The House Between the Trees

The House Between the Trees

There is a pocket of land in Negros Oriental surrounded by banana trees. In the middle stands a small, unadorned house. Set low and half-concealed in the clearing, it doesn’t quite announce itself as a home. Its pale fiberboard walls are broken in a few places, and its foundation is barely high enough to lift the structure from the damp ground. Around it, the grove keeps the place quiet in a way that feels unnatural. The rustle of leaves, the grunt of motorcycles, the far-off bark of a dog: everything arrives late and dulled around the edges, as if sound has to fight its way through the trees. This was where Nanay Sita lived with her two sons. All three are gone now. It was a few weeks before Christmas, three years ago, when I first met the family. Sita, 76, was preparing lunch for her two grown children, Allan and Manuel. She sat cross-legged at the threshold of her house, framed by the doorway. Small and slightly stooped, she wore a loose white T-shirt and shorts, a pink rosary resting on her chest. Her tousled hair was cropped short and gray, and her ears protruded slightly, lending her face an almost disarming softness, even as the rest of her features were sharpened by age and hard years. The house looked different then. It was patched together from old plywood, coco lumber, and sheets of sawali. Inside was a single room, dim and crowded. A low bed stood against one wall, but it had become storage as much as furniture, covered in folded clothes and boxes of things kept for so long their contents had been forgotten. On a small shelf in the corner were three dust-coated religious figures, one of them the Virgin Mary cradling a child. That shelf was kept free of clutter. Sita in her old house. Sita occupied a sagging spot on the thin, wooden floor padded with flattened cardboard. This was where she lived her days, and where she slept. Her joints hurt so badly that she stayed close to the door, where sunlight slanted and the air moved. Everything she needed was kept within reach. In front of her were a pot of rice, some fish, and a plastic ice cream tub filled with vegetables. “Langkang gulay na ginataan,” she told me in Bisaya, speaking slowly, the way one does to someone who doesn’t understand the language. The fish and vegetables were gifts from her neighbors, she explained. Sita scooped generous portions of food and water into clear plastic bags, tying each one shut. She avoided plates and cups. “They will just throw them around and break them,” she said. The next part she insisted on doing herself. Sita edged toward the doorway, carefully aligning her feet on a small cement step. With her cane in her left hand, and a firm grip on my arm for support, she pushed herself upright, her face tightening with pain. “Hala, ginoo!” She groaned. Barefoot and unsteady, her body pitched forward, she reached for a nylon rope tied along one side of the house. She held on to it and moved inch by inch, using it as a guide. Behind her small wooden house stood a cage of cement and rusted metal. Waiting inside separate cells were two gaunt men with hair that had grown long and tangled. These were Allan and Manuel. We handed over the plastic bags of food and drinking water. They took them, tore them open, and began eating without a word. Allan was 47. Manuel was 43. Sita did not linger. With labored steps, she returned to her usual spot beneath the doorway. She sat still for a while, her palms pressed between her thighs, her gaze vacant. Then she began to cry. “I hope I don’t go yet. I won’t be able to care for them,” she said. From the doorway, her voice did not carry as far as the cages. Sita feeding her sons. Allan and Manuel had schizophrenia, a serious mental disorder that can disrupt the way a person thinks, feels, and relates to others. It can also cause people to lose touch with reality. In the Philippines, hundreds of thousands are believed to live with the condition, many of them without regular treatment. The illness remains deeply misunderstood, especially in rural areas where information and mental health services are scarce. Some families still attribute it to supernatural causes or a lack of faith, even a punishment from God. Others fear the stigma. Being labeled “baliw” carries consequences, and many households learn to keep their struggles and loved ones hidden. As medical help remained out of reach and their symptoms worsened, Allan and Manuel became increasingly unpredictable. At times, they wandered into neighbors’ homes, took things, and injured people, frightening members of the community. “They were stealing chickens and clothes,” Sita explained. “I got scared because they became very aggressive. I hid my bolo and knives so they can’t grab them.” At Sita’s request, village officials and neighbors built the enclosure behind her house. By then, she felt she had run out of options. Keeping her sons confined seemed the only way to keep them and everyone else safe. That was eleven years ago. By the time I arrived, the cages had become part of the