1 PREFACE This writing on the Waray culture is a response to a need and a challenge. The dearth of a systematic body of knowledge to understand a people who are the fourth largest ethnolinguistic group in the Philippines and who occupy the third largest island in the archipelago pressed the author to respond to that need. The unconsolidated data from various sources here and there and the absence of venues for discourse pose a formidable challenge for any writer. The changing landscapes and seascapes in the island worlds of Samar and Leyte islands are compelling. The cultural worker is bound to get to work – retrieve and document and advocate for the conservation of the natural and cultural wealth there are. But these cannot be frozen in a time warp. Time moves on and life goes on. Generations past are gone and generations now will produce and raise the next ones. How do we bring them to the world of the next millennium? We are limited by our own lifeline. As the Jesuit chronicler Father Francisco Alcina did in the 1600s, the necessary act is to write. Write or things would be forgotten. Write or else nobody would know of how people in this part the world made meaning of their lives. Write or else nobody would know of us at all. Write so our children would know and understand themselves. Write of what is, has been and could be so they would see the paths that they could take, not just to survive but to live happily. This monograph on the Waray is an ordering of the seeming helter-skelter information, written and oral, recollections and reflections, memories and current meanderings of thoughts on the savoring of Waray food as the pristinely fresh kinilaw or of a moment of ringing laughter over a friend’s funny anecdote over a sip of tuba. The narratives written here is a portrait composed out of primary field data, published materials and interview conversations, observations of the daily life of the Waray in the market, in the church, in school, in jeepneys, in the streets, at the farm, at the beach, on a boat a sea, underwater, during parties, fiestas, funerals and weddings, onstage, backstage, in various homes and at home. It is a recollection and reflection of the unfolding of the author’s life in this ancient fertile land that arose from the sea eons ago. This record is by no means complete as it is uneven. Only distinctive Waray traditions and readily accessible information have been included here due to lack of data and limits of space and time. This attempt at consolidating