The Unbearable Lightness of Insignificance

Development work can be excruciating. One will traverse leech-infested rivers to reach towns, as well as walk 8 kilometers up a mountain to get to an isolated village. These instances can be depicted. Most defy description.

The mandate of development work is changing the fate of people. No matter how much tome you turn over, that’s the bottom line.

Years of doing this kind of work afford me one conclusion: fate plays a major role in the significance one can have in life. Unoriginal, but true. Fate is the invisible chain that imprisons potential.

I, however, do not refer to fate as that which is written in the stars. If you’ve been to where I’ve been, you’d come to know stars from the vantage point of the gutter.

The people I’ve met are those whose fate has been handed down to them, not from the movements of celestial bodies or the great unknown, but by the machinations of those who are on, yes, equally unreachable heights.

It shapes the lives and continues to dictate the state of this people’s future, as well as of their progeny’s future. Defying it is a concept that is not even known to them. What they know is that one cannot really budge from where one is.

This fate, however, has bound them to a lifetime of insignificance, making them resigned to the dustbin of mediocrity. Their milieu is exactly what Aesop meant when he said “Our insignificance is often the cause of our safety.”

The ignorant mother in a coastal town who doesn’t know what television is because the place she has known all her life has never had electricity is safe from the global fear and paranoia of economic recession. What she knows is contentment because the sea has provided enough thus far. And the sun will rise tomorrow, anyway. And the fruit on the branch will fall, anyway.

If you’re fated to be insignificant, then, by all means, you are.

Potential is a word that comes from the middle class, the affluent, and the civil society.

Maybe, all these efforts in development work to make people realize that they have a potential to achieve might just be disturbing the order of things in their universe. Life in the islands was peaceful and relationships were in better accord when the people were using alibata, an indigenous form of writing. Now, they have to memorize 26 letters in the English alphabet and learn syntax that is not only alien to them, but eventually useless. They are not about to get the chance to leave the island.

Just as Western colonizers were intrusive on our culture, so are we now who are really nothing but puppets of development whose tenets have been formed outside of these islands. We teach people to aspire to ideals that are benchmarked in the West.

We define happiness and contentment for them. We play the spinner of fate and hand them down our definition of potential. We fail to see that, in their ignorance, they are truly happy.

There is stillness in the sea, and it exists precisely for only that. And development workers such as me only disturb this stillness.

There are those who can and will be significant, as well as those who will forever remain inconsequential. And somewhere in between are those, like me, who persist to be a spinner of fate and move the forces of nature so that the lives of the trivial ones escape irrelevance, not knowing that there is a place under the heavens for us all.

Looking at the vastness of the ocean in this coastal fishing village, I conclude that I belong to those who are truly ignorant.

Drowsy

At last, policy makers are awakened into the reality that currently bites the Philippines. Economic planners are trimming growth targets. It isn’t these targets, however, that ordinary Filipinos find mind-boggling. The planners and policy movers have always had a penchant for making targets anyway, elevating the effort to the level of a sport. It looks, though, that they had been making plans either in slumber or in a half-awakened state. Being in climate-controlled luxury cars and excellently airconditioned homes and offices can, indeed, induce a narcotic, numbing, and trance-like effect.

The ordinary Pinoy finds sick humor in television ads and cinema ads where the president of his country is seen smiling from ear to ear (to match a professionally done make-up and expertly coiffed crowning glory that projects a beaming leader) in cross-fade frames along with animated graphs and statistical figures that visualize a smiling, swimming, and swooning economic upturn (constant and consistent) in the past few months. Along with these images are a series of shots of government institutions that have supposedly been furiously addressing, albeit just recently, the country’s economic blight.

To the ordinary Pinoy, this is not only sickening; it makes his heart sink. But because Filipinos are wont to just laugh off their problems (probably, out of an attitude of being resigned to the fact that is, in turn, an after-effect of centuries-long subservience to colonial rule), the sickening images are merely taken as sick humor. Those images and statistics are lost on the ordinary Filipino because from the time he opens his eyes in the morning till the minute he rests his weary body at night, he knows a different set of facts.

He only knows lower-digit numbers in his economic realities, not ones that can be exponentially configured into statistics. Being destitute, he does not know that far.

Long before the price of rice went up, the ever-dependable instant noodles have also become staple food for poor Filipinos. A pack of instant noodles comes at about 5 pesos. A poor family of five people will have roughly about four packs a day. The taxicab driver will have to ask his passengers for a few extra bucks additional to the metered fare because it has become impossible for him to recoup his gasoline expenses. To the passenger, this means the equivalent of 30 to 40 pesos to show his generosity. Many primary and high school students, in both the countryside and urban poor areas, are forced to quit school because their families can hardly come up with financial requirements needed to sustain schooling. The school I.D. and other seemingly necessary requirements will come up to around 200 pesos more for low-income families.

While the country’s economic planners speak in terms of inflation, export, import, Dubai crude oil prices, and strong peso, the ordinary Pinoy can only utter the price of rice, price of canned sardines, price of instant noodles, cost of public jeepney fare, additional financial requirements in public schools that are supposed to give free education, and the ridiculously escalating price of gas partly due to an imposed 12% expanded value-added tax over and above the ridiculously escalating cost of foreign oil.

It would do a world of good if all Filipinos call a spade a spade. But I am not sure which is more expedient for the sake of having a unified country: for the poor to understand economic terminology or for the ones in power and authority to have their ear to the ground.

Payatas: The Poetry of Poverty

An eyesore to those who are used to seeing asphalted roads, at least, the terrain here is of the mushy, squishy type. A crust of a curious kind that covers the unseen ground is made from layers of refuse at different stages of decomposition. All sorts of organic stuff fill the ground, from the raw to the maggoted to the egested. As to the garbage that doesn’t decompose, the place is also a grand showcase of an amazing array of synthetic items, from the ubiquitous plastic bags to polystyrene in many shapes and sizes.

The biodegradable trash emits the distinctive stench of death and dying. The non-biodegradable expels the frightening smell of kill. Plastic that has been left out in the open, under the elements, lets off a putrid sulfuric stench that comes with smoke. Some say that the killer methane must be coming from the chemical reaction between biodegradable and non-biodegradable, mixed with H20 from the rains and the CO2 that comes from somewhere. My little knowledge from high school chemistry cannot comprehend all that.

Human beings scale this place and spend hours on this mountain in the only livelihood they know how to eke out – picking trash that can be sold. Armed with long and thin metal rods that are bent on one end to make a hook, hands quickly search the area, hook items that are mostly plastic, and throw them into used rice sacks slung on emaciated backs. Like a metronome, rods held by grimy hands pierce into the refuse, expertly search and hook, and deftly shoot into the sack the coveted discards. A graphic oxymoron. Whole families can be seen plying this trade.

At the foot of this garbage mountain is a thriving colony of illegal settlers, known more colloquially as squatters. These people who have not known the more pleasant side of life, are buried under ignorance, social degradation, economic desperation, senseless infighting due to gross crab mentality, and vice. An entire family’s meal budget for the whole day may be thrown away on betting for the much publicized and legalized lotto. There is a not so half-hearted joke that poor Filipinos used to run to church to pray for hope and solution to their never-ending economic woes, but now run to the lotto betting stations for brighter hope.








Drugs proliferate the place in such ridiculous ease that one can turn on a corner, hand a ten-peso bill to one of the many people packed on every possible square foot space, and openly receive a packet of weed or a smaller sachet of what is locally known as ‘shabu.’ This drug of choice is synthetic amphetamine, regarded as poor man’s cocaine and even lower in cost than crack. It slowly fries the brain to a crisp. Peddlers are users. Users are couriers. And the whole shebang is of people drugged enough to forget that they haven’t eaten for at least two days.

On July 10, 2000, the mountain of garbage caved in on the slum colony below, killing hundreds of people and rendering some more hundreds of families homeless. That is, if makeshift contraptions made out of derelict wood, rusty galvanized iron sheet pieces, and cartons of milk assembled to stand up can be called shanties.

Days of heavy rains during one of the fiercest typhoons that ravaged the Philippines loosened the mountain of rubbish. Three days after the crash of the dumpsite, rescue teams were still pulling bloated decomposing bodies out of the heaps of garbage. Society’s debris buried under plain debris, seen over CNN.

The place has remained ugly. It is a picture postcard of squalor and pain. It is so ugly that it starts to look pretty on pictures that accompany some NGO’s country report.

Three months out of a year, every year, I live in this place on a self-funded and singular mission to do whatever I can to upgrade the literacy level of out-of-school youth who are drug dependents. Because the drug trade along the dark dingy alleys peak from 10 in the evening to 2 in the morning, I schedule my classes during those hours and call it the Midnight School. We hold it under a mango tree on the yard of a kind old lady that keeps me there, with the dim sputtering light from the lone incandescent bulb of the tiny house spilling out to provide us some form of illumination. It looks poetic to survey a sea of heads huddled over seatwork exercises.

When the police frisk these youth during the months that we don’t have school, the law enforcers find drug packets and fan knives inside pockets. During those three months, however, police are surprised to find little pocket dictionaries, ballpens, and crumpled folded makeshift notebooks instead.

I always look forward to those three months, every year.

Hope in the Midst of Squalor

Payatas Garbage Dump Collapse

After the Crash

Life On A Banana Leaf

One in three Filipinos are now living in poverty despite the purported modest economic gains in recent years.

The number of Filipinos living on just one dollar a day rose from 23.8 million in 2003 to 27.6 million in 2006, according to a survey released by the country's economic planners.

Oil prices have been rising (22 percent over the last three years). So have the cost of transport and basic food items. Wages have barely moved in the past few years. Inflation has been rising steadily (5.4 percent in February, the highest since October 2006).

Poor personal income in the face of soaring cost of living equals a desperate country.

"Let's move to Australia," my husband says, lost in thought.

I shoot back nonchalantly, "The opportunity for this country to go up is available only when it's down."

"You're philosophizing Reuters. You wax everything poetic," he retorts teasingly with a silly grin.

"At least my life does not revolve around pairs of Nikes," I snap back only half-jokingly.

He grabbed to hug me, as if to say I win the argument hands down.

Yes, I am hopeful for this country. It's the only one I have. I had made a definitive choice a long time ago to not be part of the statistics of diaspora. I probably think this way because I happen to be in a childless double-income family. The thoughts might not be the same with those coming from families of large broods and a myriad of needs.

But making dreams in a place like this can only be put on hold. I pinch myself each time I say that things will be okay in this desperate land. In the meantime, we merely dream of moving out of our city-center dwelling and set up residence in the suburbs where we can have a garden (planted on land, and not in pots), keep a dog and cat (that can procreate their respective lines till they can), and inhale unadulterated air (as well as exhale unadulterated carbon dioxide). We can also almost see our little adopted Aeta boy from Pinatubo with a mop of hair in very tight curls.

The Fable of Foibles (The Fallibility of Knowledge)

While global economic experts debate on such real considerations as Gross National Income (GNI) Per Capita, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP$), Actual Final Consumption Expenditure (AFCE), etc., the typical Filipino rural child does not even think if the water he drinks from the communal shallow tube well is safe, whether his parents will allow him to still attend classes this coming planting season when his manual help in the farm is absolutely needed, or if he can still manage to walk the muddy roads to school at daybreak because a mudslide is surely to occur again this year. It may not even cross his mind that he is very rarely able to drink milk because his father would rather pump up the gamecock with multivitamins.

Knowledge is lost on those who are truly informed.

A little knowledge, indeed, is a dangerous thing.