Villa Dolina Township’s Alibangbang Festival is a community festival celebrating the butterfly and its significance to the campaign to sustain a livable environment. It celebrates in dance form the butterfly’s wonderful metamorphosis from being a helpless egg, to being a voracious caterpillar until it hides inside a cocoon as an unnoticeable and ugly pupae, and finally when it transforms itself into the lovely, attention-catching, and nectar-sucking imago that we locally call as alibangbang-----a favorite visitor to blooming flowers around us. A sight of these Mother Nature's multi-colored decorations inspires us to sustain the campaign to plant trees and ornamentals and against the use of pesticides and other environment-destructive chemicals.  Phone:(053) 323-7702 Why alibangbang? Alibangbang is the Lineyte-Samarnon name for butterfly. Butterflies elicit pleasure and curiosity more readily than any other insect. Since the early civilizations, it has been the favorite subject in the vast field of the arts, and has been variedly attributed to myths and folklore in almost all cultures. For the Chinese and most Asians, two butterflies flying together are a symbol of love. For some, a butterfly is a personification of a person’s soul, of a coming visitor and even of a bad omen. Still for some, it symbolizes good luck, happiness and prosperity. For some cultures, it symbolizes rebirth into a new life after being inside a cocoon for a period of time. But for us in Villa Dolina Township, the abundance of these lovely yet fragile insects in our neighborhood---in our gardens, lawns and open spaces---attests to our still livable environment---a condition that we must sustain globally for this generation and the generations yet to come. |
