In the ESSC publication, Forest Faces, we featured a family of wood gatherers, Undong and Fatima Mapayag from Barangay Lumayong, Kabacan, North Cotabato.

We met at the bridge where the Kabacan River joins the Pulangi River, where the barangay of Lumayong has taken advantage of the meeting point. Haran, the grandfather, is Maguindanao, the dominant culture in of Muslim Filipinos in central Mindanao and he lives here with his parents and children. He learned to talk Tagalog through his Christian neighbor.

They earn a living gathering driftwood that comes from the Arakan Mountains. The floods bring a large supply of tree trunks, which they capture and haul onto the banks, as many as they can. Their neighbors have the same livelihood and the children help in gathering wood.

Undong, the father, saws up the logs under a loose frame that provides shade while he splits the logs, and his wife Fatima packs them into tight bundles for sale. They sell the wood mostly to bakeries and restaurants, but logs of quality can be sliced, so these they bring to the banso or sawmill. By early afternoon, Akmid, the son, is home from school to see what is happening while they ask what he has learned.

The family maintains a gulayan (vegetable garden) on the bank where they grow eggplant, okra, and ampalaya (bitter gourd) that allows them buy one to two kilos of rice daily. When there's a flood, their gulayan gets washed out, but it is good while it lasts. The river provides a limited supply of fish.

For now, they continue to be dependent upon the river and whatever it brings by way of opportunity.