Kap was here

Of course he was. I don’t remember buying pakó (fiddlehead fern) at the market yesterday, and yet there they are. In fact, I never buy pakó I do not intend to serve immediately. Kap must have dropped by while I was asleep. He’s always doing this sort of thing. Last week it was cucumbers.

Kap is shorthand for kapitan — which he is, of a mountain barangay  a half-hour’s drive from the city. It’s nothing you’ve heard of, this place, although maybe you should. It’s called Lonoy, and it has two day care centers, a healthcare facility that actually has medicines and working equipment, and, just recently, its own chapel. Villagers have access to free running water, some right in their own homes. The main street is well-lit at night. It would be fair to say that Kap’s done well.

Or at least as well as anyone who has had to do his job in spite of a purposely indifferent local government — which is to say, very well indeed. Kap isn’t much for politics, so the less said about that, the better. Let’s just say that he’s on City Hall’s shit list for being on the “other” side. And staying there. Why doesn’t he just jump the fence? The man can be stubborn.

It shows in the lines of his jaw. There’s determination there, the kind that makes a person stick to his guns even if doing so makes it all the harder to do his job. It’s ironic because the only thing that came easy to Kap was winning his job. “Look around you and see if any of the things you enjoy today, you enjoy because of City Hall,” was all he had to say when it was time to run again. They did, and voted him back in.

The plain and simple fact is that Kap gets things done. The water pipeline, a three-kilometer span from an underground spring in the mountain all the way to the village, was funded solely by donations and built by the villagers themselves. Kinderhilfe approved a grant for a day care center and was so impressed by the community spirit and financial diligence involved that it agreed to have another one built in a distant sitio, making Lonoy the only barrio in the province with two such facilities. Both were finished in record time. Total cost to government: zero.

Now Kap is working to make their health center double as a birthing clinic. It’s routine for him to be roused in the middle of the night by panicked fathers-to-be. Then it’s off to the hospital with him, the man, and a very swollen, likely bleeding woman between them. On a motorcycle. “Never a dull moment there,” Kap chuckles. But there’s also bitterness in that laugh. The trip takes too long, and sometimes too late. Kap intends to change that. There are more villages up the mountain.

And so it happens that by taking care of his own, his way, Kap flips the middle finger at the political establishment and its culture of patronage. It must amuse him that the ruling politicos have probably spent more money trying to get him out of his job than to help him do it. He owes them no favor that way. And that’s too bad, since Kap never forgets one.

Which brings us back to the pakó, freshly harvested from the wild. “Was Kap here?” Of course he was. He’s always bringing something. We don’t always see him when he does, but every now and then we catch him in the act, as it were. “But it’s nothing!” he’d protest, pushing yet another bag of something across the table. Last time he said that, we had avocado for a week. The man is stubborn. Thank God for that.