There is a wide street near the docks that is lined with copra warehouses on both sides. I’ve often looked with interest at the dirty men loading and unloading the copra from trucks, thinking they would be great subjects for a photograph.

I also wanted to learn more about copra, so yesterday I went inside one of the warehouses to check it out. This first warehouse was a huge, cavernous place with mountains of copra piled up against the walls. A large and new truck had been driven inside. The entire side panel of the truck folded back and an equally large loader began scooping up buckets of copra and dumping them inside.

I stood at the entrance for a minute or two and chatted with some men sitting there. I had no idea if they were employees or managers or what. I took a couple of pictures of them and then asked if I could go deeper inside the warehouse. They indicated that it was okay. I doubt they had the authority to allow me inside, but I don’t think it matters here in the Philippines. There are not yet the billions of rules that have crept into society into the West – rules designed to protect us from everything and nothing.

I walked to the very back wall, where I found a group of about fifteen men shoveling copra into sacks, setting those sacks into a big group, and then sewing the openings shut. It was extremely hot and muggy inside the warehouse and most of these men were stripped to the waist and sweating profusely. It was very dusty and dirty and they were covered in grime. It had a Victorian feel to it, and I had a great time snapping pictures.

At the time, I thought that despite the darkness, I was getting great pictures. They looked amazing on the LCD screen on my camera. Later, I discovered that they weren’t particularly sharp. The ISO had to be boosted to such a high level that a lot of noise and grain had been introduced. My little Olympus doesn’t quite have the horsepower for extreme low-light situations. Still, the subject matter of the pictures was great and I got four or five pictures that I really like.

[slickr-flickr tag=”copra warehouses”]
I dropped in at a much smaller warehouse next. Two men were sitting near the doorway and working on some equipment. I was intrigued by one implement and bent down to examine it. For all the world, it reminded me of a homemade spear gun. I asked the men about it and they said that it was used to take core samples of the copra. A man got up to demonstrate it. He grabbed the long metal spear and plunged it into a sack of copra. When he withdrew it, he pressed down on a lever and a handful of little pieces of copra fell into his hand. At the time, I had the vague idea that this was done to make sure that the sacks actually contained copra all the way through. You wouldn’t want to buy sacks of copra from a farmer and find out that they were only half full, the remaining half of each sack filled with old leaves or something.

I got to talking with another man, and he turned out to be the owner of the warehouse. His name was Benny. He was a Filipino Chinese originally from Cebu. His family owns a number of copra warehouses and even copra processing plants around the Philippines and he had been sent to Tacloban to manage this one.

Benny was a very friendly man and willingly showed me around the entire operation when I told him that I was interested in learning more. We first went back to his little office, where I met his wife and had a cold drink and biscuits. An attempt was made to produce a chair for me, but the only chair around was a plastic one that had long seen better days. Little more than cracked plastic, it was clear it wouldn’t stand up to my weight. It was removed, and I settled down on a wooden bench in the office.

There is no possible way for words to capture how dirty and broken down this office area was. If anything had been cleaned or fixed, it must have been done a hundred years ago. The constant assault of copra dust had likely broken down the morale of the cleaners and everyone had agreed to simply give up and let things be. There was a relatively clear area on the desk to allow for papers to be filled out and calculators to be punched, and that was sufficient for the operation.

We discussed personal things for a while, and I was told about the wide range of sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, and cousins that were living in Canada. His wife’s relatives were in Calgary and Edmonton and other places. Benny didn’t actually know where his relatives were. Knowing they were in Canada was all he could manage.

Benny pointed out some items of interest relating to the copra business. To my great surprise, he said that the room next to the office was a small laboratory. There, they tested the quality of the copra to assess its value and fix a price. Benny was in the middle of testing a recently shipped load and he invited me along as he completed the test.

