Sundays are very quiet days in the Philippines. Most businesses are closed, and I found all the copra warehouses closed and the streets empty of trucks. That isn’t to say that the streets were without life. There were quite a few people on that street and as I made my way along it, people asked me to take their picture and I stopped and took some pictures and chatted for a bit.

These picture-taking sessions can be a bit awkward depending on how long they last. I can just take a picture and move on. For the most part, people don’t even ask to see their picture on the LCD screen. That’s a good thing, actually, because the screen is generally washed out by the bright sun. But if I stay and talk to people, it generally leads to them asking me for money. And then I’m not sure what to do. It’s one thing to give money to a single person when you are walking down the street going somewhere. It’s quite another to be surrounded by ten people and then give money to one of them. They will all want money and you will literally become a human ATM just standing there putting cash in an endless stream of hands.

I started off chatting with a man who was fixing a motorcycle. He was crouched down with a range of rather makeshift tools spread out on the ground around him. He was a middle-aged man and he pointed out a shack nearby saying that that was his home. He told me some things about his home, but I didn’t understand what he was saying. It sounded for all the world like he was saying that he had “No pants.” I wondered if he meant “No fan” as if indicating that it was very hot inside his little shack – no fan and no air conditioning. But that is kind of a given, and it would be weird for him to bring that up.

I found out that he was married and had several children. One son was already 27 years old and had three children of his own. This man hardly seemed old enough to have a son that age, but I’ve never been a good judge of ages, and people start having children here much earlier than in Canada.

We talked about where I had been in the Philippines, and I told him all about my fake wife in Canada. I’ve told a number of people about this woman, and it has made life a lot easier for me. I’ve even given her some character traits. She is a homebody, for example, and does not like to travel. That explains why I came to the Philippines alone. She is also a bit timid and would be frightened by the Philippines. People constantly tell me how dangerous the Philippines is, so they all understood this fake woman’s fears. As many people have done, this man told me that I should visit some kind of famous bridge on the island of Leyte. No one has been able to tell me where it is, but it is apparently the highest bridge in the Philippines. I’m fairly certain they don’t mean the San Juanico bridge. That one is just outside of Tacloban, and it is the longest bridge in the Philippines, not necessarily the highest.

A short distance down the copra street, a fairly intense game of basketball was underway. There was a hoop on either side of the street and the two teams raged from side to side as they scored baskets. I think all the players would have liked me to stop and take pictures as they played, but my little Olympus isn’t really up to a challenge like that. It wouldn’t be able to focus on running and jumping basketball players. It’s funny that I think of that as a big limitation of the camera. I’ve come to take auto-focus completely for granted when it is still quite new to me. Compared to my various film cameras, this Olympus is a marvel of auto-focus. I’d never have been able to take pictures of moving subjects with my film cameras, period. I spent an entire life shooting only stationary objects and people, and I found it next to impossible to focus even on those. My Olympus is magical compared to any film camera I’ve ever owned.

A short distance past the basketball game, I came across a chubby boy who asked me to take his picture. He plopped down in the standard white plastic chair and flashed some gang signs at me. I took his picture and then he ran off. Directly behind him was another shack – one of a series of rough dwellings that had been built against the copra warehouse walls. A woman was standing in a fenced-in area beside the shack and I chatted with her. I opened the conversation by asking if she was the boy’s mother. She was not. She was very friendly, though I understood very little of what she was saying. I keep making the common mistake of asking yes/no questions. It seems to be the easiest way to get information, but yes/no questions usually just lead to misinformation.

While we chatted, another woman showed up. This woman was quite a bit younger and better dressed and fairly attractive. Through yes/no questions, I learned that the two of them shared this shack and lived together. Later, I found out that this wasn’t true at all. Only the one woman lived in the shack. This other woman was her friend and just came over to visit when she saw that I was there.

