Words for Maguindanao

The horribly brutal Maguindanao Massacre surprised even the most jaded of Filipinos and activists.  I learned about it on Monday morning, when I was tucked safely away in my apartment in Berkeley.  On Thanksgiving Day I found words, however inadequate they may be.

I was a lone jogger on UC Campus; a gray ghost with a messy ponytail, breathing in air and giving back perspiration with pores on my face and my body.  I crushed grass under my feet and I greeted the squirrels as they buried their treasures under leaves and pine needles. I took larger strides and my hair stuck to the sweat on my neck.

What was it that drew me from the grass to the street?  My steps went without thought.  I could not hide my eyes from the massive crane that rose like a guillotine above new construction.  I kept taking in and giving back.  Air and water for carbon and salt.

The skeletal building spoke as wind moved inside it; metal against metal, plastic on concrete.  The living and the nonliving merged into sound.  I could not silence my breathing.  I could not stop taking from the earth.

For three days I have thought about Attorney Connie’s last moment.  Was she taking a breath when they killed her?  Did she cling to the air in her lungs because she knew it would be the last?  Or had she exhaled, resigned herself, when they took the last of her?  Had she seen the others go first?  Did she grieve for them?  Did salt fall from her eyes?  Does the ground know the difference between tears and blood?

The word “massacre” is too sterile because every death of the 57 was a massacre in itself; every moment an unprecedented tragedy.  Some still had hope.  Some must have given up.  Many were crying out for mercy but I imagine those who were mutilated were praying for the end.  It was one after another after another after another.  And yet, the world was no more adept.  At no time did creation shrug its shoulders and say, “Oh?  Just one more?”

It’s not my story.  I am none of these people.  If they know me, it is in my complacency.  So let the survivors tell this story.  Let the handful who outran the terror write on the wall of history.

I saw nothing.  I was nowhere.  In the frame of a building thousands of miles West, I heard a universe groaning: I heard spirits saying, “Please, please.  Please, please…” I warmed myself with my guilt.  I walked into an open street of a city that was silent for one day.

This time last year I’d begun saying goodbye to Mindanao.  I was frying stuffing and paying for chicken and soda and wine to feed my coworkers and friends.  I was pleased at how the celebration had grown from the year before and I was thinking how lonely it would be when I didn’t share my kitchen with anyone.

They gave thanks for the struggle, for the movement, for solidarity and for the will to keep going.  I am thankful they are still there.  I am thankful for my head and my body.  I am thankful no one has taken either from me. I am thankful for the attorney and I am thankful that there are those who will carry her on and on until they themselves go into the night.

I am thankful I can resist the darkness.  It filled the empty construction at UC Berkeley and it filled my apartment for the last three days, but with these words, I send it out again.  My dog stands guard against it at the front door.  She knows it will return.

I am thankful that violence is not the end, that “Maguindanao” is not the last word.  It won’t be, as long as there is still struggle among the living.  For the sake of the dead, they will say it again and again.  Maguindanao.  Even an animal would not turn its back on such a thing.  Even the rocks hear when the universe moans.

I left UC campus and ran on the street in downtown Berkeley.  There were no cars to stop me, traffic lights were meaningless with all the people tucked away in places I could not find them.  I was a citizen of a ghost town. When I lengthened my gait, I took in more air.  I moved more of creation with me.  The universe groaned for Maguindanao.  It has seen this before- it will see it again.  But like every time, this time is different.  Distinct.  Tragic. Fifty-seven kinds of loss.  Fifty-seven wasted reasons.

“Please, please, please,” it said.

Who am I to comfort all of existence?  So I just cried out, too.  “Thank you,” I said with my legs and my lungs, with my heart and my head and all of my being.

“Thank you for not giving up on us.  Please don’t.  Not yet.”

Fog and reflection

The fog off the bay has kept me from reaching the keys of a dying computer, has clouded my mind with new concepts of color and family and home.  Berkely is my weigh station, testing the depth of where I have been and what I’ve learned; keeping me from moving.  I mean no ill to Berkeley.  The art of standing still is something I should practice anyway.

