My experience yesterday at the White House

No, no…. I did not go to the White House in Washington D.C.! I am talking about a legendary place on Samal Island called the “White House.”

Almost any Samal native will know where the White House is, you just have to ask for directions and they will point the way. A few weeks ago, I made my first visit to the White House and snapped a few photos. The house was obviously abandoned, and I poked around a little bit to see what I could find. The doors were boarded up, but some of the wooden windows were open enough that I could see the inside of the place. I peeked through, and it was pretty empty inside. Floor boards were loose and rotten, pieces of the walls had fallen off. There is a statue outside, apparently of somebody who lived in the house many years before. It was hard to read the weathered sign on the statue, but apparently it was some sort of military man who lived in the house at one point.

The things that I’ve heard from Samal natives, though, were not about a Filipino military man living there. They all told me that it was a white man who lived there many decades ago. They went on to tell me that the man was a former or future United States Senator, and the place got it’s name, because he was a white man, thus the house became known as the “white house.” I don’t know how much of this is true, because I have searched for any information I can get about a US Senator living on Samal, and I find nothing. The statue outside the house is not of a white man, but a Filipino. If a US Senator had lived there at a time, I think that there would have been some mention of that on the plaque at the house. But, who knows.

I have been curious about this, so I asked a friend (Blogie Robillo) of mine about it. Blogie is from Davao since birth, and his family are long term residents of the City. He had not really heard of the White House before, but when I described the location to him, he said he thought it might be the place where the Mongkadistas live. I asked him what a Mongkadista is, and he explained that it is a religious sect that resides on Samal Island. Apparently, one of the beliefs of the sect is that they do not eat cooked food. I asked Blogie if the Mongkadistas are friendly people, if they welcome visitors in their area, etc, and he said that as far as he knew, they were quite friendly. On the grounds of the White House, there is an old abandoned Church still standing on the property, maybe this is connected to the Mongkadistas. With this bit of information, I decided to go back to the White House and do a little more looking around.

Yesterday, Feyma and I ventured out there again, and we brought along Gladys, my business manager for the adventure. We got up to the area where the White House is, and we parked the car and did a little hiking around the area. We even met a few people who lived in the area. These were farmers living out in the middle of nowhere, and they were very friendly when we talked to them. They confirmed that the Mongkadistas were indeed the people who had settled the White House, but there was nobody who seemed certain if the Monkadistas were still there. As I said, the house was obviously abandoned, and the Church looked like it had not been used in years too.

We ventured over by the house. I wanted to show Gladys the beautiful view of Davao City from there, as she had not been to that area before. As we walked toward the house, an old man with long white hair and a long white beard walked toward us. He had only one arm. The first thing that came to my mind was that the current highest ranking Abu Sayyaf member was a one armed man in his 70′s! Oh boy. But, the Abu Sayyaf is not in this part of the island, so this should not be the guy. As we got up near the house, we heard Muslim prayer. It was a very familiar sound, and we knew what it was. But the Monkadistas were a Christian sect as far as I knew. This did not seem right. We listened, and determined that the Muslim prayer was most certainly coming from inside the White House! I thought it was abandoned! On my last trip, I had tried to get inside the place to look around. I even went underneath the house in a sort of makeshift basement or crawl space (it was about 5 feet high, though). I snooped around this “abandoned” place a lot, and for quite a long time. Now I hear Muslim prayer coming from inside. The house was not abandoned after all.

After about 10 minutes the prayer stopped and it was peaceful. Feyma, Gladys and I, though, were very curious as to what was going on inside the house! We were sitting on a bench under a mango tree in the yard of the house. I noticed a sign on the house. The sign, which I didn’t notice on my first trip here, declared that it was the headquarters for the Mongkadista sect. But, I was still curious about the Muslim prayer. A few minutes later, an old man climbed out of a second floor window and came out on the roof! I shouted out to him “Hello Manong”. No reply, he didn’t even look my way. My wife said that he must be deaf. He was an old man, at least in his 70′s. I shouted out a couple more times with no reply. At this point, I was starting to get a little worried. I didn’t want him to see us and figure that we were up to no good. He might have a gun or something inside the house!

Finally, he looked up and spotted us. We immediately waved to him to show that we were friendly. He waved back! Whew! At this point, my wife started speaking to him, and he did respond. We asked if he lived there, and he said that he lives on the second floor. We asked what he was doing out on the roof, he said that he liked to go there because there was a tall calamansi (Filipino lemon) tree where he could get calamansi fruit. OK, we said, and we bid him farewell. We are still curious about just what this old guy was doing there. He was obviously Muslim, yet the house was clearly marked as the Mongkadista Headquarters! After talking we all decided that maybe he was a caretaker of the place. Who knows!

So, anyway, we finished up our visit to the White House, and headed back down to the lowlands of Samal to enjoy the rest of our visit to the island!