A brief walk around the roundabout on Good Friday

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

I took this recording on 29 March 2024, Good Friday, Holy Week when is God is dead. I walked around the roundabout of Pio del Pilar barangay hall, which is close to where I currently live. Barangay is the smallest local government unit in the Philippines and came from the pre-colonial word balangay which were traditional boats in the Philippines. When I was growing up in a small town, a former fishing village outside Metro Manila, Good Friday means that we are not allowed to take showers despite the tropical heat and humidity. Establishments are closed. Children should not be unruly, and generally, everyone should stay at home because there is no God watching over. Crucified, he is suffering in pain on this day.
The sound recorded here is supposed to be a quieter 8:30 evening than usual. The laundromat, the karinderya, and the sari-sari store are all closed. You will hear dogs barking, supposedly domesticated. There is a sound that appears like birds chirping, but I am unsure about this because they could be shrieks of a mouse or something else. There are several voices: a man saying “perfect”, two kids trying to ride a bicycle, a random passerby. You can also hear the rumble of the motorbikes, the quieter hissing of some cars, the build-up of a roar from a mid-sized fire truck, a honk from a teen-age boy driving, and possibly my footsteps and television noises from a random house.
I returned to the Philippines late last year after over three years of living outside the country. I lived for two years in one of the richest countries in the word, and for one year in one of the poorest, classified by the UN as a least developed country (LDC). In three years, I moved in and out of nine apartments for various reasons, lived in four cities for at least a month: Geneva, Zurich, Vientiane, and Bangkok, I got stuck in a city because of Covid-19 policies, went home in January 2022 only to leave again in less than a month without fully unpacking my belonging and my reflections. Living close to this roundabout was not well thought of and I want to leave. Yet, I am unable to move, stuck here in this random destination with no family or friends nearby, and with no specific purpose. Sometimes I fail to remember what I did where and why. I think I am moving too quickly, unprepared for what I am trying to do. Am I really getting good at anything other packing and unpacking, throwing or selling secondhand items, trying to fit all my belongings in one big luggage? I used to think that airports are transitory spaces, but not anymore. Not when I remember how I got stuck in Istanbul airport trying to entertain myself with baklava and not when you count the hours I spent stuck in NAIA. Virginia Woolf said I am rooted but I flow – and this might be out of context, but I want to borrow it because what I felt and what I still feel is a constant floating and flowing, a state of trying to remain and at the same time move elsewhere.
Recorded by Elaine Lazaro.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration
IMAGE: Benson Kua, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons