Bohol: My Work: Pt. 3

Bohol: My Work: Pt. 3

I woke up coughing to the smell of smoke, and looked around with my eyes burning to see the rest of the room covered in smoke. A little freaked out, but still bleary-eyed, I looked around and saw no one else freaking out. It was about 6 AM, and the lights in my room were on, but some of the other guys in my room were still asleep on the bunks, and the guy putting his shoes on said it was just breakfast being made. Since we had a window that overlooked the kitchen area that was open all the time, the smoke from breakfast was pouring into our room, though it was less bad in the living room area. I was tired enough that even with the lights on and smoke filling the room, I decided to set the alarm for 30 more minutes and try to sleep more.

This of course didn’t work. After falling into that half-sleep, I woke up coughing probably five times before I decided to leave and save my lungs, eyes, mouth, and nose. However, out in the living area, all the seats were taken, and the seats on the porch were taken too. Tired, and not wanting to stand around for a half hour until breakfast, I decided to try and go back into the room and read or something while I braved the smoke, which by now had made all my clothes and other things smell like smoke. I tried to get some stuff and get dressed, but the smoke was extremely distracting. I’m still not sure why it happened, since there was never again any smoke pouring into the room, but that was one of the roughest mornings I had in the Philippines, with me having to wake up to smoke and not being able to even stay inside the building without being assaulted again by the fumes.

Luckily, we were able to dispel the smoke with fans after an hour or so, and breakfast with the other 20 or so helpers was fine. This time, knowing what to expect, I sat around with Juvy, until once again we dashed into the black pickup to go wait by Bohol University again. This time, I shared a crammed seat with an older Filipina lady who I don’t think spoke any English and a few girls younger than me. With the pastor and Juvy again in the front seat, and the big joking guys in the back smoking cigarettes, we took off again for a new relief site.

The day was largely similar to the previous one. It took a few hours to get to the place, and on the way we passed both beautiful and damaged landscape, including more busted chocolate hills, and muddy river with carabao (the local cows) lining the sides, rice paddies, damaged homes and buildings, rock slides, and a brilliantly white beach surrounded by mangroves on a dark blue and gleaming ocean.

Our stop was once again up, up, and a little more up on a one lane gravelly and rocky road. The barangay hall, whose meager shade had been expanded by the big guys and the tarps, sat on a leveled area basically on the side of the hill, and tall trees, bamboo groves, and general jungle surrounded it. There was a mostly demolished church and some crumble-stoned houses at the top of the hill, but most people in this town lived deeper in the jungle in houses reached by winding jungle paths.

Again, as soon as I left the truck, stares from the hundred or so people greeted me. Kids were pointing, older ladies were pointing and whispering to each other, and a toothless elderly lady yelled “Hi” to me and asked me to sit next to her, laughing uproariously when I said that I would love to, but have a seat elsewhere. I did get a chance this time to see the beginning of the whole process, as a barangay official gave a speech in Bisaya, followed by a medical professor from Silliman. Since we got there closer to midday, I got a chance to get off the pile of rubble that had previously been someone’s home that I was sitting on during the speech and hand out plates of food to the people in the crowd. Far from being sad or embarrassed or even desperate for the plate chock full of food, the people of the community graciously accepted the relief, and often laughed at my “salamat” or asked if I could give them a hug or more food.

As I helped pass things out and create some relief packages, I got to know some of the new relief workers, as both the people from Mindanao and the Silliman guys with whom I slept were elsewhere. Today, it was people my age or younger who were there helping, and Juvy introduced them as part of the youth group in the Tagbilaran UCCP church.

After a few hours of putting together some relief and having more staring at the “Americano”, the debriefing started in full, and the kids broke off as the adults circled up. I decided once again to join John and the girls with their kids to help out. That day was easier, as John knew I would be there to help again, and so had planned for me to participate more and do some more things with the kids. Using my large knowledge of silly kid games that I had gathered from two summers of being a camp counselor, I was able to entertain the kids for a half hour or so, and continued to be the photo and snack guy. I talked more with the people my age from Tagbilaran as we watched the play from a pew that was pulled up from the nearby pile of rocks that was now the church.

So, after another long day, albeit with minimal actual relief work accomplished by myself, we packed into the black pickup and left, this time with lots of hand wavings and racing after the vehicles. I felt more assured about my work. Sure, I hadn’t rebuilt the church or made a more passable road out of asphalt with my bare hands, but I talked to a lot of people, helped out with the kids, and passed out some badly needed food. One guy that I talked to was with the high school group, and he said, at 17, he had three small kids at home and not enough food. We made sure to give him some extra relief for his kids and wife. Things like that made me feel like I was making some sort of difference in people’s lives.

