Mother’s Day stories are usually wrapped in flowers and soft words. They speak of quiet sacrifices and smiles offered through exhaustion, the kind of sentimentality people post online for a day and forget by the next morning. But some mothers carry memories that do not fit inside greeting cards. Some memories smell like wet soil before sunrise, like pesticide clinging to worn-out clothes, like fear.
Lani carries the memory of it all.
She is fifty-six now, originally from Asuncion, Davao del Norte. She still speaks carefully when recalling those years, as if parts of the past never truly left her body. In 1990, she arrived in Brgy Gabi, Compostela, Compostela Valley (now Davao de Oro) to work in the banana plantations. Back then, survival already demanded too much from ordinary workers, but she believed hard work could, at the very least, keep food on the table. Maybe that was enough then, or maybe she only needed to believe it was.
For ten years, she worked under DOLE operations before things began to shift.
By 2001, when Fresh Banana Agricultural Corporation (FBAC) took over, the conditions became harsher, heavier, and almost impossible to ignore. Workers reported entering the plantations as early as three in the morning and sometimes leaving around one in the afternoon, only to receive around eighty pesos for hours of aching backs, blistered hands, and labor that still had to translate into food at home. Just eighty pesos.
How do you explain that to children asking for milk or “baon” for school?
How do you tell them their parents are working themselves sick and still fall short?
Lani remembers going home exhausted, constantly calculating the cost of rice and school supplies as debts piled quietly in corners no one else could see. Her husband also worked in the plantation, yet two incomes still felt smaller than the needs waiting at home. And slowly, anger began to grow, not in loud declarations but in quiet conversations after work. Women compared wages, men spoke of unfair conditions outside cramped houses, and mothers wondered why endless labor still meant poverty.
Between 2002 and 2004, workers began to quietly organize, eventually founding NAMASUFA in 2005. They moved carefully, always aware that fear was an unspoken supervisor. At times, strangers would come looking for Lani at home. She never knew who they were, maybe management, maybe informants, maybe just rumors taking shape in uncertainty. But fear has a way of reorganizing everyday life. She would tell her mother, “If someone asks for me, just say I’m in the plantation… or somewhere else… just make up something.”
Picture that, a mother learning to disappear over the simple act of wanting a fair wage.
Yet they persisted, because desperation leaves little room for silence.
There is no denying the reality of labor exploitation in the plantations. No amount of slogans or public relations can erase the truth of the grueling conditions the workers have suffered and many are still suffering from. The struggle was real then, and it remains real now.
Lani recalls leaving home before sunrise and returning near midnight after overtime work, only to find her children asleep both times. The memory pains her, evident in the way she pauses too long before finishing a sentence.
And then Typhoon Pablo struck in 2012..
Operations in parts of Davao de Oro were disrupted. SUMIFRU operations stopped temporarily after the destruction. Lani and her husband searched for “sidelines” just to survive. She worked in rice fields under brutal heat, cutting stalks for meager pay while trying to keep the family afloat.
No speeches there.
No ideology.
Just survival.
Six months later, they returned to plantation work because there were no real alternatives. And ordinary mothers stand in the middle of it all, absorbing every blow. Somewhere along the way, another kind of exploitation entered the picture, and this is the part people often avoid talking about.
For years, organizations presenting themselves as defenders of workers moved deeper into labor communities. At first, many workers welcomed them. Why wouldn’t they? When the system keeps failing you, anyone offering solidarity begins to sound like hope. Lani listened, too. She attended meetings after exhausting shifts and joined rallies, believing that finally, someone would listen to the ordinary laborers. She believed protests could pressure abusive systems, and many workers did. But according to her, what began as genuine calls for reform slowly shifted into something else entirely.
One Monday afternoon, during a gathering of workers, Lani felt a quiet but unmistakable shift. She noticed how discussions inside organizing spaces had slowly drifted away from wages, benefits, and humane working conditions toward something more ideological and political. It was less about addressing the immediate struggles inside the plantations and increasingly about sustaining outrage itself.
The workers’ suffering remained real and also became useful. Useful for mobilizations. Useful for recruitment. Useful for political narratives far bigger than the actual mothers waking before dawn to survive another day. And perhaps that is what disturbed her most. Mothers like Lani did not join to become instruments for someone else’s revolution. They joined because they were hungry, because their children needed school supplies, and because they were tired of abuse. That distinction matters.
Lani says her personal hardships were repeatedly used to deepen resentment and encourage alignment with causes connected to front organizations associated with the CPP-NPA movement. She saw the meetings begin to romanticize armed struggle, portraying conflict as inevitable and even necessary. At one point, she herself was recruited into the Communist Party as a “Sanga sa Partido member” in their barrio and was invited to anniversaries of CPP-NPA activities in remote areas.
And yet… Even then… something inside her resisted.
Because Lani understands what violence really costs.
Not in theory, not in slogans shouted through megaphones,
But in real life.
She knows what happens when fathers disappear into conflict zones, what fear looks like when communities are caught between armed groups and propaganda, and how children do not eat ideology or sleep peacefully while adults glorify revolution from safe distances. What mothers like her need is stability, work with dignity, and peace, not endless mobilization that consumes what little time they already lost from their families.
The labor struggle is real; exploitation, abuse, and poverty exist, and these truths should never be denied or minimized. But neither should the manipulation that can grow around those struggles. Genuine activism should help workers reclaim dignity, not turn them into permanent fuel for ideological conflict; it should strengthen families, not pull parents away from their children in the name of endless struggle.
Lani is not a propaganda symbol.
She is a mother.
A survivor.
A woman who carried sacks of hardship long before front organizations of CPP-NPA arrived with speeches, banners, and false hope. This Mother’s Day, hers is the story worth listening to—not the loudest voices claiming to speak for workers, but the exhausted mothers who lived with the consequences long after the rallies ended and everyone else went home.
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