I had intended yesterday to go on to note other characteristics of the Philippines, but I ran out of steam. I’ll continue today.

A big part of daily life in the Philippines is the sari-sari store. These are everywhere since making one involves simply cutting a hole in the wall of the front of your house and installing some chicken wire. Voila, you have a little variety store. Sari-sari stores are very picturesque. However, I dislike them for the simple reason that you can’t go into the store and see what is for sale. In order to make a purchase, you have to know what you want and then ask for it. Chances are, there won’t be anyone in the sari-sari store anyway. These are family-run stores and family members are expected to take turns working, but, of course, that doesn’t work and there is often no one in the store. You then have to shout to get someone’s attention or rap your coin loudly against the wooden ledge or counter. Then you have to ask them for what you want to purchase. Chances are they won’t have it. And if they do have it, you can’t control the product’s condition. It might have been there for months or years baking in the hot sun.

Combined with sari-sari stores is the problem that no one ever has change. It’s a fact that haunts my days here. It actually keeps me from making purchases because I don’t want to deal with the long wait and the hassle as people try to find change. I wonder sometimes if this lack of change has a cumulative effect on the national economy. I wonder if a simple policy of making sure stores have change would boost the economy drastically. I can understand the lack of change to a certain extent. People don’t have huge amounts of money to keep around in small change. But I think it has more to do with poor planning. Businesses should make a point of keeping enough change in the “float” of each register to start each day. If you don’t do that, customers will become annoyed and go somewhere else. At least, this customer will.

Related to the lack of change is a laidback approach to stocking the shelves. This, too, drives me crazy. I always keep my eyes open for an actual shop that I can go inside, as opposed to a sari-sari store. I return to that store again and again when I find it. Unfortunately, once a shelf has been emptied of a certain item, that shelf just stays empty. I have often purchased the last of an item on a shelf. Then I return to buy another of that item and find that the shelf has stayed empty. They just don’t restock – something that again has to affect the national economy to an extent. The restocking, when it does happen, is also quite laidback and careless. This drives me crazy, too. I’ll go into a shop that I know has a cooler set to a nice cold temperature. I’ll want to have a cold Coke. But I’ll find that the cooler is stocked from top to bottom with Sprite and Fanta Orange. There will be crates of Coke sitting on the ground nearby, but the cooler will contain no Cokes at all. In fact, there will be a wide variety of drinks in crates on the ground, but the cooler won’t contain any of them. This makes no sense to me. I’ve often gone looking for just one small bottle of cold beer, but the store will only have the big bottles of beer in the cooler. The small bottles will only be on the floor or the shelf. If I were running the store, I would keep some of every product in the cooler. What’s the point of filling your cooler with only one or two drinks when your store carries ten drinks? Why not put ten of each drink in the cooler instead of fifty of only two? It’s simple logic.

Philippines are great shoppers, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere. Their culture is a pop culture of consumerism. In larger towns, the shopping malls are the center of daily life. In Naval, there is no shopping mall, but consumerism is still a big part of daily life. It’s interesting though, to note how important the construction and farming and hardware stores are. In every town, you see the same set of stores providing hardware, plumbing equipment, building material, animal feed, paint supplies, and things like that. And these stores are always packed. These stores also have a slow method for processing purchases. This involves telling someone what you want to buy. They have to go get it. Customers generally aren’t allowed near the products. This clerk, however, is not allowed to hand you the product. They write down the price on a piece of paper and you hand over the money. This is given to another person at a cash register of some kind and the purchase is made. Then you are given your purchase. Sometime a third step is required. All of this happens, I assume, to reduce shoplifting and employee-theft.

This brings me to another huge part of life in the Philippines – corruption. I’ve noticed the concern about corruption on every trip here. I assume that corruption is a big problem. Certainly, people believe it is a big problem and they talk about it all the time and it dominates the news. A few weeks ago, a huge scandal emerged called the “pork barrel” scandal. It’s a really bad one since it involves NGOs trying to help the poor. I don’t understand the details, but apparently politicians have access to large pools of discretionary funds to be given out to NGOs to help farmers and poor people in their districts. There was little control over these funds and the politicians simply helped themselves to all the money while pretending to distribute the money to the poor through the NGOs. One politician in particular was at the center of the scandal. She disappeared and the entire country was put on alert. This went on for days. It was a massive manhunt and during this time, you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing a picture of this woman (looking rich and sleazy in her dark sunglasses and designer clothes). She was eventually tracked down and arrested.

