Twin Rivers

Chapter One: Twin Rivers

Twin Rivers was a small town 30 miles north of Davao City.  It was situated at the foothills of the Apo Sandawa mountain range.  Two rivers watered the area: the Saro river and the Baracayo river which united at the lower boundary of the town and became the Lipadas river downstream. Thus the name, Twin Rivers. Population: 12,000 with ninety percent working in banana plantations.

Banana plantations covered eighty percent of its territory, approximately ten thousand hectares.  There were more than a hundred plantation owners.  Some owning areas as small as three hectares.  But there were those few who owned bigger stakes.  The Del Mar family had the largest single-owned landholding: two thousand hectares comprising about twenty percent of the total plantations area.  The Jamesons, who were of Canadian descent, owned one thousand hectares.  And the Villareals who owned six hundred hectares. There was also the Twin Rivers Ventures, the largest, which had a combined landholding of three thousand five hundred hectares.  It was owned by a group of friends composed of Salvador Duque now survived by wife Maila, Arturo Lee and Alberto Monteazul.  The rest of the small landowners have banded into two rival cooperatives: the Northeast Coop and the Southwest Coop.  Since upland bananas were better, quality-wise, than low-land bananas, the banana plantations in Twin Rivers were a source of pride, and much money.

The town had three elementary schools, two high schools and a junior college. It had a medical clinic, a supermarket,  an inn, a mountain resort and a sports complex.  Not too many businesses thrived in Twin Rivers because of its close proximity to Davao City. Plantation workers lived in four housing complexes located at the outskirts of the town proper.  Wealthy landowners built mansions on choice portions of their properties.

Before the advent of bananas Twin Rivers was a sleepy old barrio with residents mostly below the poverty line. Robbery and thievery was not uncommon. The populace was bound by ignorance and superstitions. But when the demand for labor in the banana plantations encouraged the people to work, everything changed. Everybody became too occupied to loiter around. Teenagers went to school and worked during their free times. There were no drug-related problems in Twin Rivers.

When Alberto Monteazul first arrived in 1960 there were no banana plantations in the place.  The leading crop was abaca, a remnant of the famous Japanese plantations of the pre-war years. With a loan from his father who was a merchant in Davao City, he and his young wife, managed to purchase 50 hectares of fertile land.  He planted dwarf Cavendish bananas and contacted Japanes buyers.  He got a contract from a Japanese firm in Osaka for him to supply the Japanese market with one hundred metric tons of bananas a month for a period of ten years.  The Japanese were willing to give an advance payment of one million pesos, a fortune in those days, in order to enhance production.  Alberto sought the help of two former classmates from his college days to do the venture.  And so the Twin Rivers Ventures was born.

Conrado Del Mar arrived in 1963 just as the banana industry was rising.  A millionaire by birth whose father was a shipping magnate, he initially purchased five hundred hectares from a Bagobo Sultan.  In that same year, Roland and Ronald Jameson, sold their printing business in Manila and bought two hundred hectares for banana cultivation. In 1964, Ben and Raquel Villareal, having won the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes' grand prize, chose to invest their prize money in banana growing and bought a hundred hectares to begin with. Through the years additional parcels of land were acquired for banana growing and more plantation owners emerged.

On May 18, 1965, Del Mar's wife, Clarissa, gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.  She was named, Dawn.  Conrado thought the name was appropriate because the name suggested hope.  Ten days later, Ana Maria Monteazul gave birth to a healthy baby boy.  Alberto jumped for joy, he had an heir to carry on his name.  The couple acknowledged their true wealth in their son and named the boy, Aldrich. On that same year, daughters were also added to the Jameson's and Villareal's households.  Kathryn Jameson was born on the 6th of June and Lovely Villareal on the 28th of September.