I read somewhere that an American should leave New York before she grows jaded and leave California before she gets soft.  When I strolled down the streets of the Upper West Side two years ago this July, I said to city, “I’ve escaped my darkness.”  My sandals smacked the bottom of my feet, fleeing from the scorching asphalt with each lift of the knee.  I prayed I would be returned to the Apple of the east, to moments of understanding that were highlighted by blissful affection.

In San Francisco last night,  when I hugged my self over a jacket and scarf, a woman said to me, “The fog won’t leave the city until September.”  My toes clung to the inside of my loafer, pulling back from the dampness that threatened through the tear in my sole.  A month is an eternity, while the years flee with a cold wind when no one is keeping track.

I pray to be returned to a citrus-saturated Orient, a time when I was stretched and broken and overwhelmed by a feeling of being alive.  I found a new darkness in Mindanao.  It fooled me into thinking that things would be easier if I could find a home.  It fooled me into believing home is where you live. 

I tried to leave the dark at a snow covered grave in Pittsburgh and then on a baggage carosel at SFO.  When I’m standing still it has an easier time finding me, but to move means I have to carry it along.  Do I even exist in a place where I am unkwown?  This new darkness tells me, “You can’t understand a world that happens outside of you.”  And yet everyone in America has answers. 

The gospel I evangelize places wisdom in the hands of people we do not see, the people whose gaze we avoid by crossing to the other side of the street.  The message puts me at bay.  The heaviness pulls me down.  The fog keeps my eyes from surveying the breadth of the Pacific.

Two months in less than 2000 words, as I watch everything opening in front of me.

Originally I had wanted to post a blow-by-blow account for you of the past two months but really, the details that matter here (and anywhere) are rarely the who, what, where, and when, so let those be an afterthought and not the heart what I say and who I am. The past two months have been filled with puppies and parties and teach-ins and immersions. In my ever evolving environment, I keep reminding myself that I didn’t become a missionary to make cool new friends and have my own room and access to a shower. That’s hard isn’t it though? When what we’ve imagined comes face to face with our realities. Even worse I think is when the people we thought we were meet the people we’ve become. I like this woman I’ve become, the one who rides water buffalo and whom the villagers call Esai. I like when I hear visiya come out of her mouth and I like that she knows how to harvest kamotes and slaughter a chicken (it’s true!) The old me is shocked when I see her happily eating meat and doing laundry by hand.

I spent most of December on the east coast of Mindanao, near a tiny city named Mati, the better half of my three weeks living with a family in this little barangay called Sanghay. (There are pictures of my host family and the farm shack where they live at www.flickr.com/slavishtubesocks) I rode a horse (falling on my rear when I tried to mount him), I rode a water buffalo (they don’t move until forced to, so are easier to board), and I climbed a mountain to a remote(r) community where a priest performed the first mass that the people had in a month. He baptized babies, though it was just really a formality. Due to the high rate of infant mortality in many countries, the Vatican has extended the right of baptism to the child’s mother, so children in remote provinces are blessed almost immediately after their appearance from the womb. The Vatican no longer states that unbaptized babies wait in purgatory, but the people are still afraid of this possibility.

I spent Christmas at the Benedictine convent near Sanghay. It was amazing and spiritual experience: vespers, prayers, lauds, and some of the best food I’ve eaten in a long time. The nuns grow their own food and tend to their own animals, along with being the medical, social, religious, and activist outreach to the communities around them. On Christmas Eve afternoon I took a nap at the convent and had a horrible nightmare that when I got home everyone else had just gone away. When I woke up I had to run into the chapel for lauds and during our prayers I began to weep openly. The Reverend Mother left prayers and brought me tissues. After I washed up and came out for Christmas dinner I began to weep again and Reverend Mother held me. I will never forget what she said. “Oh, Esai. Why are you crying? You are so beautiful and the sisters and I bought you all sorts of beautiful things for you, didn’t we?” (Affirmations from the nuns) “Oh you know those puppies we have that you’ve liked playing with? You can have one! Two if you want! I know how hard this is.”

