SAGADA, Philippines — A tribal elder in a traditional feathered headdress presides over a prayer. The pavement is stained red from the pig and chicken butchered as an offering to the god Kabunyan. A few local men beat the gongs in measured beats as locals dance around in celebration. Such scenes could have easily been mistaken for any ordinary ritual. Except it was done under the glare of a fresh 150-foot cellular tower as part of the structure’s firing up inauguration.
The structure is perched on a hill overlooking the Episcopal Church of St. Mary, that is both a literal and figurative gateway to Sagada’s history, being an iconic landmark built by American missionaries in the early 1900s and one that stands at the doorway of the hanging coffins in Echo Valley. Standing across a Globe Telecom tower a couple of meters away, Smart Communication’s tower marks the company’s reentry into the town after closing down its previous site when it was embroiled in the middle of a family dispute.
Darwin Flores, head of Smart for community partnerships, said this has been the first such cell tower inauguration that has involved an indigenous group.
“This is a case where nakuha na namin lahat ng permits pero sinabi ng mayor na your site is an ancestral land so you have to go through this process,” Flores said. “It is part of the growing up of the company. It is a learning process.”
For the locals, the precarious balance between welcoming modern technology and preserving their cultural heritage is one that is not lost on the community.
“Naiintindihan naman namin ang development,” said Jaime Dugao, mandatory representative to the Sagada municipal indigenous peoples.
Dugao, a respected village elder, stressed that they “understand the benefits of technology to our community.”
“Considering the situation that we are already in the computer age, so we really need this signal,” Dugao said.
The community said that boosting telecom interconnectivity would help draw tourism. But beyond drawing in more tourists, locals said they also want to use the internet to help ward off tourists once they see the community’s carrying capacity is close to being breached.
“With regards to this technology, this is something that we have to see that it will not erode the culture but will help in the preservation,” said Sagada vice mayor Benjamin Capuyan.
Capuyan said they could easily announce that the town would not be able to accommodate more tourists at certain points in time by announcing it through various official social media platforms. Today, the town has some 4,500-5,000 bed capacity for tourists, but Capuyan said they recorded 10,000 visitors during the recent Chinese New Year, almost nearing the town’s 12,000-13,000 population.
“Having an excellent service like this will further promote good tourism in Sagada,” said Andreo Maguilang, community development officer of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples.
For Smart, the newly launched cell site forms part of the telco’s planned doubling of LTE base stations to 17,700 this year as part of a nationwide roll-out.