ifugao grandma

When we were at Batad, we dealt with young people at the inn--they must have been the kids of the owners. We didn't see the owners, but we did see their grandmother (or maybe it's their great grandmother). She was this old, bent, industrious woman who was always sweeping the yard. We saw her sweeping when we first got there. And we saw her at it again the day after we toured the village.

That day (April 6), we saw her sitting outside their house (next to the inn), half-naked. My companion went over and tried to talk to her even though they didn't speak the same language. I believe they talked about her tattoos. While Ifugao male elders tend to have tattoos marking their bravery, the women's tattoos were actually beauty marks. These tattoos are symbolic (e.g., a stalk or sheaf of rice), too, and the more a woman had, the more she was considered beautiful.

Here are pictures of the grandma tying together what looks like rice stalks, and another of her using it to sweep the floor. As you can see in the second picture, she is bent from the waist. That's actually not just because she's sweeping; she really is bent at the waist and walks almost with her face to the ground. And she's not the only old person that we saw who's bent like that. I guess the rice planting (or something) makes them have that posture.

Later on, I joined them. I told the grandma I wanted to take her picture, and I believe she was saying that she looked messy because she started to try and fix her hair. You can see her tattoos quite clearly in this picture. You can also see her wearing a good luck necklace. A necklace with just one of those pendants is already considered a good luck necklace, so her necklace must be even luckier as she has three of those pendants.

Later that afternoon, we saw her cleaning again. Probably not wanting to be ambushed again by picture-taking tourists like us, she had combed her hair, put on a headband, and put on a top and cardigan.