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Wind, balmy and resolute, whips through my hair and all around me as our rusting motorbike rushes along the broken roads and exiguous towns that sprinkle the coast outside of Coron. We fly past makeshift stalls vending roasted pigs, vacant basketball courts missing their nets, and tittering schoolyards alive with the shouts of playing children. I wave at sedulous, smiling laborers and impassive elders just as often as free-roaming livestock and scrawny, panting dogs. The pungent scent of burning trash permeates the circumambient air and fills my eager lungs with each breath. My fingers, slick with sweat, cling to the reflective metal bar on the bike’s rear as the dusty highway beneath us twists and turns. The dense Kabantigi trees that line that winding path offer no relief from the relentless sun of Busuanga Island as it beats down on our tanned skin. As our destination grows nearer, schoolchildren appear on our route’s shoulders in surges- chatting and giggling with the unmistakable, universal joy of classes ending for the day. Clusters of students wave as we pass and their shouts of laughter follow us even after they have disappeared in the dust kicked up by the bike’s tires. Civilization shrinks and foliage grows rampant the farther outside of town we drive. The clusters of children become less frequent as the sun blazes even fiercer, high in the abounding sky. We zip past a particularly large group of chittering girls and my eyes fall to a child, all alone, trailing behind. Her long, ebony hair whirls around her in an exceptionally humid gust of air. Her deafening loneliness drowns out the boisterous conversations of her classmates just a few meters up the road. Right before our bike sputters by her, as she brushes the hair from her eyes, I catch her gaze and wave, smiling with all of the joy I can muster from within. The way her face lights up hits me harder than the cracked road that flies beneath my sandaled feet ever could.