BAGUIO CITY – Songaben Payoyo, 66, was 7 years old when his family decided to return to Besao, Mt. Province, after languishing in the mines of Itogon, Benguet.

Postwar Besao was remote, and Payoyo remembers how laborious it was to be a child. “You stayed in a dap-ay (indigenous town hall). You had to serve the old men, giving them back massage and kolkolis,” he says in Ilocano.

Kolkolis is an indigenous form of reflexology where sticks are beaten on one’s soles.

“There were too many feet to work on. Sometimes the elders woke you up at dawn,” Payoyo says.

This rite of passage in the dap-ay of Colcolalong and Malabagan in the village of Kadangaan in Besao proved to be a valuable experience for Payoyo.

He used to till a farm in Besao, but an accident in 1980 made him blind. His knowledge in kolkolis, however, provided opportunities for him to tour the Cordillera.

But Payoyo laments that none of the generations after him want to learn kolkolis. “They must have been frustrated by my stories of serving the elders without sleep,” he says.

He had been to Apayao, Mt. Province, Benguet and Kalinga doing kolkolis on every sole presented to him.

Healthy

“This is not mere massage. This is healthy to everyone, especially the old,” he says.

“Even when I was young, some foreigners would ask the elders in the village what kolkolis was good for. The elders would say it makes the nerves awake,” he says.

“It’s rare for those who undergo kolkolis regularly to suffer a stroke,” he says.

It was only last month that Payoyo stopped traveling and decided to offer his skill through a wellness center at the Laperal Building on Session Road in Baguio City.

He is the only one who practices kolkolis from experience and could regale patrons with stories about the old Mt. Province. Moreover, he charges less than P100.

Payoyo says a weekly kolkolis session is ideal for one’s health. This relieves stress in other parts of the body by beating the sticks on selected parts of the feet, he says.

He uses bamboo sticks carved like a blunt pencil to beat the sole. “In the old times, we used wood and rono (a type of bamboo). I experimented even on iron rods, but I found out that bamboo is lighter and more effective on the body,” he says.

He also uses bamboo sticks shaped like drumsticks for reflexology, which he learned from a Chinese doctor in the 1970s.