The massacre in Mindanao on Monday the 23 of November in which at least 52 people including 18 journalists were murdered as they traveled to file candidacy papers for next year's elections, has been roundly criticised by the Philippine government, but considering the tiny amount of convictions (only 4) for the murders of any of the 67 journalists or 1013 activists killed under President Gloria Arroyo's nine year reign beginning in 2001, it is hardly surprising that the perpetrators of the Maguindinao Massacre seemed so at ease with acting above the law.
I am devastated by these deaths.
My thoughts are with all Filipino journalists, peace builders and activists who have worked so hard to try and bring about peace in their country, lift it from some of its war induced poverty and call those in power to account. The only good thing to come of this tragedy is that at last the media is actually naming names and the Ampatuan Clan and other Clans run by war lords in Mindanao might finally be held responsible for their violence.
Many people I spoke with about the embattled peace process in Mindanao mentioned the Ampatuan Clan as being part of the problem, but only off the record.
Quite rightly they believed they could continue their journalism or advocacy better by staying alive and not criticising the Ampatuans in print, than by naming them and ending up dead.

The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR), had this to say of the Maguindanao Massacre: the killings, “are likely to trigger a cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals that will raise even higher the levels of violence in Maguindanao, quite possibly in the rest of Mindanao, and even the entire Philippines itself. Violence has a way of begetting further violence, as Philippine experience demonstrates.”
“It was not only an attack on a local politician, on his supporters, and on journalists. It was also an attack on what’s left of Philippine democracy, in which free and peaceful elections have never been as urgent an imperative as today.”“Only the quickest and most decisive response in terms of arresting and bringing the perpetrators to court can prevent the November 23 killings from turning into one more incident to inspire the killers—of journalists, political activists, local officials, priests, lawyers and judges—who roam this country with impunity to keep on killing.,”

I did an email interview in August with Noynoy Espina, vice-chair of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), about the state of the media in his country. Can I just say what a fan I am of the email interview. No transcribing, no being unable to read your own shorthand, no painful phone conversations where the bad line means you have to ask everything three times. Also the interviewee has time to think carefully about what it is they want to say. Obviously email is not appropriate for all situations but sometimes it can be a stroke of genius. In this case it worked particularly well and I was amazed and very grateful to the comprehensive answers Noynoy gave to my questions about the Filipino Press.  Later I met Noynoy at the NUJP anniversary party where his gravelly voiced Karaoke rendition of "Wonderful World" was something else....
I've decided to publish the interview in full as I think his analysis stands up on its own without me writing it into a news report. However I would like to add some commentary and comments from conversations with other journalists.
While not a direct response to the current massacre hopefully the following interview will provide some background to the killing of journalists in the Philippines and relationship between Manila and the rest of the country as well as an overall background to how the Philippine media works in general. I've put Noynoy's statements on media killings in bold.


Noynoy:
"I'd like to be clear that my answers are my personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the NUJP's positions or those of any media outfit or organization. The state of the Philippine press is quite complicated, in my own opinion, and far from ideal. There are several levels or divides, if you will, that all affect how the Philippine press performs or fails to perform its watchdog function. At one level, there is what I call the media industry – perhaps what you could call the ownership structures or the business side of media – and the media workers, both groups having different, often conflicting interests. On another level are the so-called “national” (read Manila-based) media outfits and the hundreds of mostly small outfits based in the regions and provinces. And on yet another level are the “mainstream” outfits and the “alternative” media. On the first level, I am sure you are aware that practically all the major outfits - whether print, broadcast or new media - are owned by either business or political interests. The same actually holds true with major regional outfits and even with many smaller provincial newspapers and radio stations. For most of the owners, the bottomline is either profit or the protection of their interests. While by and large, the working media – editors, reporters and other news staff – do strive to perform their jobs as best they can, this may sometimes clash with the interests of their employers, the media owners."

*Me:
While the phenomenon of business ownership of media effects most countries it is particularly poignant in the Philippines where it is said that practically the whole of the country, including the media, is owned by 10 wealthy families of Spanish and Chinese descent, who of course very interested in maintaining their wealth.
In America's Boy, James Hamilton-Paterson , describes them as "The Manila 400", referring to the number of people fitting into the ballroom of a famous Manila socialite rather than 400 families.
According to DJ Acierto at human rights group Karapatan, most problems occurring in the Philippines "are rooted in the basic conflict between the poor and the ruling classes and until this is fixed we will continue to have the same type of conflict."

Noynoy:
"On the second level, there is a vast difference between the way the Manila-based media and the regional and provincial press view and cover events. Being situated near the centers of national political and economic power, the Manila-based media often look at events from the perspective of these power centers. This tends to relegate events in the regions and provinces to the sidelines except when these involve armed conflict or natural disasters. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I think the regional and provincial press have a tendency to be overly hyperlocal in their perspective, often failing to situate events in their localities in the broader frame of the national life. In some cases, Cebu for example, there is an element of resentment at the chauvinism of what is derisively called in the provinces the “imperialism” of Manila. In most cases, though, it is because the bulk of local outfits lack the resources to maintain reliable news links to the national center. The result is what I call a lack of dialogue, not only between the national center and the regions but even between the regions themselves. On the third level is the divide between the “mainstream” and “alternative” media. By mainstream, I mean outfits that profess to hew to the Western model of journalism and its mantra of objectivity. Profess because, in my opinion, the interests that control outfits in the mainstream media often use “objectivity” as a convenient excuse for protecting and promoting the social, political and economic status quo, to which their owners belong. This is true even of those mainstream outfits that take a progressive or even oppositionist posture. These outfits can be overtly, even shrilly, critical of the ruling order of the day but seldom venture beyond the shallow spectrum of political partisanship to the deeper social roots of national problems. In marked contrast are the alternative media, ranging from the likes of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, which, despite a history of churning out reports critical of corruption, nepotism, and the other ills that afflict the political system, nevertheless professes a strict adherence to the Western conventions of journalism, to the openly left-wing online publication Bulatlat.com, to regional outfits like Mindanao's Mindanews and Davao Today and northern Luzon's Nordis that advocate regional concerns they rightly believe get scant attention from the national center and the rest of the country. These outfits do take a deeper look at the problems afflicting the nation and its people, very often incisively and with deep passion and commitment. However, their individual and collective output is mostly shunted to the fringes of mass consciousness, mainly by the dominance of the mainstream giants but also because they do require more of their audiences. On the plus side, a number of mid-level media executives, even in the mainstream giants, began their careers in the alternative press, especially during the waning days of the Marcos dictatorship and the Aquino years. But while many of them strive to imbue their staff with a more critical or analytical approach to the craft, they nevertheless remain constrained by the interests that control the outfits they work for. On the minus side, the repression of 14 years of dictatorship made for a rather small community of professional journalists following the so-called democratic restoration of 1986. As publications mushroomed in the years after the dictatorship's ouster, many of these staffed their desks with fresh graduates with little or no experience in working the field. This, plus the exigencies of protecting or promoting media owners' interests, has led many outfits to stick to the standard “he said, she said” or, as you rightly put it, “waiting for official sources” mode of reportage. Of course, with such mentors, many of the new crop of journalists have imbibed this admittedly lazy way of coverage. Given this milieu, are the Philippine media performing their watchdog function? Broadly, I would say yes, since, notwithstanding the weaknesses I have outlined previously (and I have just skimmed the surface, really), the Philippine media, to a large extent, seem to relish taking an adversarial position vis a vis government, even if within the narrow confines of political partisanship or focusing mainly on official malfeasance. Of course, there is very little investigative journalism to speak of, or very little of the sort that takes a critical and unflinching look at the problems besetting Philippine society. On the part of the mainstream media, this has mainly to do with the fact that such journalism would invariably run smack into the interests of their owners and that such reportage hardly commands a wide audience and is, thus, not all that commercially desirable. For the alternative media, the resources serious investigative journalism demands often are prohibitive. Unfortunately for the Philippines, our experience with a dictatorship that shut down the media, replacing these with its propaganda machinery, has given development journalism a bad, almost obscene, reputation. For this is what the dictatorship called the crap it dished out. This partly explains why many journalists and media outfits are wary of venturing into development journalism, preferring to stick with their adversarial role with most of the focus on politics and corruption in government. While there are a number of journalists and alternative media outfits that engage in development journalism, especially in the context of grassroots and civil society efforts, there is really no sustained coverage. And all too often, the subjects of development journalism of this kind tends to fall within the ambit of the social conflicts besetting Philippine society and, thus, in many cases the reportage comes across as advocacy journalism. Do the media reflect the various peoples, groups, interests and ambitions? Many journalists strive to. However, the interests that control much of the media preclude a true reflection of the broadest spectrum of groups and interests. Journalists in the Philippines face a whole range of obstacles to the effective practice of the profession. The skill level of many journalists across all platforms remains sadly wanting. This has much to do with both the quality of education in the country and the hiring practices of media owners, particularly in the regions. I am not a big fan of credentials, being a dropout myself. To be sure, I am not downplaying the value of a good education, although to be frank, I personally do not believe a journalism degree or any degree necessary to becoming a good journalist. Except for a few schools, there really are not that many good journalism schools in the country anyway, and most of the instructors have had little experience in the profession as well. Unfortunately, the trend of the post-dictatorship years, when the dearth of experienced journalists saw greenhorns manning desks or covering beats traditionally reserved for veterans – like Congress or the presidential palace – has continued to this day. There is thus little depth to much of the coverage of these crucial beats. The old newsroom culture, with its tradition of mentoring, has also all but become extinct. Technology has made it unnecessary for young journalists to report to the newsrooms where, in the past, they often got a better education in the craft from their editors than they ever could in classrooms. In the regions, a lack of resources prevents many small outfits from hiring real talent. There is also a lack of appreciation for the safety of journalists, especially those assigned to hazardous coverage like conflicts and natural disasters. Only a handful of outfits provide their staff with training and safety equipment, though to be fair, not many outfits can afford to equip their personnel with such gear. Fortunately, there are media organizations like the NUJP that offer free safety training to journalists. All too often, ownership patterns and hiring practices also lead to a breakdown in ethics. It is often argued that ethics is a personal issue. But to be practical about it, the only one who can really enforce ethics is the employer, through the power of the purse. Which begs the questions: what if the employer is unethical or imposes work conditions that often force ethical dilemmas? In some provinces, managers of radio stations have been known to require their reporters to solicit advertisements, sometimes in lieu of a regular salary. Even in major outfits, stories have been “killed” to suit the owners’ interests. Many journalists are also paid very meager wages."

Me:
With provincial salaries going as low as 15 pesos a story, several journalists I spoke with reported having to do extra work on top of their daily reporting when they first started out, such as selling their stories to the wire, inorder to make ends meet.
"You work everywhere, you "scoop" (tabo) everything to earn a living, from local TV and radio to PR work,"  one ex-correspondent journalist told me.
It is these journalists who work outside Manila who are in the most danger of being murdered but because they have to resort to other kinds of work as well, the government tries to dismiss them as the deaths of "blockclimbers" rather than journalists.

Noynoy:
"The lack of transparency in government makes it difficult for journalists to gain access to accurate information. The Palace has itself made this practically a policy with the issuance of executive orders that bar government officials and employees from testifying before congressional inquiries without the personal approval of the president. This lack of transparency is abetted by the absence of a freedom of information law. There are media organizations that have acknowledged these problems and are working to address them. However, because of the great odds, including the difficulty of engaging media owners, has made the work slow. Very often, it is the journalists who seek ways to improve their work conditions and make it easier for them to perform their jobs well. This sometimes entails setting side competition and working together. This works particularly well during hazardous coverage, such as conflicts and natural disasters. The killing of journalists in the Philippines has definitely taken a turn for the worse under the Arroyo administration. Since 2001, when Arroyo became president, more than 60 journalists have been murdered. This is the worst toll under any president, almost double that of the 14-year dictatorship or the combined deaths during the three previous administrations. And yet, there have only been three convictions, all of them gunmen, none of masterminds. There is no proof that these killings are part of any official policy, unlike the murders of activists. But government inaction and the administration’s often contemptuous or hostile posture toward the media help foster an impunity that emboldens those who seek to silence journalists. It is also strongly believed that many of these murders were ordered by politicians, most likely allied with the administration, or even members of the security forces who are either in cahoots with crime syndicates or run these syndicates themselves. To be sure, many of the murders are a result of a less than ethical practice of the profession, especially in the provinces where politics often equates with warlordism and where criticism can be taken very personally. Many of the victims have been known to be retainers of political factions. But there are just as many who were killed because they were zealously pursuing legitimate stories of either official corruption or criminality and its links with power structures. And, as many media organizations maintain, a lack of ethics is no justification for murder. However, there has also been a disturbing trend under this administration – the inclusion of media organizations and journalists in so-called orders of battle of the military. In 2005, the media came across a PowerPoint presentation called “Knowing the Enemy,” which was produced by the Armed Forces intelligence service and which listed down organizations accused of being “legal fronts” of the communist rebel movement. Among these were the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. Recently, another order of battle drawn up by the Army’s 10th Infantry Division was discovered. This also listed the NUJP as well as the group’s former secretary general, Carlos Conde, the Philippine correspondent of the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. Several journalists based in the provinces have also reported their inclusion in such lists. It is common knowledge that a number of persons whose names landed on such orders of battle have fallen victim to extrajudicial killings believed perpetuated by state forces. Aside from a glaring apathy towards media killings, this administration has itself sought to silence the press. In fact, it is only Arroyo who, since Marcos shut down the media, has tried a wholesale muzzling of the press when she declared a state of national emergency in 2006 and threatened to takeover outfits perceived to be inciting to sedition and subversion. During that short period, police were sent to raid an opposition paper and troops were sent to the headquarters of the two largest networks. This attitude has also led to the mass arrest of journalists who covered a failed mutiny by rebel soldiers who took over a hotel in Makati City in November 2007 and, more recently, to the brief detention by the Army of journalists covering the humanitarian crisis in Mindanao in late June. Our libel law, which dates back to the American colonial period and was designed to prevent the emergence of a press critical of the colonizers, has yet to be repealed or amended. Thus, libel remains a criminal offense. And the law has often been used to harass or even jail journalists who anger powerful interests, whether political or business. For example, Arroyo’s husband filed multiple libel suits against more than 40 journalists and media executives, withdrawing these only after he underwent open heart surgery and said he wanted to reconcile with his detractors. But the journalists he sued refused to take the bait and filed a countersuit accusing him of violating the Constitution by brazenly assaulting press freedom. The suit is still pending in court. The continued and worsening attacks and threats against journalists can be said to have made journalism more difficult under this administration, especially for reporters in the provinces where the danger of physical assault is many times greater. But if the Philippine media remain generally independent, it is largely because of the refusal of journalists to succumb to these threats despite the all too real dangers they face. Thus, yes, the Philippine press may be far from perfect, saddled with major issues of ethics, safety, the welfare of media practitioners and a host of others, but it remains free because journalists wish it to be. To be honest, there is a crisis of credibility too that many journalists believe is responsible for the lack of public sympathy and outrage over media killings. But I believe that should the media, as an institution, come under threat, the people will come to its defense to prevent a repeat of the experience under the dictatorship when the media was shut down and only government mouthpieces were allowed to exist. As for there being too much lifestyle and celebrity news, I cannot agree more wholeheartedly. This is because of the nature of media as, first, being an industry, a business, whose primary reason for existence is profit. And what sells better than celebrity and lifestyle? This is especially true in broadcast where more and more segments of primetime newscasts are devoted to entertainment news. But even many major newspapers have thicker lifestyle and entertainment sections than news. On the other hand, this can also be viewed in the context of how Philippine politics has regressed to the point where it now revolves around personality more than ideology or issues. The result is an obvious “dumbing down” of the news to pander to the least common denominator."

I was trying to interview people for an article on cyclone Ondoy and Mel sent me this story of his experiences during the floods. I enjoyed reading it so much that I didn't want to break it up into excerpts in my article. Here it is in its entirety. I've interspersed it with pictures of what Manila Bay looked like before the flooding. Note the ones at the very end with the woman collecting recycling from the beach made of rubbish.

Mel's Story

You're lucky to have left this "beautiful but benighted city" before the deluge, and I'm glad your sister is ok out there in Samoa. Just about everybody here has stories to tell about his or her experience or has friends or relatives who had lost their homes or had suffered worse from Ondoy's (Ketsana) devastation. Mine is no tale of misery or sacrifice - only inconvenience. And it's hard to talk about inconvenience when you're barraged everyday with news of sufferings of thousands of others. The flood's aftermath has exposed urban blight and helped us realize our puny existence. Rich and poor alike shuddered when nature showed us who's boss.