All of the nuns there had been foreign missionaries for a time and they shared stories about their first Christmases away from home. The Reverend Mother had been a medical missionary in Ughanda and had spent her first Christmas in a bomb shelter cooking wild chickens for terrified women and singing them Christmas carols. Sister Stella contracted influenza as her first Christmas present away from home while working in an orphanage during an epidemic. I know it seems atrocious but these stories were told to make me laugh. And I did. I ate the fabulous dinner they’d grown and prepared and opened the beautiful presents they’d given me. I had to leave the puppy at the convent (there’s no way I could take him home) but Sister Stella (the dog lover there) said she’s taking extra good care of him and texts me updates as to how he’s doing. In case your wondering he’s grown to be 65 pounds and they’re trying to teach him only to eat the leftover chicken they put in his bowl and not the live ones that are running around the yard.

When I came home around New Year’s I was excited to start my “real work”. Fascinating that after four months I had learned nothing. But, third immersion is the charm. This time there were no kind nuns to care for me (though I will be visiting them again soon!). I was sent to an urban poor community in north Davao City. Only a half hour ride from where I “live” but most of the homes in this community were without electricity and all of them were without running water. Some of the houses didn’t have toilets. I stayed there for two weeks with two different families. I did “work”- I spoke to the people (in Visiya!!) about the Visiting Forces Agreement and Balikitan (the US military exercises here). They have sewing machines in the community that were donated as a microloan concept for the women to make dresses and bags to gain lucrative employment. The project has gone by the wayside, so as the activists got them to reorganize around the idea, I tinkered with the machines and put them in working order, along with talking to the women about idea possibilities for modern bags that would sell easily. I made some prototypes. I worked in the dress shop, in the town “hall”, on my host families farm. But I think the crucial moment for me was when I was sitting in my host-family’s “living room” after having walked a 3 km trip to the stream to bathe and do laundry. It had gotten dark and I was staring at a blank page in my journal. I wrote this:

Today was the perfect day to search for beauty. As will be tomorrow and every day I breathe. I see it everywhere in this one moment, in the mud on on my feet, the rice on the table, the rain coming down into the buckets outside. I understand this wholeness, these precious moments and this precious rain water, drop by drop caressing the earth, to be so much more than what I do or where I go. Being is not just solidarity and living is not just for social change. It’s beauty, it’s all just a search for the beauty in creation, and my desire for busyness and effectiveness can suffocate a more perfect world around me. Long blades of grass grow two feet high across the path in my atte’s garden. They’re reaching up and bending over and worshiping the sky and loving the rain. There’s no other place they’d rather live, no other planet where they’d rather be. I myself have also grown fond of this one.

I leave on February 1 for Cagayan de Oro where I and my coworkers will be helping at conferences and seminars about Balikitan and the US military presence in the Philippines. We’ll be there for three weeks and during that time I’ll be taking a short trip to Thailand to meet up with a fellow UM missionary. I wonder about the tea and the peanut sauce, the temples and the landscape. I wonder when this world opened up for me. I didn’t see it happening but I’m so glad it did. May the Lord punish me, be it ever so severely, if I fail to thank the earth properly.

On a lighter note

Me- “I’m a Methodist missionary.”
Local- “Baptist?”
Me- “No, Methodist.”
Local- “Baptist.”
Me- “No, United Methodist.”
Local- “Catholic?”
Me- “Umm…. Jesus? Jesus.”
Local- “So, Catholic.”
Me, changing the subject- “Gusta nemo ka carne mo?” (Would you like my share of the meat?)

Thanksgiving and Solidarity

A fair amount of time has passed since I last wrote. I wish I could say I’ve been so busy I just haven’t had time, but quite frankly, for all my years of formal education, I have merely been unable to formulate sentences that could be at all relevant in my experiences here. It’s been little things, trips to the market, countless meals of rice and fish, words learned and lessons lost. When I look at the calendar I can scarcely believe that it’s already December; the unbearable weather here seems to leave my understanding of time in a perpetual month of August. And yet, I bear it. Everyone else here just deals with it- there are very few of us who flourish in it. So often when I tell American friends of the constant eating of rice and dried fish, of the endless sweating in the humidity they’ll say, “Wow, that’s not for me.” It begs the question, are we actually ignorant enough to think that Filipinos love living without air conditioning, that they enjoy eating the same food every day? Just because people are accustomed to a lifestyle doesn’t mean they would have chosen it for themselves.