The anger over this is understandable. It’s one thing to siphon away money from highway construction projects, but to steal from government funds specifically meant to help the poorest of the poor is a real crime and it makes people angry. Worse, it makes people feel that no one can be trusted. And if no one can be trusted, then why shouldn’t I get in the game and become corrupt myself? If everyone else is getting rich, why shouldn’t I? The corruption isn’t even close to the level of corruption I saw in Guinea, but it appears to be pretty bad.

The Philippines appears to be a very young country. In fact, from the point of view of someone just wandering around, the country seems to consist largely of students. Students are everywhere. Education is extremely important and is taken very seriously. The twist is that there don’t seem to be enough jobs for all the people getting an education, which leads to all the Filipinos looking for work overseas. This population of overseas workers – known as Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) – is huge and it plays a key role in the country. I see evidence of it everywhere. For one thing, I can’t have a conversation with anyone without this fact coming up. The people themselves either have worked overseas or will work overseas or they will mention their family members that work (and often now live) overseas. I also see many “remittance” shops. I don’t know how these work, but OFWs send their salaries back to the Philippines in the form of a remittance. And these businesses do that for them in exchange for a commission.

An interesting side-effect of this is that every international news story has an OFW angle. If a war breaks out in another country, there are always thousands of OFWs stuck in that country trying to get out. The news is also full of legal cases concerning OFWs in jail overseas for working illegally or other offences. Other OFWs make the news for being abused while overseas. It’s a big part of life here and every student I speak with mentions the lack of jobs in the Philippines and the fact that they will have to go overseas when they graduate.

Connected with the issue of OFWs is the concept of the extended family in the Philippines. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the family is important in the developing world, but I see the concrete nature of this all the time. I often try to find out something of the life of the people I meet, and it always gets very complicated. People in the west have simple lives by comparison. People in the West have separate economic lives – this is my house, and my car, and my job, and these are my bills. People here by contrast are tied closely to family members through everything. In fact, I’m sure they would find it very difficult to survive if it weren’t that way. This comes up because I’m often puzzled by how people can afford certain luxuries. I wonder where the money has come from. After a bit of questioning, I find out that it is a shared luxury. The person using the computer, for example, won’t own the computer exactly. It will belong to some other family members and they are just using it. The same thing will apply to vehicles, land, businesses. It’s like the guy I got to know at the beach resort near Caligara. His sister actually owned the resort and he simply ran it.

Of course, I can’t claim to really know anything about the economic life of people here. The only people I meet tend to be of the subsistence type – farmers, store clerks, tricycle drivers, etc. I often see prosperous looking people driving around in brand new Ford F150 pick-up trucks, but I never have the chance to meet these people. I haven’t the slightest clue how they could afford such a truck.

What else would strike a visitor about the Philippines? Certainly the vast number of bicycle taxis in a town like Naval. I don’t know the number but I would say that a huge percentage of people in the Philippines make their living as taxi drivers, tricycle drivers, and pedicab drivers. Pedicabs – bicycle taxis – are the most common in poorer places like Naval. I have a love-hate relationship with these things. I like them in that they are very quaint and very quiet. Who wouldn’t prefer a street filled with bicycles over a street filled with nasty, horrible jeepneys? They exist because they are very cheap and everyone can afford them. Naval is a city of students and the students take pedicabs to school and then home for lunch and then back to school and then home again at the end of the day. Pedicabs are cheap enough that even students can afford to take them by themselves. A single student in school uniform with textbooks on their lap zipping home in a pedicab is a very pleasant sight.

I admire these pedicab drivers. They stop for everyone, including me. In fact, I can’t go outside without every pedicab in the neighborhood racing toward me. It’s weird, but I still haven’t ridden in one. Not even once. I either ride my own bike or I walk. This puzzles the pedicab drivers to no end. Why walk in this heat when you can ride? I like to walk just to enjoy the scenery and to control my own destiny, but I also walk because I don’t want to deal with the hassle over the foreigner price.

These pedicabs don’t have any gears. There is just one speed. They also don’t have any modern brakes. They’ve developed their own foot brake which involves simply pressing a chunk of rubber (usually from a car tire) against the rubber of the front tire. This wouldn’t be safe on a regular bicycle, but it appears to work fine on the pedicabs. I do wonder, though, how quickly it wears out the tires. Pedicab drivers don’t seem to care how many people they carry. They sit patiently while person after person and load after load piles in. The seat is designed for two people at most, but there are often four people in the front. Two will sit down and then two will actually stand by putting their feet on the seat and holding onto the roof. There is a luggage rack on the back, and people will often sit there as well leading to as many as six adults in a pedicab at once, sometimes with additional young children on their laps. The pedicab drivers don’t seem to mind at all. It also doesn’t seem to slow them down. They go at the same rapid clip wether they are carrying one person or six or seven.