They invited me to sit in the doorway of their little shack to get out of the sun. The two women climbed into the shack and sat down there while I perched in the doorway. The shack was made of the usual variety of scrap wood and metal. The floor was quite solid and was raised up off the ground on stilts, making it dry and somewhat comfortable. The shack consisted of just the one room. It was about ten feet by ten feet and was mostly empty. Against one wall there was a small cupboard with some clothes and other items piled up on the floor around it. And that was about it. There was no furniture of any kind and no bedding that I saw. The ceiling was too low for anyone to stand up or even sit on a chair, so life was spent sitting or lying on the bare wooden floor. There was no question of there being any running water or bathroom or anything like that. This woman would have to go somewhere else for that. I asked her if she paid rent, and she said that she did. She paid 20 pesos a day. She did the math for me and said that that was 600 pesos a month, the equivalent of $14 US.

These woman did not ask me for any money, but it became a bit awkward anyway. The attractive woman who had shown up later was almost certainly a prostitute. And by the way these two women behaved, it became clear to me that they were assuming that I was looking for a prostitute. Why else would I be wandering around in this neighborhood by myself? This attractive woman had lain down on the floor and arranged herself in a seductive pose. And while I chatted with the two of them, she kept asking me to come all the way inside the shack and lay down beside her. It would be more comfortable and I could get some sleep, she said. She patted the wooden floor next to her and smiled at me. I was quite happy perched in the doorway and deliberately misunderstood her and stayed where I was.

When I left, I found a few more people waiting for me on the street. Two older teenage boys in particular wanted to have their picture taken. They whipped out two pairs of glasses with bright white frames and put them on. They looked quite amusing, but the boys clearly thought they were pretty cool. They didn’t mean the glasses to be a joke. After I’d taken a few pictures, the boys rubbed their stomachs and said that they were hungry. Had we been somewhat alone, I might have given them money. However, there were people all around us, and there was no way I could just take out my wallet and give these boys money without starting a riot. In the end, I treated their statement about being hungry as just a conversation topic. I asked them if they had had breakfast and I said that they should go get something to eat if they were hungry. It was either that or ignore their statement altogether. After all, they certainly didn’t look hungry or even poor. They were dressed in ordinary clothes and they looked very physically fit – solid build with good muscles everywhere. They didn’t look like they were starving or anything like that. Plus, an older man had come by. He introduced himself as something of a barangay official and he said that these were bad boys and I should be careful. There was mention of drugs and alcohol.

During all of this, a group of young boys had also come around. They asked me to take their picture and they kept saying that they were hungry and asked me for money. I’d noticed that some of them were carrying glue bottles and they kept trying to hide them. One little boy asked me if I was with the Streetlight organization – a Norwegian NGO that worked with the local street kids. I think many of them assumed that I was with Streetlight and that was why I was wandering around this neighborhood. I imagined that the occasional Norwegian volunteer shows up and goes around Tacloban interacting with street kids looking to help them. I also imagine that NGO reps would not exactly approve of glue-sniffing. They probably would make it a condition of helping the boys that they not sniff glue. So they had learned to hide the glue bottles. If so, they weren’t doing a very good job of it. It’s funny that when people try to hide things, it generally has the opposite effect. I might not have noticed the glue bottles at all, but their attempts to keep them hidden made me notice them. They stuffed them into their armpits, for example, and that was such an odd movement that my eyes were drawn to it, and I saw the glue bottles. They also just put them in their pockets, and the hand movements caught my attention and I noticed the bottles.

The prostitute had come out by this time, and she posed for a picture. There was another woman there washing some clothes or some dishes on a wooden table. She had a small daughter and she was encouraged to pose for a picture. While I took that picture, I aimed my camera in the general direction of the woman at the table and took her picture. While looking at the picture later on, I noticed that I had also captured in the frame a teenage girl crouching in an alleyway and going to the bathroom. I have to be careful with my camera because of stuff like that.

I also should learn to be more careful about theft. At one point, I was showing the boys the pictures on the LCD screen of the camera. I was crouched down with my pannier bag on my back like a knapsack. Lots of people, including the young boys, were crowded around me with many of them pressed right up against me. It was then I started to wonder if any little hands were slowly (or quickly) making their way into my pannier bag’s various pockets and making off with valuables. I didn’t think they were because the zippers on my pannier bag are very big and strong and it takes a lot of effort to pull them open. I don’t think it could be done surreptitiously. But it was possible, and I resolved once again to be more careful and on my guard. As soon as I could, I removed everything from the outer pockets and put it all inside the main compartment. Then I threaded a small padlock through the main zipper pulls. This made it more awkward for me to access items in my pannier bag – such as a new battery for the camera – but at least it kept my valuables safe.

