One heartwarming story published by TIMES yesterday was the article on the celebration of the Igorot community with the delegation of the Cordillera Administrative Region to the Palarong Pambansa 2019 in the city.
The story quoted Col. Ezra Balagtey, spokesperson of both the military and Cordillera Mindanao, as saying that the Igorot community in the city and the delegation from the CAR had a mini-festival held at the grounds of the Kapitan Tomas Monteverde Elementary School where the delegation was staying during the duration of the sporting event.
Some members of the local Igorot community even went to the venues of the games to show their support to their “kababayans.”
The show of solidarity speaks a lot about the Igorots, how they value their ethnicity, their culture and their people. They showed a vivid example of how, even if one needs to embrace the culture of the place that plays host to him or her, it does not, and must not, make him a foreigner to the very community where he or she is from.
In some communities, however, leaving the very community where they grow up allows them to take off the very culture they dread to love as they want to appear as better persons in the eyes of others when the fact remains that loving the culture that nurtures one is the only way for that person to be better. Culture is never a material that can easily be taken off, it is an identity which teaches the person that most valuable thing in life: character.