I and my two kids spent nine hours on a flyover on South Luzon Expressway near Buendia Ave. in Makati cocooned in a van amid torrential rains. We were with hundreds of others, I think, who got "trapped" on the flyover when the road below us got inundated within minutes forcing terrified motorists to leave their vehicles. That's when I realized we were luckier than those people on the streets below who had to wade in waist-deep water amid a heavy downpour. The flood overwhelmed even trucks and buses and that made the gridlock even worse. But it was fun time for many street kids who honed their swimming skills in what used to be a busy highway.



We waited out the rain inside the car, telling stories, and listening to news reports about the unravelling disaster. I didn't bring any food because we were on our way to a swimming party in Los Baños in Laguna some 70 kilometers away (We almost ended up in a different swimming party). The weather bureau which we call Pagasa didn't advise us that the volume of rain would be this heavy. There was no clear warning from disaster agencies. We're used to weather disturbances anyway.



We didn't actually starve. Happily, street vendors turned up in droves with answers to our gastronomic longings. Of course I was talking about stale biscuits, chicharon, pretzels, and some hardboiled eggs. And yes there was bottled water.




The rain eased a bit in the afternoon and then traffic moved a little. I crossed over to the other lane when I saw a chance only to stumble into another traffic jam. By this time, we were trying to return home. By 7 pm, we got to leave the bridge but had to drive through many flooded areas.




We passed by abandoned vehicles and processions of people trying to get home. What a pathetic sight. At an intersection a few blocks from home, I decided to pull over and finish our journey on foot. The water was too deep. I carried my little girl Fides on my back while her brother Julian carried our bag. It was dark because power had been cut and that spot in Metro Manila seemd to be eerily deserted. It was I think a 20 minute walk in waist deep brackish water to the building where we live. My kids said they had fun...




The government had a ready explanation for the rapid rise in floodwaters that left close to 300 people dead - the typhoon unleashed a month's worth of rain on a single day. Of course, the flooding would not have been that disastrous had the waterways not been clogged with tons of garbage.




Politicians here tolerate vote-rich squatter settlements near or over rivers and creeks. Property developers have no qualms about flattening mangrove swamps to build resorts or condos. And many ordinary Filipinos take pride in keeping their homes clean but see nothing wrong with throwing trash out of their car windows.



Mayors and other local officials here have pork barrel funds but these are rarely spent for environment projects or those that voters may not remember in the next elections. Now these officials were using funds that should have gone to dredging rivers, building flood control projects, etc. for doleouts in evacuation centers.



Up to this day, many areas in Metro Manila remain flooded. In some cities, the floods have receded but knee deep mud complicates rehabilitation efforts. The situation in many evacuation centers is terrible. Sanitation is the biggest problem. And we almost forgot about the animals...I think people from PAW (Philippine Animal Welfare) began collecting stray animals like cats and dogs in ravaged areas a day after the deluge. Many house pets were not as lucky...



This country is full of surprises.

Typhoon devastation exposes Metro Manila’s town planning disaster

This story was published on Pacific Scoop and I've put put up the edited version


Justin Jiminez with a pile of Manila rubbish... "operation Twitter" helped flood victims where authorities could not.

It was left up to many of Metro Manila’s 11 million citizens to organise their own rescue during last month’s deluge of typhoon Ondoy, which killed 295 and saw people trapped for hours in cars or on multistorey rooftops by raging floodwaters.

But ordinary Filipinos rose to the challenge and coped with an apparently unprepared, underfunded and disorganised central and local government.

“Twitter and Facebook were intense”, says Justin Jimenez. a Filipino-American intern at ABS-CBN, who spent his 24th birthday packing supplies at La Salle High School relief centre in Green Hills.

“There was update after update, telling people where the relief centers were, who needed what help and where.”

He describes the experience of following Twitter and seeing the flooding on TV in Eastern Manila while everything looked fine out his window in mostly unaffected Makati as “surreal”.

Many Filipino celebrities such as Carlos Celdran and Manual Quezon used Twitter to answer calls for help and handle the logistics of getting relief to the right places fast.

Jimenez’ own Facebook status two days after the disaster on September 26 – three days before the Samoan tsunami struck – was declared: “Justin Jimenez is eager to witness the power of the bayanihan spirit firsthand”.

Bayanihan is a Filipino concept which refers to a community spirit or helping each other, which Filipinos are very proud of as a national trait.

Jimenez joined in the group effort himself by volunteering to drive a small truck two days after the storm, loaded with supplies to San Roque Marakina, one of the worst hit areas.
Metro Manila floodwaters during typhoon Ondoy. Photo: Mel Selona

‘Cool networking’
“It was my first glimpse of the devastation. There were no lights, no electricity, debris lining the sidewalk, everything was still muddy. People were still walking around covered in mud.”

Jimenez says the way civil society used new social networking technology to combat the disaster and rescue each other was “really cool, really nice to see”. But it also highlighted how unprepared the government was.

Not only was their warning and response system inadequate but the whole lack of urban planning and amenities such as waste disposal and drainage for the sprawling metropolis has come under fire.

He says the authorities – who gave no warning of how heavy the rainfall would be – became defensive almost as soon as Ondoy hit, saying things like: “Don’t blame us, we responded much better than the US during Katrina”.

However, both central and local governments have been receiving much blame, both from the public and each other.

From wanting to send the local mayors to jail to suing the management of Angat, Ipo and La Mesa dams for opening the floodgates without warning, public officials are vowing to spend more taxpayer money in order to find culprits.
"The flooding was greatly exacerbated by drains either not being built large enough in the first place or being clogged by the city’s rubbish." Photo: Justin Jimenez

The flooding was greatly exacerbated by drains either not being built large enough in the first place or being clogged by the city’s rubbish.

‘Unsustainable city’
In Jimenez’ words, “Manila is an unsustainable city”. From the 1970s onwards, institutions such as the World Bank and leading Philippines universities have conducted numerous studies highlighting Manila’s urban planning as a disaster waiting to happen.

The studies singled out three areas of Metro Manila, Marikina Valley, Laguna Lake shore and Manila Bay as needing a cap on development due to their lack of infrastructure and frequent flooding.

These were the very areas worst affected by Ondoy, yet the government still claims to have been taken by surprise by this disaster.

According to Pete Troilo, director of business intelligence at Pacific Strategies and Assessments: “These months-long, multi-million dollar comprehensive studies have been routinely ignored by the Philippines government, failing to muster any active political support from key funding and implementing officials.
Girls clinging to a lampost as floodwaters swirled around then during Cyclone Ondoy. Photo: Mel Solina/PMC

Girls clinging to a lampost as floodwaters swirled around then during cyclone Ondoy. Photo: Mel Selona/PMC

“The implementation of effective urban planning programs and institutionalisation of disaster management systems requires long-term foresight and invariably take years to complete – a timeframe that extends far past political terms of office and administration lifecycles.”

Troilo who advises businesses on safety and feasibility issues in the Philippines, says, “Despite multiple warnings, the Philippines government never dedicated itself to solving the problem. Instead, during times of disasters the government always resorts to temporary evacuation and short-lived/sighted disaster relief.

“Indeed, over the course of the last 32 years, the Philippines government – from the Marcos regime of the 1970s to the Arroyo administration of today – was offered official warning after official warning with corresponding recommendations for improvement that went unheeded.”
Girls clinging to a lampost as floodwaters swirled around then during cyclone Ondoy. Photo: Mel Selona

Shanty dwellers
Troilo also cites studies recommending relocation back to the provinces of the riverside shanty dwellers who flock to Manila in the hope of finding work.

However, as the studies indicate, this is only feasible if the government invests in rural livelihood projects.

So far the government has failed to do this, relying on overseas remittances for people to subsist on rather than providing work in the countryside.

While the city came together for the relief effort, it will take time to see if the deeper issues of urban planning, over-population and infra-structure get addressed, says Jimenez.

People in the middle and upper classes are finally starting to talk about these issues. However, for those living hand to mouth in shanty towns with very little education available, simple survival takes precedence over consideration of the environment, he says.

Jimenez noted that all the relief was distributed in the very plastic bags which often end up in drains.

“It’s the same problem all over again with disposing of the bags.”

He says he heard of people simply taking the relief packages out of the plastic bags and then dumping them straight on the street. A study by the Asian Development Bank reports that 6050 tons of rubbish is produced in Metro Manila everyday but that only 71 percent gets collected and taken to land-fills. The rest is left on street corners and finds its way into drains.




Back to business
Despite Ondoy having destroyed $283 million worth of properties and effected almost four million people, in Jimenez’ area of Manila, Makati City, it is back to business as usual.

The aid efforts are winding down now and many of the high schools and students which served as temporary relief centers and volunteers are back to classes, says Jimenez.

“Things appear to be returning to normal”, he says, “but many places still need our help. It’s hard to get perspective here in Manila where the press is so Manila-centric, but the effects of the second storm Pepeng in the north, for example, are huge even if they don’t get as much media attention.”

Fortunately, the help coming in from overseas hasn’t abated.

In Glenfield, New Zealand, Jojo Velasco and his wife Ofel are spearheading a charity drive for victims of Ondoy from their Philippine goods shop, Tindahanpnoy.

“We have a very good Filipino community here”, says Velasco who has lived in Auckland for the last 10 years.

“Even though we are all different, still when calamity strikes we get together and help each other.”

This week the Hamburg Sud shipping company has agreed to take ten boxes of donations as far as Hong Kong free of charge, from where they can easily be shipped to the Philippines.

However, Velasco, voicing fears of many overseas relief networks – including governments believes it is better to send money directly to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) where he hopes it will get to the people who need it rather than going through the Philippine government which he fears will take a cut.
Jose, his wife and son, in their shop

Corruption notoriety
The Philippines is notorious for corruption.

Just this year the Red Cross released a survey revealing that 80 percent of Filipinos, Liberians and Columbians cited corruption as the biggest barrier to receiving aid compared to only 59 percent in Haiti, the Congo, Afghanistan, Georgia and Lebanon.

Velasco says ex Filipino Department of Social Welfare and Development staff come into his shop and tell how when donations arrive more three quarters disappear before they can be distributed.

Even though the government is “really crying for help now after tropical storm Pepeng came back”, Velasco prefers to send the money he raises to the charities of the TV stations GMA and ABS-CBN.

“Half each”.

He is very aware that it is only seven months away from the Philippine elections and he wants to remove any doubt that the government might use the donations for political gain.

When the local and national government distribute the aid they have received from overseas, they don’t say it comes from New Zealand or Canada, he says.

“They stick a picture of their own faces on it.” Senator and possible presidential candidate Lauren Legarda was recently reported in the Philippines media as saying: “Maybe it would be better not to be a candidate right?

“Maybe it is better not to run and whatever you will spend [on your campaign] just use this for humanitarian help”.

Poverty too high
Velasco agrees with Jimenez and Troilo about the state of urban planning in Metro Manila and hopes this election will usher in a president with the political will to uphold urban development laws and regulations.

“The unity of helping each other is there. We just need the political will of a leader to make it happen,” he says. “There are too many people in Metro Manila. The city is too small and poverty is too high.

“I feel sad about what has happened in my country. I grew up there. Even before Ondoy, that was the problem.”

Meanwhile, people affected by floods continue to shelter in relief centres while urban poor continue to dwell in shanty towns in 526 communities along the city’s river banks. The government does not have sufficient plans to provide better amenities and waste disposal, or to provide employment opportunities outside of Manila to ease pressure on the city.

How you can help

Thousands of Filipino “kababayan” (countrymen) need help after the typhoon and flooding hit Metro Manila.

Hamburg Sud Shipping has teamed up with the New Zealand Filipino Community to offer a 6 sq metre container free of charge departing for Manila at the end of October 2009. The container has been placed at the Good Shepherd Parish Church, Balmoral, Auckland, for donations:

Container closing date: 1 November 2009
Departure Date: 6 November 2009
Vessel Name: Cosco Fuzhou v.27N
Estimated Arrival in Manila: 25-30 November 2009

The goods that are most needed are food, clothing, blankets, footwear, towels and general medical supplies for general distribution by the religious organisations, aid agencies and government bodies in Manila.

More information and other collection points:
Good Shepherd Parish Balmoral
27 Telford Ave
Balmoral
Auckland
Tel: (09) 620 9517

I went to Siquijor looking for witches and found angels instead.


After the hectic pace of life in Manila I wanted some time on a laid back tropical island and fascinated by the stories of witches, healers and “black magic”, decided to head to Siquijor. What I wasn’t prepared for was just how beautiful and relaxed it would be, and how friendly the people. If the rumours of black magic, or even actual magic itself, have helped to protect the island from rampant tourism, then I don’t want to be the one to debunk the magical aura of “Fire Island”.

The name, magical sounding in itself, was bequeathed to Siquijor by the Spanish because of all the fire flies which inhabit it, making the island glow with its own eerie light during the evenings.
One of the nicest things I did on Siquijor was to drive up into the mountains for a group “firefly viewing” trip with the Japanese owner of my resort, who had transplanted this tradition from his home country. Our outing involved a group of guests piling into a truck while a “spotter” hung out the window until he found a tree buzzing with light and we lay down on the road to admire it and gaze at the stars.
I wonder if the fireflies are what started the idea of the island being magical, or if they actually are a signifier of the magic and the island really is one of those power sites which are said to exist all over the world?
I can only relate my firefly experience to the Waitomo caves in New Zealand. It is one of our biggest tourist attractions, where endemic luminous “glowworms” have made their home in a complex warren of stalactite and stalagmite bejeweled caves so that walking or floating through on a boat, it seems as though you are passing through a galaxy of stars. Maori (indigenous people of NZ) believed the caves were an entrance way to the underworld and upon reaching the tapu (sacred) cave, which was once a burial ground, the temperature inexplicably drops. The tour guides attribute the sudden cold to ghosts but tour guides know tourists enjoy being scared a little - it gives them better stories to tell when they get home.
(boat I traveled on to siquijor)
My journey to Siquijor started in Dumaguete where I talked to a resort owner about my search for witches. He had a healer from Mindanao associated with his resort whom he took his guests to visit. He said that when his healer went to Siquijor, all the other healers would run away and hide because they were afraid of his powerful white magic. He thought the healers on Siquijor used black magic - “One will make you a little bit sick and then another will make you a little bit better.”
He explained how they worked: “Everyone has some spirit-guides or guardians, not of this world, who follow you round. Most people aren’t even aware they’re there, but healers can talk to theirs and ask them questions. They can use them to find out what is making a person sick. If they discover someone else has put a curse on you they can help to remove it.”
On Siquijor most people were at great pains to tell me that they were a very god-fearing, religious people and all the “Black Magic” rumours were unwarranted. In New Zealand there are lots of “alternative healers” using all sorts of methods to heal people, from spirit-guides to herbs, to the more accredited, Chinese acupuncture. People either believe in them or they think they are charlatans trying to rip off the credulous, but no-one is really afraid of them or attributes them with powers of black magic.
Almost as soon as I arrived on Siquijor I got the flu. During the day I lay in a hammock under the coconut trees thinking about how lucky I was to be staying on this lovely island, but then at night I thought about what the resort owner told me in Dumaguete and wondered if a witch doctor on Siquijor really had set a spirit on me to make me sick. It was only the power of suggestion, but I stayed awake at night scaring myself with these thoughts and dreaming of fairy tale witches with pointy black hats and warty hooked noses.
I decided to go and visit one of the witches (bolo bolo)- I mean healers - anyway. Dagman my host told me he had taken more than 300 guests to the “bolo bolo” and they usually reported feeling better afterwards, “but it only works if you believe.”
There are only three bolo bolo on the island but about 100 different types of healers practicing things like massage. There are also said to be five shaman who can produce magic potions powerful enough to kill.
Several people I talked to on the island swore by the bolo bolo and one told me the story of how after Emelda Marcos had the bridges built on Leyte, her skin went all scaly “like a fish” and nothing would cure it until she came to see a Bolo bolo in Siquijor.
So Dagman drew me a map, I hired a motorbike and went to visit the Bolo bolo The drive is beautiful. Bamboo hut fishing villages sit on white-sand beaches, banked by rice paddies studded with coconut palms and fine old trees.



