For Luna mill pickers, a weight gets heavier

WATCHTOWER The Baluarte, a Spanish-era watchtower, is Luna’s many famous landmark. EV ESPIRITU

LUNA, La Union—Sixty-seven-year-old Ester Camat, a pebble picker of Barangay Nalvo Norte in Luna, La Union, chuckles when asked what she wanted to spin when she was a child.

Camat once dreamed of apropos a teacher, though she had to give that adult when her relatives died in a highway collision when she was 8.

To this day, she has combed a shores of Luna for hours, plowing her unclothed hands into a sweeping of stones for excellent pebbles that are widely believed to be gifts from Luna’s patroness, a Lady of Namacpacan.

Camat started her grind in a late 1950s when a businessman from out of city asked some residents to collect stones for him. Then 17, she assimilated a handful of people in entertainment white, prosaic stones that a male bought during P2 a bucket.

At first, she was not too penetrating about a job. The suspicion of spending prolonged hours on a beach and lugging pouch after pouch of pebbles underneath a breathless feverishness disheartened her. But she indispensable money, so she usually went with it.

“If we had a choice, we would not have left pebble picking since it was tough work. But we had to since we indispensable to make a vital and with pebble picking, we didn’t need anything though earthy strength,” she says.

Camat is a usually pebble picker in her family. If there are not too many pebbles on a beach, that is mostly a box when a waves are moderate, she helps her father compartment a land that her sister leased to her, tend their livestock, and cut firewood.

Most Luna residents juggle these jobs via a year.

Even children are partial of a routine. Besides assisting their relatives collect pebbles, they fill wine bottles with “seven-colors stones” that are gray when dry though arrangement assorted colors when dripping in water.

They sell these to tourists visiting a Baluarte (watchtower) in Barangay Victoria in Luna to acquire propagandize money.

PRECIOUS STONES Young and aged residents of Luna, La Union, brush a town’s beach in hunt of pebbles and stones that they sell to traders and exporters. EV ESPIRITU

Luna’s beach has over 30 kinds of musical stones. Chiseled to soundness by a Amburayan River and a West Philippine Sea (South China Sea), a pebbles mostly have purify contours and well-spoken surfaces, and come in a accumulation of shapes. Most demeanour like little triangles with blunt edges, some prosaic and broad, and others prolonged and slight or made like eggs.

The sizes of a pebbles are equally varied. Some are as little as peas, while others are as large as rugby balls. The smaller a pebble and a rarer it is, a some-more costly it gets, pickers say.

The 25-millimeter “BP1 black stones” sell for P25 a bucket, while a “kudo-kudo” (30-mm) black stones sell for P19. Black stones are a many abundant.

Gray, white and “seven-color” stones are not as common, though these cost a same as black stones. Green and tiger stones, and marble are tough to come by so they could fetch as high as P70 to P100 a bucket.

Pickers sell their pebbles to checkers who, in turn, sell these during aloft prices to 29 internal traders and 4 exporters. They move a pebbles to Metro Manila for conveyance to several areas in a country, quite in Bulacan and Pampanga. Some find their approach to Malaysia, Hawaii, Singapore, Korea and Switzerland.

Camat says pickers have attempted seeking traders and exporters to boost a shopping cost of stones since there never was one for a prolonged time. But traders would tell them that they can't since they spend a lot on enclosure and shipping fees, that could simply strech P15,000 per trip.

The provincial government, that oversees many of a operation, usually allows pickers to collect pebbles that are between 10 mm and 100 mm in diameter. Collecting smaller pebbles would need a use of collection that would dive a lassitude of supply while incomparable stones are healthy “sand weights” that forestall a belligerent from eroding.

The heaps of pebbles found on a shores act as healthy barricades opposite charge surges. Without them, a city would be in good risk of large flooding.

To keep a healthy environment, Roel Collado, an operative during a Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB), says a volume of pebbles collected should never surpass a rate during that a sea replenishes a supply.

In this regard, a provincial supervision has asked pebble pickers to use usually their hands and equivocate regulating shovels or any other apparatus to forestall large-scale extraction.

The pickers are also compulsory to hand-carry a stones they collect. Using carts, wheelbarrows and other automatic apparatus has been banned.