Right now I’m listening to old European Christmas carols as I sit writing next to our office’s Christmas tree. It’s meager and under-decorated, but I rejoice in seeing it anyway. There are reminders of home everywhere, at no time more obvious than during the Thanksgiving celebration our office held last week. There was no turkey (we would have to shoot it ourselves, and there was no way I was condoning such an action, in my heart I am still a vegetarian) but there was stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob and pie. Pineapple pie is still pie. Fifteen people in all joined in the celebration- coworkers and their spouses and a few children. We all said what we were thankful for- all for family and loved ones and most tellingly, many for solidarity in the cause of peace and justice in this country. I was most thankful that even in my isolation on the other side of the world, I had learned that I was not alone. Not alone in being, but mostly not alone in my desire for love and peace. If good-hearted Americans think it is our job to “save” the world, we are sorely mistaken. The most we can hope for is to be in solidarity, to struggle along side the masses and to open our hearts to justice, no matter what that will mean for our comfortable way of life.

I have found myself more comfortable being back in Davao City. I spent the end of October through the middle of November in Polomolok, a Dole pineapple plantation a half hour from General Santos City on the southeastern side of Mindanao. It was an enlightening and bizarre experience. Enlightening that I learned so much about the workers’ struggle against massive multinationals like Dole and bizarre in that I was just thrust into their lives for the briefest period of time and for those few days I was there felt consumed by the apparent hopelessness of their fight against greed-driven capitalism. And yet, is there not always hope? Filipino national ballads project such an idea, as do liberal priests and activist nuns. Those who are true to the faith do not put all hope in end-of-the-world eschatology that declares the people should wait for God to do right. The faithful most in touch know that there is a call for the church to do something, to be an aid and a comfort to her people in their endless conflict with the powers that be.

I was not an aid or a comfort in Polomolok- in the most obvious sense I imagine I was a burden. Oh, the American can’t eat this or that, the American wonders where she can buy toilet paper, the American needs extra water to do her laundry. Certainly no one was short with me, in fact it was their over-accommodation, their severe hospitality that made me the most uncomfortable. The guilt and shame I felt in my inability to survive was not personal, but societal. For my own experience, I was quite proud of how I adapted. Compared to those around me, I was unnaturally weak.
Weakness is perhaps the greatest burden here. I carry it around in the form of a water bottle and closed-toe shoes, both connected by climbing hooks to my water proof backpack that is twice the size of anything else my colleagues are carrying. But I need, x y and z, I need this medication for this affliction and this one to prevent malaria. And bug spray and a misquito net and a dictionary and a phone charger… It just goes on. I’m weak when I carry so much extra. Then I’m vulnerable when I go without. Humility is not an option, it’s an assigned task.

On December 3 I’ll be going on my second immersion to a peasant community an hour and a half out from Davao City Proper. I’ve already met the nuns and priest I’ll be spending most of my time with at a forum at their parish, St. Isidro. The local farmers had come to the church leaders requesting a forum on new government legislation that threatens to turn the land, their very livelihoods, over to large multi-national mining companies. They’ve entrusted their fate to these clergy, who in turn have returned it to the people. At the forum the leaders recommended the peasants start their own labor organization in an effort to unite in a seemingly hopeless struggle for their way of life.

I look forward to spending the beginning of Advent, the season of active waiting, with these peasants. I hope to learn enough about their situation to be of some use- I hope to be wise enough to find my place and that, that place may be in solidarity.

I hope I don’t have to eat very much pork, but of this, I am skeptical.

Into the Tondo

I was in the Tondo community September 19-20, part of a longer urban poverty immersion in Manila.