Everywhere I drove on the blissfully empty roads were waving smiling school children, placid caribou and farmers tending their crops.




As the road wound up the mountain brightly coloured washing strung on lines looked like Tibetan prayer-flags and I’m sure just getting out into such beautiful countryside was good for my health.
Even so I was slightly nervous and I kept imagining the coconut-headed scarecrows in the corn-fields coming alive and watching me like crazy, spirit-world sentries.

Dagman had told me the Bolo bolo's house stood alone at the end of the road, on the edge of the forest. From this ominous description I was half expecting the kind of gingerbread witch’s house used to lure children in for eating I used read about in fairy tales
But when I got there it was an ordinary bamboo house with a small shop, just like any other.
There was a fat pig and chickens, a couple of children playing with a kitten and another patient there with his Mum.

Except for being in a Nipa hut, it felt just like being in a doctor's waiting room at home.

The only give-away that the bolo bolo might be a witch was her extremely old age and the fact she had a black kitten. In Western folk lore witches are usually ancient and have a black cat. You should always be kind to any black cats you come across incase they belong to a witch. If you treat her cat well she may reward you, but if not she will cast spells against you
The bolo bolo spoke no English, but her other patient who was home on holiday from Dubai and had a rash on his arm cheerfully told me she used “black magic” to cure him. He said her power came “from heaven” but not from angels. God had come to her in a dream and given her the power to help people. She did seem to be be muttering some sort of invocation to someone in the sky as she filled a glass, with a black stone in it, with water and then blew into it with a bamboo straw all around my body. It sent goose bumps down my spine but that could have been just the effect of a cool glass touching the back of my neck. When she stopped, the water which had started out clear was murky and filled with bits of slime. “Very dirty”, she told me. She repeated the process with fresh water three times, the water remaining clearer with each session.
I wanted to believe, and part of me really thought the muddied water was the illness or black magic coming out of me. The journalist part of me however, remained unconvinced. “She could have been blowing gunk into the water through the straw”, was my immediate thought. Although I did feel good after my visit, needless to say my flu was still there the next day.
Maybe my own cynicism was to blame. Maybe it was visiting the famous Santa Rita or “Black Magic Mary” in the church in Maria on the way home. This statue, much vaunted in foreign travel guides for her supposed ability to come alive and wander round at night, looks terrifying in her black nuns habit with her staring eyes, holding a skull in her hands. I didn’t want to linger in the empty church.
I had the distinct feeling that I had seen her face in a dream earlier in the week. Having researched her however I discovered that she was actually a good, peacemaking woman who become a nun after her abusive husband died and her sons were murdered. In her later years the Italian saint had developed a stigmata bleeding from the forehead like Jesus scratched by the crown of thorns.

My next foray in Siquijor world of dark arts was to visit a “magician” who dealt in love potions. Again I was guided by Dagman who had smeared the love potion around the door frame of his resort in order to help business. From the way the rooms were filling with guests, it seemed to be working.
The potion can only be made during holy week and is a complicated process combining ingredients from “the North, the South, the East and the West, the sea, the sky, the earth and the forest”.
You mix it with your favourite cologne and dab it over your heart and if there is someone you wish to fall in love with you, or hire you for a job, you have to make sure you introduce yourself to them first before they introduce themselves to you or it won't work.
This just sounds like common sense to me.
Smelling nice and confidently introducing yourself to someone is bound to make you more attractive.
Maybe the love potion lends a helping hand. It doesn’t feel like anyone should need love potion in the Philippines - everyone already seems so friendly and open to the possibility of love anyway.
In New Zealand you can buy cosmetics which, although not going as far as proclaiming magical properties, use essences of natural ingredients only picked at a certain time of day, at a certain time of year, which are meant to enhance their effects. They are horrendously expensive,
Again I travel up into the mountains and through the forest to buy the potion, this time from an old man and his daughter.
I still have the love potion sitting on my shelf next to the bottle of San Migual gin - a little bottle of Philippines magic brought home with me.
Did it work? I smeared some on my computer to bring success for my writing and all in the same week my story got published, my tutor was happy with me and a declaration of love arrived in my inbox. I don’t know if I should attribute this to the potion or to my own magical self, but I’m keeping the potion.

Angels

All magic and witchcraft aside, I really did find some angels on Siquijor. The angels came in the form of an unlikely retired Japanese couple living out their dream of building a resort and helping children. Their resort is Villa Marmarine. Their charity is named Siquijor’s Angels and owner Toshito “Dagman” Harada uses his rotary club and other connections in Japan to raise money for projects in Siquijor schools such as providing running water and toilets, buying books and shipping over second-hand laptops from Japan.
Dagman, a retired school teacher, is unusual for a Japanese civil servant, in that he managed to spend a total of seven years teaching overseas with his wife and children in Lebanon, Kuwait, and the Netherlands. After he retired he and his wife Marie wanted to go abroad again because “there is no sense of community in Japan anymore”.
So they went on a tour, checking out Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji and the Philippines, but it was Siquijor where they stopped.
He thought, “the children here are very simple, very shy, and they like to study. Maybe I can do something for them”.
He started by simply visiting schools and teaching them about Japanese culture through traditional games, even bringing over a troupe of Japanese university students to perform a musical. With funding help from his friends and ex-students in Japan he has now built toilets for 30 schools on the island. He can’t understand why anyone would build a school without one, but this is just one of many aspects of Filipino life which confuses someone raised in Japan.
“Filipino and Japanese culture are very different. At first it confused me a lot but I try to walk a balance between the two.”
Coming to grips with the very loose Filipino conception of time compared to Japanese punctuality and organisation was particularly difficult.
“They are always late, they don’t have planning.... but I understand it’s the Filipino way. Now I have many friends here - teachers, the Rotary club, tennis players, and of course all the children.”
In Japan teachers are often highly revered and much loved by their students, holding a very respected position in society. It was Dagman’s dream to have a place where he could invite his ex-students to come and stay with their families or girlfriends and experience another culture. So far about 30 have visited him.
This sense of wanting to be a good host, pervades the atmosphere of the resort and staying there you feel more like a friend than someone to make money off. In fact, though the business is doing very well since they got mentioned as “Top Pick” in the Lonely Planet Travel Guide, most of the money they make goes back into the island through the employment he provides to all the construction workers adding to the resort or working on the school projects. Most of the resort staff are also part time students whom he is helping through school.

The resort was designed by Marie and unlike some of the wedding cake concrete monstrosities further along the beach, it has an understated Japanese design ethic which tries to compliment, rather than obliterate nature
The deck overlooking the beach is built around the coconut palms she refused to cut down and natural fibers and wood have been used where ever possible, “despite the inconvenience of having to re-thatch the straw roof every year”.
Everywhere there are little Japanese touches mixed in with Filipino beach style which give charm to the place.
At night the friendly waitresses don a much more comfortable Filipino approximation of a kimono sewn by Marie and obis (bows) all askew they saunter about carrying cold flannels and free desserts to their guests.
From their own table Dagman and Marie chat happily with everyone and try to make them feel at home.
Flo, the Filipino manager took time to tell me various ghost stories from the island including one about a golden horse running around under the island which foreigners want to catch but if they do the island will sink.
She told me about various people on the island who had been enchanted by goblins and gone missing for hours, swearing they had been at a fancy party in a condo, which when they pointed to it was really just a tree or cave.
Sometimes the goblins would return to try and convince their human consort to marry them and come away to the spirit world, much like fairies in Western folk lore.
She also spoke of a mysterious creature with a horses head and a mans body who liked to sit in trees smoking cigars.
If you cut down their tree they would attack you, but judging from the numerous beautiful old Balete trees still standing on Siquijor, they still have plenty of places to live.
Flo said they were very frightening, but to me they sounded like some interesting creature you might meet in the pages of The Chronicles of Narnia or some other children’s book.
In Maori mythology the forests are also inhabited by many unearthly creatures, with every tree and stone and river having some sort of life force or spirit protecting it. You had to pray for permission before you could cut down a tree and there is a story about a man forgetting to do so before he cut down a huge Kauri tree to build a canoe. Tané the god of the forest got all the insects to put the tree back up every time the man cut it down.

In the strange world of journalism, the most respected reporters are the ones who go out and get the story, who hunt it down with agile cunning, who risk life and limb to bring home the hard facts. Even though almost all of us do it sometimes, sitting at the desk and waiting for a story to come to you is looked down upon.
This story is human interest rather than hard news, but nevertheless it was found not through searching, but on the contrary, by sitting very still and not searching at all.
Traveling alone has both advantages and disadvantages. Being by yourself makes you more approachable, which can be very good and very annoying, especially if you just want to read your book in peace on the beach. I've had many Filipinos tell me that as a nation, they are “very shy to speak English”, that they are embarrassed that their grammar is incorrect. In the press corp when they see someone else talking to me, they start wiping their hands under their noses and cracking up about nosebleeds – it's a favourite joke that talking English for too long will give you one. They say things like “I didn't pack my English today” and “his English is all used up, come back in 20 minutes” and then they high five each other and fall about laughing.
But if it's true – the shyness I mean, then it's also a myth as well, because people talk to me all the time.
On Boracay especially, sitting on the beach is to expose yourself to a constant stream of bead-sellers, shell-sellers, watch-sunglass-carving-miniatureboat-sellers, masseuses, tour operators wanting to take you diving, sailing, snorkeling, parasailing, people who think you might like a Filipino boyfriend and who believe dating you will be like being in an American movie such as American Pie.

So it was very refreshing the other evening as I was sitting on the beach watching one of the heart wrenchingly beautiful sunsets, when a girl sitting nearby started talking to me. She spoke, not because she wanted anything or had anything to offer me, but because I was alone and she was alone and missing her family and just wanted someone to talk to.
She told me she was 27, but sitting there hugging herself she looked 16. She was waiting for a cousin who never showed up, had come here to find a job and rented herself a “bed space” for a month. She was really missing her family. “They are only over there” she said indicating the mainland a 20 minute boat ride away, “but...” indicating through a shrug, an expression on her face, that they were impossibly far away.
She sees a kindred spirit in me, in that we were both alone on an adventure, away from our homes. I am really glad to have been alone in-order to have shared a conversation with her, banal yet exceedingly poignant, as the last rays of sun receded below the horizon and darkness closed in around us.
She represents another paradox in this country. The need for company, to always have a companion (although maybe not so much in sophisticated Manila), to be surrounded by family and friends, is a national trait. Yet despite this, there are 10 million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) spread out across the globe trying to send money home to their families. I have no idea of the figures for those who have left their families behind in the provinces to seek their fortune (or at least subsistence) in Manila as maids and drivers and guards and whatever they have to be, but I know it's a lot. Anyone with even a tiny bit of excess cash seems to have a maid, and most maids seem to have children whom they have left with relatives, maybe seeing them once a week on their day off. (or once a year if they are OFWs).
They say that it is the OFWs and their remittances which have allowed the Philippines to weather this and previous global recessions far better than many of their neighbours.
According to social work professor Cindy Hunter in Move magazine: international migration is “the single greatest poverty reduction effort in human history”.
In Aotearoa we also have an army of overseas NZ workers, going abroad to work is almost a rite of passage. No matter what kind of work you do or how low paid it is, there is the sense that you will return with a greater understanding of the world and a broader mind, that you will return carrying new and innovative ideas to our far corner of the world.
I don't know that the same is true of the Philippines. Of course if you go overseas to study or work in a profession, then chances are you will learn a lot of new skills which could be of benefit to your country, but generally I don't think many in this bracket actually return home except for holidays.
For those that go overseas to work as servants in highly stratified societies, I wonder how much they do actually learn. (Apparently those who go and work in Europe often have a much better time (and want to stay) than those who work in Saudi Arabia or Malaysia for example, where they don't have such a revolutionary background and servants are second class citizens. - Move magazine talks about the great benefits of those working as nannies in France such as extra holidays, and being given old laptops and Dior suits, while there seem to be a lot of stories of maids being abused in the Middle East and in other closer Asian countries).
I don't think these people often return loaded up with either enough cash or ideas to start a business. For a start most of their money has been sent home to support their families and educate their children anyway. Perhaps all they return with is a bit of extra cash and a new found materialism.
Ed says that a lot of small businesses, eg little beauty salons, dairies, in the provinces were started by people who made their money overseas. However Marie thinks only a few come home and start a business, more often they build a house and buy the things they want “they don't think about if the money will run out, they just spend it”.
Her aunt is encouraging her to join her in Dubai to work as a maid. Marie says the decision to miss out on watching your children grow up is a very difficult one, but on the other hand you get to give them the life you want.... She also says she has seen people go overseas to work, but when they come back their life is the same, with negligible material improvement. Someone else tells me that sometimes when people go overseas leaving their kids with relatives, the relatives spend the money sent home on themselves instead of the children. The parents return expecting to find fat, happy, well dressed, well educated children and instead find them in the same condition as when they left.
There is the perception that those who do return, often return with an attitude of superiority to the rest of their “country hick” relatives, and find it very hard to settle back into life here, often returning for more stints of overseas work. (but maybe they are just like me and have wanderlust in the blood).
As I'm writing this, with only two days left in the country it suddenly occurs to me that this would be a fascinating topic for a dissertation - “Those that returned and what they brought with them”- not so much in terms of money but in terms of ideas and feelings. I'm kicking myself for not having thought of it sooner...
The loss of their best and brightest, forced out of the country by a perception that it is impossible to get ahead here, that the corruption, political mismanagement and general malaise of this country will never improve, is something much lamented in the Philippines. I spoke to one women who left during the Marcos years because she couldn't stand watching what he was doing to her country anymore and by the time he was toppled, she had made a life for herself overseas.
The opposite of this, the highly educated ones who stayed, the ones who returned, profess to having done so through a great love of their country and a faith in its future. The most famous of these is the author and national hero Jose Rizel, who after being educated in Europe returned to try and liberate his country from the medieval oppression of the Spanish and was martyred for it. Everywhere you go in the Philippines you will find statues of him and his novels are read by every school child in the country. His first book Noli Me Tangere “was the first major artistic manifestation of Asian resistance to European colonialism”, according to Jessica Hagedorn on the book jacket.
Ed tells me that one of the reasons he didn't want to emigrate was because he had a really good job here and would have to start right at the bottom again in another country with English as his second language. He says his friend who was a university professor in Manila, became a store clerk in America. Ed also admits laughingly that the thought of having to do his own cleaning and laundry was a big disincentive. “My friends overseas have to spend their weekends doing their own washing! What a life!”
Someone else tells me that when they watch movies made abroad they are really surprised to see the characters doing their own cleaning even though they own nice houses and apartments. He also says that the reason almost every middle-class person in the Philippines needs a maid is because they work so hard that they don't have time to cook and clean. I tell him I think the reason they all have maids/drivers/doormen etc is because they cost so little.
José joins the conversation, half jokingly but half sincere, to say that “we think of the maids as part of our family and you don't pay your family...”.
Erik also said that having a maid or nanny was like adopting someone to live in your house for a time. In ideal situations this is true and there is a very close friendly relationship between employer and employee, who will help each other out above and beyond the terms of employment. In other situations it can feel like living in Elizabethan England. My FilAm (Filipino-American) friend says (and I also read this idea in James Hamilton-Paterson's writing), that the remnants of the Malay caste system still survive in modern Filipino society. In this way those in the highest caste or socioeconomic group – the Datu can command fear, respect and obedience from those in the lowest – the Alipin:
“This term refers to the lowest class of people in the Philippine social system, and is often translated as “slave”. The concept of alipin originates from a Malay socioeconomic system – perhaps akin to a caste system of sorts – that existed in the Philippines prior to the arrival of the Spanish. It was a system of economic servitude under which a person in debt would be required to render service to his debtor; these economic burdens often then lead to psychological shackles from which escape is practically unattainable. Some suggest that those that live in extreme poverty today are modern-day alipins of Philippine society. Such a condition is perpetuated by a system where people have no other options, and thus focus on the immediate benefits in front of them while disregarding the consequences of their actions. These individuals live off the handouts provided to them by the wealthy in society. Moreover, those with power and status attempt to preserve this system to maintain their dominance. One may argue that it is perhaps this mutual, though severely imbalanced, interdependence of the rich and the poor that is holding – though precariously – contemporary Philippine society together.” Essay by Justin Jimenez, Philippine Mass Media and its Role in the Culture of Poverty.
The whole concept of having servants is something that my two American friends in Manila and I write off as an aspect of Filipino culture we will never quite get our heads round.
Which isn't to say that my life wasn't made easier by Ed's maid Marie doing all my washing and cooking and dishes for me.... But that isn't the reason I liked her. I liked her because she was kind and intelligent and explained many things about her country to me. She also translated the Tagalog for me when we watched TV together and when I rescued a sick cat off the side of the road and took it to the vet, without any prompting at all, she volunteered to take it home. “I will take care of it. Don't worry about anything, it can come and live with me.” I nearly cried with gratitude.
Marie had never been a maid before and only started a few days before I arrived so the experience was weird for both of us. Although she cooked me delicious eggplant omelets, spring rolls, and egg with bitter melon, I think her talents are wasted as a maid and the job bored her.
Though not wealthy, her parents had sent her to good schools and she has near perfect English. She told me she had been the editor of the English newspaper at her high-school and had wanted to become a lawyer, but then she met Ed's, (now), driver Danny and ran away with him when she was sixteen, had a baby at seventeen and was married at eighteen.
In our apartment maids can't leave without the owner giving permission and telling the lobby guards. She told me they would actively stop you from leaving if you tried without permission. Having just watched a TV ad about maid abuse, this horrified me, but apparently it's quite common. She looks so sad if I go out at night, her husband driving me, while she stays at home alone, bored, like Cinderella. Which I guess makes me the ugly sister...
Her pay is around about $100 a month, which I think is actually quite a good maid's salary in Manila and as her husband is the driver, she gets to see him everyday, even though he boards somewhere else. She tells me her children cry and cry every time she has to go leave after her day off.
Before I leave we go out for Halo Halo and then she asks if I want to visit her husband's flat. He lives in the little shanty town that I was afraid to go into when I first arrived. It's kind of like a tree house knocked together with Gib board and he apologises for his accommodation, but I tell him it reminds me of a warehouse I lived in when I was a student. Sitting drinking red horse beer on the floor of his tiny room while Marie placidly told me shocking stories from their lives was one of the nicest things I did in Manila.

Faded splendour of Boracay.

Starving dog on a littered beach.

The sheet of flapping tarp
on a dilapidated bamboo hut
makes shiny resorts gleam obscene

You're like Fitzgerald's French Riviera
in Tender is the Night

Global warming will sink you
but you will sink yourself with concrete too

Sandbags holding back the tide
on the shrinking whitesand shore,


I walk through a fetid swamp
milky with soap scum
colourful with plastic debris
to get to your otherside

I give money to black skinned
fuzzy haired children
"Indios", with hands outstretched,
this island was their birthright
but “all was grabbed”
300 years ago

They say, “it is much improved”
They say, “only you could be maudlin in paradise”
They give me a necklace made from the hands
of orangutans
and ask me to wear it.

I walk along paths I once rode on horseback
the horses all gone, I search in vain
for the long maned horseman
who rocked his baby
in a hanging crib
while Anna and I drank rum punch

His baby will be grown now
and helmeted Koreans speed past
on quad bikes

And yet...
inside my resort
lush with tropical growth,
in the bamboo house,
reclining on the bamboo couch...

And yet....
back on the “front side”
the sunset like a Turner painting
the sea still as blue
and sailboat adorned....

Local children still build ornate sand-sculptures
illuminated by candles.
The evening sea-breeze still caresses.
and in bars in hammocks
amid driftwood and hanging buoys
in the soft glow of fairylights

The nightingale still sings
and “Tender is the night”

- Not the Salon I went to, just some pictures I took in Manila. I wonder what Keira Salon would sell if I owned it?

So I went to a salon to get my legs waxed, deciding it would be faster and less painful than doing it myself. While I waited for someone to become available they suggested a “hair spa”.
It's like a conditioning treatment I guess.
In the chair with the hairdresser we have the usual conversation about New Zealand where I explain its location and how it's not part of America, and the usual questions about my age and whether I'm married and “why not?”
Taxi-drivers, waitresses, other journalists, coconut sellers, they all use these questions as an ice-breaker. Although to be fair some people do know about NZ from Lord of the Rings and because most of their milk comes from us, they know we have lots of farmland and more cows than people.

Some can even name Fonterra and remember ex-PM Helen Clark coming over to promote it.
But not this hairdresser who cannot understand why I don't have a boyfriend. “But you are very beautiful”, he says. “Have you been too busy working hard and chasing your career?” he asks, but this is a lie I am not prepared to collude in.
Taxi-driver, hairdresser, waitress, anyone I meet, (but not Ed), what am I supposed to answer? Well my therapist says it's because of this.... my ex's say it's because of that... but I prefer to err on the side of some deep flaw in my personality?
As he's putting special serums onto my hair he keeps on tsking about how dry it is. I tell him it's because I go swimming a lot and he says to put conditioner on first, but I worry about the coral and think the effect of my sunscreen sliding off into the water is probably bad enough without adding conditioner into the ocean....
I suggest that maybe dry hair is the reason for my singleness but he doesn't “think thats the true story”.
Later as he's combing out lots of knots , I have to explain that it's because I don't really bother brushing it. He is horrified. “Brushing is the most important thing”, he says. “Maybe that's why I don't have a boyfriend”, I suggest. This time he doesn't argue.
“Once I've done your hair you will get a boyfriend”, he tells me, “maybe a Filipino one”.
“Maybe”, I reply, “they're kind of macho...” thinking of the friend who is not allowed to smile at the guards but whose husband flirts with whomever he likes...
“Not really, not once you get to know them. But anyway, after I have have finished with your hair even if you don't find a boyfriend, you will at least find a friend, I promise you.”


He asks me if I want it styled straight and is pleased when I answer yes. When it is finished he shows me in the mirror and says “straight is better” several times. From the back I could be a Filipino. Straight is fun for a change but it always makes me feel I should put on a suit, rush off to an office and start administrating. Nevertheless, after I get home from going out to dinner on the beach-front with the resort staff and take a latenight pool dip, I keep my hair out of the water....
If nothing else, from now on when people ask me why I'm single I'll be able to explain with some authority that it's because of my unruly hair.

After the “hair-spa”, the wax.... It does not start well as no wax comes out of the nozzel and the beautician kind of just scrapes my skin, like giving me a Chinese burn. I yelp and ask if she's done this before. She says twice, so I get her to turn the lamp on so she can see what she's doing and endevour to teach her how it's done, but even though she tries her best, it continues to be a disaster.
By the time she finishes, my toes are stuck together from where she absent-mindedly dropped my foot into wax, there are little bits of wax-strip stuck all over my legs, I am practically glued to the table and she inexplicably has wax in her hair.
Only one side of my leg is done, but neither of us say anything, each hoping the other won't mention it so this torture can end. She looks close to tears.
Of course, they would never dream of not charging me.
It makes sense really. If someone's service has been that bad, then they are probably not going to come back whether you charge them or not, so you may as well get the money while you can.
I wish I didn't have to pay so much for it, but in the end its just another sticky travel story, something to laugh about when you get home.

When I get back to the resort, some children are outside torturing/playing with a kitten and I yell at them. They have strong squeezy children's hands made for grabbing the things they want. They have no idea what I'm talking about so I go over and stroke the kitten with one finger saying “be gentle”.
Very gently one of the boys tries to pull the kitten's whiskers out.

People here are happy to talk to me about current affairs, about media issues and ethics, their “benighted country”, but they are also very keen to tell me about how beautiful the Philippines is and suggest travel itineraries. Journalism is all very well they say, but you need to have fun too, spend some time traveling and sightseeing.
Believe me, I don't need to be told.
So I went on a snorkeling trip to Apo Island, off the coast of Negros Oriental, with Reuben and Melvisa.
I love snorkeling. I love it at Goat Island, I love it in Rarotonga and I love it in the Philippines.
I love floating suspended in the water, looking at the fish and I love the way they look curiously back at me.
Apo Island is an amazing spot. The coral is as diverse and beautiful and intricate as an underwater forest. The tropical fish, starfish and even shy sea-snakes are colourful and abundant.
Lots has been written about Zen and different activities, - the art of motorcycle maintenance, archery, a whole host of extreme sports have called on Zen imagery to describe themselves and the very singular act of concentrating on the moment which they require.
Let me add to this tradition by writing of Zen and snorkeling.
So snorkeling is like Zen meditation because you immerse yourself fully in another world. You put your head down into the water and suddenly all the annoyances and things you have to worry about above the sea just disappear.
It is so relaxing, so calming.
(Some people may prefer diving, arguing that you can immerse yourself much deeper and further into another world, but there is so much equipment and training and usually money involved. I like the simplicity of being able to drop into water with just a mask and snorkel and baited breath.)
All you have to do is float there and watch the sea reveal its wonders.
The stiller you remain the more you will see.
The Goat Island link even suggests learning to swim without using your arms so as not to startle the fish.
Another way snorkeling relates to Zen is that if you try and look ahead to see what's coming up, your vision becomes murky and obscured, whereas if you look straight down it's like looking through glass and you can see clearly through the layers of water all the way to its ripple patterned bottom where starfish have left the imprint of where they last lay.
Time slows and you can spend hours of intense looking, getting lost in the shapes and colours of the coral formations.
Snorkeling and meditating are like metaphors for each other. Snorkeling the actual physical embodiment of what meditation describes.
And if you are patient, it will deliver strange and beautiful gifts.
I actually got seasick and sunburnt at Apo, throwing up over the side of the boat while the sea flashed red in my unsteady vision, but I don't care about any of that, what I take away from that day is not sunburn and seasickness, but the gift the sea granted me – a sea turtle.
Floating along immersed in the coral I suddenly looked up and there it was just ahead of me in all its placid seaturtley glory.
They have such thoughtful intelligent faces.
We looked at each other for a minute and I wondered what it was thinking.
Then it swam away from me in a wide arc and disappeared into the blue.
It was surprisingly fast and agile for something which appears so slow and ponderous, but then I guess the water is its element.
I know there are some people who come upon an animal and immediately think about killing and eating it, and really if you eat tuna you may as well eat sea-turtles because the light-lures which they use are responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 turtles a year (and that's only on the boats which are monitored), but for me seeing an animal in the wild fills me with delight and joy and wonder.
I wonder if Reuben and Mel had got to see the turtle, they wouldn't have ordered bluefin tuna for dinner that night?
Some other things I did while I was in Dumaguete were write a column,and meet Melvisa's family.

I was at the travel agency buying boat tickets and got talking to the agent. She decided I could write her weekly column in the Negros Chronicle for her - about what I thought about Dumaguete. They seem to like that here. To be really interested in how foreigners view their country, what they think of things here. It's impressively outward looking, more so than most countries I think.

Meeting Melvisa's family was nice too. I'm their new “god-daughter”.
They are one of those giant extended families you find here, where you can never tell exactly who lives in the compound and who is just visiting and who all the children belong to.
However it's easy to tell who the matriarch of the family is – Lola (grandma) Leah.
She is 92 but maybe looks 70 and she welcomes me into her home like some long lost daughter.
Her family tell me that I should come back anytime because “Lola Leah is always here waiting for foreigners to come and visit”.
Her sister is 99, she tells me and she had a grandfather who purportedly lived to 200 and slept with his eyes open.
Lola Leah doesn't eat meat, only fish and rice and vegetables.
They are a very religious family, with several pastors in their ranks and they pray for me when I get there, selecting bible verses and only using half the sentence so as to change its meaning to serve their purposes, with gay abandon. They enliven and indiginise the Christian religion with a very Filipino joy de vivre.
Normally someone mentioning God in every second sentence might get annoying, but it just comes across as a quirk of another culture here and I accept it with all the other peculiarly Filipino quirks.
As I've mentioned before, people here (and at home sometimes too) get a little concerned when I say I'm traveling alone. “Who is your companion?”, they ask, but Lola Leah gave me the perfect answer to that question when she said: “God is your companion!”
It is so great to meet someone so old but so accepting of my lifestyle.
In this deeply religious country no-one is going to be able to argue with “God is my companion”. It effectively silences any protests about the dangers of solo travel and I believe I will use it from now on.
In response to incredulous “you're doing what!?! you're going where?!?” I'll just be able to say “no no don't worry. God is my companion.” and possibly “I have a sea-turtle spirit-guide” as well.
Things are looking up.

Dumaguete traffic cop

Photos from the water co-op meeting day
















There is so much news here. The Filipino journalists all think it must be terribly boring to work on a newspaper in Aotearoa. They look at me (representative of NZ media) dismissively when I tell them we only really have one major newspaper per city in comparison to the eight broadsheets and 20 tabloids in Manila. But then Manila has a population of 11 million and the entire country more than 80 million compared to our measly 4 million.
All the stories jostle each other for page space, at the same time competing with the “Lifestyle” stories/celebrity gossip/ thinly disguised infomercials which, like in papers across the world, seem to be slowly squeezing out the actual news.
Things which would take up the front page for weeks in NZ barely get a mention sometimes here.
A bomb goes off in Mindanao. An 11 year-old is shot dead when police raid her home looking for insurgents. A hostage is released, a hostage is taken, ransom is paid, someone denies ransom was paid. The leader of the tricyclists (motorbikes with side cars, which transports people and goods) protesting over petrol price increases is shot and wounded. Amnesty for Abu Sayyaf (armed terrorist group) is suggested and then laughed out of the house, in other parts of Mindanao a cease fire is called so peace talks can resume with other insurgent groups. President Arroyo takes another overseas trip with her huge entourage, on the taxpayers' Peso but this time it is to an interesting forum which I hadn't heard of before – a kind of reverse G8 for nations at the other end of the G8 spectrum. I could go on.... But before I do.... The trip Gloria went on was to attend the Non Aligned Movement Summit in Egypt which is for countries, not aligned to any major power block (even though the major world powers tend to seep up all other nations in their quest for supremacy).
According to Wikipedia it “Started as an attempt to thwart the cold war in 1955” and aims to “ensure the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” in their “struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony, as well as against great-power and bloc politics”. - I don't know how well they achieved any of this but it's still an impressive mission statement and Hamilton-Paterson says the Philippine's participation back in the fifties was displeasing to America to say the least. - Even now the U.S. still likes to think of Filipinos as their “little brown brothers”, their American outpost in Asia. In a recent (and much vaunted) first Asian leader trip to visit Obama, the U.S. president praised Arroyo for her human rights work (are you crazy? see previous blog for her human rights record) and anointed the Philippines designated co-ordinator for the rest of Asean.


The journalists I was talking to at the National Union of Journalists Philippines were outraged by this, saying things like “it's good for America to get Obama for president, but it doesn't change anything for the rest of the world. No one man is big enough to change U.S. foreign policy, there is too much money and business at stake.”
I tend to agree with their scepticism about Obama. The whole “come on everyone, out of Iraq..... and into Afghanistan. Now this is where we can really do some good, if only we are prepared to spend more money and send more troops and be prepared for a long haul...” somewhat disturbing.
An Indian man I talk to in the swimming pool tells me I should report some good news, “ not like all the sensationalism on BBC and CNN”.
I ask a researcher from the Popular Democracy Institute about this, about whether the Philippine media is failing the people by concentrating so much on negative stories. He replies that the journalists are aware of the concepts of developmental journalism and the need to help build up a nation by telling some good news about it, but that “it's a matter of supply and demand”, and the supply of negative stories is huge - “turn this way and there's six stories of corruption, turn the other way and there's another six on war”.
He also cited the Filipino's love of a scandal, but I think this is fairly universal.

Another source blames the Marcos years for giving developmental journalism a bad name. He says all the propaganda lies they distributed through the state sponsored media heaping praise on themselves and the economic development of the country during their reign of power came under the developmental journalism heading.

