Camote is a sweet potato grown on the hillsides in the province of Sua. They grow underground beneath these purple colored flowers.
Cassava is another staple but I don't care for it as much as the camote.
Guavas and coconuts are common along the trails. Delicious Samar rice grows in the flat lands. The only rice that is on the same par is the stuff grown around Batad.
Copra is dried coconut meat that is sold to wholesalers who in turn send it to manufactures to be made into oil, soaps, cosmetics or whatever.
Tuba is a drink that the locals make from coconut also. It has an unpleasant odor and is slightly alcoholic but isn't too bad in a glass on tanduay.
The farms in this area are well kept and very productive but there is very little cash to be earned because of the hassle of getting the goods to market.
Almost everyone lives in bamboo stilt homes along the shore. When the tide comes in it sweeps away all the garbage and sewage that is below.
I don't understand why they don't build their homes in the mountains instead of being bunched up in a crowded stilt village. I wasn't able to get a proper understanding of why that is because most of the people speak Waray and Tagalog.
The coconut trees here are very short unlike the towering ones in Luzon. Even I could climb them to get a coconut because the trunks are notched for footholds.
In other places they are so tall the climber is taking a big risk and must take every precaution not to fall and get killed, but it does happen sometimes.
Another thing that I found strange was that many of the homes had big pigs in bamboo pens on stilts alongside their house.
It didn't make sense to me when they had all kinds of farm land where they could raise many more with a lot less effort.
A few people have tv's and there is a community billiard table right by the dock but the men spend a lot of their time at night drinking tuba.
The scenery in Sua is really nice but life does get boring after a while especially if you are just visiting because you are not occupied by working the farm during the day.
What I landed up doing at nights was quizzing the kids with running math problems. The kid chopping the coconut was a wiz. She was in grade 2 but had a gift for mathematics.
In school she was only up to addition and subtraction but I got her going on multiplication and division.
She caught on so quickly we started decimals but that kind of scared her. She was doing addition all the way into the billions which was a word she didn't even know before.
There are paths that you can follow over the mountains to the other villages but most folks don't stray far from home.
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