Rita in front of her home, a few moments before we said goodbye.
I met Rita in Batad , one of the small villages perched among the 2000-year-old rice terraces of the jagged Cordillera mountain range on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.
No roads reach the mountain village. To get to Batad we hired a jeepney in Banue and rode an hour to a place called the saddle. At the saddle we disembarked and hiked another hour down steep rocky trails into the village.
Most of the villages in the area have no roads and can only be reached by walking hours — or days.
It’s well worth the effort.
Stunning, right?
I’m enamoured by this place.
The rice terraces are a tribute to human engineering and endurance. They were slowly carved by hand from jagged mountainside using stone tools over two millennia ago. The Ifugao people still farm the terraces the same way they did when they were first built built and flood them using the same system of stone aqueducts that their ancestors built.
During the harvest season the community will take to the fields and chant the Epic HudHud of the Ifugao , which is an epic story with 40 episodes that takes three to four days to complete. I haven’t heard it yet, but I imagine the sound of the HudHud filling the valley as all the farmers chant in unison for several days.
The Ifugao culture — like many rural tribal cultures around the world — is slowly being eroded as television creeps in and young people move to the city in search of jobs and the excitement promised by television shows. Because of this, the number of farmers in the terraces has been steadily declining and the chant of the HudHud is becoming weaker every year.
We spent the day hiking the hills around the village and visiting a waterfall. Afterward I sat at a restaurant overlooking the terraces to wait for my friends, who had taken a stroll through the village. That was when I met Rita.
She told me about her life in the village. After speaking for some time, Rita suddenly disappeared into her house and returned with a tattered scholarly article written by an anthropologist many years earlier. It explained that Rita was the last living practitioner of the traditional Ifugao weaving process. The document include photos of Rita harvesting vines from the jungle, stripping the fibres, spinning them into thread, and then weaving them into cloth on a simple handmade loom.
I asked Rita how old she was.
She replied that she didn’t know because at the time she was born her tribe didn’t keep track such things.
I asked her if she had taught anyone else her weaving method since the article had been written.
She told me that she had taught a man close to her age who lived in the next village over, and laughed heartily as she explained how terrible he was at it, obviously relishing her own mastery of her craft.
Then she told me that she had given up weaving because it made her hands hurt too much.
My friends returned and Rita allowed me to take her photo before we began climbing the steep dirt path toward the potholed dirt road where we’d flag down the next passing bus.
As we climbed the trail between the rows of traditional Ifugao thatched huts jutting from the mountainside, I noticed that between them hung laundry lines adorned with jeans and basketball jerseys. We passed a group of teenagers huddled excitedly around a single cellphone, and I was gripped by an unsettling certainty that I had just witnessed some kind of vague injustice that had no definable perpetrator and of which no one seemed to feel they were a victim.
A version of this article originally appeared on The Liberty Project and has been republished here with permission.