Of course, while we were driving back, Juvy told me that, once again, when asked what people learned or remembered most about our relief efforts, the people responded that the “Americano” had made the most impact, just by being there. That still feels odd to me, but if I helped just by being visible, I guess that is good. Perhaps I made it seem like the international community cared about their livelihoods after the accident? Though I am not sure if I can claim that I really am qualified to portray something like that in any way, I am glad my mere presence helped.

We drove home again, with the sun sinking over the palm trees, and encountered a slip up in the form of a flat tire. Our caravan stopped in basically the middle of nowhere on the side of the wooded road, and while we waited for help from afar, we got out, hung out on the road, and many people even walked over and talked to the family whose house and farm we were in front of.

I just sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed what my official post-undergrad job was at that moment. I was watching the sunset in the middle of the forest, eating some of the bread and drinking the lemonade we got as a waiting snack. The noise of happy voices and laughter drifted from every direction, including the porch of the local house, who had invited people in to use the bathroom and take a rest. The sounds of roosters crowing and goats baaing came from the farmyard, and even a few lows of the carabao with the giant horns tied up nearby. The big guys who were usually on the back of the truck were cracking more jokes about the earthquake (including fairly bawdy jokes about “potholes”), and they kept asking me if I “liked Filipina girls”, and then “if they liked me”. In short, life was relaxed, I was in a beautiful place, and even in the middle of a disaster zone, happiness was pervasive in the people around me. If this was how the rest of the next few weeks was going to play out, I thought, it wouldn’t be too bad at all.

Bohol: My Work: Pt. 2

Bohol: My Work: Pt. 2

We drove for about an hour to the next site. As we drove through the middle of some of the most damaged areas of Bohol, we passed lots of destruction. On left and right, it was not hard to spot buildings with a wall gone, or buildings with roofs gone. We saw rubble on the roads and in the rice fields. There were lots of places where there used to be solid rock that was just a pile of rocks, and lots of roads covered in rubble from landslides.

The Chocolate Hills, which I mentioned in an earlier post as one of the more iconic sites in all of the Philippines, were also damaged. The lookout point, which was a touristy area right outside of the town of Carmen on top of one of the hills, was damaged so bad that they wouldn’t let anyone up the hill, but, worse than that, the hills themselves were damaged. Some of our driving took us past them, and huge rocky chunks were taken out of them by the landslides. The formations that previously looked like Hershey’s kisses now looked like half-eaten chocolaty masses; as these are natural land formations, the chances of rebuilding these are slim to none, and now Bohol’s largest tourist attraction is forever marred.

Our earlier trip to Bohol as a YAV group in September had taught us some about the situation with the agriculture in the Philippines and in Bohol especially. We had stayed with this group in Cebu that was interested in helping local farmers in the Central Visayas, which includes Bohol. Our point person, Patrick, showed us what the situation was, and what we would see when we got to Bohol, and, in addition, we talked to the extremely generous and friendly locals who were nice enough to give us a place to sleep and great food while answering our personal questions about their lives.

The basic outline I got was that the Filipino farmer has been suffering for a long time, and that there is no end in sight. The land in the Philippines is almost entirely owned by what we in the US call “the one percent”, the wealthy elite who also control almost all of the government positions, corporations, and in general the power and money of the country. The separation and corruptness of these wealthy individuals is one if not the main problem in the Philippines, as they control just about everything that happens in the nation (including the media, and now social media). With insanely high amounts of hunger, poverty, homelessness, and unemployment/underemployment in the Philippines, it is these select people that continue to steal from the poor to give to themselves, as is evidenced in the constant corruption and scandals that have flooded the news during my time in the Philippines.

The small Filipino farmer is suffering the same, if not worse, than the others who are under the thumb of the current land-owners. In the US, there are only about 2 million farmers left (as I learned in a class about “US Food History” in college). Most of the farmers own enormous tracks of land that they outmuscled from the smaller farmers around them. The majority of farms are basically run like large corporations, and less and less smalltime farmers are around anymore.

The Philippines, on the other hand, is almost all smalltime farmers. Even though there are lots and lots and lots of people (especially in Manila, one of the most densely populated cities on earth), many of them live on small farms and most are farmers.