It has taken me a while to write this. I still wonder if it’s my place to write what I do- if I tell a story from this island, it’s not mine. The story, the land, the people in it. It seems like lots of Westerns have spent the last 450 years taking what they want from the Philippines, from the Global South in general. And so if listening carefully is important for me here, speaking carefully, choosing language carefully is just as important. I think perhaps the greatest flaw in many non-profits, in many well-meaning people who want to work “on” issues or “on” countries starts with the language they choose. If we talk about places and people like they’re projects then we grow to feel we can take their images, stories and ideas without their permission. Because of course, we’ll be using this information in their best interest. There are lots of problems with this reappropriation, but the most glaring is that we assume we know what is in the best interest of someone else just because they are poorer, less “educated,” different.

It’s also taken me a while to write this because I haven’t wanted to think about it. It would be grossly unfair to say that what I see most of the time here is tragedy- quite the opposite. The way of life, the people I’ve met, the foods I eat are for the most part amazing and much of my time here is spent laughing with coworkers and learning all I can from the people around me. But it’s human nature to remember the negative, to dwell on the horrifying. Maybe because at heart our nature is morbid, but I think it’s because deep down we know that it’s the darkest moments that define us the most. It’s the time of suffering, the hours of struggle that make our victories meaningful. It’s not until we’ve faced true tragedy that we can live real joy. Good Friday to Easter.

But some people’s Good Fridays last longer than others. The Villa Delorosa to Tondo is hidden and strange. Powers-that-be have done an excellent job hiding this poverty, blotting this blemish on the face of Manila. But a stench cannot be blotted. So I smelled the Tondo before I saw it. It permeated the inside of the taxi that my guide had hired to bring us there- I could feel it getting into my hair. I glanced at the clock on my cellphone, a habit I’d gotten into throughout the immersion.

Tondo is a warehouse community that sits inside the main garbage dump of metro Manila. The city built these warehouses for this very purpose, to hide the public housing where no one of monetary value will ever travel. And public housing is a very generous term. Warehouse is literal. The structures are just large empty two story rectangular buildings among the heaps of trash. There’s no running water (that I could see). Thousands of people live in these buildings. They’ve separated the space into “apartments” with tin and plywood, some have managed to run in electricity, but it only works from 6pm to sunrise.

And garbage is not just the aroma, but the income. The work in this community consists of sifting through the trash to find recyclable materials like plastic, glass, and aluminum. The materials are wrapped in bundles and sent to factories to reuse. Women and children are the main labor force, but men who haven’t been able to find other work as a tricycle or taxi driver do the sifting as well. And that’s a lot of them- under and unemployment rates are through the roof.

The walk into urban poor communities has consistently been a bizarre experience. When I first round the corner or go through the gate I feel a bit like a celebrity because everyone stares and points and waves and the children all want to know my name. White people don’t usually tour these parts of the Philippines. But I feel more like a dog with its tail between its legs because I know the economic systems that allow people like me to be so wealthy have a downside. And this is it; widespread, gruesome, and cruel poverty.

The entrance into Tondo was different and not. It’s like the high-rise of shanty communities, a mini-city of naked children and haggard adults sifting through mountains of garbage. I just wanted to run- I looked over my shoulder as they cab that had driven my guide and I here was pulling away. I wanted to call after it. I wanted to go anywhere, anywhere else. A small child ran over to me. “Hey, Joe!” he shouted, holding out his hand. “Joe, joe,” he said over and over.

“Wala,” I replied, my voice empty. I shook my head. No money here, no pesos here for you. I had made the mistake of giving out money before, against the advice of my guide. The children had swarmed me and she eventually had to yell at that them and push them away.

“You won’t have enough for all of them,” she said.

Hollowness gripped me when the boy finally gave up and went to beg elsewhere. Someone has enough for all of them- someone has these children’s share tucked away in a bank or invested in a company. Someone is driving it around or wearing it on his wrist. These children have been robbed before they even leave the womb.

I stayed in the community night. I will decline to write about my evening experience because I do not feel I can do justice to the generosity of my hosts and I would only be self-centered and focused on the hardships I faced for less than 24 hours. And those are not my burdens to claim. I was just a guest looking in, counting down minutes until I could find a bathroom and breathe clean air. My efforts were so minimal, my time so short. Maybe if I lived there for years, or raised a child there, maybe if leaving was not a luxury I was afforded- then I would have something to say about Tondo.