landscape behind Sita’s house. They crouched beneath the banana trees, large enough to dominate the yard but tucked so close to the back of the home that they seemed almost reluctant to be seen. You heard them before you saw them: Allan and Manuel’s voices rising and falling in loops, strings of words that did not quite settle into meaning. In the small community, everyone knew the cages were there. People were not cruel, but their voices lowered around the subject. It had been a hard life for Sita, even before the brothers got sick. Her husband was a coconut farm worker twenty years her senior. He suffered a stroke, became bedridden, and eventually died, leaving Sita to raise their young children on her own. Their daughter, born between Allan and Manuel, married and moved to the city, where she worked as a cashier. She later contracted leukemia, and within months, she too was dead. It was Sita who took care of them when they fell ill. She worked well into her senior years as a hired hand for the village until arthritis seized her body. Even as her health declined, her memory remained sharp. She could recite, with visible pride, what she had bought with her last salary, which amounted to 4,450 pesos: a radio, a flashlight, medicine for her children, a plastic chair, an umbrella, and a blister pack of mefenamic acid for her aching knees. When she could no longer earn a living, she relied on her late husband’s pension, a meager 2,800 pesos a month. It was all their family had to survive on. “I buy rice first but we run out so quickly,” Sita said. “Then we have dried fish, or just bagoong or coffee. We can’t afford anything else.” Help, at least on a map, was nearby. Not far from their home stands the Talay Rehabilitation Center, the only government-run mental health facility in the region back then. Patients come from across the island, and even from neighboring provinces, drawn by the lack of options elsewhere. Sita brought her sons there for a time. Allan was admitted in 2003; Manuel followed in 2009. But their stay was cut short. According to Sita, a staff member at the facility made a hurtful remark about how long they had been there. Embarrassed, she decided to bring her sons home. “Why are you living here already? Are you planning to die here too?” she recalled being told. “I cried and took my sons home.” Provincial officials said the employee had since retired. The facility remained open to patients, they added, provided that a family member was present to care for them. Sita, however, vowed never to return. The incident had stayed with her, and in her condition, making regular trips to the facility to care for her sons would have been difficult. At times, she needed care herself. Early the next morning, Marcelo was already at Sita’s house. Middle-aged, with short graying hair, a broad face, and an easy, unguarded smile, he had the sturdy build of someone used to physical work. Marcelo moved easily through the yard, as if the place were his own. He grabbed the garden hose and began cleaning the cages behind the house, washing Allan and Manuel in the process. In a small shed, a pot of rice was on the fire. He checked on it, then turned to a leak in the hose, patching it with a strip of rubber. He was also the one who had tied the rope along the side of the house, a guide Sita now relied on to move around. This was Marcelo’s morning routine, a set of small tasks he completed before plying his route as a tricycle driver. “When I wake up, I come here first before doing anything at home. The two will keep shouting if I don’t give them food,” Marcelo said with a chuckle A television set abandoned on the ground. . Helping Sita had become a family affair. His wife, Meriam, came by to do her laundry. Their three children also kept an eye out for their neighbor and her sons, helping with cooking and cleaning when needed. In the absence of formal support, Marcelo’s family became Sita’s safety net. “She said she felt embarrassed because we’re not even her relatives and she can’t offer us money,” Marcelo said. “I told her, we’re not expecting anything in return. Just think of us as family.” Marcelo knew the brothers before they got sick. Allan had been studying to be an engineer but was forced to drop out because his family could no longer afford it. He fell into a deep depression and soon began to change. “He stayed in bed all day, crying,” Marcelo recalled. “He said his dreams were now out of reach.” Marcelo had also worked construction with Manuel, building houses in the city and nearby communities. The younger of the two was tall and muscular, an asset on the job. By then, he had already seen what illness had done to his older brother. Then one day, he stopped showing up to work. “He could no longer eat or sleep. Then he kept walking around and started hurting people,” Marcelo said. It was difficult to imagine the brothers any other way. Back inside her home, Sita asked Marcelo to look through a pile of belongings in the corner of the room. In a small plastic bag, she kept IDs and photographs of their family. Only