‘Kumusta, Kaibigan?’: This children’s book explores grief, repair, and the art of asking

“Kumusta, kaibigan?” is the kind of greeting that passes between jeepney seatmates, between neighbors over a fence, between friends who have not seen each other in a while and truly mean it when they ask.

Repurposed here as the title of a children’s book — one whose subject is friendship, deforestation, and the communal work of ecological repair — the phrase becomes more deliberate: an address extended toward something that cannot respond, in the hope that the asking itself might do something powerful.

Published by The Center for Art, New Ventures and Sustainable Development (CANVAS) and written in Filipino by Russell Molina with an English translation by Aya Licsi, Kumusta, Kaibigan? is narrated in two voices. The first belongs to the tree who watches, gives shade, and eventually loses its home to a logger’s sharp axe.

The second belongs to the community that gathers, afterward, to bring the forest back. It is a structure that asks a reader to hold two perspectives simultaneously: grief and repair, loss and the possibility of returning.

Sixteen of painter Roel Obemio’s works, as featured in the book, currently hang on the fourth floor of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila, where they will remain for at least several more months.

A painter’s mountains, a writer’s hope

Roel Obemio is known for his volumetric figurations — a style that draws frequent comparison to Colombian painter Fernando Botero, whose Boterismo is characterized by exaggerated, rounded forms. Where Botero deploys volume as a mode of social critique, Obemio redirects it toward whimsy, narrative, and world-building of dreamlike proportions.

But Kumusta, Kaibigan? represents a different register of Obemio’s practice, one that is much less whimsical than expected for his portfolio. He grew up in Mindanao, in the mountains of Bukidnon, and the subject of the book is not abstract to him.

“Habang umaakyat, may ibang parte sa bundok na nakakalbo na,” the artist told Rappler. “Nakikita ko rin ang mga consequence nito, mga repercussion, lalo na kung may mga malalaking bagyo.”

(While hiking, there are parts of the mountain that are now bare. I can also see the consequences of this, the repercussions, especially when there are large typhoons.)

The consequences he names are concrete: destroyed bridges, damaged homes, and a casualty count in Cagayan de Oro that he traces, without equivocation, to deforestation and corruption. “Parte ito ng korupsyon (This is part of corruption),” he said plainly. 

This is the knowledge that informs the paintings. His palette for the book is predominantly cool — greens with restrained warmth — less a stylistic decision than a form of fidelity to the landscape he grew up in. For a painter whose gallery work tends toward the vivid and the festive, the sobriety here is itself a kind of statement. “Ang tao at kalikasan ay yin and yang,” he said. “Nakadepende rin tayo rito.”

(People and nature are yin and yang. We depend on the environment.)

Before his career as a painter, Obemio worked as a caricaturist and effects animator at the now-defunct Philippine studio of Hanna-Barbera, Fil-Cartoons Inc. — an experience that instilled in his practice a flair for narrative and an attention to composition that has never entirely left. It shows in the book’s paintings: each image is organized around a story beat, a before and after held within a single frame.

The text those images accompany belongs to Russell Molina, a Filipino children’s book author and comics creator whose work has won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the PBBY Salanga Writer’s Prize, and the National Book Awards, among others.

He began writing for children in 1998, entering a story in the PBBY Salanga Writer’s Prize that received a special citation — a nudge, he said, that he took seriously. His background, before children’s literature, was in advertising: writing copy for print and television, distilling narratives into seconds for audiences with voracious appetites.

Asked what he hopes a child carries from Kumusta, Kaibigan?, Molina does not hesitate. “Hope,” he told Rappler. “The book is all about empathy, caring, and hope for the future. And I think that’s what we want to accomplish with the book.”

The collaboration was brokered by CANVAS executive director Gigo Alampay, who brought Molina — a friend — in to write around Obemio’s subject and sensibility. “Nag-usap kami in regards sa collab,” Obemio recalled. “Painting ko, subject ko, then idea ng story kay Russell. Simple lang siya, ‘yung storya, pero challenging.”

(We talked in regards to the collab. It’s my painting, my subject, then the idea of the story is from Russell. It’s a simple story, but it’s challenging.)

The challenge, he clarifies, was not simplicity itself but the restraint required to let the story breathe — to not over-rely on the familiar arc of planting, dying, and returning to life, and instead trust the image to carry meaning the text does not need to restate.

For Obemio, this is less a design principle than a conviction about what art and literature are for in relation to each other. “Sa aking pananaw, bahagi siya ng kabuuan dahil hindi malalarawan ng bata ang visual na anyo ng naratibo,” he stated. “Mag-partner ang visual at literatura; hindi sila maghihiwalay.”

(In my view, it is part of the whole because a child cannot visualize the form of the narrative. The visual and literary are partners, they cannot separate.)

April is National Literature Month, and Molina is measured about what that spotlight accomplishes. “It’s important because it puts a spotlight on local creators and local work,” he said. “It’s also great to put a spotlight on our own culture and own narratives because it gives us a sense of identity.”

20 years and half-a-million books

CANVAS, a nonprofit organization that works with the creative community to promote children’s literacy, explore national identity, and deepen public appreciation for Philippine art, culture, and the environment.

Founded in 2005, its efforts include book publishing, art and museum development, and book donations. Its origin story is rooted in Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees — a parable about one person’s capacity to change a landscape through quiet, sustained effort (drawing parallels to Kumusta, Kaibigan’s own narrative) — which founder Gigo Alampay has cited as the intellectual seed of the organization’s philosophy.

The numbers, 20 years in, are not small. By the end of 2025, CANVAS had donated over 516,000 books since the start of its literacy campaign. The books go to public schools, disadvantaged communities distributed by all sorts of people from doctors to the barrios, leftist organizations, to soldiers — Alampay is deliberate about this range, and deliberate about what it means. “We’re politically agnostic,” he noted.

CANVAS’ mission, as he frames it, is structural rather than ideological: closing a gap in access. “It’s more of the accessibility. We’re trying to bridge the gap in access to children’s books,” he said. All CANVAS titles, he added, are also freely downloadable.

The rationale connects to a sobering statistic Alampay returns to often: “In our country, more than 50% of those who enter elementary school will not graduate high school. So it’s important that children not only learn how to read, but to learn to love books. Reading is a lifelong skill that they get to have and then get to use, whether they stay in school or not.”

This year, CANVAS is slated to release more than 10 titles. The exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts — where Obemio’s paintings from Kumusta, Kaibigan? currently hang alongside other paintings and child-oriented exhibits on AI and digital literacy — is part of a broader retrospective marking CANVAS’ 20th anniversary, serving as a preview for their biggest project yet: the inauguration of the Tumba-Tumba Children’s Museum of Philippine Art, currently in development in Ibaan, Batangas.

Kumusta, Kaibigan? sits at the center of several of CANVAS’ stated concerns — environment, national identity, community — but it wears none of them as a moralistic banner. It is, at its most literal, a greeting. At its least literal, it is a reckoning with what it means to ask how something is when you already know the answer, and to ask anyway, because the asking is the beginning of repair. – Rappler.com