The laboratory, even more than the office, needed a good scrubbing and a coat of paint. The important bits still worked, however, and Benny ran me through the process. It was fascinating. First, 100 grams of the core samples of copra (taken with the spear I had examined earlier) were placed in a beaker and mixed with 150 milliliters of a chemical. (I’ve forgotten the name of the chemical.) The beaker was then placed above an electric coil. A thermometer was inserted into the beaker to monitor its temperature, and a small graduated cylinder was attached to a tube coming out of the side of the beaker. The beaker was heated to 200 degrees and then allowed to cool. Moisture was created and ran out of the tube and into the graduated cylinder. When the temperature dropped to 160 degrees, the graduated cylinder was removed and the amount of liquid produced was measured. This told Benny the moisture content of the copra. The drier the copra, the more valuable it is.

The sample that Benny had just tested produced 13 milliliters of liquid. He referred to a chart on the wall and saw that this produced a moisture discount of 9%, meaning that 9% was deducted from the gross weight figure. He called in the man who had delivered this load of copra and gave him the results. Benny then went into the office to fill out the invoice. The invoice began with the total gross weight of the load of copra. On a sample invoice I examined later, the total weight of the load was 3,005 kilograms. A dust discount of 1% is deducted right off the top from each load to account for all the debris and dirt that gets into the copra. Thus, 30 kilograms was deducted from the total giving a net weight of 2,975 kilograms. The moisture discount was the same as the most recent test I had witnessed: 9%, which in this case equaled 268 kilograms. This, too, was deducted from the total leaving a payable net weight of 2,707 kilograms. The invoice called this the “Net Resecada.” Taking these discounts into account, the seller had brought in a load of copra weighing 3,005 kilograms but would be paid for only 2,707 kilograms. The rate at the time this invoice was written was 27.7 pesos per kilogram. Therefore, the seller was paid 64,155 pesos for his copra, or approximately $1,500.

I asked Benny about how the copra made its way from the individual farmers to his warehouse, and I got some of the details. I’d learned from talking to farmers that coconuts were harvested every three months. Young boys and men climb up the coconut trees and cut off the ripe coconuts. These fall to the ground and are gathered up. The coconut is cut into pieces and these pieces set out to dry. After a certain amount of time, it is possible to easily remove the inner shell – the copra – from the outer husk. The copra is then dried – either by fire or by the sun.

Benny appeared to buy his copra not directly from the farmers but from middlemen who drive around the countryside in large trucks buying the copra from farmers. I assume the middleman has to judge the quality of the copra he’s buying on the spot to offer the farmers a price. He would not be able to run a laboratory test on the road.

The middleman then came to the big copra buyers in the larger towns like Tacloban to deliver his truckloads. The load was weighed, tested, and the middleman got paid. I assume that Benny had regular buyers that always came to him. There are probably others who shop around to get the best price for each load.

I’m sure there is a lot more to the business. Like anything, it would take a while to learn all the ins and outs. For example, Benny took me out into his warehouse and showed me a large pile of copra at the back which had been sitting there for more than a year. He picked up some of the copra and snapped it in half. It was clearly bone dry and very brittle. Common sense says that this copra would be less valuable. The newer copra contained coconut meat that was very white and looked nice. The meat on this old copra was dark and dry. Yet, this very dry copra was much more valuable. I assume this relates to the process by which the oil is extracted from the copra. Perhaps it is easier to extract it when it is dry. Perhaps it even produces more oil the drier it is. I would have to visit a processing plant to figure that out.

After my visit to the copra warehouses, I walked down to the docks. I was interested in taking a boat to the town of Basey. This is the jumping off point for trips to Sohoton National Park. I don’t know that I’m interested in visiting the national park, but a boat trip to another town would be interesting.

I asked around at the docks, but there didn’t seem to be any boats going directly to Basey. The only option seemed to be to take a boat to San Antonio – the same barangay I’d visited previously – and then take another boat to Basey. That wasn’t ideal, but it seemed to be the only way and I climbed aboard. During the trip to San Antonio, I learned that I’d misunderstood. There was no second boat to Basey. I’d have to take a motorcycle taxi – a “moto” – to Basey, and this would cost about 50 pesos.

When I landed at San Antonio, I made the snap decision to take a short walk south down the beach from the dock. On my other visit, I had gone north along the beach. I hadn’t explored south of the dock.

