INDEED, WAY Kurat has come a long way from Compostela. His is an agricultural province carved out of Davao del Norte, where farmers grow bananas, coconuts, or rice and nurture a strong peasant movement. The communist insurgency is a given. Add to that explosive combination bounty hunters and fortune-seekers who flock to gold-rich Mount Diwalwal in Monkayo, Zamora’s hometown.

	Zamora (left) consults House Speaker Jose de Venecia (right) during a session at the House. [photo courtesy of Ben Razon]

Zamora found himself in the center of turmoil there in 1984, when the mayor asked him to lead the small-scale miners association. He had by then settled into a peaceful life tending his father’s farm, but he seemed like a good choice as the miners’ leader. The town, after all, knew him as an ex-student activist and community organizer.

At that time, the Paper Industries Corporation of the Philippines (PICOP) was driving the miners away and unrest was brewing. Zamora managed to organize the miners to enable them to put up a fight, but he paid a price for it. On September 13, 1984, he was picked up by military authorities, beaten up, and then thrown in jail for a night. He was less three teeth when he was finally released.

And he thought he had already left behind a life lived dangerously. Almost two decades before, when he was 15 and flunking his freshman year at Mindanao Colleges, he filched P117 from his father’s wallet and ran away from home. A few months later, he wound up in Cebu City, where he invested what was left of his money on a shoeshine kit and set up shop on a sidewalk in Colon district.

For breakfast he had “singkong pan, singkong tsokolate (five centavos worth of bread and five centavos of chocolate)” and for lunch “singkong ice drop, singkong Ice King.” Ice King was a brand of cigarettes and five centavos at that time bought him two sticks. (He now smokes Hope, which he buys by the stick rather than by the pack.) For dinner, it was “one-two-three” — he and his fellow shoeshine boys would eat at a carinderia and then simply take off without paying for their meal.

Like Manila even then, the streets of Cebu were mean to minors. The young Zamora got entangled in a brawl and stabbed with a sharp-handled comb. A couple took him in and became his foster parents for two months. Meantime, he got off the streets and worked first as a busboy then as a waiter in a well-known resort. Being a waiter then was a plum position — apart from a daily wage, a waiter could earn tips and also a chance to offer prostitutes to American soldiers who would toss the pimp an additional quarter if they liked the woman they got.

On Sundays, though, Zamora would attend gatherings of the Jehovah’s Witness church. He would pose as a member of the audience, raise a scripted question or engage the pastor in a pseudo debate, and then leave when the crowd had swelled. For that he was paid a peso.

A few years later, at the height of the student demonstrations then rocking the country, Zamora found himself in Manila, where he enrolled at the National University. He also joined the leftist Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and took part in rallies where his job was to mix and toss Molotov cocktails. One of those rallies left him dazed and shell-shocked, not from Molotov-related injury, but because he fell into a manhole. After that, he was told to handle the more sedate task of indoctrinating new recruits in what was then known as teach-ins.

By 1970, he was in Basilan island, still as a KM organizer. He says he helped form the Basilan Youth Movement. There he met an aspiring student leader at the Basilan City High School. Zamora would meet up with the teenager at the school track-and-field oval, wrote the student’s speeches, and coached him on delivery. The boy would eventually join the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), return to the fold of the law, and later become governor of Basilan. His name was Gerry Salapuddin.

In late 2002, Zamora delivered a privilege speech at the House of Representatives where he denied taking any gifts from disgraced Manila congressman Mark Jimenez. It was Salapuddin, now deputy speaker, who was presiding. Salapuddin introduced Zamora as “my former mentor.”

THERE ARE other political names from Zamora’s past, but each time he crossed paths with them, it was always as a lowly member of the working class, never as an equal.

When martial law was declared, Zamora had to flee Basilan. He made his way to Negros Oriental where he got a job repairing typewriters and cash registers at a sugar mill. The mill was owned by the Teves family and managed by Margarito, the former congressman who is now Land Bank president. The patriarch, Herminio Teves, is now Zamora’s colleague at the House. Zamora declares proudly that it is the Teves family who appears in his résumé as his first employer.

Another former employer was the wealthy Sarmiento family of Davao. His father used to work as a sakada for the Sarmientos, until he got hold of a homestead patent and 24 hectares of his own in the 1950s. Zamora himself was once farm manager for the family of Lorenzo Sarmiento, now his political patron.

And then, there was his encounter with Imee Marcos. In the 1970s, Imee Marcos was the daughter of the dictator reported to have ordered the mauling of a student who heckled her at a forum in one of the universities in Manila. But Zamora’s brush with Imee happened in less stressful settings much later.

To Zamora, “Imee Marcos” was the name of the award he received for inventing a mechanized peanut sheller — one powered by bicycle pedals — that won him third prize at an inventor’s contest in Mindanao in the early 1980s. The prize came with an encyclopedia set and cash. The top two awards were, of course, the “Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos” awards. Today, his “Imee Marcos” is somewhere on a shelf in his house, his peanut sheller forgotten. He did not have the money needed to have the contraption patented.

Zamora’s life story is the stuff movies are made of, and a production company has in fact offered to buy it. Given the choice, he would like his part to be played by Fernando Poe Jr., another name from his past. As a boy in Cebu, he would spend 20 centavos for triple features of FPJ movies. Unfortunately, it is not FPJ, but comedian-singer Amay Bisaya, who is interested in playing Way Kurat.

Zamora’s saga in Congress, however, may not have an ending just yet. He says he plans to run again in 2004, although that may still change, depending on what Sarmiento and the other political leaders back in Compostela Valley finally decide to do next with him. “Para ba akong robot,” he admits. “I do not know what (will happen) in the next elections. I cannot say because the leaders will determine it.” Just so long, perhaps, as there is a garden in the picture.

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