Its very easy for anyone to get bogged down by all the bad news, to feel that corruption and greed will hamper any progress which individuals or groups try to make, to believe that there is no point trying to help people who don't seem able to help themselves....
The other day I met another foreigner who has been here a few months working on various projects, who crystalized for me the experience of many foreigners working for change in a 3rd world country beset by seemingly insurmountable problems. Tom is young, intelligent, enjoying his job, enjoying his Filipino colleagues, really happy to be here and slightly despairing. During our conversation he notices himself sounding less than optimistic about the state of the nation and tries to remind himself, not too successfully, of some of the upsides.
It reminds me of finally meeting with Green Steve last year whose praises I had heard for almost as long as I had heard of Karenni refugees in Thailand. After working with Karenni refugees on human rights and environmental issues for the past 20 years, where to a large extent nothing of the macro picture involving Burma has changed, he looked and sounded tired, (but maybe he just needed a break.)
I don't know if this story is true but I still remember someone telling me how the environmental group Steve had helped facilitate, excitedly invited him round one day to eat an endangered species of monkey they had just caught.
Back in Manila what Tom finds particularly depressing is over-population and massive resistance to introducing any form of birth control. This huge population means there are simply not enough jobs and though in order to combat this you will find incredibly inefficient systems where you have five people doing what could be done by one, if only they would streamline their processes, there is still very high unemployment.
Erik from IPD tells me that only something like 20-percent of workers are formally employed, the rest of the employed are farmers, drivers, seasonal workers etc.
In Manila City (as opposed to the whole Metro Manila area- which is comprised of several different cities like Auckland) it is illegal to buy the contraceptive pill.
They are trying to push through some sort of family planning bill which would encourage education about other forms of contraception aside from “natural family planning” but the huge sway which the Catholic Church has over the country is making it difficult.
Tom tells me with horror, a story of women getting an IDU inserted and then being refused communion by her local priest, (nothing being kept secret in small rather open communities).
I don't think this can be in a big city though. Marie says "many Filipinos prefer to use contraceptives rather than have another baby, so they ignore the church".
It distresses me that the Bishops can't have the same sort of sway when it comes to banning other activities which go against their teachings such as murder and corruption, although I guess they try. – I read stories about them urging restraint to anyone considering revenge after the bombing of a church in Cotabato and they have been active in spreading information about disease control in relation to swine flu. Their presence also means that the death penalty will probably never be reinstated here, although they can't do much about the extra-judicial death penalty as metered out by corrupt politicians or war lords.
During the Marcos years and after, many of the clergy were instrumental in monitoring election ballet boxes and visiting political prisoners, and often faced death, along-side any one else standing up to warlords/corrupt mayors/ignorant army thugs.
During Edsa (the people power revolution which was instrumental in deposing Marcos), they could be seen kneeling in the streets in front of tanks beside the 10,000 other protesters.
However it should also not be forgotten the effects of the first Spanish friars in the Philippines who treated their parishes as private fiefdoms meting out medieval cruelty as they saw fit and painting an image of Philippine Muslims as heathen pirates from the south, which probably still effects politics today.


Ed is equally pessimistic about the plight of the poor masses. He explains agrarian reforms to me.
Tenant farmers, working on huge blocks of land owned by wealthy families who generally acquired their land either through impressive stealth and cunning or straight out collaboration and/or marriage during the years of Spanish occupation, were given rights to the land so they could grow crops and couldn't be evicted. They have to give 60% of any profits they make to the landowner. This doesn't sound like a particularly good deal to me but Ed says they are much better off under this system, which means if they don't make any money for some reason then the don't owe anything. - 60% of nothing is nothing. In different industries the division of profits is different and a benevolent landowner will pay for production costs also. Tenants are also given the option of buying the land off the owners with a government mortgage, but owners who don't wish to sell can simply over-evaluate the value of the land so as to make it prohibitively expensive. Buying back land which is your ancestral domain anyway must be an annoying prospect....
The peasants fought long and hard to make these gains and being shot by police during protests is still not that uncommon. Somehow Cory Aquino, the President after Marcos who implemented land reforms, managed to not give up any of her giant hacienda to peasants. In all the banner waving and glorifying over her death last week it should be remembered that under her administration police opened fire on and killed many peasant farmers attending a peaceful protest to urge for the promised land reform to be delivered. (If you are rich or powerful in the Philippines, it seems you can get around anything.)
This is a very brief summary of a much more complicated issue which has its roots in the 300 odd years of Spanish colonialism followed by American then Japanese then American again colonialism, which obviously wrecked havoc on land rights and the national psyche, but for eloquent description of history, rural poverty and land tenure, read James Hamilton-Paterson.
Here is a quote from his book America's Boy explaining how many of those who orchestrated the popular uprising against different colonial powers were often betrayed by the land owning classes. In this case he talks about peasant farmers but equally he explains how the guerilla armies which were a major force in resisting Japanese imperialism along side America in the Philippines, were later labeled as communist insurgents by an America keen to use the country as a strategic base in Asia for warding off Chinese and Russian communist expansion.

"Neither Congress nor the Philippine (Commission reckoned with the ignorance of the common people nor with the opposition to the aquisition of land by poor Filipinos... on the part of their richer and more intelligent fellow countrymen ... The cacique does not wish his labourers to aquire land in their own right for he well knows that if they did so they would become self supporting, and it would cease to be possible for him to hold them as peons, as is commonly done at present.." Dean C Worcester, The Philippines Past and Present, (New York 1921) pp830-1

Ed tells me he used to be very pro-farmers, until he tried to work with them and make his family land more profitable for everyone involved.
He tells me he had all these ideas of setting up a craft business and providing work for the peasants living at his family estate and how he gave jobs to some of his neighbours as caretakers for his unoccupied family home, only to find that they had let the plants die and were syphoning his water for their own houses.
He can't understand why they don't want to grow their own vegetables on their land instead of buying them at the shop and why they only want to work half the day or only in the planting and harvesting seasons.
“They are so lazy, all they want to do in the afternoon is drink and watch cock fights and wait for handouts.” (cockfighting being a national past-time here – all over the city you can see big glossy roosters tethered outside apartments, I think there is even a cockfighting channel)
He particularly can't understand why when they go overseas they work so hard that Filipino workers are in demand in several countries. Possibly the pay-rates overseas engender them with the feeling that they really can get ahead, possibly its something to do with their homeland having not been owned by Filipinos for such a long period of history?
Myself often preferring to err on the side of laziness, (although I do like growing my own vegetables), I can understand why beyond being able to provide for your children without resorting to stealing from your neighbour, people may prefer to just kick back and relax, but Ed just sees fertile land going to waste and possibly fertile minds too. It's like the rich, or middle-class and the poor, across the world often have two very different mindsets. Bringing in my experiences with youthwork and with Karenni refugees, I think it takes very special people to be able to cross that divide and be able to both listen to what a group actually wants and inspire them to take action to change their lives.
This of course needs to be parenthesized by saying that dividing people into rich and poor probably isn't particularly accurate, as material circumstances don't necessarily reflect mindset and I've seen people inspire themselves without any outside intervention- those farmers who organise and lead the protests for example, the revolutionaries and guerrilas who fought off the Spanish, Americans and Japanese from their islands here, all the amazing Karenni that I met. Perhaps inspired and uninspired would be a better set of definitions?

But all this has been a way of working up to some good news. Of writing of solutions both for the downtrodden and oppressed who can't seem to raise themselves from the dirt in which they squat to watch their rooster fights and for Ed's stolen water and umbrage at the prevailing lethargy.
I did an interview at the Institute for Popular Democracy last week, which is kind of a think tank or research orgnisation, trying to improve democracy in the Philippines. One of their projects is organising water co-ops so that the 50% of Manilans who aren't connected to the water mains don't have to rely on buying bottled water in or filling buckets from trucks which the mayor delivers every few days.
(this is a painting of the 4 presidents since Edsa (people power revolution which deposed Marcos)The gallery owner told me it represented the common people still yoked like the carabo while their leaders grew fat and happy off the peoples backs)
NUJP party

Erik who who explains all this to me is passionate about the water project which he believes can be a vehicle to mobilize the people into becoming interested in true democracy and removing the power of corrupt mayors to buy votes.
He is so passionate that he gesticulates wildly as he speaks and eats breakfast at the same time, flinging rice from his chopsticks, grains of which get stuck in wayward strands of wispy hair.
He never seems to get enough time to eat and is so busy fighting for democracy that he has to stop at McDonalds on the way to a water co-operative meeting.
He asks me if I am a “serious and sustained” vegetarian. He says he is a carni-vegetarian, which I think means he aspires towards only eating fish but doesn't always quite achieve it, such as when there are no fillet-o-fish burgers at McDonalds so he has a bigmac.





And finally the water co-op story:

“Water is life”, says Bagong Silang Water Cooperative member Lorda Feudo, yet more than 50-percent of Metro Manilans still don't have clean water on tap.

Those the least able to afford it are spending the majority of their salaries buying in water or wasting their days chasing water-trucks up and down the street just to survive.

However an energetic group of communities are taking the matter of water supply into their own hands and forming water co-operatives, so the daily struggle for water is one less thing they have to worry about.

Before we started the co-op and got connected to Maynilad Water, life was very hard, says Feudo.

“It was difficult relying on trucks to deliver water. We had to wait and run after the truck many times. Sometimes the trucks were not coming, so the day was useless, only watching for a truck that didn't arrive. It is so tiring, running to get water and then running home carrying the pails.”

“Sometimes we had to fight others who pushed in the line. Those who know the truck driver got more water. Everyone was very frustrated, sometimes angry”, adds another member Noemi Pajo.

We are sitting in their little office in Maharlika Village, Bagong Silang, Caloocan City, an area almost entirely occupied by relocated urban poor who have been moved from central Manila.

Outside you can see water barrels lining the streets of those houses who have not opted to join the co-op, while inside the office large charts show monthly expenditure and intake and the position of each board member.

“Financial transparency is very important,” says Feudo.

Maynilad Water had been promising water connections since 2002 but were unable to deliver and eventually after the co-op formed in 2008, Maynilad asked them to help provide water to other local households demanding their services.

The way water cooperatives work is that members front up the cash and labor to install pipes themselves and instead of having a meter for each household they have just one “mother meter” which measures the entire co-op's water consumption.

In effect they are buying the water in bulk from their water provider and taking care of the pipes and fee collection themselves.

The Maharlika board is comprised of housewives who received help and free workshops on how to set up a cooperative, write a business plan and build consensus from the Institute for Popular Democracy (IPD).

“We are all mothers,” says Feudo. “The men are all at work, they don't do household chores, so they don't know our water needs. They come home and say 'Why don't we have any water?'”

The women run the co-op themselves, each board member volunteering one day a week in the office while a manager, plumber and cashier all receive salaries of P3500 per month.

Despite the extra work of running the co-op the women say life has changed for the better since the daily struggle to find enough water has been replaced with water on tap.

“Household costs became very easy, everything becomes easy. When we want to take a bath we can. We don't have to wait we can do washing when we feel like it. It gives relaxation to our minds, life became very easy because water is life”, says Feudo.

According to the IPD households in non-connected areas can spend as much as P2,000 per month on water, including their labor costs for haulage, compared to an average P80 for those connected.

In Maharlika Village households have gone from paying up to P1750 per month for water to P600, “so they are happy.”

To supplement the free water delivered by trucks households buy in mineral drinking water, and also where possible buy water from local wells or other households who are connected to the Caloocan Water System in adjacent communities.

However the amount of water delivered by trucks varies greatly and in some areas trucked in water makes up less than 30-percent of water consumption.

“They may not feel it because they pay on a daily basis, but most of their income is going water”, says IPD researcher Kristine Quiray.

Quiray helped the women form their co-op and can attest to chaos of water truck deliveries.

“I remember holding one training seminar where suddenly right in the middle everyone dashed out of the meeting because a water truck had been sighted,”she says.

The co-op has 172 members so far and aims to reach 1500, however it wasn't easy to bring people round to the idea of joining and fronting up the initial costs of installing water pipes and a mother meter, especially when they could get free, but not enough and not necessarily drinking quality, truck water.

“They had to see the pipes installed in the streets outside their houses before they would really believe it could happen and pay the P1100 startup fee,” says Feudo.

The co-op began with just 22 members and P22000, but fundraising and a donation of 20 pipes from the son of the town's mayor who said he was “happy to help people who are helping themselves” got them started and after a year of successful running they were able to secure a grant from the Peace and Equity Foundation.

Quiray once took the group on a study tour to visit the Lusrai Co-op which started with water and has gone on to provide “ad-on services” such as life insurance, in Antipolo City.

Other models were also studied in Binangonan, where there are 21 water co-ops, the oldest having formed in 1976.

Now, as the pilot water co-op of IPD, Maharlika co-op receives visitors itself.

The women proudly inform me that they have had guest researchers from China, Singapore, Sweden and California all keen to learn about their project.

But despite their success the co-op is still far from reaching their 1500 household membership.

“We feel ok, but we are worried that there are few applicants coming to us”, says Feudo.

“But we feel we should continue, no matter what.”

She says they had a surge of applicants during the dry season, but they are in competition with the local government water provider who charges only P6 per cubic meter of water compared Maynilad's P12.

However they are hoping the local government water which is running at a loss, is often not suitable for drinking, has very low pressure and only works from 5 p.m. to 8 am, will eventually close down.

In comparison the women say Maynilad's water is very reliable and fine for drinking, although they still boil it for infants.

The local government also trucks in free water.

The IPD asked the local government to use the large funds – as much as P400 000 per month - spent on trucking in water to invest in structural development for the co-op instead, providing water connections to many more homes.

The IPD believes this would be a much more efficient use of government funds, and a much more effective means of getting water to the constituents, but the local government wasn't interested.

Water co-ops are somewhat of a passion for IPD researcher Erik Villanueva.

The IPD is basically a facilitating and research organization founded in 1986 interested in political and electoral reform, local government, social movements and development issues.

Villanueva sees water co-ops as a vehicle for engaging ordinary people in the workings of democracy and throwing off that famous Filipino fatalism which can see people simply waiting for destiny or other outside forces to help them instead of taking an active hand in improving their own quality of life themselves.

“The fight for water can open up a way to challenge local political elites”, he says.

Villanueva says the adoption of water co-ops is wide spread throughout Manila, especially on the outskirts and it is not just the urban poor who are making use of the system, but middle class home owners associations too.

“It wouldn't have been possible for the spread of access to water without water co-ops,” says Villanueva.

Currently one of the IPD's projects is forming a water co-op network association to bring all the different co-ops together in order to share expertise.

They are also negotiating on the networks behalf for a bulk discount from the water providers, but so far despite the co-ops providing the materials, labor and management which allow the water corporations to deliver their services, neither Manila Water Corporation Incorporated or Maynilad Water Services Incorporated have been interested in offering a discount

Quiray describes the situation as selling “retail and wholesale at the same price”.

Outside of Manila central, only 50-percent of the population is provided with level three faucet water, while in Metro Manila most of the 680 000 informal settler families also can't get connected.

Villanueva can understand the reluctance on the part of water providers to invest in high risk areas.

In the case of squatter settlements, the communities have no legal title to the land so the companies investment isn't safe and if the community gets moved on they won’t be compensated for their infrastructure.

Also non revenue water (NRW) can be as high as 70-percent in some areas, from leaks, water theft and people simply not paying their bills.

Quiray says Maynilad Water told her that recovering costs from areas such as the resettlement area of North Caloocan was extremely difficult and that even just fixing damaged pipes cost more because they had to send an extra worker to guard the truck so the tires wouldn't get stolen.

Maynilad water was unavailable for comment.

Villanueva says when the community takes over the management, these issues cease to be a problem as it is much more difficult to avoid paying your bills when it is someone from your own neighborhood collecting them.

“The incidence of NRW is very low when the community patches the leaks and collects the fees themselves”, he says.

Despite this, the water providers still claim ownership of the pipes and meters which the co-op have installed as the laws recognizing co-ops and their rights are not strongly enforced.

“How do you encourage urban poor or middle-class to invest in their own infrastructure, when neither the government nor the water services recognize or support their efforts?” Villanueva asks.

“Local officials promise water connections which often don't get delivered and then deliver free water from trucks in the meantime, with their names plastered all over them. This way, people will know who to be grateful for; this kind of behavior destroys the will of people to act on their own initiative and organize themselves.”

He describes watching people scrabble for water from trucks as “horrible and disgusting”.

“Politicians exchange services for votes and this becomes the currency by which the relationship of patronage is maintained. Instead of services like roads and water being the normal function of government, they are handed out like goodies in exchange for votes and the political elite maintain their position by exploiting the apathy of these voiceless, faceless, helpless masses who are made to remain dependent on someone else.”

He cites roads which end abruptly at the half of the village who didn't vote for the local official, as examples of “a democratic system that fails”, but also admits it is “not just the fault of officials, but those who elect them”.

Water co-ops are a way of sidestepping these traps, he says, freeing both the community and their elected leaders to campaign and vote on real issues rather than the mayors having to find ever new ways of raising the cash to buy the personal loyalty of their constituents.

Meanwhile another water co-op is in its founding stages in Recomville 2, a village described by one of the freelance facilitators from the Akbayan Citizens Action Party as a “government housing project gone awry”.

