Engineer Abdon M. Balde Jr.

It is a beautiful January day in Daraga and I arrived at Our Lady of the Gate Church at 8 AM to participate in a Daraga School District Cultural event aimed at preparing teachers and staff for the Cagsawa Festival 2013.  That festival will run from February 1st until the 28th.  It is the 199th year since Mt. Mayon erupted and devastated the former Cagsawa church and the original site of the town of Daraga.  The Provincial Governor has called upon civic and community leaders to come forward and help plan a day to day celebration to commemorate  this event.  

The attendees were privileged to hear from a Pilipino  author and poet, Engineer Abdon M. Balde Jr. Mr. Balde worked as an engineer for 33 years and then when he retired in 2000, he began pursuing the writing craft.  He told me that he never dreamed that he would be as successful as he has become.  Awards and accolades from all over the world have been given to Mr. Balde.  From 1970 until 1999, his writing was in English.  Since that time he has returned to his Mother Tongue.  He writes in Tagolog and the Bicol Oasnon dialect. He did acknowledge that he will insert a Bicolano word from another dialect if it is a better fit then his own.  Mr. Balde resides in Manila but returns to Daraga every three weeks or so to explore the region and interview the older citizens, taping their stories and making notes of their vernacular.  Poetry, myths, humorous text are all part of his published repertoire.  Mr. Balde is also prominent in producing text for the primary grades in the Mother Tongue.  He is a proponent of preserving the traditional vernacular and has been frustrated by the loss of historical fact and stories because they were not written down and can no longer be remembered.