The first thing I encountered was a group of men playing cards and gambling behind a couple of large bankas. The men were hunched down on the ground around little pieces of cloth placed there as a gaming table. They told me the name of the game and joked that this was “illegal gambling.” There were two games underway when I showed up. Later on, a man showed up and laid down a third cloth on the ground. He was clearly setting up a third game. I imagine that the men who owned the cloth and the deck of cards controlled each game and earned a small percentage of the winnings.

A short distance further down the beach, I came across a group of people sitting around a table in the shade of a tree and eating and drinking. They called out to me and asked me to join them. I often politely decline when these groups consist of only men deep into their tuba or beer. In this case, it seemed to be more of a family gathering. There were men and women and children and they were eating rice and fish as well as drinking tuba from big one-gallon jugs.

I threaded my way through a bunch of boats and tree branches until I reached this group and they produced a plastic chair for me and quickly thrust a big glass of tuba into my hand. I was leery of drinking the stuff. Tuba is locally made and there is no way to tell how hygienic it is. I have horrific memories of the result of drinking this sort of home brew in other countries. Yet, I’ve found the water in the Philippines to be extremely good and people are generally quite careful to distinguish between drinking water and that for general use. So I had some confidence that this tuba was made with potable water and I accepted the glass. The risk of digestive disaster was the price I had to pay for joining this group.

[slickr-flickr tag=”San Antonio Party”]
It’s almost a rule that in these groups, the most social and the most vocal person is the one who speaks no English. In this case, this person was an older man sitting right beside me. He spoke Waray to me in a loud voice about all kinds of things, but I had no idea what he was talking about. That I didn’t understand him didn’t slow him down at all.

Some of the other men spoke a bit of English, and we communicated in a fashion. As always, they had a lot of trouble understanding who I was and what I was doing in the Philippines. They had seen other foreigners, of course, but they were always easily classifiable – either a member of a family in the Philippines on a resort holiday, a foreign man married to a Filipina, or someone on a mission connected with a religious group or an NGO. A lone man simply wandering along their beach with no discernible purpose was a new thing to them. This time I created a fake wife back in Canada. That forestalled most of the attempts to produce marriageable local women. It didn’t stop them completely, though. My fake wife waiting for me in Canada didn’t appear to be a 100% barrier to me marrying someone from the Philippines.

The men said that they were all crab fishermen. I hadn’t seen any crabs anywhere, and another man I spoke to later on gave me the impression that they probably meant clams not crabs. That made more sense since I had seen men carrying nets and bags full of clams. One of the men was a shark fisherman. It took me a while to figure this out because the word shark came out clearly as “sharp”. For a while, I thought this mean that he was a particularly skilled fisherman – a “sharp” fisherman. The penny finally dropped with references to big, sharp teeth. I asked what they did with the sharks, and it appears that they simply ate them.

The men were deep into their tuba and in a pretty jovial mood. They told me, amongst much laughter, that this spread of food and tuba was the normal way of life in the Philippines. When they had rice and fish, they ate and enjoyed themselves. When they had no rice and no fish, they went hungry and slept. They were poor subsistence fishermen and they lived from day to day on what they could wrest from the sea. When the fishing was poor, they went hungry. Some family members (they were all members of the same large extended family) had other sources of income. One daughter was a teacher in a local primary school. One man had a motorcycle and made some extra cash driving people around when he could. An older woman had a part time job cleaning the barangay office. I’m sure other small streams of income came in through selling coconuts and other activities.

Life wasn’t easy for them, they told me. They had no money and they struggled to deal with medical emergencies. The foot of one older woman was completely covered up in a cloth bag and bandage of some sort. The cloth bag was stained through and flies crawled over it. Her foot was clearly in a bad way, and they told me that this woman suffered from diabetes – a very common problem in the Philippines. They told me that diabetes was caused by their steady diet of rice, but I find that hard to believe. The overabundance of sugar in their diet seems the more likely culprit.

Another woman had a bad heart. She’d had a couple of heart attacks already and needed medicine and medical care – something that they could ill afford.