A danger I face in sharing the positive side of Filipino life is that I will subconsciously romanticize their hardships. Certainly the family bonds here are powerful, life is much slower, there is time made to talk, and the people are hospitable. But it is in my best interest, not theirs to say life is “quaint” here and this is “just the way they do things.” While cultural difference play a huge part, no one enjoys living in absolute poverty. Maybe people make the best of it, but for me to write off what I see as just an interesting outlook on life is to divorce any responsibility for the poverty. It’s true, Filipinos laugh a lot, but it’s not because life is great. Just because people love their families doesn’t mean they love living in a shanty with them. Just because Filipinos are kind to foreigners doesn’t mean they don’t understand that the West has robbed them.

And so I’ll share this. As we left the next morning my guide was stopped by a woman who was concerned about her neighbor’s baby. We went to see the child in question. I cannot describe truly what I saw, at first I thought his head was much too big for his body and then I looked closer and saw his ribs and joints clearly exposed his skin. His mother was cleaning his diaper. His waste looked like that of a bird’s. I tried not to stare at the boy and his mother while my guide talked to the other woman in hurried Tagalog. I was able to decipher what they were saying through their sporadic use of English- this was a case of a simple infection gone awry and compounded with severe dehydration. The mother’s eyes were dull and distant, a sign of childhood malnourishment- a sign of hunger-caused mental retardation. She explained she had just kept giving the baby water in a bottle to try to rehydrate him. She hadn’t known he’d needed to go to the hospital. Her other two children were standing by. Things had gotten tight and she’d been giving her food to them so they wouldn’t go hungry. She didn’t know this would make her breast milk worthless to the baby.

The guide, a former nurse, gave the other woman the name of an admittance counselor at a local Catholic hospital. “They’ll see the baby for free,” she said, and quieter, “God knows, they would have before too.” She paused and glanced at the mother. “And she needs get a prenatal exam.” I swallowed. Of course the mother was pregnant again. This is a Catholic country- birth control is condemned and is widely unavailable, especially to the poor.

As we walked out of the warehouse, I leaned in a little to speak to my guide, but couldn’t figure out how to start the sentence. I didn’t have to- she shook her head as she put her arm around my waist. “This is what it looks like. It’s not the mother’s fault- no money, no education,” she said. And then she said, “It will be over soon.”

Maybe for one child. For his mother, this will go on and on. For the people it will never end until the world is turned on its head.

We took care to hop over the streams of filth on our way back to the main road, on our way out of the Tondo. I took care to look over my shoulder and not at my watch, but by the next evening I was sleeping comfortably in my own room, belly full of good food, running water just a few feet away. The hum of the air-conditioning drown out the noise of the people in the street.

Laika’s Community

Though I have not started my actual job (this will happen after I leave for Mindanao on October 2), my schedule has picked up here. In the past week I have done two urban immersions in which I went into local communities and stayed with host families and took part in daily activities while learning about the political issues affecting the people.

My first stay was hosted through Kairos, a Catholic organzation that works with squatter communities to organize the people to fight for their own justice. Many squatters in Manila are former farmers who have been forced to flee their lands due to economic hardship. As though it is not enough that they live in shanty villages, many without water and sanitation, now the government threatens to demolish these villages in the name of big business.

The community is right off the highway, after exiting the jeepney, we walked around a corner and saw the community. This was only my second observation, the first thing that struck me was the smell. I cannot fully describe what the stench of this sewage-filled river is like- even as I think about it now, I feel a bit queasy. And I’d thought maybe the smell would pass or I would get used to it, but as I lay on the floor of Laika’s one-room shanty with the other 6 members of the family later that night, the smell kept me awake.

Laika’s mother was unbelievably kind. She was constant in offering me snacks (coconut milk right from the fruit, fish cooked whole on a skillet outside) and spent a great deal of time just talking to me about what life was like here and the dreams she had for her daughters. In the evening of my second day there seminaries from Redemptorist Catholic Seminary in a nearby part of Manila. It was good to be able to share with them. They had all come from the provinces and this was their first exposure to urban poverty. It is so different than rural poverty, they said. At least out in the country there is clean air and space for the children. In urban poverty the air, water, and land are all filthy.

