I’m not sure if I woke up as the curmudgeon or the invalid. Maybe I’m still both. I woke up to the tinny and endless sound of horrible music coming out of Guapo’s cell phone. (I’ve recently learned that the young muscly and fashionable guy with the cell phone is referred to as Guapo or “Guaps” by everyone here.) The music got worse and worse until the “Barbie” song capped them all. The skies are completely grey and overcast, and it is raining in a desultory fashion. That’s a less than promising start to the day. It astonishes me how much it rains here. I ended up kind of stuck here in the beginning largely because it rained so often, and I was reluctant to hit the road. I kept waiting for the rainy season to end, but it never does. It just changes the type of rain. I’m not sure if I wrote this down before, but a man told me that the rainy season here is eleven months long and in the twelfth month it just rains a little bit less. As much as I dislike rain, I seem to end up in cities where it rains a lot. So much for the curmudgeon.
The invalid is still present. I began the day with stomach cramps and sitting on the toilet and expelling what I hope was my last meal turned to pure liquid. My last meal was almost exactly 48 hours ago – a simple breakfast of plain rice, one fried egg, and a type of meat called tapsilog. I had that meal just before I went to MSF. I don’t know how long it takes for a meal to make it through one’s digestive system, but perhaps I’ve evacuated that meal and now have a clean system. I haven’t eaten anything at all in the last 48 hours since that meal, and I don’t have any plans to eat anything today either. At least the stomach cramps have gotten much, much shorter in duration and less frequent. I passed a relatively comfortable night. Hopefully the anti-biotics are speeding me on to recovery.
When I got the anti-biotics, I was also handed two packages of Oral Rehydration Salts, or ORS. I understand that this preparation has saved a lot of lives since it was invented. It’s cheap and simple and keeps people from dying of complications from dehydration. I don’t think, however, it is meant for comparatively mild cases like mine. The whole idea of it is to get liquid into a person’s body to replace all the liquid they lose through the diarrhea. When an already weak or malnourished person has cholera, they lose a lot of liquid very quickly and the condition can become fatal. The ORS helps them. I don’t think it helps me. For one thing, the ORS can only be of use when you actually drink it, and I find it particularly nasty. When I mixed up my first liter, I was expecting a pleasant cherry flavor or lemon-lime or grape. Instead, there was no flavor at all, only the overpowering sensation that I was drinking seawater. I had to concentrate hard to keep from gagging and get some of the horrid mixture down. I would have poured the whole liter down the drain except that I don’t have that much drinking water around and can’t waste any of it. I’ve been forcing myself to drink from this bottle of ORS, but after 24 hours, I’ve only managed to consume half a liter. I find the stuff repellant. To replenish the liquid in my body, I’m much better off just drinking plain water or water flavored with anything. Heck, even Coke or coffee is a better bet. It may not be as healthy as ORS, but at least I can drink large quantities of it and some of it has to stay in my body.
Not much happened yesterday afternoon after I dropped off my cell phone and iPod at the fire station to be recharged. I found the energy to wash my main pannier bag. It was getting pretty foul with encrusted dirt. I simply soaked it with water and then doused it with laundry soap and gave it a good scrubbing. I think I got most of the dirt out of the material.
Late in the afternoon, I noticed that Carlo had dropped by and was sitting by the laundry area with Leanne. I quickly mixed up a cup of instant coffee and went out to join them. Carlo is easily the most interesting person I’ve met recently, and I was keen to hear more of his stories. He appears to be well-connected and knows a lot about what is going on in Tacloban.
One of the recent scandals involves the temporary housing that is being erected for people who have lost their homes. While I was at the fire station, I overheard them talking about it. Gerald explained that every building cost 830,000 pesos, which is about $20,000. That is outrageously expensive, and he said that the politicians kept most of that money for themselves and used only a small portion for the construction of the buildings. I find that unlikely, but they believed it firmly.
Carlo disapproved of these buildings because they were temporary. They were being built largely to get the refugees out of the schools that had served as evacuation centers. They want to start classes again in the first week or so of January, and to do that, all the families have to move out. The idea is to move them into this temporary housing. And then later on – a short time later according to Carlo – they will be moved to permanent housing. Carlo’s opinion is that this is very wasteful. Why not build the permanent housing right away? Why put all this money into building temporary housing when you already know where the permanent housing will be? Just put the money into the permanent housing right from the start.
Carlo told me some more things about his experiences with the Japanese journalists. He did not, as I had thought, spend nights all over Leyte and Samar as they traveled around covering stories. Their work consisted largely of day trips, as the Japanese had to return to Tacloban each night to edit their stories and pictures and then upload or transmit them to Japan with their own portable satellite.
I learned this because as we were chatting, it came out that Carlo liked his little luxuries. We talked about travel and I told him a little about some of my experiences in places like Guinea and Ethiopia. He waved a hand at the Your Home Pensionne and asked if the places I stayed in in Guinea were like this. I couldn’t help but laugh. I told him that this pension house would be considered pure luxury in most of Guinea. In the Philippines, he said, this place wasn’t even a one-star hotel. He said that he could never go to Africa, not even to a relatively developed country like South Africa. He asked if the places in Guinea supplied toilet paper. (It was clear that he really didn’t understand what conditions were like in those places.) He said that if a place didn’t have lots of toilet paper, he couldn’t even consider staying there.
After all of this came out, I wondered out loud how he had managed to put up with the discomforts of traveling around Leyte and Samar after the typhoon. There would have been no hotels of any kind available, so they would have had to rough it. That’s when I learned that they returned to Tacloban each night. That made for very long days, but it was necessary for the Japanese to file their stories.
At first, Carlo found the trips with the Japanese very difficult and tiring. But then he started to enjoy them. I was quite jealous of all his experiences and of the Japanese. I was thinking that it would be pretty cool to be a journalist covering stories like this. However, it didn’t take long for reality to creep in. I talked about this with Carlo and tried to get across my idea of how difficult it would be to report a story accurately rather than just put together a pre-packaged report to suit what your audience expects to hear. Carlo told me, for example, that at one point one of the big bosses from the Japanese media operation showed up. He was quite upset because the team hadn’t produced pictures of enough dead bodies. He was looking for a story of great tragedy and misery and loss of life, and so he wanted pictures of lots of dead bodies. Carlo’s job became one of helping the Japanese to go out and find dead bodies to take pictures of. This was largely a matter of timing. Carlo told the team that they would have to wait until late in the day. The workers from the Tzu Chi Foundation, for example, would uncover dead bodies throughout the day as they worked, and then these would be carried to the roads and laid down there.
I was surprised to learn about their experience when they went to visit a mass grave site – something that all journalists would have to do at one point. They went to Basper, the same place that I visited, and they found bodies being laid down in neat rows. I questioned Carlo closely about this because I was convinced he was talking about the memorial gardens cemetery – the place where I went with the firefighters for the ceremonial burial. But Carlo said no. He said that they went to a cemetery about two kilometers up the road from the memorial cemetery and on the left hand side. It sounded like exactly the same place that I saw, but I saw something completely different. I saw hundreds of bodies (in body bags) just dumped into the hole in the ground with no care or order or respect. Carlo also said that the body bags they saw had detailed tags on the outside describing the body within with clothing and identifying tattoos and other marks. I saw nothing like that at Basper or anywhere else. It makes me wonder if the officials knew of the visit of the Japanese journalists in advance and orchestrated this. It seems unlikely, but I’ll ask Carlo about that.
Carlo also told me a funny story about a friend or relative of his who had done some looting at Robinson’s shopping mall. He grabbed seven large cooking pots and proudly brought them home to his family. His grandmother looked at the pots and was angry. She told him to go back to Robinson’s and get the lids. Carlo explained that most people just grabbed things at random and the first things to get grabbed were the display items. And in this case, the pots were on display without their lids. The lids were probably in the back storeroom still inside the boxes. The guy had grabbed the pots and forgotten about the lids.
Carlo also mentioned that politicians here routinely get 10% of the value of any contract that is rewarded. This astonished me, and I asked him to explain. What he meant was that politicians will get a kickback of 10% from the contractor – the standard corruption. If a road construction project worth ten million pesos is awarded to a construction company, the company is expected to give ten percent, or one million pesos, back to the politician. It’s part of the deal. This is why, Carlo said, that everyone wants to get into politics. They simply see it as a way to get rich quickly. It’s astonishing how matter-of-fact everyone is about stories like this. Carlo wasn’t upset about it or angry about it. It’s just the state of affairs and he laughed as he told me about it. I don’t know how true it is, but I said that in Canada any politician who did that would soon find himself in jail. Yet, here people say that all politicians do it. It is a standard and accepted practice.
Carlo and I also talked about the Chinese firefighting brigade. I had noticed a fancy-looking fire fighting station with two shiny fire trucks many times just a short distance away from this pension house. Carlo said there were three such fire stations in Tacloban and they were run and paid for by volunteers from the Chinese community. Carlo said that they were much more efficient than the BFP. He said that the standard joke is that the BFP is always the last to show up any fire and even then they are usually pushing their fire trucks.
I had noticed that the fire trucks at this Chinese brigade never once left their station during the typhoon and all the following weeks. I was very surprised at this considering the huge demand for working vehicles. Firetrucks and other vehicles had come to Tacloban from all over the Philippines. Yet, all these fire trucks here in Tacloban never moved. I figured there had to be a story there, and the story is likely that since this fire brigade consisted of Chinese volunteers, there would have been no one here to drive them or release them. The Chinese business community largely fled the city, so all the Chinese volunteer fire fighters were likely gone, too, and the trucks sat there unused. A reasonable guess is that this volunteer brigade was put together and funded by the Chinese business community to protect their own businesses, not as a project to help the community as a whole. They probably found the BFP less than adequate for the job of putting out fires, and decided to set up their own fire fighting brigade to protect their businesses.
I’m curious now if Carlo’s family is Chinese or not. I’m not very attuned to facial features, and I can’t look at a person and decide if they are Chinese or Filipino or what. I didn’t even know until quite recently that it was even an issue in the Philippines. I had had no idea, for example, that the family that ran this pension house was Chinese. I had never thought about it. I’m not sure how one goes about finding out, though. Is it polite to simply ask Carlo if he is Chinese or not?
Carlo also talked about the big fiesta that is going to take place in Cebu. I think he said it is scheduled for the third Thursday in January. He mentioned it because he thought it would be something I’d be very, very interested in and would enjoy. Of course, I was interested to hear more about it but only in terms of avoiding it. I have vague plans to go to Cebu after Tacloban, and I don’t want to time my visit so that I show up during fiesta time and have nowhere to stay. Carlo himself plans to attend the fiesta. He is currently looking into booking some accommodation and is finding it difficult. He said that the hotels won’t accept reservations until the new year and that prices will double during the fiesta. He said that a hotel that costs 1,400 pesos a night will cost 2,800 pesos during the fiesta. Carlo also asked if I would be in Tacloban for New Year’s Eve. He invited me to go to his place that night to celebrate with him and his family. I won’t hold my breath. I’ve gotten used to offers and invitations being made liberally and the follow-through distinctly lacking.
The extremely loud woman from the owner’s family was also back at the pension house in the afternoon. The curmudgeon in me got very annoyed as she rampaged about shouting at the tops of her lungs even when her conversational partner was just a few feet away. She, like Leanne, seemed angry and annoyed at everything. I think part of it is just that trick whereby people often sound angry when speaking in a foreign language. At one point, she sounded absolutely furious and out of her mind with indignation as she went on and on. Carlo then interpreted and said that she was telling a story about friends of hers who had gone target shooting. This woman then broke in and said that it was very dangerous now. Many people had guns and you didn’t know who to trust.
I have no idea why she went there, but she said that had gone to the Basper mass grave site. She had a friend somehow connected to the government, and this person told her that there were three bodies in those body bags, not just one. The idea is to try to minimize the official number of dead. I’ve heard this story from many people – that if the body count rises above 10,000 then the UN can step in and “take over.” I’m not sure what the UN would take over exactly, but everyone is convinced that the government is up to all kinds of shenanigans to make sure the body count stays below 10,000. I didn’t bother to question this woman or disagree with her. I’ve learned that no good can come of introducing common sense into any of these scenarios. The thing is that it is very easy to see how many bodies are inside a body bag. I’ve seen only one body inside each bag. At Basper and at Suhi, there was clearly just one body in each bag. And, in fact, from what I witnessed, it was often quite difficult to get that one body into the bag. To get three bodies into one bag would be quite the difficult and very gory chore. I can’t see it being a widespread practice.
People have also often repeated the story that it was now the law that you can’t build a house within 40 meters of the shore. This came up while talking to Carlo about the temporary and permanent housing for the people in the evacuation centers. I asked why these people can’t just go home and rebuild their houses. Carlo said that they can’t because the government won’t allow it. These people all lived along the shoreline and are now not allowed to build there. I tried to bring up an opposing point of view since I’ve clearly seen hundreds and hundreds of houses being rebuilt along the shoreline in the squatter settlements, but this perspective didn’t make an impression. People simply insist that they can’t do it. I point out that they ARE doing it. Then what I said is ignored.
The issue is further complicated by how difficult it would be to determine where the shoreline was. There are numerous cement walls built out into the water. People build their houses on stilts over the water that pools into the big squares between these cement walls. So if you are measuring forty meters from the shoreline, are you measuring from this outer sea wall? Or are you measuring from the actual shoreline where the land first rises from the ocean? It would make a very big difference. In fact, it raises the question of whether these people would even be effected by this law. It might say that you can’t build a house within forty meters of the shoreline. But these houses are not in that area. They are beyond the shoreline and technically out in the ocean. Does the law cover that?
I was amused while talking with the annoying loud woman to hear her claim that nothing has changed in Anibong. I had told her that I had stuck around Tacloban this long partially because I was interested to see how things changed in the shoreline communities like Anibong. She rode right over me conversationally and said that nothing there was changing. She had driven by and it looked the same. It was quite an odd claim coming from someone who fled the city right after the typhoon, only recently returned, and has almost certainly never gone into Anibong itself. I had explored the area thoroughly before the typhoon, seen it completely devastated by the typhoon, and had watched it rebuild itself, but it is impossible to get that across to people like this woman. It appears that listening is a rare quality in people. Lately, I’ve had a lot of trouble finding anyone that actually listens to what their conversational partner says.
3:00 p.m.
I broke out my journal this afternoon simply because I have to say something about the rain. It is raining heavily now and has been raining most of the day. It’s astonishing. I’ve never seen so much rain in my life.
I did escape from the pension house for an hour or two. I was determined to do so. I’ve been cooped up here so long by the weather and my illness that I’m going a bit nuts. So when the rain halted for a while this morning, I set off with my camera. There were even blue patches of sky, and I was cautiously optimistic that the rain would hold off long enough for me to get in a good photowalk around the downtown area and then Seawall and Anibong. Of course, I only made it a few hundred meters from the pension house before it started to rain and I had to get out my umbrella.
I was quite annoyed by the rain, but I was determined to press on. Even if I couldn’t take pictures, I wanted to see something of the outside world. I was going a bit stir crazy.
I was pleasantly surprised upon walking toward downtown to encounter the lovely smell of copra. I don’t know which warehouse it was coming from, but someone had clearly gotten in a shipment somehow. Either that, or I was imagining things.
There is a lot of talk of the recovery of Tacloban – all this tindog and bangon nonsense – but you wouldn’t be able to prove it by a walk along the warehouse street beside the harbor. When I got there, I was astonished and even upset to find that it hadn’t changed at all. The debris of the toppled over cement walls still filled the street. I have no idea why it wasn’t cleared yet. Perhaps people don’t care about that area. Perhaps the large volume of cement means that they need heavier equipment to move it. In any event, it’s a depressing sight. The people in Seawall and Anibong and Magallanes are poor, but the poorest of the poor seem to be on this street beside the harbor. For a newcomer to the country, it would probably seem a very dangerous place to go. The people look very rough and aggressive. I’m comfortable there because I’ve been there so often. Many people even know my name, and I was greeted with many cries of “Merry Christmas, Douglas!” (this time without the gales of laughter).
At the harbor, I was greeted by the sight of not one but two large grey navy ships. I spoke to the guards at the front gate and they said that they were Korean ships. They had brought over thousands of troops and other personnel as well as building material for new homes. I imagine those ships are connected with the large containers of what Manny called pre-fab housing that has been piling up at RTR plaza.
Staring at those ships, I felt very much on the outside of the whole typhoon experience once again. I appear to have a mindset of someone that wants to know what is going on. I want to be on the inside and know everything. It’s frustrating to just be wandering the streets with my camera and have no role in anything that is going on. I watch the fancy NGO trucks drive around and want to know what they are up to. I see these huge navy ships, and I want to be up on the bridge and sitting in on meetings where they make their plans. That’s why it feels so weird to sit around chatting with guys like Carlo and, before him, Dan. They effortlessly find themselves at the center of events and know everything that is going on. Here I am, a Canadian who happened to be physically present when the typhoon struck, and I’m the total outsider just wandering the streets and looking in from a distance. I know less about what is going on than even the most disconnected Filipino. They at least are tuned in to the local media and get reports that way. Rene asked me the other day if I had attended the Christmas Day concert put on by the Philippines Symphony Orchestra. My mouth practically hung open in shock. There was a concert by a symphony orchestra and I had missed it? And on Christmas Day!!!????? Everyone apparently knew about this concert. Everyone but me.
I stared in at those Korean navy ships and at the rather tall and imposing Korean soldiers stationed in a perimeter around them, and I wished I could just march in and insinuate myself into the proceedings and ask questions. I didn’t even try, though. The Philippine navy was a very friendly operation and allowed me to just walk right up to the ships and climb on board. I doubted very much that those tough-looking Korean soldiers actually stationed at protective positions around the ship would be as casual and welcoming.
Sunday appears to be something of a market day, and the downtown area was bustling. Temporary market stalls lined both sides of the street along the harbor. From the water side, the stalls looked like a row of squatter homes. But from the street side, they looked much more pleasant – each stall full stocked with all manner of good things to eat and drink. I’m still on a self-imposed fast, and I could only look at all the food and dream about one day being able to eat again.
I spotted a man with a Canon EOS 60D standing on the harbor wall and taking pictures. I struck up a conversation and learned that he worked for World Vision. He was taking pictures around Tacloban for their year-end report. He was going back to Manila in the afternoon. My hands itched to get hold of his camera to take some pictures and compare the experience to taking pictures with my baby Olympus.
The rain came and went as I walked through the market area and toward Seawall and Anibong. I kept having to get out my umbrella and put it away again. Lots of people called out to me to take their picture, but I wasn’t able to oblige them what with struggling in the rain with my big umbrella.
Seawall and Anibong had again changed almost beyond recognition. More and more houses had been built and they were crowding the narrow cement pathways that ran between them. All the views that I had grown accustomed to were vanishing, and it was becoming possible to only see a couple of feet in any direction. It was acquiring the same claustrophobic feel I remembered from before the typhoon. It felt much better to me in the early days after the typhoon when all the houses were gone and there were expansive views. Then as just a few homes were being built, it was still possible to walk around and see everything. Now it was reverting to the congested maze it was before, and I felt very out of place. I felt far too big for the narrow passageways. I was certainly too tall for the plastic awnings and the ropes that were strung up everywhere. I kept having to bend way over and my knapsack and umbrella got hung up all the time. I would stop to take a picture, and people would crowd behind me trying to get past. That didn’t happen for a few weeks after the typhoon.
I said that I wanted to try out the Canon DSLR the man from World Vision had, and I do, but I don’t think I would have been able to get any of the pictures that pleased me using that camera. The Filipinos are eager to have their picture taken, so it would be no problem raising a big DSLR camera up to your eye and pointing it at them. The problem is that the people would almost always strike a goofy pose, and I don’t want those pictures. Plus, the children go practically out of their minds when they know you are pointing a camera at them. I get much more pleasing pictures with my Olympus as I can hold it at waist level and take pictures by simply touching the screen or just hitting the shutter button and hoping the focus was in the right place and I had framed up something interesting. There is that odd quality to many of the pictures where the people are looking at my face far above the camera. So they aren’t looking into the camera lens. That takes away from the dramatic quality of the pictures, perhaps, but I still like them.
It was unfortunate that it was so rainy and so unpleasant. I saw wonderful picture-taking opportunities all around me. But the rain kept me less active than I’d have liked. My Olympus is waterproof (in theory) assuming you put a waterproof lens on it, but I’m not confident enough in that to simply walk around with it fully exposed to the rain. So when the rain got bad, I had no choice but to put the camera away and take out my umbrella.
I made my way across the bridge from Seawall and entered Anibong. Anibong had also changed a great deal. There were many more houses and many more people. The number of children around had increased dramatically, and I found myself surrounded by quite vocal crowds of them everywhere I went. It felt almost exactly like it did before the typhoon when my presence could sometimes cause a mini-riot of excitement and cries of “Picture me!”
Another, much less pleasant change, was the amount of garbage. There were piles – quite large piles – of rotting garbage everywhere. There doesn’t appear to be any systematic garbage disposal system and people are simply dumping their garbage on the ground, particularly down by the water. Informal garbage dumps were thus formed all over the place making the area quite unpleasant.
The rain suddenly came down in buckets, and I had to take shelter underneath an overhanging roof. The children in all the houses around me went insane for a few minutes and the noise level was deafening. I kept my head down and ignored them until the sound level dropped and then it became quiet again. As long as I stayed still and didn’t do anything interesting, I was allowed to stand there in peace. A simple house was being built just across from me. It was a two-story structure and – tying in with what I have written before – looked almost exactly like a fort that older children would have built in their back yards in Canada in my youth. This resemblance to a fort causes some conflicting feelings in me. On the one hand, seeing these fort-like structures brings out a warm nostalgic feeling. They look fun. And this one in particular was filled with young teenagers and children and they were hanging out and laughing and joking, lying down on the wooden floor and staring out at the world. They were sheltered from the rain and they were having fun with their siblings and friends. It looked very pleasant – but as a fort. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t a play fort. This was their home and they spent all day and every night there. Then it wouldn’t be so much fun.
All of these young teenagers had cell phones, and the bravest of them asked if she could take my picture. I said yes, of course, and after she took my picture, they all wanted to do so. I became quite the model for a while as they struggled to capture a pleasing image in that rather dark and narrow alleyway. I don’t know what they thought of my qualities as a model. I did not, as Filipinos almost invariably do, mug for the camera. I simply stood there and thought my thoughts and looked about the area and let the budding photographers do their thing. I fantasized that I was looking like a casual GQ kind of model, just leaning against the wall with my wind- and rain-swept hair. Cool and adventurous. I’m sure I didn’t look nearly as cool as I thought I did in the pictures. With my very strange pannier bag with shoulder straps on my back and a huge red and white striped golf umbrella I’d rescued from the garbage and my ridiculous sports/travel shorts and shirt that I’d purchased in Taiwan and my dirty socks (full-length socks that I’d converted to ankle socks by cutting them short with a pair of scissors), I think I probably cut quite a ridiculous figure. I just don’t have the knack of fashion and looking good.
In fact, this is something of a theme of my time in the Philippines – one that has continued right into these difficult post-typhoon weeks. This theme is how clean and well-groomed and fashionable the Filipinos always manage to look while it is all I can do to step outside the door not actually covered in filth and only slightly stinking like something the dog killed and dragged home through the garbage dump. I always feel that I should look much better than I actually do. And when I look at the Filipinos, I wonder with some amazement how they manage to do it. Of course, part of the secret is around me everywhere I go – they spend a lot of time doing laundry. I can’t stand doing laundry by hand and bought special clothes designed specifically to stay clean a long time and then be quickly washed and dried. Then I push those limits and don’t do any laundry for a long time. And, going against my better judgement, I did not go for the imported high-quality brands but purchased the Taiwanese versions – and this clothing has been a nightmare since I bought it. It has fallen apart – buttons popping off and zippers jamming and the awful belt staining everything bright red. And it is all several sizes too large and flaps around me like a tent that blew away and wrapped around me. Perhaps when I get to Cebu I can do some shopping and get some proper clothes that don’t make me look like a cross between a refugee from a poor segment of the French Foreign Legion and Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter.
Having said all of that, I often find myself being admired for my clothing and possessions – mainly because they are perceived as being expensive. Today, for example, I learned that I am sporting a very desirable brand of shoe. I had no idea. My shoes, like everything I have with me on this trip, was purchased almost at random in a frantic shopping spree around Taipei as time ran out and my flight to the Philippines approached. I had misjudged how much time I’d need just to pack up my life in Taiwan and I left very little time for preparing for my life in the Philippines and beyond. So at pretty much the last minute, I grabbed a pair of shoes at the same sports store near my old apartment where I bought all my clothes. The shoes I bought were Merrel shoes and were pretty much the only shoes in the store that fit me and did not look like they should be flying through outer space shooting out laser beams like a traveling disco. I never thought anything about these shoes beyond hoping that they would fit me and be comfortable when I got them home – a thing that rarely happens. Anyway, today, I was chatting with two guys in Seawall, and one of them was staring at my feet and then said something to the other guy. I thought he was staring at my rather bizarre socks, but when I asked what was going on, the guy said that he was commenting on my fashionable shoes. The guy knew the brand and he was commenting that I was wearing some pretty awesome shoes. He said that since they were genuine Merrel shoes, they would cost something like 4,000 pesos in the Philippines. Who knew? I’ve been traipsing around Tacloban in the height of fashionable footwear.
My last interesting encounter took place when the already intense rain got even harder, and I was forced to move deeper into a dark portion of the alleyway underneath the roof. I found myself standing right outside of a door of a cement building and a man suddenly appeared and spoke to me through the steel mesh of the door. He invited me to come inside several times, but I kept insisting that I was fine outside and we chatted through the door. He was a fisherman by trade, but he hasn’t been able to make any money since the typhoon. His fishing boat was destroyed and all of his fishing nets and other equipment was gone. His house was also destroyed in the typhoon. He pointed to an empty space across from us and said that his house used to stand right there. He then pointed to a large steel shipping container nearby – the kind that you see on big container ships and trains – and said that that container had been floating in the water and had hit his house several times until the entire thing collapsed. He had seen it happen from this cement house, where he and his family had taken refuge. I wondered aloud when he might be able to rebuild his house, and he said that he had no idea. If he had money, he would first have to invest in a new fishing boat and fishing nets. Then he would have a source of income and could start to rebuild his house. He said that a fishing boat would cost about 25,000 pesos and new nets about 15,000, bringing the total to 40,000 pesos or just shy of a thousand US dollars. Considering that he was telling me that his family was completely destitute, had no home, and no income, he was pretty cheerful. That’s another odd aspect to the post-typhoon world of Tacloban – like looking at the houses and seeing a fun play fort – people who should be weeping and wailing and tearing out their hair are laughing and joking about their misfortunes. There are two conclusions you can make about this. One is that Filipinos are naturally happy people, and that is certainly true. The other is that the situation people face isn’t always as dire as they present it to be. I’ve come to think that this is also true to an extent. After hearing this man’s story, I wasn’t about to reach into my pocket and produce a thousand dollars to “save” his family. I think he had his own resources to draw on – resources that didn’t come out in his story. He was, for example, now living in that cement house. I forget what he said about the owners, but they were some kind of relatives of his. He also looked well fed, so it’s not like he’s been starving since the typhoon struck fifty-two days ago. He talked about having to rely on relief goods for food and looted items for clothing, but I doubt that that is the entire story.
Eventually, I gave up on the rain ever stopping a I put my camera away and said goodbye to the man and started walking back the way I had come through Anibong and Seawall. The rain had let up enough that I stayed relatively dry underneath my oversized umbrella. However, nothing is ever easy when it comes to me and walking around in rainy Tacloban. I soon found myself blocked by deep puddles and my newly-fashionable Merrel sneakers got soaked through with icky dirty water. When I got back to the market area, I found myself facing a massive and very long garbage pile of market refuse. It was all organic and therefore rotting and extremely foul. The smell was overwhelming. A large front-end loader was busy scooping it up and dumping it into waiting dump trucks. I waited for my chance and walked around the rear end of the front end loader. But then I found myself trapped with a deep pool of really foul water in front of me, a high wall of filthy garbage on my right, and this front-end loader tearing up from behind me blasting its horn to tell me to get out of the way. I had no choice but to plunge ahead into that water and let it seep its disgusting way into my soaks and shoes. It was horrible.