I asked if I could see their house, and my main contact amongst the women gave me a short tour. This was the woman who had the cleaning job at the barangay office. Her English was the best among the group and she was the easiest to talk to. The house was a simple affair made from wood with a tin roof. She cooked the meals over a wood fire. There appeared to be two rooms in the house, and these served as the bedrooms for everyone. People slept on thin matts on the wooden floors wherever they could find a space. They did have some luxuries. There was electricity, and a TV had pride of place in one of the rooms. There was a narrow bench made of slats of bamboo in the entrance/kitchen area. I was told that they 82-year-old matriarch of the family slept there.

This 82-year-old woman was, in fact, the star of the group. She was produced early on as the best English speaker among them and introduced as Lola. She was extremely friendly and talkative. Unfortunately, she was also quite deaf and her mind wasn’t all there. She spoke to me on the same two topics over and over again. I couldn’t really follow what she was saying, but the story had to do with a sibling named Arjun who might be living in Canada and how when she had money she was going to visit Arjun. Other times, Arjun seemed to be a long lost lover. I never could figure it out, but she was a lovely person and had a great toothless smile. At one point, she offered to sing for me. She sang with great feeling and I recorded some of it on my camera. It was a love song, and she made it clear as she sang that she could not ever love me. This love song was not meant for me. I could forget about any kind of romance with her. The song was for someone else. I think she said that it was for her dead husband or perhaps for this mysterious Arjun?

Before I left, one of the women wrote down their names and address. They clearly hoped that I could help them financially in the future – particularly with their medical problems. The address was a simple one – just their names and then the name of the barangay – San Antonio.

By this point, it was too late in the afternoon to continue by moto to the town of Basey. I said my goodbyes and walked further down the beach. I was told that I shouldn’t go that way because of the danger of snakes, but I didn’t see any snakes anywhere. The most dangerous things I found were, as always, little boys. I encountered two mischief-makers with homemade slingshots. They let me pass and then fell in behind me. I knew it was inevitable, and I wasn’t surprised when a rock went flying past me. Little boys the world over are such a horror. I turned back and spoke to the boys and let them know that if another rock came flying in my direction, there would be trouble, and I showed them my clenched fist. I wasn’t actually angry or upset. I was just going through the motions for fun, I think. Still, they bothered me. It wasn’t the rock and the slingshots as much as the laughter. The whole time they followed behind me, they were making jokes in their own language and jeering at me. The more they realized that I couldn’t understand them, the bolder they became with their jokes and laughter at my expense. It’s always annoying to have a nice encounter with friendly people like that family and then run into the ill-mannered local boys.

I didn’t get very far along the beach. It became very rocky and then the beach disappeared altogether and I wasn’t able to get any further without a lot of trouble. I turned back and I met a friendly young man. I’d guess he was in his late teens. His English was quite good and we chatted for a while. He was astonished at my answers to his questions. In fact, the two boys with the slingshots had told him that a lone foreigner was walking down the beach. He didn’t believe them and had come to the beach to see this bizarre thing for himself. He asked about my companions. When I told him that I had no companions, he said, “That’s so sad.” He then painted a picture of the Philippines as an extremely dangerous place. He was surprised beyond belief when I told him about walking the streets of Tacloban and eating at local eateries. He said there were bad men everywhere in Tacloban and I could be attacked and robbed and even killed. He attributed my survival in that urban jungle to the large number of police there.

This boy’s ambition was to go to college and earn a degree in education so he could be a teacher. However, he could not afford the tuition and had gone no further than high school. I asked him what he did now, and he said that he hung out and watched TV. I suppose he’ll make his way through a variety of odd jobs. He was clearly intelligent, though, and could succeed at college if he had the opportunity.

I had to wait for a while for the boat back to Tacloban and I passed the time walking through San Antonio. It was really a lovely place with shady lanes, and the people were very friendly. I could have spent hours going from house to house sitting down and chatting with people.

The boat ride back was short and sweet, and I was soon back at my new favorite eatery enjoying a big meal and a banana shake. I passed the evening happily going through my pictures of the day. I still might go back and try to make it to Basey. I’d learned that it would be possible to take my bicycle on the boat. It would only cost an additional 12 pesos. Then I could ride to Basey on my own.

 

 

Tags: Canada, load, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, San Antonio