A seminar workshop on heritage conservation and preservation will be held at the Nabua High School on Saturday and Sunday, July 12 and 13, 2008. The workshop is sponsored by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the Heritage Conservation Society and the Instituto Cervantes. This workshop is like fresh wind blowing in the province after a long hot summer. It can launch an advocacy that will hopefully make the heritage of Camarines Sur.

        The Nabua High School is chosen to be the venue of the seminar workshop because of its Gabaldon Building which, reports reaching the Bicol Mail say, is due for demolition.

        This workshop could have been the answer of the NCCA to a letter request from Dada Docot, founder of Nabua Forum, asking for advice on how “we can protest the demolition of one of our town’s remaining cultural sites . . . If we, Nabuenos, do not move to save the town’s one and only Gabaldon Building, the future generation will have very few cultural monuments to appreciate.”

        Docot in her letter to Bicol Mail further lamented that “a few years back, the Nabua High School demolished . . . . a wooden school building with beautiful capiz windows, which served as a garrison during the Japanese occupation. Most of the century-old houses in the town which reflect Spanish and/or American architecture are also being abandoned, bulldozed to the ground, or dismantled to be replaced by more modern structures.”

        What is so important about the Gabaldon Building?

        The Gabaldon Building was constructed all over the country as early as 1907 and maintained as a school by the provincial and insular governments. The building was named after Nueva Ecija Assemblyman Isauro Gabaldon who sponsored Act 1801. In its blueprint the Gabaldon Building was a complex containing nine classrooms, a library, a property room, a principal’s office and an assembly hall large enough to hold four hundred people --- laid out in a four-hectare property. Its grounds were planted to shade trees, hedges and shrubbery.

        This building was designed for the education of high school students and was replicated in almost all provinces and big towns in the country These buildings were set up to complement the elementary school training given by the Thomasites, the American volunteer teachers on board USS Thomas, who came in 1901.

        In the rooms of the Gabaldon Buildings, the Filipinos enjoyed the freedom of education they were deprived of by the Spaniards. For decades the Gabaldon Building had American educators until they ended their tenure sometime in 1935 when Filipino educators assumed the post.

        But as history would have it, the building was converted into a Japanese garrison during World War II and a hospital for wounded American soldiers during the Liberation..

        Such was the fate of Gabaldon Building in some parts of the country and most likely of those in Camarines Sur including that in Naga City and that in the Nabua High School.

        A school. A garrison. A hospital: The Gabaldon Building must have had a lot of stories to tell were it able to talk: the heroic incidents in the town, the blood shed by guerillas imprisoned in the building, the community and national leaders produced by its classrooms.

        Truly, needed are its documentation and its preservation. Much of the region’s heritage would be lost if left in the hands of leaders who do not care about local culture and history. One glaring example is the old belfry of the San Francisco Convent in Naga. At the moment --- even with an annual fund of P100,000 appropriated for the past two years by the Sangggunian Panlungsod for its cleaning and upkeep --- it is still left to the elements by the city officials.

        The fate or fortune of the Gabaldon Building in Nabua will presage the fate or fortune of the heritage of the Camarines Sur.