I've been living in Cebu for almost 3 years…
and this time, I realized I had been looking at one word the wrong way.
I visited a small cassava processing facility in the mountains of Catmon.
Before I got there, I casually called it a factory.
Melvin smiled.
"No, no," he said.
"I can't call this a factory."
"It's a processing facility."
At first, I thought he was just being modest.
The building only had two rooms.
It used to be a boarding house.
Most of the work was still done by hand.
So I joked,
"Oh… I expected a bigger factory." 😂
But the longer we talked, the more I realized the problem wasn't the building.
It was me.
I was measuring the place by its size.
He was describing it by what it actually did.
Later, Melvin told me something that stayed with me.
He had lost his job and returned to his hometown.
He learned how to process cassava from his mother.
They're still improving the facility little by little.
Then he mentioned they had received ₱80,000 in support from the Department of Agriculture.
He looked at me and said,
"₱80,000 is too small for starting a business.
But for me…
it was too big.
Because I started with nothing."
That was the moment I stopped thinking about whether this place was a "factory."
I realized I had walked in looking at a building.
He was thinking about how it all started.
Almost 3 years in the Philippines,
and I'm still learning that the words I use don't always mean the same thing to the people who live here.
Still Learning.
Still Exploring.
One conversation at a time.
Daghang salamat, Melvin🙏
I kept saying "factory," and Melvin kept saying "processing facility," and for a while I thought we were just disagreeing about a building. Two rooms. Mostly handwork. Nothing that looked like what I pictured when I heard the word.
But the more he talked — about losing his job, about coming home, about learning the process from his mother — the less this was about the size of a room. He wasn't downplaying anything. He was just describing what the place actually did, not what it looked like from the outside.
"₱80,000 is too small for starting a business. But for me… it was too big." It made me stop for a second — and then laugh, quietly, at myself. I'd walked in measuring a building. He was measuring where he started.
The gap wasn't in the building — it was in how differently we each chose to name it, one of us by size, the other by what it does.
| Date | July 19, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Location | Corazon, Catmon, Cebu |
| Event Type | Small Business Visit · Cassava Processing Facility |
| Access Method | Invited by a local contact (Melvin) |
| Food Featured | Processed Cassava |
| Cost to Attend | Not a public attraction / Visit by arrangement |
| Rarity | 🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜ — A small, family-run operation, easy to miss |
| Bayanihan Index | 🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜ — One family's persistence, with support from local programs |
Whether this is just Melvin's own way of describing his work, or something bigger about how people here name what they build, is still something I don't know.