Slavery or Saving Grace?

There is a store across from our internet cafe that sells livestock supplies, bulk rice and corn grits in wooden bins, a few plumbing, electrical and painting supplies, and food and sundries for the comforts of daily life. The store is owned by the most prominent family in town. The same family also owns a couple of other stores here.

I know the owners of the stores and I pass the time of day with them once in a while. They are pleasant and unassuming folks, all. Quiet and with a humble demeanor and ways. I guess I would say they are decent folk and there is nothing in what I see in them that resembles anything close to a controlling or superior attitude.

The store across from our shop employs 4 or 5 girls in their late teens or early twenties. They also have several young men working for them, who do the heavy lifting, make deliveries and pump the gas at the store's station. I am going to focus on the situation of the girls, since it is the one with which I am more familiar.

The store and the family home are all one building, with a separate warehouse next to it for LP gas, 50 kilo sacks of rice and grits, and big bags of feed. Above the store is the living quarters of the girls who work as sales girls. "Work" is a general description of a day spent standing around and chatting and occasionally waiting on customers. The sales girls are not overworked.

However, their living and working conditions are very different than anything allowable in the United States. They work a 7 day week from 6:30 or 7AM to 7PM. When they get off work, they are free to roam around  the town, for one hour. They are required to be in their dormitory, atop the family home, by 8PM each and every evening.

The employees make a very small wage: the equivalent of about $45 per month. All of their meals, and a place to sleep, are provided at no charge. Other employees of the family do the cleaning and cooking, shopping, etc. 

The employment situation of these young ladies could be seen as something akin to slavery, I suppose. But in a country where poverty is the norm - a poverty that all but the most destitute in the U.S.A. would know about - these girls could be considered lucky. They eat regularly and have a roof over their heads. There is no social life, other than the socializing between fellow employees. There is no time or money for hobbies and activities that we Americans take for granted.

Questions come into my mind: What are human beings entitled to? Should a difference in a person's financial status be a determining factor of entitlement? Are the employers, in this case, well-intentioned benefactors or greedy capitalist slave drivers? How do we fairly determine the boundaries of our responsibilities to others?

Ordinary Love

It's November 1st and All Saints Day here in the Philippines. Tomorrow is All Souls Day. I dropped Clyde and Jan Mark off at the cemetery before heading here to the internet shop, with Gab, the six year-old. They will buy candles and put them at the grave of their grandmother: Emelie's mother. The cemetery is very crowded on this day. The peaceful dead have to make room for the hustle-bustle of the living. Since tomorrow is a working day, most people visit the graves of their ancestors today.

People from all over the province come here to pay respect to their dead relatives. The town is full of folks shopping, walking around and visiting. The carenderias will sell out early. The road in front of the cemetery is a mass of people and parked vehicles. Visitors contemplating those who have passed on are not thinking about traffic as they walk in groups down the center of the road.

Vendors selling candles, hot food, snacks and flowers line the street on both sides. Food for the living. Tribute to the dead. A small profit for the locals, living near the cemetery.

Today or early tomorrow, most visitors will head back to their homes in Cebu City or other parts of Cebu Province. Most will be back here at Christmas time and then again in March, for the town fiesta and the two-week-long Hinatdan Festival. Expat Filipinos come from all over the world to enjoy their town and visit their relatives at this time. And many foreigners visit as well, most of whom are men married to Filipinas from the Ginatilan area.

Celebrating is in the culture and in the blood of the Philippine people. Birthdays, weddings, holidays and the feast days of saints - especially the feast days of saints - are celebrated at great expense. Pigs are bought and raised for the occasions and butchered a day ahead of time for the big feed. The pig is either roasted whole, over a hot, wood fire reduced to coals, or placed in huge pots and woks, and also cooked over a fire of wood. Native chickens, maybe ten or so, are also part of the menu. They are tough and lean and the meat is dark. But the flavor is worth the extra chewing required.