“Can you imagine a government housing project with no electricity and no water?” he asks.

The village has already secured its electricity connection through its own efforts.

The water-barrel lined streets are a hodge-podge of finished and half built houses with weeds growing up through the open rooves.

A father bathes his child beside one of the barrels outside his house on the street.

The meeting itself is held in a hastily constructed hall not big enough to accommodate everyone so that some attend by looking in through the windows.

However those at the meeting have great hopes for the future of their village.

The President of Recomville 2, Phase 3 and 4 says that though they have existed for four years without water “it just takes someone to start a project and when they see it working there is no need to invite people to join, they just start paying and paying”.

Lyn Tayawa is a mother of two who is helping to organize the co-op before she has even moved into the neighborhood.

“I am just waiting the pipes to be connected so I can move here and open my store,” she says.
“We are all very excited to have water here.”

Beyond politics and posturing, housewives and mothers in communities all over Manila have a very simple need to be met – water.

Because as Lorda Feudo so succinctly phrased it: “water is life”.

So! The anti-Sona rally, biggest event on the Filipino left's calender of the year. Foil to one of the biggest political events of the year: the State Of the Nation Address (Sona). This year the stakes are higher on both sides because this will be (fingers crossed) President Gloria Arroyos 9th and final Sona and amid rumours of her finding ways to change the constitution through charter-change (Cha cha) in order to extend her reign of power, people (not necessarily from the left) are very anxious to see her on her way.
This is what my Filipino friend from the book club had to say about it.
"80% of income goes to servicing debt, much more of which has been taken on during Gloria's term. Imagine trying to run a house when 80% of your income is going towards dept repayment, your household would fall apart – its amazing that our country hasn't fallen apart, maybe that can be Gloria's legacy –having held the country together despite the debt.
It should be one of the biggest rallies ever. Most people are going to make sure that Gloria leaves.”

A selection of other reasons for wishing to see the end of Gloria's Presidency, as given to me in a press kit by the organisers, are as follows: Human rights abuses have definitely spiked during Gloria's presidency but I'm not sure that she can be blamed for all the charges laid against her, some feel endemic;

$24 million – estimated annual amount of exposed corruption scandals involving the Arroyo family and close political allies since 2001;

$ 2 billion – estimated amount that gets lost to corruption in the Philippines each year;

28% - amount of debt interest payments as a percentage of annual spending of the Arroyo administration;

6%- Amount of government spending for housing as a percentage of total spending;
1% - Amount of government spending for health as a percentage of total spending;
4 million – number of jobless workers every year since 2001;
1,013 – number of victims of extra-judicial killings from January 2001 to March 2008; (government has these figures at only in the 200s – due to overseas pressures has had to start investigating these killings but most believe they haven't done nearly enough)
1036 – number of victims of torture ding the same period;
202 – number of victims of enforcers or voluntary disappearances;

This is the "colour story" I wrote for the newspaper but they didn't have room for it. Its not formal news style but not quite my voice either:
“Cha Cha. Gloria. Ibasura”.
The crowds chanted out slogans and surged forward, a colourful mass of flag waving protestors dotted with snack vendors, some standing round chatting or holding babies, others dancing wildly to the rock music on stage, but all there for one reason - “Cha Cha Gloria, Ibasura”.
It was my first ever Filipino rally and held outside what protestors hoped would be President Arroyos' last State of the Nation Address (SONA). It was one of the biggest ever and also the wettest.
Organisers estimated over 12000 were in attendance.
Police who numbered 5000 themselves had a more conservative estimate of 9700.

The rain seemed to spur some present to dance and flag-wave even harder, while others found a double use for their banners and used them for shelter.

I had been warned about how dangerous Filipino protests could be, but apart from the chaotic burning of Arroyo's effigy, there was nothing “third world” about this rally.
In fact it felt like a big street party with sudden bursts of energy as trails of matching flags jostled forward like charging knights whooping in the rain.
It was as though, in true Filipino spirit, the protesters had decided if they were going to protest a serious issue of national significance, they might as well have fun doing it.
Bayan secretary general Renato M. Reyes, Jr, told me they had been organizing the SONA rally for even longer than Arroyo's nine year presidency and apart from a lack of rubbish bins, they appeared to have it down to a fine art.
The impressive collection of bands playing original music, artists and speakers all performed on stage without a hitch and the massive down-pour of rain didn't cause any technical problems.

I was glad to be out here in the artist filled, carnival atmosphere of Bayan's “alternative version of SONA” rather than stuck inside the buttoned down congress.

Some of the artists present had gone to so much work
I bought a hand-made badge from a university students' cultural group whose mission it was to “expose social realities through art” and admired the work of a group who had embroidered a 30 foot patchwork flag for the occasion.
There was a photography exhibition mounted on a fence under umbrellas and one man from the Kadamay indigenous organization wheeled an effigy holding a torch aloft which he said was both a “call to every Filipino to mobilize and a message to the government to listen to every Filipino”.

However the stars of the day were the Ugatiahi artists collective who have been making giant effigies of Arroyo for the rally for the past nine years.
Together with students and professional artists Iggy Rodrigues, Ben Calubayan and Max Santiago spent a month creating a twelve foot “Gloria Forever” effigy of a rotting, maggot incrusted Gloria riding a “Cha Cha” tank, being fed from a drip painted like the U.S. Flag.
It was when the time came for the effigy burning that I remembered I wasn't in the West, with our strict safety codes, anymore and I suddenly felt that anything could happen.

Their was a palpable anarchic energy in the air as the band on stage played heavy metal and organizers struggled to keep the cheering crowd at bay as Gloria was doused with petrol and lit.

Unfortunately, with all the rain, the paper machet didn't catch fire very well and remained intact, smoke billowing evilly out of Gloria's head while protesters pelted her with rotten food.

Just like the real Gloria, her effigy wasn't going down without a fight.

There were even casualties in the struggle as one enthusiastic man threw petrol at the effigy and caught on fire when the flames sprang up.

Unlike in New Zealand where we have the “stop, drop and roll” fire safety message drummed into us since childhood, the burning man had no idea what to do and ran into the crowd flapping his arms wildly while a scrum of photographers descended on him trying to get their shot.

Undeterred, more petrol was used until Gloria was burning nicely.

When just a blackened outline remained the crowd went back to dancing to the music with an insane energy.
Despite another stage being set up on non-legal protest space on the other side of the freeway and protesters on that side standing waving their banners directly in front of police ranks, the police held their lines and the protesters didn't advance.

Having observed rallies around the world, this was one of the most energized yet peaceful ones I've been to and the “nationwide send off” for Arroyo on her trip to the U.S, will also serve as a memorable sendoff for me in my final week in Manila.

Hardly any traffic about this morning. It's like a different city on Sundays. There is a mass exodus back home to the provinces.
I went to the local organic market. It was like being back at the French market in Parnell – only less crowded. Like fancy international markets the world over, it's a lovely place to while away a Sunday morning, snacking on international treats and chatting with chilled out vendors with a love of craft or cuisine.
I sampled chinese dumplings, lemoncello, lassi, corn fritters and a pesto made from Filipino wonder herb “malangai” - said to be one of the highest in iron and vitamin C plants known to man.
And bought silkscreen printed postcards.
The lemoncello lady told me I was “very pretty” - it was like being back in Japan.
Next I wandered into a little park filled with sculptures, pagodas and water-features – gifted to a beloved accountant for services rendered to Makati City.
In the cool garden surroundings you can read plaques affixed to stones, with sage quotes from the philosophic accountant, or write your wishes in water on the stone “wishing table” and watch them slowly evaporate into the atmosphere, or just do what people normally do in parks – read, dream, picnic, stare at the fish, or like the group who have just entered my pavilion, have a photo-shoot.
On the way home a well-dressed man with gangrene limps after me and asks for money. I give him some, but he says he needs more to get an antibiotic prescription so I empty out my entire wallet and still feel like i should have actively gone to the hospital with him, waving my press ID and demanded that he be seen– its gangrene, I imagine he'll need his leg amputated.
It's the contrast of poverty and riches, being able to walk from a cool well kept park into a slum, which constantly surprises me here. It's like walking through dappled light. Constantly dipping in and out of cool shade into blinding sun and back - riches then poverty, almost more jarring than constantly being exposed to poverty alone.

People here who aren't beggars discourage me from giving money. They say that there is a lot more governmental help for those in need than you realise, (ie the free wards in hospitals) - “just ignore the beggars, some of them are earning a lot”. However after telling me not to give anything I still notice one of the journalists surreptitiously giving a few coins to a young girl “asking for alms”. People say that the poverty stricken but still voting masses have a lot of sway over the government here and have laws such as squatters rights and rent control protecting them, “the rent is lower than the taxes you have to pay on your house, you have to pay your tenants to move out if you want to sell it.”, says Ed. If we were in NZ I would have more faith in these safety nets, because I know that in NZ we have benefits for those that can't work, and free emergency medical care (for the moment anyway), and free schooling (education being perhaps the biggest need), and I'm fairly trusting that if I give money to a charity, it will be spent on that charity. Here my driver says “if you don't work- you will die” and I read in the paper a Red Cross poll which said 80-percent of Filipinos, Liberians and Columbians cited corruption as the biggest barrier to receiving aid compared to only 59-percent in Haiti, the Congo, Afghanistan, Georgia and Lebanon.
At least if you put money directly into the hands of a beggar, you know they will get some use out of it... and is begging really less admirable than many other occupations which don't contribute anything to the world except environmental degradation?

Standing tired and grumpy in the hot sun a man in a wheel chair wants some money and puts his best begging face on, extending his neck and pouting his lips and trying to look as forlorn and hopeless as possible. His begging face annoys me and though I'm sure they discriminate against people in chairs here, he looks in good condition and in my bad mood he would have to be dragging himself along on a skateboard to elicit any sympathy. I tell the next little girl, fingers clasped to her lips to demonstrate hunger, to go away too, but then I go into a shop and get a chocolate bar and find myself unable to buy myself one without buying her one too. Encouraging begging in children, as well as making life difficult for the next foreigner who comes along by setting up the expectation that they have spare money, is horrendously irresponsible, as is giving them sweets when what they really need is proper food. When the girl smiles in thanks for the gift and I see blackened stumps where milky white teeth should be, I feel guilty. On the other hand, I made a little girl happy, giving her a moment of chocolaty sweetness in an otherwise difficult childhood. She could be hit by a bus tomorrow or die of dengue fever or the flu, so I don't regret it, and I know it always makes me like people more when I see them showing compassion in countries where you might expect compassion to run a little thin.
Now, does anyone know of Toblerone's palm oil status.....

I'd forgotten about the death-rides. It's been a while since I've taken one of those long, freezing, terrifying bus journeys through Asia. But on Friday afternoon – a particularly rainy, trafficy, one- I got on a bus headed for Pagsanjan.
The first thing you notice when you get on, is the icy temperature. For some reason buses always always seem to have the aircon on too high and being used to walking round in the swampy heat of the tropics all day, you are never never prepared. (I'm sure it is the weakened resistance of those enduring hours of this freezing ordeal which is allowing the spread of swine flu from city to city rather than anything else.)
But the cold is a minor inconvenience – what is really troubling about your journey is the manic lurching in and out of traffic, overtaking on blind corners and suddenly slamming on of breaks, so that you imagine, should you go to the front of the bus, to find not an ordinary driver, but Hine Nui Te Po, or some other demonic scion of death standing at the wheel enthusiastically honking the horn, as she endeavors at breakneck speed to deliver you into the open mouth of hell. Traveling at night through a strange country, all is blackness out the window and you really could be speeding through some parched and fiery Dante landscape.

I don't know whether it's worse during the day when you can see the oncoming traffic of the “invisible third lane” (apt description from lonely planet), but it definitely seems worse for lone passengers disembarking at empty stops, when made bold by daylight, the driver doesn't see the need to come to a full stop and the passenger must leap from a still moving bus. - I saw a women roll head over heels onto the side of the motor-way today as the bus suddenly lurched just as she was stepping off.
In several countries more relaxed (about certain things) than my own there is always the option of over the counter opiates, but then again it's often more preferable to stay alert for wallet snatchers, to avoid missing your stop and to be ready for the afore mentioned leap from the bus.
When you arrive at your terminal in the dark, you could be anywhere and you just have to hope that you are in the right spot.
When I arrived at the last stop on Friday night however, I had no need for concern... On hearing of my planned solo trip my colleagues at the Police Press Corp, who to be fair do report on crime all the time, were so concerned that they made a phone call to the Police Chief in Pagsanjan asking him to take care of me.
For pretty much the whole weekend I had a police escort. Ed thought this hilarious when I told him. “The Pagsanjan Police received a special mission from HQ, forget about bandits and murderers, this weekend they have to concentrate on protecting you,” he splutters with laughter.
Four uniformed cops meet me at the terminal, one carrying an assault rifle, and we all barrel into the police car, Simon and Garfunckle on the radio. It's like we're teenagers packed into a car, driving off to a party. I lean back against the seat letting the police drive me where they will and the feeling returns to me, the loss of which I had been lamenting only that morning, that the world is a strange, mad, beautiful, free-floating place.
The feeling abated somewhat when we pulled up at hotel and spa Thai Touch and they asked if I wanted dinner or to go straight to my room and told me the room-price. There was that terrible moment of awkwardness ( I think instilled in me from Japan) where I worried about offending these people who had so kindly bought me here and don't really understand what it means to be a backpacker, coupled with worries that maybe there were other factors involved such as the police getting a cut from my fee or forcing the owner to give me a lower than fair price because they were police and can do such things in the Philippines. I made some noises about being a student and being on a budget and ordered dinner and then as I am learning to do from Filipinos – left it up to destiny.



Meanwhile Police Captain Louis talked to the owner of the hotel and, being the off season, she came back with a drastically reduced price.
Thai Touch ended up being pretty fun, staffed by sweet young girls who held dance practice with the waiters in their massage pajamas in the dining room at night and coerced me into joining them.
“Morning Ma'am” they greet me in their singsong voices.
Arriving at night, you be in a hotel room anywhere, but in the morning I look out the window to discover the town is on the banks of a river surrounded by misty bejungled hills.
The main attraction in Pagsanjan is taking a boat ride up the river to get splashed under the falls and then riding the current back down. It’s a really pretty ride through steep sided jungle and was used in the river scenes in Apocalypse Now. Sitting in the boat trying not to unbalance it while keeping my camera dry it reminded me of canoeing down the Whanganui river with Alicia - A trail of chocolates and letters in our wake for Nick to follow, like a trail of breadcrumbs for orphaned children leading to the gingerbread house.
What is really impressive about the trip is the skill of the boatmen taking the craft up river. When paddling isn't enough to get through the rapids, they take to leaping from side to side in the boat using one foot to push off from rocks and stepping back to heave the boat forward then jumping back to the helm to start pushing again. It's hard, impressive work and they really do deserve the tip they ask for. Unfortunately as a solo passenger I've just paid almost double the price of a shared ride and when I tell the boatman this he tries asking for my cell phone number instead. On my refusal he goes back asking for his tip. I wish I could have given more, because of the large fee I paid I'm sure he only got a small portion.

According to the Lonely Planet boatmen used to stop midstream and demand exhorbitant fees before moving the boat on again, until it got so bad that the tourism police stepped in and syndicated the whole act. Thus in the middle of the river there is now a police booth and medical centre.


Did I mention that the police dropped me off and picked me up from this excursion and when I returned from a walk on my own, the hotel owner told me they had been texting like crazy to find out where I was and an officer came into the garden bar I was in to tell me that if I wished to go anywhere, they would escort me.
They were taking their responsibilities as my guardians very seriously. Here are some of the texts I receive from Capt Louis.
“Gudmorning Sister, how are you now. pls wait my police woman name Yvette to assist you at Paete area.”
“Welcome and takecare, text me anytime f you have a problem or inform me f ever.”
In response to my thanking him and saying I'd got home safely - “Its little things. Yes thankyou lord. Anytime your welcome in my place, I miss u.”
But this is just how they text and speak round here. I met some communication students one time at work and now one sends me inspirational texts most nights from the bible or about an angel laying its wing over me. They are some of the nicest texts I've ever received and I take them in the totally sweet unself-conscious spirit they are given.


