Lanyu aborigines visit ancestral home in Bataan

A group of aboriginal people from Taiwan’s Lanyu (Orchid Island) returned recently to Bataan, the land of their ancestors, with a shipment of medicines and farming tools, spending a week with their distant relatives to teach them modern farming and fishing techniques.
Lanyu, located about 90 kilometers southeast off Taitung County, is inhabited mainly by aboriginal people belonging of the Yami (or Tao) tribe.
According to Yami oral history, the ancestors of the tribe sailed from the Bataan area to Lanyu with the help of the Kuroshio Current more than 1,000 years ago.
Now a group of Yami people traveled in the reverse direction. Seven days ago, more than 50 people, including nurses, pastors, tribe elders as well as farming and fishing experts, set sail to visit their kin in Bataan 180 km away.
In addition to delivering pharmaceuticals, gloves, sickles, and fishing nets, they also took a ship to visit different spots to teach Bataan people how to improve public health facilities, increase farm crop productivity, and boost fish catch.
Residents in Bataan were also highly impressed with the advanced diving gears used by them, they said.
They explained the traditional agricultural cultivation methods used by people in Bataan are still comparatively primitive as compared with those employed in Lanyu and by other aboriginal people in various areas in Taiwan.
The size of sweet potatoes and taros and the production of rice is much smaller than those in Taiwan, they observed.
The Bataan region is full of natural resources and what the people there need is the more effective cultivation methods to increase output and improve living standards, they said.
They stressed that they are glad to have the opportunity to give assistance to their distant relatives separated by an epic length of time.