And the children are small. When I first meant Janine, Laika’s youngest sister, I thought she was about 6 years old. She was so small and quite. Janine is actually 10, almost 11. I took to her immediately and she held my hand anytime we walked somewhere so I wouldn’t get lost. She shared her toys with me though she had so few, her favorite was her bottle cap collection. There were no real rules to the game, just shuffling them around. Coming from a country where a child’s happiness is a commodity that Disney, Mattel and other corporations sell, the sight of her so in awe of toys from garbage moved me.

Though I was inclined to stay on with them longer, Kairos had arranged for me to go to another squatter village that night. This village was by the airport, right beside the barbed wire fence that partions off the runway. I must have flown over it on my way into Manila. The smell was not nearly as prominent here, but the noise from the planes was so loud that anytime one flew overhead, the shanties’ tin walls would shake.

The house I stayed at here was larger- three rooms, one of which was a sewing cubby where the mother made handcraft rugs to sell on the streets. Getting into the home was difficult. It was on the second floor so to enter one had to climb a wooden ladder from the street. I quickly learned that there was no water there- on this particular day they didn’t have the 2 pesos (4 cents) to fill get their container filled and since the father was at work there was no one strong enough to carry it up the ladder. I have no idea what they were doing as far as using the toilet, I didn’t ask.

When I left the shanty town on my third day of the exposure, I didn’t look over my shoulder- I was on the way to the promised land of personal space and running water. There can be no true solidarity when one can fall back on other resources, but I am ashamed to say in that moment I just didn’t care. I was not strong enough to stay there.

Magandan hapon from metro Manila

When I first heard I was going to Philippines, when I first tried to dream of the Philippines, of what any of this would be like, my mind went blank and empty- away from thick jungles, dirt roads, and rice patties. Like a potted plant moving from its container, I said, I am ready to live in a different soil, breath the air of a different dirt, gaze at foreign stars. Here now, at a desk in an office on the biggest thoroughfare in Manila, I am glad I did not dream of these things. Because so far, that is not where I am.

In the mornings here I watch the sunrise over large buildings and parking lots and palm trees. It comes early here, at 5:30. The first day I was hear I noticed a nearby rooster crows at daybreak. Then I noticed the rooster crows pretty much all the time. I no longer notice the rooster as much as abhor it. True though, without him, the juxtaposition of farm life and urban living would be lost. The Karaoke Bar down the street broadcasts its patrons’ offerings well until the wee hours, along with the never-ending stream of traffic. Filippinos aren’t agressive or angry drivers, but the majority of vehicles are older and so the noise can be a bit overwhelming. I am pleased I will only be in Manila through October 1st. I hear in Davao there are more trees and cleaner air. The smog here is quite terrible- when riding in jeepneys women will cover their children’s mouths with hankercheifs or napkins. Needless to say, I have not done any biking or jogging since I’ve been here.

This past Thursday I went to a forum on the global “War on Terror”, apprpriately scheduled on the 6th anniversary of September 11. There’s a very pacificistic movement here, I think it comes from the Filipino experience in WWII (100,000 civilians were killed within one month when the Japanese were trying to take over the islands). Filipinos are concerned about protecting their civil rights after the passing of the Filipino version of the Patriot Act, as many Americans are at home. I continue to find more similarities here than differences.

Young people are politically active and gravely concerned about the economic issues here. The main line of work for most adults here continues to be international-focused (either they travel abroad to make a decent salary they can not get here, or they do telecommunications work outsourced by American companies.) The Western World seems keen on taking advantage of the cheap labor here and as in the United States, corporations seem to always win over the workers, especially the poorest ones.

The food is different. In my time here I have gone from being a former vegetarian to a conesore of stuffed squid, turkey intestines and fish. Lots of fish. But not like American fish- Filipino fish come with their heads and tails still attached. I find it hard to not look the fish in the eye while I scrape the meat from his bones, or more often, the bones out of the meat. The taste of the food is not altogether unpleasant when dipped in approprate soups. That being said- I am already one third of the way through on of the jars of peanut butter my grandmother sent with me.