a few remained, and they did not capture happy moments either. One was taken during their sister’s wake. Manuel stood off to the side, solemn, tall, and imposing. In an old ID card, Allan’s hair was neatly cut, his expression almost shy. In these images, Allan and Manuel appeared as they once were—young, healthy, and still untouched by illness. The banana grove in Negros Oriental where Sita's house is located. I approached the brothers, wondering if some part of who they had been could still be reached. Manuel was squatting on the floor and seemed curious, but he hid his face behind his arms the moment I spoke. I turned to Allan. “How long have you been here?” I asked. “6000,” came the reply. I tried again. “Have you eaten?” “Mmm,” Allan said. Then, suddenly, he added, “And you?” After seeing the brothers seemingly lost in their own worlds, the reply took me by surprise. It sounded like a small gesture of politeness, even concern, familiar in the way Filipinos are taught to ask after one another. “Not yet,” I replied. He stared. Then I lost him again to a stream of words, random and repeating. I tried asking about Sita. “What’s the name of your mother?” “Elcita,” Allan replied. “She takes care of you?” “Yes.” After a pause, he continued. “I haven’t changed. I only make her tired.” They had been confined for more than a decade, without the treatment they clearly needed. But they were not beyond reach. In brief moments, through a question, a name, a fragment of memory, something of the brothers still surfaced. We asked the provincial health office what could be done for Sita’s family. The response came in a matter of days. Four health workers arrived at her doorstep, brisk and smiling. They greeted her warmly. Among them was Dr. Liland Estacion, the province’s top health official. “How are you, ‘Nay? Do your knees hurt?” she asked. The house call was a welcome development for Sita, who nodded at her guests. She asked for medicine for her knees, and, more urgently, for her sons. Their time at the rehabilitation center had taught her that Allan and Manuel needed regular injections and oral medication. For years, these had remained unavailable to them. Dr. Estacion promised to provide the medicines for free. “It’s difficult to care for people with this illness because the symptoms return again and again,” she explained. “But I assure you, with maintenance medicine, they can live a normal life.” Marcelo was already waiting as the health workers handed over the first batch of medicine. He pushed out two tablets from the foil pack and crushed them with a spoon. Then he prepared instant coffee in two mugs and mixed in the medicine. The drinks were poured into clear plastic bags and given to Allan and Manuel. For the first time in a long while, Sita allowed herself to hope. “I would be so happy if they could remember me, if they could return to who they were before. With regular injections, maybe they can call me ‘Mama!’” We left her seated at her usual spot beneath the doorway, illuminated by Christmas lights Marcelo’s wife and children had strung around the house for the season. A few months passed. Then we received a message from Marcelo with photos of Sita’s house under renovation. The improvements were modest: a new galvanized iron roof, fiberboard panels, a cement floor. Small changes to make Sita’s living conditions more bearable. The story of Sita and her sons had spread online, moving some people to send money and donations to the family. Marcelo documented the repairs partly to share the good news, and partly to account for the funds. Some of Sita’s relatives, absent through much of her ordeal, had begun to whisper that Marcelo’s family was keeping the money for themselves. There was another attachment: a short video of a gathering in Sita’s yard to celebrate a birthday. There he was, outside his cage, in clean clothes. It was Allan. His hair was cropped short, his beard and nails trimmed. He was still thin, but had noticeably gained weight. He sat on a monobloc chair, his back straight as a board, as if years in a bare concrete cell had made him forget how to relax. Marcelo and his family sang “Happy Birthday” as a simple cake was presented to him. Allan’s face registered a faint smile. With regular treatment, both brothers began to improve. Of the two, Allan showed the most progress, enough that one day Marcelo felt confident letting him out of his cage. “He ate a lot!” Marcelo recalled, grinning. “Then I said, so you’re not returning to the cage anymore? He said, I’ll come out in the morning, but I’ll return at night. I feel sorry for my brother. He’ll be alone.” A closeup of Marcelo's scapular. As Allan got better, their world slowly crept outward from the banana grove that had enclosed it for more than a decade. In another video, he is seen taking his mother to the beach with Marcelo’s family. Allan pushed Sita’s wheelchair. She wore a loose white dress printed with black and pink patterns, and like her son, she had gained some weight. The sun was high as they sat together under the wide shade