place to bury it."

Hanang, however, is unlikely to be the last in her community to make such a decision. For she is one of the Bajau, and for many years now, these once proud people have been taking steps that have broken their own hearts, and have led them farther away from what they used to be—self-reliant people of the sea.

In the past, the Bajau lived almost their entire lives on water. A peaceful people, they would simply float away on their houseboats whenever they felt threatened by groups encroaching on their territory or when adverse conditions impinged upon their community.

Today, after centuries of living and roaming the southern Philippine seas, only a few Bajau still live on their boats, most of them in parts of Tawi-Tawi, Sulu and Zamboanga. Here in Basilan and elsewhere, Bajau boat communities have coalesced into larger pole house villages, where their ways are slowly being taken over by those of the surrounding shore population, and where they now live in abject poverty. Perla de Castro, the Region IX director of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), herself says, "It is quite clear that the Bajau are the most marginalized among all the indigenous people's communities."

It is not by choice that the Bajau have gone onshore. For decades now, they have been losing their traditional fishing grounds to both legal and illegal fishing vessels intruding into their territory. In more recent years, they have become the favorite prey of pirates roaming the seas. Unable to fish and fearing for their safety, the Bajau have been forced to abandon their traditional homes on boats for stilt houses where they thought they would be able to live in peace.

But on land, the Bajau have no real means of livelihood. This is why the first—and often, only—meal of the day comes as late as two in the afternoon, when the few men who have boats return with their catch. Desperate to feed their families, many of the tribe's members, male and female, have left for faraway cities to beg. A growing number of the women left behind are also opting to abort their unborn children rather than see their offspring die later of hunger or disease. In fact, many Badjau children now suffer from malnutrition, dysentery, malaria, tuberculosis and ulcer.

"We don't have food for the children anymore," says Dalpaki, a 35-year old Bajau community leader who looks twice his age. "They are now dying or are even killed inside the womb of their mothers."

Indeed, even burying their dead has become a problem for these gentle people. Their traditional burial ground, a small island off the shore of Maluso, has been taken over by a Tausug community who fled from the poverty and the sporadic fighting between Moro rebels and government soldiers in the nearby province of Sulu. Says Dalpaki: "We have to dig up our ancestors to bury our dead. Sometimes we have to travel far to bring our beloved to some desolate island in the middle of the ocean for burial."

The Bajau, who number from 70,000 to 100,000, believe any kind of misery that befalls them is brought about by saitan, evil spirits who live in the sea and mangrove forests. The tribe also believes in other spirits that are said to travel from place to place, often in the form of animals or fish. The Bajau say hordes of these wandering spirits invade villages, causing an epidemic or illness.

It used to be that shamans would perform a curative rite known as the omboh, which involves the launching of a pamatulikan (spirit boat), to get rid of such spirits. These days, the Bajau are too poor to launch even a small boat for the ritual. But they also know that their omboh may not be able to protect them from more ruthless saitan who wear bonnet masks and are called by many names like pirata or Abu Sayyaf. Not to mention the big commercial fishing vessels that now dominate the waters they used to call home.

Many of the Bajau who still venture out to sea say the modern-day saitan take away not only their catch for the day, but also the motors of their boats. As for the Abu Sayyaf, the Bajau say the group of bandits harass them for food. Paki, a tribal elder with scabies all over his body, admits, "Our omboh seems not to work anymore against these evils."