Visit Your Ancestral Home, Please!

                     By Vic Odarve

A visit to our ancestral homes enables us to trace our roots, remind our past, and provide a thrill to learn how our great-grandparents lived in their heydays. This gives us a unique opportunity to connect our relatives and friends that for many years we have not seen face to face. It also allows us to see what have had happened to some of the places where we once considered as a playground when we were still young and carefree. Further, if this is a land of our birth, we are stepping back in time; the land where your life had started, and a visit provide a thrill on how things are going on. A visit to our ancestral homes maybe a journey of our lifetime… before we traveled to another universe and see our Maker.

Ancestral house

A timely visit is usually done during fiesta celebration and reunion activities where relatives and friends are also around. This gives us a unique opportunity to connect our relatives and friends that for one reason or another, could not make a visit. Our old folks at home welcome us with big smiles, treated us like kings and queens, and huge open arms extending a mile out of their sleeves. Here, plenty of stories were told with a bottle of beer, singing, and dancing, and tracing the roots from the grandparents. The best part could be listening to our grandma, and grandpa reminisces about the people and events from their past. Here we learned that some of our relatives and friends are already gone while some are still living.

A tour of our hometown also allows us to see what have had happened to some of the places filled with memories during our younger days. For most of us, we consider a visit as an awesome adventure. In our last visit, for example, we came to a path that leads off down a sloping mountain near the river where I had played with my kite before. The trees had grown up a lot in some areas, and the once nicely kept rice fields were overgrown and were nearly filled with tall grass after a massive landslide happened a decade ago. It is still clear in my mind how I keep running on this mountain slope before.

Farmland visit

Going back to the old trail, I can feel like walking through mists and clouds along the mountain ranges, meet all the fairies and magical creatures, and watch the birds doing orchestra along with the canopies. Thus, we remembered our good old childhood days, where we spent much time playing with our neighbors and assisting our parents in keeping our rice fields. It is sort of feeling that cannot be captured on camera and more than the old pictures hanging on the wall. It is an exhilarating feeling to walk in the footsteps of your ancestors. Sometimes a visit gives me a feeling that had I did not study in a university and became an engineer, I might still be working in the rice fields, instead of doing lectures in the fields of engineering here and abroad.

Our ancestral homes also provide us a glimpse of how things are changed rapidly where today’s technology is far more advanced. The old house standing could serve as powerful reminders for the current and future generations about how life once was, back in the days when smartphones, videokes, and other gadgets were all still unheard of.

There really is no place like home. Our ancestral home reminds me about the place and events where I come from; the land of my birth, and with all its diversity, the good and the bad, I would like to go there first over anywhere else in the world.