of a tree, taking in the breeze. Later, mother and son shared a pair of popsicles. Hers was ube. His was strawberry. Allan walked to the shore, pulled his shorts higher, and dipped his feet into the water. Two months later, he was dead. When I visited Sita again, a cloudless sky stretched taut above the trees, so clear it seemed to sit just over our heads. She was still beneath the doorway of her small, renovated house, a thin mattress between her and the floor. “He died,” she said, almost matter-of-factly, before I could ask anything. Then her face changed, as if the meaning of the word had only just reached her. She held herself together for a moment, then broke down. Marcelo had found Allan unresponsive in his enclosure. He was brought to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Doctors said he had suffered a heart attack. No further inquiry was made. Manuel, who had remained in his cage throughout Allan’s brief improvement, seemed to sink into a deep depression after that. He stopped eating and became dangerously thin. When he was rushed to the hospital, weak and emaciated, he was diagnosed with pneumonia and severe anemia. Sita also fell ill after Allan died and was unable to attend his funeral. She had not seen Manuel since he was taken to the hospital. “It hurts so much,” she told me, rubbing her chest. We brought Sita to the cemetery on the fortieth day after Allan’s death. She clutched Marcelo’s neck as he carried her from a rented van to her wheelchair. They lit two small candles in front of Allan’s grave and said a quiet prayer. The tomb was finished in plain cement, with Allan’s name and the dates of his birth and death scratched into it. Sita could not yet afford a proper marker. From the cemetery, Sita went straight to the hospital to visit Manuel. Curled in bed under a blanket, her youngest son looked small. Sita’s pink rosary was draped around his neck. “Have you eaten?” Marcelo asked, trying to coax him. “I’ll ask someone to buy food for you.” “No need,” came Manuel’s weak reply. Sita adjusted his blanket, then placed her hand over his. “Poor thing,” she whispered. Manuel died a month later. After that, Sita’s yard seemed to fall out of time. For eleven years, her days had been arranged around her sons’ needs. Food, water, medicine, waiting. Then, almost all at once, the routine that had driven and exhausted her, also disappeared. What remained was a devotion with nowhere else to go. Marcelo picking weeds. More than a year passed before I returned to the pocket of land behind the banana trees. I met Marcelo and Meriam at a chapel a few blocks away. A storm was approaching and it had been raining all morning. They arrived in their tricycle carrying an extra umbrella, both of them noticeably older than when I last saw them. Sita’s house was locked. Peering through the crossed bamboo slats of a window, I saw that most of what had been inside was gone, taken by relatives. What remained were the small, stubborn objects of daily life: her old mattress, a worn pair of shoes, a cane, a kitchen knife tucked against a wall, a jar of Vaseline by the door. Outside, the yard had gone still. The enclosures had been demolished, and weeds were taking over the ground. Out of instinct, Marcelo pulled out some of the vines, then stopped midway. “When Manuel died, she could not say a word,” he said. Sita died on the anniversary of Allan’s death. Marcelo said the final months of her life had been quiet, maybe emptied out. She did not complain, but she never seemed to recover from the death of her sons. She was buried beside them. Marcelo struggled with the cruelty of how things had played out. For years, Sita and her sons had endured with little more than the compassion of a neighbor to rely on. When help finally arrived, late and briefly, it made a difference. Then, almost as quickly, everything collapsed. “I saw how happy she was then, when she could talk to them, when they could recognize her,” Marcelo said. “Then suddenly, it was over.” The brief respite that Sita and her sons enjoyed did not redeem the many years of neglect. It was evidence of what was possible, and it made the years before it harder to accept. On the day Allan took Sita to the beach, she smiled as she squinted at the sunlight filtering through the trees. It was the happiest that Marcelo had ever seen her. All her life, Sita had asked only for enough to keep going. “I have no complaints. I just ask for the strength to keep taking care of my children. I don’t know when God will take me. I just have to ask for enough time.” In the end, she was spared the fear that had followed her for years: leaving her sons behind. It was a terrible consolation, but perhaps the only one left. Around her house, the banana trees pressed close together, quiet and thick. —with web design by Jessica Bartolome/LA, GMA News Editor's Note: This story draws from reporting originally conducted for the documentary Mga Bakanteng Selda, produced for I-Witness. Additional reporting was done for this written version. The original documentary can be viewed here.