It is evening now, about 7:30. I've been writing this in spurts. In and out of the shop all day, there has been no chance to sit quietly for a length of time. It has been my day to shop and do errands. I took the kids home about an hour ago. They were here playing games on the internet for an hour or so. Tomorrow is the first day of school in 12 days. Semester break. I'm glad it's over. Not that I don't enjoy the kids, its just that our time together (Emelie's and mine) is much more relaxed when it is just the three of us: Emelie, Shane and me.

In keeping with the native spirit (and spirits) I'm drinking Tanduay rum and Sprite in celebration of the end of semester break; all souls day; all saints day and good rum. In fact, it strikes me that life is worth celebrating in appreciation of the happiness it brings. Here's to you, life! Thanks for keeping me interested! Thanks for the family who bring out the best in me. Thanks for my friends and acquaintances who add love and spice to my ordinary routine. And thanks for the beauty that stands tall on trunks, walks on two legs, and sways in the breeze and the ripples of the sea. Daghang salamat kaayo!!

Fish Soup and Clyde Weaves a Fateful Tale

Tinola Isda or Fish Soup

Fish soup is a common dish here in Cebu Province. It starts off with the catch of the day. To this is added some onions and garlic. Emelie used green onions for today's soup. Then she added the round, green leaves pictured - molonggay, or kalamungay. When it was done cooking, I put the soup over rice. Many people eat the rice on a separate plate from the bowl of soup, but I like to combine them.

The variety of fish and other seafood seems endless. It is all delicious and healthful. The molonggay leaves add a power-packed lot of vitamins and minerals to the food, and it is tasty, to boot. The leaves come from a tree of the same name. The tree grows everywhere here and can be started by plucking a small branch from an existing tree and stuffing it in the soil.

We consume seafood from a few times a week to a few times a day. In the year and a half that I've been here, I have never seen a fish fillet, other than the ones I filleted myself. The fish is always served whole or cut into sections, if it is a larger fish. I filleted fish at home a couple of times and showed my wife how to do it. The next time she served fish, one side of the fish was filleted and the other side was cut into sections, with the bone. The fillet was for me and the sections for her. She thought I would prefer the fillet, but steaks are just fine with me, so, after a couple more times of serving the fish half one way and half the other, I suggested she just cut it the traditional way.

I have gutted and scaled fish a few times but I am slow at it, compared to Emelie. She can have ten fish done in the time it takes me to do two of them. I'm pretty sure this is an aptitude shared by most Filipinos. They are experts with most any kind of knife. Today, I watched Clyde take a dried branch from a guava tree that was cut off several weeks ago, and make it into a knife handle, using nothing more than his bolo, the machete of the Philippines.

I am eating a banana as I type this blog. We recently bought about 150 bananas, in two bunches, from the man who rents us his house. The bananas were growing in the yard. We paid a little over two bucks for the whole lot of them. You might be wondering what on earth we will do with 150 ripe bananas. We have three teenagers. Eating thirty bananas a day is no great feat for our crowd. Even the two year-old can devour several a day, between meals. The bananas we have now are about half the size of a large Chiquita banana, but the flavor makes a Chiquita seem tasteless.

Peanuts, anyone? I bought a large coffee can full of them at the market yesterday, intent on making lugaw today, which I did, but almost didn't because the boys ate most of the peanuts. I gave the boys and their sister each a handful, in the shell, after I boiled them last night. I told them I wanted to save the rest for the logaw, which is sweet rice cooked in lots of water so the consistency is mushy and soupy. Meat, fruit, veggies or anything edible can be added to the rice. I like mine with peanuts and I decided to add some bananas as well.

The boys got into the pot when I was in town doing errands  today. By the time I got home, they had eaten most of peanuts that I was saving for the lugaw.