I said that I have a love-hate relationship with these things. The hate part only relates to the non-stop flow of pedicabs in the streets. As in pretty much all of Asia, pedestrians are of no importance. It’s extremely difficult and dangerous to walk around as there is often no sidewalk. And when there is a semblance of a sidewalk, it is rough and irregular with danger everywhere. I usually can’t walk down any sidewalk at all because I am too tall. There are overhanging roofs everywhere, and they consist of extremely sharp edges of galvanized metal. Many times, I’ve nearly cut my head wide open on these roofs when I forget they are there. Pedestrians get pushed out into the streets where they have to compete for space with the pedicabs and other traffic. This is all well and good, but there is rarely a break in the flow of traffic to allow pedestrians to cross the street safely. There are no traffic lights at all so traffic just flows non-stop. There is also a system of one-way streets. These were developed to ease traffic congestion, but in effect they create a Formula One race track around which the traffic can flow without ever stopping. Walking around, as I like to do, becomes a tense experience. It’s even more difficult because all the traffic flows at different speeds. The pedicabs are the slowest (though they move faster than you realize and I’ve nearly been hit many times). Then you have motorcycles, trucks, jeepneys, and private cars. Everything is going at a different speed, so it is often nearly impossible to make it across even the smallest of streets. Intersections are also not regulated and crossing near them is taking your life in your hands.

Laundry is also something that will strike a visitor to the Philippines. Laundry is done outside wherever there is a water source, so one sees clothes being washed by hand in large tubs everywhere. My heart always goes out to the women doing this laundry. It’s a thankless, tiring, difficult job, particularly as one has to go to the water source or carry water home. Then the clothing has to be dried and one sees drying clothes everywhere in the Philippines. It is draped over and hung on everything.

Related to this is the idea of water. Many peole live without running water, of course, and this means that water has to be carried to their homes. Luckily, there appears to be no end of water sources in the Philippines and people don’t have to go far to get water, unlike in some countries where getting water can take many hours. In the Philippines, there are often neighborhood taps. People still must bring containers to the taps, but they don’t seem to have to travel very far.

Sports are another big part of life in the Philippines, at least amongst the boys. Basketball is clearly the most popular and you can’t walk down a street without seeing a bunch of boys shooting baskets somewhere. There are basketball hoops everywhere – many of them makeshift – and I often see full basketball courts even in very crowded areas.

Next to basketball is probably boxing, particularly since one of their national heroes is the boxer Manny Paquiao. I rarely see a boxing gym, but I assume they exist in the larger cities. I’m sure the wealth of Manny Paquiao has encouraged a lot of young boys to emulate him and try to become successful boxers.

Another part of life in the Philippines is the multitude of languages. English is commonly spoken, of course, and that makes life here very convenient for me. I can’t even remember the last time I encountered someone that couldn’t speak English to at least some degree. I do often overestimate the level of English a person will have. Women at little eateries might speak enough English to handle orders and money issues, but when I ask them a question beyond that, I can be met with a blank face. I often find the Filipino accent difficult to understand. I always get prices wrong for some reason. I don’t understand them when they tell me numbers. I have to lean in with my ears and ask them to repeat what they said.

Tagalog is the second national language, but I have no idea how many people actually use Tagalog in their normal life. I can’t tell the difference between Tagalog and Cebuano and Waray and the many, many other languages that are spoken here. When I was in Taiwan, I played around with learning some Tagalog. I even downloaded podcasts and listened to them regularly. I kept a notebook of language notes and had learned quite a bit. However, all that fell by the wayside when I landed here. I found I could use English everywhere. Besides that, I found that I couldn’t use people to learn Tagalog. When I asked people the word for this or that item, I never knew if the word was in Tagalog or their local language. I’m a poor linguist, and it is a lot to ask of me to learn just one language let alone a dozen at the same time. The biggest problem for language learning, though, is my reluctance to practice. I don’t talk to people very much. The conversations are generally so simple and repetitive that I lose all interest. I can get the facts I  need in English quickly. Beyond that, there is nothing to talk about – unless I want to talk about being single and marrying a Filipina. That is the only topic of conversation that anyone is interested in.

Music is also a big part of life here – usually in the karaoke sense. People love to sing and they sing a mixture of Western and local pop songs. I see quite a number of teenage boys lounging on rooftops strumming on a guitar. I don’t know if there are enough local pop stars for people to dream about making it big as a singer. I certainly never see anything to hint at there being local bands playing anywhere.

 

 

Tags: Biliran Trip, job, Manny Paquiao, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Random Thoughts