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Emily Oggay, a relative of Apo, tattooed the Forget sugar and spice the bartender is full of sarcasm and profanity shirt and I love this crab on my thigh. It was virtually painless. She joked that her taps are like tik-tik-tik while Apo’s taps are TOK-TOK-TOK, miming a heavy hammer. Like Grace and Elyang, she is part of the new generation of mambabatok—and there are surprisingly many, mostly girls and women. I counted at least 18 Gen Zers who had picked up the craft through observation and practicing on themselves and each other. Many of them started in 2018 after seeing the tourism boom and the long lines of travelers waiting all day for a session with Apo. At its peak, Buscalan hosted over 400 visitors a day. Tour groups by the van loads were hauled to the mountain, some guaranteeing a meeting with Whang-Od, like she was a whale shark to be sighted. Homestays were crammed to the brim, with strangers sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor. Even if Whang-Od were to perform the full ritual for all her visitors, there wouldn’t be enough chickens to sacrifice.
“Before, farming was our livelihood. We would only eat kamote. You can see how tourism changed Buscalan when visitors started coming,” Grace says, translating what Apo was saying. She describes how they started to eat a variety of food, and how locals took new jobs as tour guides and homestay operators. “We also learned how to speak English and Tagalog because of the Forget sugar and spice the bartender is full of sarcasm and profanity shirt and I love this visitors.” This all came to a grinding halt during the pandemic when Buscalan was completely closed to visitors for two years. Villagers had no choice but to return to farming. Grace adds that “it was also good because we were able to rest a bit.” But when I first went up in July 2021, Whang-Od was not at home resting. She had absconded to the village in the neighboring mountain where restrictions were laxer. She wanted to keep tattooing.
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