I had a premonition. Last night before we went to bed, Clyde was telling us all a story about how he was born on a Sunday and on Monday he was given one apple to eat but it didn't fill him up. On Tuesday, he at one orange, but he wasn't full. On Wednesday he ate one apple and one orange; on Thursday it was one bag of rice. As the days went on, the gist of the story became apparent: nothing could fill Clyde's belly. A bag of rice, an apple, an orange, the combination of all of them - same result. The wrap-up to the story was this: only peanuts could fill Clyde up. He laughed and laughed at his own storytelling and we all laughed along with him. But I already had a suspicion about the fate of the peanuts.

Bagio, Typhoon, Hurricane. Same windy and wet animal.

October 11, 2011

 After washing my clothes yesterday in the late morning, my wife informed me that a "bagio", typhoon, was on the way. A couple of hours later, the relentless rain came with a furry. It has rained for the past two days straight. A couple of times it petered out to nothing more than a mist, but it never quit completely, and mist turned to heavy rain once again.

The Philippines gets an average of 25 typhoons a year. Our island of Cebu is sandwiched between bigger islands on either side of us. Most of the weather comes from the West, where Negros Island shoots skyward with its mountainous interior, keeping us safe from the kind of waves that would otherwise pound our coast and wash away the bamboo houses that stand on the sea wall or tempt fate by hanging out over the ocean, on pilings of wood or concrete.

In the cities, rain flows into garbage-clogged sewers, backing up into the concrete and tarmac streets, where it can't be absorbed by the ground. Overflowing rivers add to the melee. People are stranded. Some drown. Many are homeless. Not a pretty sight.

But here "in the Province", meaning anywhere outside the city, the water simply flows out to the sea.

My clothes are still hanging - and still wet - in various places around the outside of the house, under the shelter of the overhanging roof. If the rain doesn't let up soon, my clothes will grow mold. We don't own a dryer and there isn't a commercial laundry anywhere in town. If you own clothes, you dry them on a line. It's part of living here. If mold and mildew take up quarters on your shirts and undies, you just wash them again and pray for sunshine.

Two years ago, seven typhoons piled up on the backs of each other. The rain was extremely heavy and the wind blew hard... for two weeks solid. Trees were knocked down. A couple of houses got washed out to sea. Emelie and I were renting a place a couple miles south of here, right on the ocean. We didn't have a problem.

Typhoons might seem like something that occupies a spot near the top of a list of "cons" for living here. Not so, really. Since we don't get flooded, the typhoon spits and blows like a toothless old man who can't bite.

A Visit to the LTO

09/23/2011

The Land Transportation Office is where you get your driver's license and vehicle registration renewed. There are only two offices in the Province of Cebu. One is in Cebu City, and the other, in Carcar, a suburb of Cebu City. The island (and Province) of Cebu is long and narrow, like a  cigar. It would make perfect sense to put one LTO at one end of the island, and the other office at the other end. But the two offices are practically on top of each other. That is why we had to drive 215 kilometers, round trip, to get our registration renewed for our Rusi motor scooter. Six hours of sitting on a 125cc motor scooter. There is a consolation. A big one, in fact. The scenery is absolutely gorgeous, traveling through colorful little towns, along the coastal highway, then up, down and around the mountain roads as we cross the province from west to east.

So, we got there. We were escorted into a small office that served as the registration renewal office and the drug testing center for those getting their driver's license. The registration part of it had two desks and one young woman at each desk. The two ladies shared a typewriter which they passed back and forth. Yes, a real typewriter, a portable, in fact, I suppose to make it easier to pass back and forth.

Both ladies hunted and pecked with their middle fingers of one hand, reserving the middle finger on the other hand for a frenzy of taps on the space bar. The lady on the right, the one typing up our application, was the slower of the two. She could probably bang out four to six words a minute if her mouth wasn't spewing out a couple of paragraphs between each peck.

She was a very pleasant woman. Both of them were. At one point, the drug testing lady and a woman from another office came in and the four ladies had a five minute chat about the one woman's gray shoes with the big flowers on them. Ahem. Really, these ladies were all so very nice I never had a negative thought about them or the way they do business. After all, it's an integral part of Philippine life to cool your jets and enjoy your life and not get caught up in thoughts about wasting your valuable time.