Meanwhile, the rain had picked up again and was coming down in buckets, and when I got to the end of the garbage pile, I cut across the end and made my way underneath what remained of a big tin roof of the market. It was dry under there at least, but I was also standing amidst rotting produce and broken eggs, and the number of flies present had to be seen to be believed. The ground, and at times the air, was black with them. I was in a pretty foul mood by that point, saved by only my sense of humor and the sense that this was all suitable as far as my life went. Things like this always happened to me. Other people never seem to be trapped between massive piles of rotting garbage, deep pools of filthy water and front-end loaders, but this sort of thing seems to happen to me all the time. Where is the drama of being caught in what I’ve heard called the most powerful storm in history? No drama for me. Just drudgery, endless rain and mud and flies and mosquitoes, and my own personal comedy of errors.
I made it back to the pension without getting much wetter and filthier. To my dismay, I found I had another date with the toilet. Just how much diarrhea can one body contain? A lot apparently. On the positive side, I quite enjoyed reviewing the few pictures I managed to take. I got some wonderful candid shots of children. By taking these candid pictures, I’ve come to realize just how often people pull all kinds of crazy expressions with their faces and rub their eyes and pull their facial skin like putty in different directions. Normal pictures never capture that because people sort themselves out when they see the camera aimed at them. With my Olympus, I’ve been catching them unawares and the results are quite interesting. I also got some interesting pictures of adults.
Since I’ve been back, I’ve been hanging out and relaxing. I listened to a podcast or two, drank some instant coffee, filled up my buckets of water, and chatted with whoever was around. I just recently came back inside after chatting with one of the two current houseboys. I mentioned earlier that one of them has the nickname of Guapo – for obvious reasons. This second one has the nickname of Elvis, for an equally obvious reason I think. He wears his hair like Elvis.
Elvis is nineteen years old and got the job because he is the nephew of the main security guard. He’s a nice, polite kid and speaks enough English that we can communicate in a fashion. He’s also the one that was trapped in his room by the cement wall and had trouble getting out. He said that when he was in his room and the cement wall fell over, he really thought it was his time to die. But, he said, God saved him and he now had a second chance at life. I resisted the impish impulse to ask him what he thought of God sending the typhoon and knocking over the cement wall to begin with, but it was a near thing.
I knew this from previous conversations, I think, but I found out again that Elvis makes 1,500 pesos a month. On top of that he gets a free place to sleep plus food. The food issue got a bit murky when I pressed for details. It sounded like he was given cooked meals by the pension house owners. But then he talked about everyone having to cook for themselves. This implied that he was given uncooked food and had to prepare it himself. I tried to sort that out, and then it sounded like he was given money to buy food. I eventually had to give up. The answers were too confusing and all began contradicting each other. In any event, he earned, in actual money, 1,500 pesos per month given to him in two portions every fifteen days. So he got 750 pesos on probably the fifteenth day and the last day of each month.
I just whipped out my trusty cell phone calculator and I see that we are talking about $34 per month or $400 per year. Sure, he gets room and board on top of that, but room consists of a single bed inside a crowded room with the other staff. And the hours are also very, very long. He may not be sweating hard and working flat out all the time, but the work day is a very long one. And he works at least six days a week. Assuming the six-day work week, he would then get about 60 pesos – less than $1.50 – per full work day.
Considering all that, it is astonishing that Guapo can turn himself out in the high fashion that he does. How can these guys put any clothes on their backs let alone the fashionable duds they sport along with the fancy cell phones and other consumer items? It’s crazy. And why would anyone take a job like this? It seems that even buying and selling on the smallest of scales would net you more money than that. If jobs in general are like this, then it’s easy to see why Filipinos do open so many sari-sari stores and operate so many little food stalls and things like that. It would take only the smallest of turnovers to give you a profit much greater than what Elvis and Guapo make working full time. It’s astonishing that the two of them don’t break into my room while I’m gone and make off with whatever they find. There’s hardly a single large item I have with me that doesn’t amount to like a year or two years or even three years of salary for them.
Anyway, as I’ve implied before, this simple math doesn’t necessarily convey the full picture of their situation in life. There is far too much in the way of consumer goods floating around for all the people to be earning so little and nothing more. Other money and sources of income come into play certainly. Not much perhaps, but more.
I also found out that Elvis has completed two years of college in an education program with the eventual goal of becoming a teacher. He says that people consider him smart and good at school. I can see him being a good if somewhat laid back teacher.
One last note before I shut down for the night and switch over to podcast-listening mode. I went over my recent journal entries to try to isolate what might have made me sick. The details I uncovered were a little bit unclear, but a story of sorts did emerge. This major bout of sickness began dramatically on the night of December 19th. Yet, I began drinking the water from this pension house’s well on December 4th – a full 15 days earlier. Therefore, it is pretty unlikely that that water was what made me sick.
