TaRSIER 117: Saving Lives

On a normal late afternoon in the city and around Bohol. School kids with their coterie, leisurely walk towards home, school bags and lunch boxes dangling. Tricycles whir by noisily, moving slower than they sound. The city birds sitting lazily on the power lines remain, unflustered.

Meanwhile, at a small room tucked behind the Governor’s Mansion, telephones buzz off every so often, the phone operators, prompt and sharp, quickly answering: “TaRSIER 117. What’s your emergency?”

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All Along the Watchtowers of Bohol

The view takes one’s breath away.

But once these were real stone sentinels that stood to wave off the dreaded sea raiders of the time, preventing communities from being plundered and villages dispersed by vicious attacks that take countless breaths away, quite literally.

Courageous as we Bol-anons may be, with a Tamblot and Dagohoy strain in each of us, one Spanish colonial record even describing the people from Bohol as “very valiant, and very different in valor from the other villages” – seafaring marauders at one point were the lords of the seas, feared with good reason.

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