The success that is Tabuelan

If Tabuelan town is going to be a portent of things to come in 2012, then it will be a most especially rewarding year for museums and heritage advocacy.

Yesterday, officials of this northwestern Cebu town’s 12 barangays underwent training on museum development planning under the auspices of the municipal government led by the dynamic young couple of Mayor Rex Gerona and her first lady, Marifi. Museo Sugbo and the Committee on Sites, Relics and Structures of the Cebu Provincial Tourism and Heritage Council were on hand to provide the technical expertise and hands-on training on exhibit storyline conceptualization, exhibition designing and artifact accessioning and cataloguing.

Tabuelan already caught the eye of the province long before this, of course, ranking second overall in the annual Expanded Green and Wholesome Environment that Nurtures Our Cebu (eGwen Our Cebu), the program initiated in 2008 by Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia to measure and evaluate the performance of municipalities and cities under the Province of Cebu in all aspects, from governance and infrastructure to environment; from culture, heritage and tourism to education, sanitation, and health. Tabuelan ranks second to San Francisco but only because the latter has long started an internationally recognized and acclaimed community-based waste management program that no less than the United Nations recognized and made an international model.

When we first carried out this particular cluster of the Cebu Provincial Heritage Caravans, which included Tabuelan in 2005, its officials initially confessed that they could think of no heritage resources. After undergoing the heritage trainings, lo and behold, Tabuelan was one of the very first to submit their own cultural map and inventory, which listed over 1,000 sites, structures and artifacts/objects. The town was proof that one need not be a vibrant pueblo during the Spanish colonial period to land in the books on heritage. It too has its own ancestral houses dating to the 1920s as much as it also had archaeological sites (albeit looted in the 1960s and 70s), and its folklore and traditional livelihood practices were as vibrant as those of other towns. And its beaches and caves were equally awesome.

Tabuelan caught the attention of eGWEN evaluators when in 2008 it began marking its heritage sites, using small printed tarps that boldly proclaimed every ancestral house, every heritage tree and every natural heritage spot that it had documented from 2005 to 2007. It, therefore, came as no surprise that Tabuelan was ranked number 1 by the heritage component evaluation team for establishing barangay-based museums in 2009, a successful best practice in trickling down technical knowledge on heritage documentation and cultural mapping from the municipality to the barangay and even purok or sitio.

Last year, Tabuelan once again made news when it announced that it would formalize the establishment of museums in all of its 12 barangays even as it prepared to rehabilitate its old municipal hall and convert it into a museum and visitor center. This is unprecedented in any town in the country today. Whereas one local government official in another northwestern Cebu town berated eGWEN evaluators recently and even derided museums and heritage programs as frivolities. Tabuelan is showing the way in proving that pride of place always begins at the lowest levels of governance to be harnessed to instill cooperation in all aspects of the municipality’s life. There is, for Tabuelan, nothing to be ashamed of in showing to the world its culture and its past even as it moves the town into the future.

It was against this overwhelming spirit of cooperation that the training we conducted proceeded. Seventy officials attended and began planning their museum so that each will be different in content and theme from the other and yet all will weave an interrelated showcasing of livelihoods, of local histories, artistry and skills while designing interactive, experiential or hands-on exhibits on farming systems, fishing practices, traditional healing systems and even the Pulahan movement in the town and the devastation wrought by World War II.

We should expect therefore more news coming out of this tiny yet vibrant municipality as it works with its barangays with the constant support of the governor and the Provincial Tourism and Heritage Council.

Truly Tabuelan is one town worth emulating. Padayon Tabuelan!