While I'm trying to read my book and drink a mango shake at the garden bar, I'm befriended by two women. They have left the kids with their grandparents and want me to drink beer and party with them. Party girl (27, three kids) starts teaching me Tagalog (Filipino) with great primary school-teacher gusto and asks if we have house parties in NZ, like on American Pie. She really wants to go to a house party “but it's impossible here”.
Her sister in-law (22, two kids) is more circumspect and sits quietly flicking her cigarette and pouting like a bored teenager.
Like many Filipinos I've met Party girl wants me to gain a “good impression” of the friendliness and great beauty of her tourist-destination country, but she also can't avoid the national preoccupation of discussing poverty and too many hungry children; “some people they just have labour, labour, labour (indicating a pregnant stomach) and never think how they can afford more and more children.”
The government is trying to educate the populace on family planning, but in the provinces they are up against Catholicism, poverty, and lack of education. However Ed says that family size is decreasing slowly pointing out that while his Mother had 17 brothers and sisters, he only has 12 and the biggest family out of his siblings only has seven kids. He doesn't hold out much hope for the uneducated poor though.

The next day three police officers drive me to Paete, a small craft town famous for carving and paper machete. At one shop you can buy coke bottles of petrol, carvings of animals, saints, Santa Claus, and Buddha, and a selection of gizzards and chicken claws on sticks. One of the officers is looking to buy a life size saint and both tell me this is the first time they've been here. The annoyingness of not being able to wander aimlessly stopping for coffee at the galleries as I choose is tempered by the sense that we are all on a fun tourist trip together. We all splash out on cheap souvenirs: fridge magnets for them and a Jesus bracelet for me.
When I am dropped back at the bus station at the end of my trip Officer Yvette gave me three santol fruit and says shyly “I love you”

Meriender snacks

Fate (or fatalism) and destiny and trusting in God, come up all the time in the Philippines. It is often attributed to Catholicism, but I prefer to think of it as Catholicism mixed with more Eastern, Buddhist concepts of a zen-like acceptance as opposed to Western obsessions with busyness and constant improvement. Not to do with Catholicism at all but in “The God of Small Things” the author describes an Eastern fatalism as coming from the knowledge that natural disaster, common in the typhoon-prone tropics, could arise and sweep everything away at any moment, so why struggle? In the Philippines this fatalism very much tied up with religion, has been blamed for a situation where the poor just squat in the dirt waiting for circumstances outside of their control to act on their lives, (although the millions of overseas Filipino workers sending money home so their children can go to school, or those organising strikes and peasant protests suggests this stereotype is often not true). But there are also very positive aspects to it, which enable Filipinos to accept the things that happen to them more easily and aren't constantly in existential angst. In this way journalists here tell me that they are able to do their job despite death threats or reporting under fire, because “if it's your time to go, then it's your time and there is nothing you can do about it”, or Marie's parents coming to terms with her eloping and getting pregnant at age 16 because “they realised it was my destiny”, or Rizza not worrying about being single at 40 in this very marriage focused country because “It's all part of God's plan for me”.
Despite, all its many troubles – massive poverty, environmental degradation, corruption, insurgencies, the highest number of internally displaced people in any country in the world this year, the sad admission of locals that “we are still a third world country”- the Philippines just scored 14th place in the world happiness survey. New Zealand came in at 126 and Costa Ricans are the happiness champions of the world. It surprises me that the Philippines can be so happy, but maybe their fatalism/belief in destiny is part of the answer. I ask Danny my driver if he is happy, generally in life. Despite his low income, the fact that several years ago one of his brother's was stabbed to death in a street fight, that he only gets to see his kids on the weekend and stays at a separate house to his wife – (Ed's maid), he tells me: yes, “I have my children, my families, so I'm happy.” Marie the maid confirms this “Filipinos don't think about their problems. I don't know why. Especially when they are with their families, they are happy, they don't worry.”

Getting frustrated at the police station. After my dutiful week on the subs desk I thought that going on the police beat would give me the chance to get out there and cover stories, however, I am constantly introduced as the “trainee” and given press releases to rewrite which I'm not supposed to get any secondary sources for and which I don't imagine will make it into print anyway, or the journalist I'm with gets me to write a story from a press conference which she is also writing herself, for practice. In some ways this is fair enough because I don't speak Tagalog and even though the police spokesman mainly addresses us in English, the journos mostly question him in Tagalog. I read in the newspaper today of two protest rallies and a group of journalists being detained by the army in Mindanao, while I am stuck here in Copland and going out to a lunch with the press corp and the police chief. I don't want to appear as a rude snotty intern who thinks they know better than everyone else, but at the same time I want them to realise that I am not some wide eyed 21 year old. I don't even know if they know I have completed my journalism course, as well as having traveled alone all over the world.
I have interviewed rebel army generals and the Prime Minister of the Karenni.
It occurs to me that I need to do some research and simply write stories for my own interest.
While there is a great atmosphere at the Police Press Corps with all the journalists laughing and joking together and helping each other out on stories, there is no sense here of going out to find the news, it all just seems to be about sitting back and waiting for official sources to give you the info they want you to have, despite Rizza's admission that if a government agency has been implicated the police will probably never solve the case and it will be eventually forgotten - they won't do anything which might make the goverment look bad if they can help it.
While they are happy to use colourful language in the newspaper, no colour is added through personal interviews with secondary sources. Although having said that Rizza tells me that she has got the scoop on a story because she knew the ex PR person, of someone involved in a murder/escape from jail case and was able to get some inside info from them even though she hadn't talked to them for a long time. Which proves what they were always telling us in journalism school, that a well kept contacts book can be a journalist's most important tool.
Later
Actually having to revise most of what I have just said about Philippine journalists and will probably re-revise it again before my stay is finished.
John tells me that as they are mostly concerned with policy here at the National Police station, they do wait for press releases, but still have to get secondary sources for their stories and investigate the story, even if only off the web.
Another journalist tells me that in press releases about attacks on the military, (mainly in the still war torn Island of Mindanao, where the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has been fighting for autonomy for the last 30 years), the army are always attacked “while building schools or constructing roads, but we filter this out and also cover the stories ourselves.”
Being here at the PNP (philippine national police) Press Corp, brings up questions for me about having regular beats for journalists. I have heard several journos and journalism educators in NZ lament the demise of the specialist reporter. The argument is that any danger of becoming too close to your sources on a regular beat is far outweighed by the opportunity to develop good contacts, specialist knowledge and gain background/insider information.
Talking to one journalist here who seems somewhat naïeve about the goodness of the police and the badness of “criminals” in which group she includes the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, who are a legitimate political force in Mindanao who have been in negotiation with the government, and Abu Sayaff, who have closer links to Islamic terrorists but whose roots are in land claims, I am inclined to think embedding journalists is not such a good idea, but then I talk to other journalists here who are far more skeptical.
Partly what is confusing for me as a Westerner used to watching media scrums and aggressive questioning on TV, is the very relaxed, casual, yet courteous relationship the journalists appear to have with the Police Officials they are interviewing. In the daily conferences with the Police Spokesman, the journalists always eat the candy off the table and lean over his desk during the interview and there is much laughing and joking between the two. From what I can tell the journalists still ask difficult questions but it doesn't seem to affect their good relationship. I think the laughter and joking helps to diffuse the uncomfortableness of any questions which the police seem ill adept at answering.
Rizza who has been with the police press corp for years tells me that journalists stay young because they are always “working, always laughing and smiling and talking”. (She should tell that to the young Filipino intern here who tells me that at the end of her four years of study she might not go into journalism because her boyfriend doesn't want her to work. I have noticed that a lot of the women at the police press corp seem unmarried, which isn't usual in the Philippines, but I wonder if in this strongly Catholic country marriage means children and stopping your career)
I went to a bigger conference where the Chief of Police brought a recaptured murderer who used to be a politician along with him. Apparently the police are fond of parading apprehended criminals in front of the media usually cuffed and in prison overalls. The fact that this prisoner was uncuffed in civilian clothing, drew accusations of “special treatment” from the journos despite politely waiting their turn to speak. Before the conference began there was much hilarity as I posed for a photo behind desk and microphone with all the journos leaning in. The attached mircophones which they all sit behind offer even more opportunity for joking at volume and when the Chief of Police walks in they clap and smile, “yaay”. This is possibly partly in appreciation of the lunch at a flash Chinese restaurant “to foster good relations” which he is shouting them to afterwards.
Rizza tells me “we believe we can get better information if we remain polite and cultivate a good relationship with officials.” - This could also be in line with her newspaper which I've heard described as “friendly” and historically wanted to give Cory Aquino a chance to learn her job after taking over from her deceased husband immediately after the first “people power” (peaceful revolution) which deposed Marcos rather than launch straight in with criticism and attacks..


When I first started at the paper I used to find some of the articles practically unreadable. It was hard to work out what they were talking about and stories were so filled with the official titles of people and organisations that I got lost in the sentences. I'm not sure if it is just because I am now used to the acronyms and know more of the background, or if being off the editing desk I am reading better put together stories, but I find them easier to read now. Partly it is just getting used to a different style and a common misuse of prepositions. Partly it is getting used to only “official” sources being quoted, no interviews with ordinary people whose lives are affected by the proclamations handed down by those in power. In many cases there is no evidence to suggest that the official sources are in any way trust worthy, but they continue to be quoted anyway. Of course politicians lie everywhere but the braziness here is quite surprising. As I saw pointed out in a Philippine Star editorial column, at least when Western politicians are caught out in major lies or mis-appropriation of funds they have the good grace to resign or if lacking in good grace, then public outrage or their colleagues and superiors can force them into resignation.
There has been a lot of controversy recently about the amount of travel which the president does. For all of Gloria Arroyo's faults I would have thought travelling would be part of the job of the leader of a nation whose dependence on foreign aid, and remittances from overseas workers is so great that they haven't really troubled themselves with developing strong industry and infrastructure at home. But Gloria doesn't just travel alone, she takes her family, her aids, their families, and she makes unscheduled stops at holiday locations, all on the taxpayers dollar. There are also a lot of questions over whether the grand claims she makes over the successes of her trips and the great gains she has made for the Philippines will ever actually materialise. The president however remains unabashed. She will never stop travelling, she says.
Back from her recent trip, she decided to check into a private hospital for self imposed quarantine in deference to swine flu, or at least that was the official story, however it transpired that actually one of her breast implants had sprung a leak and she had checked in to have it fixed. While her PR people tried to deny this, records proving she had had a breast job in the 1980s were released.
As one of my new friends from the bookclub put it, “she will always keep on travelling, the only thing that can stop her is a leaky breast”.
All the while I am thinking of NZ's ex Priminister, the down to earth Helen Clark in her little house in Mt Albert. (I don't really know how to think of John Key yet, but his Parnell mansion, (so unlike my own Parnell mansion), and excess of body guards doesn't fit in with my concept of the egalitarian myth that NZ still clings to, regardless of whether he grew up in a state house or not.)
Arryo's behaviour would simply be unacceptable in a NZ P.M.

I'm not having a good morning for insects. I started eating a custard apple this morning, but decided it tasted old, so gave the rest to the little vegetarian dogs who have come up from Boracai for their monthly grooming/vet appointment, or spa treatment as Ed laughingly calls it. These little chinese dogs, who are only given bottled water to drink (even I have started drinking a bit of tap water to gradually harden my stomach up) are an endless source of amusement for Ed who has no children, only god-children, of his own.
When I went to clean up what the dogs hadn't eaten, there were tiny maggots crawling out of the fruit. I tried to get upset about it but Marie didn't seem to think it was a big deal and told me that maybe I'd only eaten the part which didn't have maggots in it. You can't really maintain a sense of horror or self righteous outrage in the face of this placidity. You just have to shrug your shoulders and hope that you didn't ingest any maggots, or that if you did, they are merely good protein.
Ed says that its alright to kill the red ants which bite you but bad luck to do the same to the non biting black ones.

Later that day the fly I found floating in my 3 in 1 coffee at the shop I'm sitting at, seemed hardly worth mentioning, but the shopkeeper did kindly get me a new one, even though I was half expecting her to simply fish it out with a spoon.
I like this little shop in the leafy suburb by the police HQ. Its all two storey wooden and concrete houses and while there are none of the expensive high-rises of Makati, there is also none of the crazy traffic and people begging.
You could describe the house with the shop on the ground floor as having great indoor-outdoor flow in that its hard to tell where the street begins and the house ends. I'm sitting under an umbrella at a table with one of those brightly coloured plastic tablecloths with pictures of flowers and fruit on them. Occasionally small neighbourhood children wander up to watch me typing on my laptop, but it's not very interesting so they wander off again.
The dad is doing dishes at an outdoor sink, knocking his head on overhanging washing while the mum cleans the interior of the shop which sells things like noodles, individual sachets of shampoo and little clear bags of salt tied with a knot at the top. I think they open as a restaurant at night.
The low wages and unpredictable work hours, (labourers for example turn up at the recruitment agency everyday and never know if there will be work or not), mean that a lot of people don't have the cash for bulk supermarket shopping and live their lives continually running to the dairy, so to speak, when they need supplies. Obviously these local shops are much cheaper than in NZ.
They also have those american kind of brand stores here like 7/11, and ministop here, which are becoming prevalent the world over. Ed tells me he was really surprised when he couldn't find one in Saigon and has been trying to encourage his friend to expand his mini-stop chain into Vietnam. I don't tell him that the idea horrifies me, that the the expansion of chainstores is making the whole world look the same. - That this little shop I'm sitting at where the owners actually work there and are comfortable and relaxed because its their house too and they don't have the regimented distinction between work and home which necessitates all those painful, work/life balance magazine articles, and are their own bosses and are part of the community is infinitely more attractive to me than going to a ministop staffed by uniformed teenagers.
It's not that Ed wouldn't understand what I'm talking about, he owns a resort on Boracai and knows that tourists are looking for “authentic” experiences, just as he himself prefers wood and natural fibers to plastic. His resort and his apartment here are filled with beautiful teak furniture, Chinese vases, woven baskets and Spanish-era religious icons. He has chefs serving local food from his native island of Aklan and at the resort spa, the masseurs are trained in traditional Filipino massage as well as other forms. (I had a traditional one from the local salon downstairs, which involved hot banana leaves and at about $15 for an hour was fantastic value for money.)
Ed has many "god-childrens" and has to buy presents for them all, but he says he just gives them money because they are so fussy about getting the right brand. “ When I was a child we didn't even have brands, everyone just wore the plain t-shirts. Although with what my company does (marketing and PR for big brands), I'm partly to blame,” he says laughing the rueful laugh of those who can afford it.

“Don't panic, everything is under control”
This is the official response to two bombs going off in Iligan City, and Jolo Sulu this morning in the Mindanao region. These were preceeded by a bomb going off beside a catholic church in Cotabato, Mindanao, killing 5 and wounding at least 40. In Jolo 6 died and 40 were wounded. Still waiting for more info on Iligan....
Fingers have been pointed at armed muslim rebel group Abu Sayaff or rogue elements of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) which has been fighting for autonomy in Mindanao for the past 30 years and still have their “Peace Panel” ready to restart the peace negotiations which stalled last year promting an increase in fighting in the region.
However, MILF deny responsibility and so far no-one has come forward although there have been the usual rumours of foreign instigators like Indonesian Jihadis or government insiders whose interest's it serves to continue the fighting.
The journalists at the Police Press Corps who seem very agitated as they relate the news to me, mock this typical, official statement. It's what they have come to expect of officials but even as they laugh they look angry about it. “Always 'don't panic, everything is under control'” they are muttering to themselves. I also hear the dreaded words “martial law” mentioned.
People have been entertaining a fear of reinstated martial law ever since a small homemade bomb went off at the Ombudsmans office and a couple more were discovered undetonated last week at other lacations.
I assumed the bombs were warnings to the Ombudsman and Dept of Agriculture staff who often receive death threats in the course of investigating governmental graft and corruption and unscrupulous agricultural land grabs, to back off from one of their investigations. Two bombs were undetonated and the one that did go off happened at night when there was no one around, they obviously weren't meant to hurt anyone.
But this being the Philippines, a simple warning was far too a benign explanation for the bombs and claims and counter claims have been splattered across the papers ever since. Most of the claims centre around a destabilisation plot. Some say the bombs were planted by the Palace (President Gloria Arroyo's seat of power, styled on the White House in the U.S.) so that she would have an excuse to declare martial law and extend her power this way – her attempts to extend her term of office through holding a “Con Ass” - congressional assembly to introduce “Cha Cha” (charter change) where they would change to a parliamentary system where the Prime Minister (Gloria) gets elected not by the public but by her friends in the senate – having failed.
The Palace has responded that it is a “militant leftist” (“leftists” usually seem to be called militant over here), plot to destabilise Gloria's government.
Another theory has been dubbed: "Oplan August Moon," a supposed plot to install members of the Philippine Military Academy Class of 1978 in key positions as part of a scheme to keep the President in power beyond 2010.
As Rizza has said, if the the bombs do come from someone in the government, the police investigators will never solve the case, “It's very sad”, but the police are also part of the government and won't find any government suspects unless the media can produce evidence which forces them to act she says.