When I left from the copra warehouse street, three of the glue-sniffing young boys came with me and kept asking for money and saying that they were hungry. They alternated this with striking bad boy poses and asking me to take more pictures. I walked down to the waterfront and spent some more time taking pictures and chatting with people.

There were several boats loaded down with watermelons. Each boat had a small scale on the shore with watermelons piled up around it. The watermelons were weighed and sold at 20 pesos per kilogram. At one boat, I talked with a customer sitting on a motorcycle. I discovered that he worked aboard ships. He said that he was a third officer and he was soon going to leave on another trip. This latest ship left from the Dominican Republic and he had to fly from Manila to London and then from London to somewhere in the United States and then from there to the Dominican Republic. I was very surprised that a shipping company would go to all that expense flying a crew member all the way around the world from the Philippines. Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to pick up your crew locally wherever the ship was? Apparently not.

My wanderings also brought me past the local Coast Guard building. I ran into one of the Coast Guard dudes and I asked him about his duties. He said that they mainly enforced safety regulations. They monitored the various passenger and cargo boats at the docks and made sure they had the necessary safety equipment and were not overloaded. So far, I’d found the boats to be quite safe – surprisingly safe. Not only were they not overloaded, they all had brand new looking lifevests, and there were clearly enough lifevests for every passenger and more. So the Coast Guard was doing their job. I was amused to see a sign on the fence around the Coast Guard building. It said that urinating against the fence was not allowed. Violaters will be shot and survivors will be shot again. I can understand their problem with public urinators. I had walked down by the water near this building and had been nearly knocked off my feet by the smell of urine and shit. The patch of grass there was clearly being used as an outdoor latrine by large numbers of people from the nearby market.

I went inside the fish market and the vegetable market with my camera. I had been to these markets a number of times with my camera, but there is always something new to see. The fish market is certainly an experience for the senses. The smell is extremely strong. For me, it is almost overpowering. The floor is soaked with all kinds of nasty fluids and my feet in their rather old and worn-out Teva sandals get covered in sticky black goo and smelly water. Of course, there is plenty of interest for my eyes – live clams and crabs, huge slices of fresh tuna, giant groupers, and all kinds of other sea creatures I don’t know the names of.

I took a bunch more pictures as I walked through the vegetable market – pictures of the produce and of the people selling them and carrying them around. I’m always surprised at the number of vegetables I see for sale compared to the lack of vegetables I see in the standard diet. I have to assume that all these vegetables get eaten, but I rarely see them in the restaurants. I often have trouble coming up with even one vegetable dish. And even then, it is almost always jack fruit or squash. Good thing I like both those dishes. I’m not sure where all the other vegetables go.

Next to the vegetable section of the market, I came to the dried fish section. I find the smell there hard to deal with and I end up holding my breath a lot. There is dried fish, but there are also a lot of tubs of fish paste. I noticed one tub of bright purple paste and I asked about that. I was told that it was made from shrimp, and the purple was just food coloring.

Before I left the market and packed up my camera, I came across a group of young boys playing a game with rubber bands. I hadn’t seen this before, and I stopped to watch. Unlike other games I’d seen, this one was easy to figure out. The boys would take turns throwing a rubber band a short distance onto the ground. The goal was to get one rubber band to land on top of another one. If you succed, you then win all the rubber bands that are on the ground. It’s a great game for the kids because it’s so simple and yet it gives them a lot of satisfaction as they build up their collection of rubber bands. They connect them together in large bunches in a daisy chain. The rubber band champion of this group had a huge daisy chain hanging from his belt in addition to the rubber bands in his hand. The game led to a lot of tension because there was fair room for disagreements. A rubber band would often land so close to another rubber band as to make it a judgement call whether it was actually on top of not. I saw this champion player rush forward to check a close call and he appeared to cheat a little bit. He nudged the band and then started to pick up all the other bands as his winnings. His competitor saw the cheating and rushed in to stop him. A fight broke out, and then a couple of mothers showed up and broke up the fight. Rubber bands are a serious business in the Tacloban fish market.

 

Tags: Canada, Coast Guard, Dominican Republic, LCD screen, London, pannier bag, Philippines Bike Trip 2013