Tuna Festival’s real heroes: fishermen

THE GENERAL Santos City fish port is teeming with activities as fishing boats unload tuna, the city’s prime produce, for distribution to markets in the city and areas outside General Santos, which is currently celebrating its annual Tuna Festival. COCOY SEXCION/CONTRIBUTOR

GENERAL SANTOS CITY—This year’s celebration of the Tuna Festival is more than the usual street parade and other festivities aimed at drawing tourists in as it also aims to pay homage to the unsung heroes of the city’s billion-dollar industry, the ordinary fishermen, Mayor Ronnel Rivera said.

Rivera said paying tribute to fishermen and other fishing industry stakeholders, who have brought “food for the family” and those who brought in “abundant catch into sprawling canneries and processing plants that we have today” was just fitting because they played major roles in turning the city into what is now one of the country’s richest.

“While we perk up the celebration with various activities and events, it is appropriate to remember how this festival started. History tells us that we hailed from a backwater, dusty city into a boom town,” said Rivera during the festival’s opening ceremony on Sept. 1.

He said it was the hard work of fishermen and other stakeholders that made the city what it is today, a “booming agri-industrial area.”

Rivera led the unveiling of the memorial shrine for some 300 fishermen, who went missing at the height of Typhoon “Pablo” in 2012.

The shrine features a rectangular-shaped black marble with a golden anchor mounted beside it. The names of all 300 fishermen are engraved on a gold-plated plate. An epitaph is also dedicated to them.

Marisol Atillo, 43, whose husband Edwin was among those missing, recounted how difficult the uncertainty was for the family.

“It was really a saddening experience. I just don’t know what to do that time. We couldn’t even mourn because we didn’t have his body. We didn’t know where to go,” Atillo said.

“We are now comforted that a shrine for my husband and the rest of the missing fishermen was constructed. We have now a place to go to remember and pray for them,” she said.

Rivera said the shrine will not only provide the families of the fishermen a place to go to pray for their loved ones but would also remind residents of the ordinary people who made the city what it is today.

“This is how we should treat the individuals who gave their lives for the tuna industry of GenSan,” he said.

“We celebrate Tuna Fest as a tribute to its flagship industry and the people behind it. We invite everyone to have fun and see how we grew from where we were before into something that gives livelihood to thousands of people,” he said.

This year’s Tuna Festival, the 17th since it was first held, will end on Sept. 6. Allan Nawal, Inquirer Mindanao