At the office we are constantly eating. Packages of food - noodles, cakes, nuts, arrive every day. Ed tells me that he used to send food to the lifestyle section until his friends there told him to stop because they already get so much. It's supposedly so the people sending the food will get favourable writeups, but half the time they don't even remember who sent it. Ed has a story of an infamous editor who didn't used to share the gifts sent to her with the rest of the staff and was gossiped about and reviled throughout the newspaper and the PR industry. Eyes wide with horror he talks of how she even left food to rot in the ref (fridge) instead of giving it to the staff. He is mortified at this waste of food. “ If you get something, you share it” he says. He himself is punctilious about not wasting food despite being able to afford it, and I watch his careful shopping and supervision of food in the house with admiration. He explains to me how he buys mangoes in varying stages of ripeness so that they can be eaten over the week, each as it reaches perfect firmness and I see him worrying over the bananas if they appear to be getting overripe. The answer, which at home would be banana cake or smoothie, here is boiling the bananas in their skins so the take on a soft sweet dessert like flavour. Alternatively they can be wrapped in wanton skins and deep fried or simply sliced and fried. You can buy them like this on sticks, hot off the BBQ from street vendors.
When I think of the amount of food which gets thrown out at home I am mortified myself.
Ed says that he makes sure to remember to send stuff to the people who work in the lifestyle office and don't get to go out and receive all the perks of arts reporters going to swanky openings and product launches. He says remembering and respecting the little people is really important in PR, you can't just talk to the editors, you have to chat with everyone. Otherwise the people on the desk can easily “lose” your photos, not give your story the attention it deserves, swear black and blue that there is only a tiny space left on the page to fit it in, “they can be very hard headed”.
In some ways these secret acts of revenge delight me. Like the waiter spitting in the food, or even more effective, simply “forgetting” to go back and serve a table of rude customers, these small subversions are incredibly satisfying and go a little way in redressing the power balances of the world. I remember when I started talking about going into journalism, aside from ecstasies over hearing me use the word career, some people seemed surprised and wondered, with good cause, if that was what I really wanted. A friend asked what I would do if someone was mean to me during an interview. I replied that I'd probably cry and then change their middle name to arse when I wrote the article. I was joking, but it is still a sweetly seductive thought. Despite claims to a Godlike objectivity, journalists are still human and at the end of the day calling someone an arse may be the most honest thing anyone has ever written about them. Which is why I guess blogs were invented and I will be the first to admit that the rabid name-calling rants which some of them descend into is the antithesis of good journalism. But then again through subtle use of hegemony, binary opposition and key words which have an implied if not stated negative connotation, articles can be hugely damaging to a person or movement, particularly if they are in a minority, without ever actually saying anything bad about them. See the Kupu Taia study on reporting of Treaty of Waitangi issues if you need proof of this.
So back to the newspaper office and the free food. There is a culture of gift giving. The way Ed describes it, it seems mere politeness which helps the world to run smoothly on well oiled tracks. It's letting others share in your good fortune, the simple mechanics of one good turn deserves another, but looking at it a different way it is merely an extension of the corruption which marrs Filipino society at every level and has resulted in the loss of literally billions of dollars which could have gone into public works but instead have been privately pocketed.
So if there is this culture in the Philippines, relatively benign at the lower level but damaging to the country at the scale of politicians, how do you separate out the two, how do you even begin to understand it from a non-western viewpoint, where it may come from a tradition earlier, and outside of the democracy it sits so uneasily along side. How, when the very journalists who are most strident in their outrage against bribery and corruption, can be seen sitting round the office eating gifted cakes, do you begin to change this situation? Or am I making ridiculous leaps in conflating the two? Maybe the difference is that the gifts sent to the newspaper here are shared among everybody instead of being kept in the hands of a wealthy owner?
At the risk of sounding like a rude ignorant foreigner who is in no position to judge another country, I ask some of the journalists around me what their opinion is. One tells me that as a rule of thumb, if you feel uncomfortable then you shouldn't accept a gift, if it's something you couldn't afford yourself, then it's inappropriate, but food is harmless and doesn't effect the way anything is written or editorialised.
I don't think most of the journalists and subs know who the food comes from but I still wonder if subconsciously those higher up in the newspapers feel better disposed to people and organisations who have been generous to them.
Another editor tells me that they have “a different concept of hospitality”, that giving food is part of Filipino culture - “a gesture of gratitude”. I can well believe her as practically everyone I meet tries to press food upon me in this snack obsessed country. A broadcaster I meet tells me the tagline of the midday news is “The Freshest News at Lunchtime” - “because everything in the Philippines is associated with eating.” I've also been proudly told of the Filipino habit of discussing what they are going to eat at the next meal while still eating the first one.
The editor tells me that no demand to print stories, comes with the food and they just accept it whoever it comes from.
In my limited experience of newspapers in Aotearoa, I can recall the Cadbury Chocolate Factory occasionally slipping a box of chocolates to the Otago Daily Times who are just around the corner or the science festival sending a thankyou note to me and the other intern for our coverage. These are reflections of the fact that they are all part of the same small community and I don't imagine it would stop the ODT from running negative stories.
The editor does tell me that corruption is a problem in the Philippine media (like almost any organisation you care to name in the Philippines), but food is not part of the equation. She says politicians or corporations use PR people to get their stories across. They will get in touch with certain journalists and then “money changes hands”, and the journalists write the stories they tell them to. There are various terms for this type of journalism such as "envelopmental journalism" as in envelope mental. where you wait to receive the envelope of money after the story is published or broadcast. Former President Fidel Ramos liked to call it ACDC journalists - attack and collect (the $$$) defend and collect. However at her newspaper she says it is virtually impossible to slip in one of these false stories because the news goes through so many gate keepers and it is pretty obvious to the editors if a report isn't true. She says the editors can usually detect if money is involved in a story, especially if it is very different from what the other newspapers are running, and they simply change it at the desk. Reporters generally seem to have no control over how their stories are editorialised and as the newspapers tend to have a reporter stationed at each major government department or press conference, the final copy which is printed in the paper can have many different stories combined into one. I've seen up to eight names contributing to the byline. On big stories it can be a truly collaborative process.

When I ask the editor if she thinks there might be any connection between the polite giving of food and the loaded giving of money. She, who as editor is facing 21 libel suits, but “they never win, I know my libel laws”, answers thoughtfully yet acerbically: “Maybe the giving culture travels over into the politician's minds and they think they should be giving away money – except its not their money to give, it belongs to the taxpayers.”

I'm jumping in and out of the brightly coloured, open ended, still moving jeepneys like a pro these days. And easing my way on foot out into the endless streams of traffic as confidently as the tiny child I saw raise an authoritative hand to bring a truck to a halt as he stepped out in front of it.
In fact the last jeepney I caught I found myself in the responsible position of passing the fares of others further down on the bench seat to the driver and returning their change.
I love the way, in bumper to bumper traffic, the jeepney drivers fight for every inch of road space they can gain, dodging bicycles, cars and buses while changing gears and lanes (if the term road lanes can even be applied here), and handling the fares on the dashboard all at the same time. I have the utmost confidence in their driving, that they will do everything in their power to break through the immovable wall of traffic and inch forward as though through an act of sheer will power.
Despite the craziness of the traffic, where indicating and using side and rear view mirrors is optional, while horns are encouraged, I don't think I've seen any road rage here.

Maybe its living up here on the 32nd floor viewing the street through glass. Possibly it's getting older, but for some reason all the admonitions of the “be carefullers”, the “abunaias”, the xenophobic, middle-class, “its a dangerous world out there”, naysayers, seem to be getting to me. The other day after walking back from the Greenbelt Mall with its designer cafes and Louis Vuitton shops, I stumbled on an entrance way which led down a dark corridor of shanty dwellings cobbled together from plywood, tin, tarp and old signs. I wanted to enter and explore, but suddenly got worried that I would be robbed, or at the very least, intrude into unwelcome territory. I told myself I'd come back later without my wallet, but I was ashamed at myself for having let the voices of cloistered safety get to me.
Recently I met some people who knew me when I was a child. They said their main memory of me was of a tiny girl walking fearlessly along the top of a fence three times her height and with the arrogance of childhood, determinedly ignoring anyone who told her she'd fall off. What had become of that little girl so fearless.
The next day I ventured back out into the streets which were intermittently flooded with pouring rain. While most people took shelter under awnings children, who find only joy in the warm monsoon rains, were running madly through the streets capering in puddles and splashing in overflowing drainpipes. Rain and poverty seemed to simply slide right off their childhood worlds – like water off a ducks back....
I went back into the shanty town armed with a camera. I don't know what I had been worried about. I even ate at one of the food stalls gingerly picking out the meat. I took the photos which I never bothered with at the mall. These are the images we want to see as tourists of S.E.Aisa – poverty, gurgling half naked kids playing in the drain, skinny men and women peddling their wares from a table on the street corner or a shouldered basket. These are the images we have come to expect and are comfortable with. We aren't interested in the signs of wealth and Americanisation of the high rise buildings and malls which press down around the shanty town. We can see enough of that at home.
Is capturing these images of poverty which may be a country's or individual's secret but insurmountable shame, merely a new form of colonialism?
Everyone loves the rambunctious, cheerful poverty and innocence of laughing children running wild in the streets. Its the other side of poverty, the maimed and the dying, the resigned, hopeless faces of a life of struggle, of worrying about where to get your next meal from, or whether you can feed your children, which are harder to look at.
I've carried an image with me for many years now, of a man in Saigon sitting on the footpath with a giant festering wound taking up almost half his leg, which he would probably die from. I can still see the look of suffering and resignation on his face, the pestilent hole in his leg. After a month of similar sights, the overwhelming sense of hopelessness had infected me too, and to my shame I carried on walking past. Surrounded by so much poverty, you feel helpless and swamped, but some of his wound has stained me too and I've carried the memory like a scar ever since.
I saw the man again yesterday. He was sitting under a tree in the rain across the road from a private hospital, unable to afford entry. It was a different man of course, a different path had led him to this state of ragged clothes and a large burn on his inner thigh in need of medical attention. (How much can some pain killers and that second-skin bandage stuff cost?)
I walked past, walked back, gave him some money (it probably wasn't enough, but on the upside there will always be more chances to get it right, always more homeless in need of assistance), took a photo, stood in the rain brushing away tears. - When you are a traveller in a foreign country, can't speak the language, you are not in a position to take people home, to look after them or take them to a private hospital – or so you tell yourself. Later I'm told that hospitals are supposed to set aside a couple of free wards for people who can't afford to pay, but that probably the man didn't know that and no-one would have bothered to tell him. Ed wasn't sure if the rules about providing free-wards were even enforced. In a country famed for its bribery and corruption, probably not.
In the past backpacking round Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, you feel very aware that you have more money or at least more earning power at home, than nearly everyone you meet. You can't help but feel guilty of your privileged position. However, here in the Philippines, the lifestyle I'm leading, (like most middle-class there is a driver and a maid at Ed's apartment), the people I'm mostly associating with – in comparison I'm not rich at all. Ed tells me that despite the great poverty in his country, it is also home to some of the world's richest people – 4 in the Forbes top 100 rich list. In these circumstances, guilt turns to anger at a country which is so incapable of distributing its wealth, that people are dying outside hospitals, while politicians buy helicopters and hire jets to do their campaigning from, and Emelda Marcos has a massive fortune in confiscated jewels which she says should be kept in a museum as national treasures.
Anger too at the WTO, IMF, wealthy nations who refuse to wipe the “aid” loans, which are crippling so many of the world's poorest countries and forcing them to send their money overseas, rather than put it into public services like schools and hospitals.
Ed tells me that the shanty town near our apartment has been condemned. It sits on the banks of a river turned black with scum and refuse. The government keeps threatening to tear it down at every election, but doesn't according to Ed in order to buy the votes of those living there.

I read this in an interview in Bulatlat about aid and corruption in the Philippines:
Bulatlat: The Arroyo government said that taxes paid, including those paid by OFWs, are used to finance infrastructure and to create employment.

Africa: First of all, the largest part of the national budget goes to debt service and to corruption. The single largest budget item, taking up around 30 percent, are interest payments on foreign and domestic debt. At the same time, some 20 percent of the national budget is lost to corruption, amounting to over US$2B annually – as had been estimated by the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and even a former speaker of the House of Representatives. Secondly, that kind of reasoning also means that we can say that taxes are used to finance human rights violators through spending on the military which has been implicated in thousands of human rights violations. Thirdly, if the government is really so concerned about generating employment, then it should overhaul its economic policies rather than spend on likely graft- and corruption-ridden infrastructure projects.

Some of my free time is spent at Green Belt Park. Not so much a park as a very green, open shopping mall with gardens and sculptures and elevated walkways like tree houses. It gives you the feeling of being in any very wealthy modern city, where even nature is planned. (which is one half of Manila – the other being poverty, chaos, manic traffic, shanty towns) Here I drink coffee at triple the price of a meal from a street vendor and am enticed into a bar for happy hour. The sudden flood of sensory memory, of the absolute luxury and holiday mood of outdoor bars in hot cities everywhere, in general and of drinking frozen margaritas with Jared in New York specifically overwhelms me and I sit at a bar made exotic with memory and temperature, rather than décor, which is kind of American family restaurant.
The waitress, with a charming, American-accented gregariousness, launches into a monologue about the colour of my eyes. The colour of her own I can only imagine to have been brown as her bright blue eyeshadow overshadows any natural pigment of iris. She told me that I should come back later for “Laughology” where people from all different countries would come to tell jokes and I would be “laughing and laughing and laughing”. How I wished to return that night so I could laugh and laugh, so confident were the waitress's assurances of the fun I would have.
I went home and had dinner with Ed instead, who is often quite entertaining in his own way.
Ed is 60 and the CEO of his own PR company with clients such as Nestles, Louis Vuitton, Purina and British Airways. He seems to know, but maintain a healthy cynicism for all the celebrities in celebrity-focused Metro Manila and has stories of the “social climbers and social butterflies” he meets, including crazy old Emelda Marcos who came across for lunch at his friend's apartment in her dressing gown and slippers. Ed studied engineering at university but used to enter and win short story competitions so got picked up by an ad agency when he graduated. He worries about his rotund belly and eats American “healthy cereal” and drinks “weight loss juice”, ruefully aware that the bold claims on the packets are just marketing spin which he himself has helped design ,but consumes anyway. He talks expressively with his hands and face as much as with words and seems kind and genteel and remarkably sage and down to earth for someone whose two small dogs have their own maid to look after them. He tells me the dogs, who live at his resort on Boracai, eat cereal for breakfast, carrot sticks for snacks and get brushed twice a day. Head cocked on one side he is able to perfectly mimic the expression of a street dog begging for food as he explains the dog rescue campaign which Purina is sponsoring in Manila. I consider bringing home a kitten I find in a park.
While most people probably don't have maids for their dogs, it is fairly standard for anyone in the middle classes to have a maid who lives in the house. Apparently it can be better paid than teaching and the Philippines struggles to fill all the teaching positions as they lose teachers to maid-jobs in Manila and even better paid, overseas. According to Bulatlat Magazine Vol v No 11 “ the exodus of Filipinos was instigated by Marcos in the 1970s urging workers to send back money to prop up the economy”. Marie, the maid here has lunch and dinner waiting for me on the table every day and almost snaps at me “just leave it Madam” when I try to clear my own plate. She sleeps on a bunk bed in the laundry and goes home on Sundays to see her children. (It’s normal for maids to leave their kids with their parents. Ed tells me that when they work overseas and send all their money home to their families, they often find their relatives have spent the money on themselves rather than on the kids whom it was intended to support. He blames they sway of Catholicism over the country, but can't understand why people already poor, would want to have more and more children they can't afford.) Marie speaks good English but I don't know how to begin to ask her what she thinks or hopes or wants from life. I know that my three weeks as a servant for some rich people in Britain didn't make me want to take it up as a career, even if cleaning can pay more than entry level journalism.