In truth, the American viewpoint of self-importance begins to seem rather foolish and silly, as I am gradually discovering, after 16 months of living here.

Well, the ladies' pleasant little chat gave their middle fingers a chance to cool down from their race across the keyboard. Now it was time to let the lips cool and get back to the business of filling in ten pages of forms in order to justify collecting a heavy toll for the privilege of owning a motor cycle.

With the trip to the emissions testing facility, and standing in line to pay, included, we were done in just under two hours, a dizzying speed compared to last year's two days to get the same scooter registered. (No joke. We had to get a motel room for the night and then go back in the morning because the person who hands out the plate stickers was in the city for the day. Apparently there was only one person qualified to pick up a sticker and hand it through the window. I didn't ask.)

And then we had a very nice ride home. And this kind of sums up life in the Philippines: No matter what befalls you in your daily adventures, there is always the beautiful sea, the lush tropical trees, plants and flowers, and most of all, the wonderful people who inhabit these islands half a world away from my mother land.

6 + 2 = 12

During the week, there are six of us at the house. On the weekends, 8, with the addition of Frederick and Gabriel. But the additional two kids more than doubles the noise, commotion and confusion. I have often told Emelie that I would like to change that, but I haven't made a move in that direction because I just don't know what to do. I don't have the heart to tell Frederick and Gabriel that they  can't come to our house on the weekends. They really look forward to it, and it is an opportunity for them to eat almost as much as they want, perhaps making up, to some degree, for the deficit in their daily diet, Monday through Friday.

Those two youngest boys were spending weekends with us long before the other kids came to live with us. A couple of years ago, they stayed in a house we rented right on the water. It was a big house, where the kids could play in the upstairs common room. They slept on mattresses there during the night, and slid on them, across the polished wood floor, during the day. They wrestled, did yoga with me and engaged in the kinds of things boys love to do, which almost always ended in tickling and fits of laughter.

But now they don't get near the attention that they did then. Besides sharing our attention with their two older brothers, their sister and her baby, we have immersed ourselves in a lifestyle that squeezes activity into the hours until they bulge, what with preparing to build a house, moving our internet business to a new location, and starting a business of selling used bicycles.

What a stupid American I am! I came to paradise to become part of a laid-back culture, so I could truly enjoy my time here. What happened? Old habits and new situations, that's what. The worst of the habits is a result of the American way of thinking that creates a direct relationship between doing and self-worth. That thinking persists despite the idyllic vision I had of relaxing peacefully on my front porch, watching the ocean waves lap the shore and tumble the grains of sand.

New situations? Well, taking on a family of kids would qualify.The added financial responsibility tugs at our income, in all directions, making it thinner than a gnat's ass stretched across a barrel head. So, we eat at home, ration food, and shop for clothes where the second-hand attire is in wrinkled heaps on the bamboo tables, on market day.

It's not fair, but Emelie and I often buy one food for the kids and after they go to school, we get something better at a carenderia for her and me and Shane. We can't afford to feed them the more expensive foods but I am not willing to live on sardines, noodles, eggs and dried fish, which is what they often eat, along with their rice. I admit to being a spoiled American. But the kids are still far better off with us than they were at home. Many times there was only corn grits for them to eat, and sometimes they had to go hungry because there was absolutely no food at all. It is a common occurrence here in the Philippines, especially among the mountain people who rely on farming for their existence. Many of the farmers cannot afford a carabaw, a water buffalo, to plow their fields. So, the size of their farms is limited by what they can till by hand. And their small farms do not always grow enough food to feed them from one harvest to the next.

This life is so much different than what I am used to. In the U.S.A., it is a certainty that I would never be raising a family of four kids - an instantaneous family with 3 teens and a baby. Back home, if I came across destitute or abused children, I would simply report it to the proper authorities whose job it is to see that they are taken care of. I would easily avoid any involvement which would require a personal commitment to their welfare.