Whispers of Ginger and Memory: The Lost Diaries of Lola Ising

By Marie. July 15, 2025

Long before Iloilo’s city lights bled into the quiet, a healer named Lola Ising of Iloilo (1920s–1940s) kept her knowledge tucked inside hard-bound journals, stitched with abaca threads and grace. Her diaries weren't merely collections of recipes—they were intimate companions, brimming with ritual, folklore, and survival.

"I preserve not merely recipes, but rituals.”

Lola Ising was a matriarch and herbalist who chronicled the healing traditions of Panay’s babaylan and daily recipes woven with prayers. Her diaries became a touchstone for post-war survivors seeking ancestral wisdom and indigenous knowledge.

“Boil ginger under a waning moon for coughs born of sorrow,” one entry reads in her curling script, beside a sketch of a bamboo ladle.

Lola Ising’s life spanned wars and harvests. As a babaylan-influenced herbalist, she treated wounds not only of the body but of memory. Her kitchen rituals, recited like prayer, included turmeric tea brewed before dawn, rice cakes offered to spirits at sunset, and the careful burning of langka leaves to cleanse grief.

Another excerpt, dated 1937:

“The children fear thunder. Today I fed them tinigib porridge with ground anise and whispered tales of Harana. It quieted their hearts.”

Her diaries, discovered in a flood-damaged cabinet decades later, became sacred texts for descendants and community healers alike. Recipes turned into workshops. Prayers became performance pieces. And Lola Ising—a woman never published nor televised—moved generations by simply preserving the sacred ordinary.

To read her is to remember that rituals aren’t lost—they’re waiting. Sometimes, in ginger tea. Sometimes, in ink.