I was glad to figure that out because it reassures me that perhaps this Waterine I have really does purify water properly. Whether or not the water that comes through the pipe into the well is potable is still a confusing issue. There are simply too many distracting factors involved for me to get a straight answer from anybody. It’s the most frustrating thing imaginable, and it’s a miracle I haven’t hauled off and punched anyone as I ask about water and water sources. I have this fantasy of taking everyone I know here and strapping them all down in chairs and wiring them up to heavy-duty truck batteries. I’d zap them painfully every time they showed any lack of logic in their answers to my questions and I’d just torture them until I got a straight and consistent story from them. (I can dream, can’t I?)
Actually, a funny thing occurred this evening to illustrate just how different cultures can be. I was standing out on the verandah chatting with Elvis and his uncle the security guard (that everyone calls just “guard”) when suddenly the headlights on the truck down in the courtyard just came on. It was dark and the sudden blaze of light was quite startling. There was no one in the truck and no one near the truck. Yet the headlights just came on. Then they started to go on and off with long periods of just staying on. It was the strangest thing, and I made a joke about a ghost in the truck. We all laughed.
I stood there with them looking down at the blazing headlights of the truck for the longest time. With every passing minute, I was more surprised that neither of them had gone down to investigate yet. They just stood there looking down at the truck. Then, finally, “Guard” moved away and went into his room. I assumed he was going inside to get a flashlight to go down to the truck. To my astonishment, he was doing no such thing. He came back out of the room and then stood around again. By this point, neither he nor Elvis were even looking at the truck anymore. It had ceased to interest them.
Forget that both of them are employed by the pension house and it was the official pension house truck. Forget that the headlights being on will soon drain the battery and cause problems the next day. Forget that it was the security guard’s job to safeguard the pension house and its physical property. What about just simple human curousity? Don’t they want to know what has caused the lights to turn on? Aren’t they dying of curiosity to go investigate? Apparently not. They couldn’t have been more uninterested and they were going to simply leave the truck be and let the battery drain. I was stunned and I couldn’t take it anymore. I finally piped up and said to them, “Aren’t you going to go see why the lights turned on?” My prompting finally got Guard to move down to the end of the verandah where the stairs are. But once there, he stopped and just chatted with one of the diesel generator mechanics (who had returned after the Christmas holiday). Guard stood around there for a while, and then he started walking back towards Elvis and me. Nope, he wasn’t going to investigate. I asked Elvis if his uncle was perhaps scared by my suggestion that a ghost was in the truck. That was the only explanation I could think of. Elvis said that maybe that was true. Then I asked Elvis if he wasn’t curious why the truck lights were on. He didn’t seem to be. Finally, after much more prompting, Elvis went down into the courtyard. He slowly approached the truck and then peered through the passenger side window. He called up to me that there was no one in the truck. Then he went around to the driver’s side and found that the door was ajar. He opened and closed the door a couple of times. The headlights went out, flickered on for a second, and then went out permanently. We still didn’t know what was going on (presumably it was just a short circuit from all this rain), but at least the headlights were now off. Of course, that doesn’t solve the larger problem in my head of how these two could be so uninterested in this mystery. It was, in any case, part of the guard’s job to investigate such a thing. So I was totally mystified at how the two of them behaved. If Elvis hadn’t gone down, I certainly would have. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep otherwise. I would have gone down instantly except that I didn’t feel that it was my place to do so. Even if I couldn’t solve the mystery, I’d have at least removed one of the battery terminals so that the battery wouldn’t be drained. This lack of curiosity will remain another mystery.
But back to water and my sickness. By looking at the dates, I kind of ruled out the pension house well water as the source of my illness. Unfortunately, that left any number of other sources. The most likely suspect is the rather slipshod and dirty and fly-infested carenderia on St. Nino street. Any of the dishes I had there were suspect as was the water. It could also have been the food or water at Megabites. From my journal, I realized that right before I got sick, I had also been eating at Mark’s house, at Hayward with Manny’s family, and with the BFP team at the fire station. I had even drunk water from the American fire fighters’ bucket filtered through their Sawyer filter. Any of those places could have been the source of the bacteria that has made me ill. Unfortunately, I’ll never know which it was.
I’m currently on day three of my self-imposed fast. I’m starting to feel the effects, and I probably shouldn’t push it any farther. I plan on having a simple breakfast tomorrow morning. That will make it a full 72 hours of not eating since I started my course of anti-biotics. I’m hoping that I’ve come to the end of my diarrhea. I don’t feel any stomach cramps at all right now. I think – I hope – that my entire intestinal tract is completely empty. And I hope the antibiotics are coursing through my blood stream and killing every nasty bacteria it finds. I’m a bit worried that the antibiotics on a long fast might be harming my body to an extent. I’ve felt some weird things in the last 24 hours – even something very strange in my ear drums. I probably should have been eating at least a little bit, but I just couldn’t bring myself to risk more stomach pain. I’m looking forward to having something to eat tomorrow morning. I’m starting to feel quite hungry.