This is not to say that there are no large corporate farms and plantations-those are plentiful. The Dole and Del Monte tropical fruit plantations in Mindanao are huge, and each island still has some vestiges of the old Spanish plantation culture clinging to it. In Negros, for example, sugar cane rules, and driving across the island means seeing vast sugar fields as far as the eye can see. Of course, they aren’t still exactly “plantations” as we envisage them, with a huge manor and a master and people with no rights working the fields for a pittance. At least not officially. But it’s not too far off.

The small farmers, however, are essentially tenants on the wealthy landowners land. Their family usually has been on the same plot for awhile, but, being poor themselves and having no power to fight the wealthy and powerful, their land is usually bought by the wealthy and then they sign a contract to live on it and give some profits to the owner, as well as paying rent and all that.

However, the total cost to maintain a farm and also give a lot of what you earn to your lord, sorry the “landowner” in this semi-feudalistic relationship ends up being more than expected profit of the farm. If they are lucky, farmers can break even with their payments and their own money to survive, but it is far more common for the farmers to end up in the red, sometimes drastically so if there is a drought or some similar problem.

One of the ladies we stayed with, Raquel, told us that the land owner had seemed to be nice 15 years ago and had lowered her rate so her family could make a little money. Now, 15 years later, she is a single mother of a child of 6 or so, and the land owner has come back asking her to pay for all the times she didn’t pay the difference from the normal rate and the lowered rate. Essentially, the guy went back on his promise and is asking for an absurd amount of rent from the past 15 years which she of course doesn’t have.

The other thing is these farmers cannot do much to change the situations they are in. The government that they would appeal to is the same government that is oppressing them and taking their money only to put it in their own pockets. They cannot go to the courts because the judges are often corrupt as well, and they can rarely afford the high legal fees. They are trapped in this situation, and there’s really no way out.

I thought about this background as we drove past the devastation. Juvy and the young pastor who was driving kept talking and laughing it up. Every once in a while they would ask me light-hearted questions about this and that, but all in all, the tone in truck was at odds with how I was feeling as we passed home after home and field after field that were damaged. All I could think about was how hard it was to scrape by in this farming life at the best of times, and how much ridiculously harder it would be once farms, houses, buildings, and really everything was ruined by a freak earthquake or a huge typhoon.

While I continued to stare coldly out the window, Juvy and the pastor continued cutting up in the front. The pastor put in a CD whose first few songs were by LMFAO, a terrible pop group with pretty gross songs about “wiggling their bodies” and how they “work out”. My stony face started to break as I saw two established leaders of the church in Bohol joke and sing along to songs that are downright disgusting to this 23 year old ex-fraternity American guy. This was a sad drive through people’s metaphorical broken lives all around us, and they were laughing and smiling and singing “girl look at that body, I work out!”

I have since then learned that is a Filipino cultural thing to do this in sad situations. Apparently in hospitals, after someone is diagnosed or told some bad news, there is laughter from the orderlies and nurses and doctors. In Leyte a few weeks later, I heard a ton of inappropriate jokes as we drove past the damage from Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda. I asked someone in Leyte about it too, and he said something along the lines of “If we don’t laugh, we cry, so we laugh.” The funeral I went to was also a less somber affair than I expected, with lots of laughing on the way down and lots of laughing during the coffee/snack break.

Even so, I felt a little strange as we pulled into the muddy parking spot in the grass near a small church on the edge of a huge rice field. This was a much more highly attended event, with, from what I could tell, hundreds of people. The big guys who I had seen outside of the conference building where I was staying earlier that morning were there, as were the guys from Silliman, who waved at me from their spot standing in the shade. The majority of people were sitting in chairs in circles under these massive tarps that were hanging from trees to block the brutal midday Philippine sun.

The church was, unsurprisingly, an unsafe shell of crumbling rock. I was told not to go inside, as anything was wont to crumble and collapse, but I peeked through the grill at the entrance and a few windows nearby as well. The small building was just a ruin, with a few walls full of holes, and rocks all around. Some of the floor had been torn up with cracks and holes throughout. There was no one near it, as no one was willing to tempt fate by sitting too near it. I followed their lead and backed away, nearly into John.

I turned around in surprise and said a happy hello, then fell silent as I realized what was going on. There were three girls with YATTA (the theater organization Dessa is in charge of) shirts on there, one of them being John, the young woman who taught us a week of local language lessons. It seemed that there were more Dumaguete people there than I thought, and I said hi to them and was introduced in Bisaya to the crowd of 20 or so children who they were entertaining beneath the shade of a tree on a big blanket. John said I could help them with the kids if I wanted, and I said I might for a bit, not knowing what my duty was there.

After walking around and seeing what was going on, I went back to Juvy. From what I could tell, all of the adults (mostly women) were in the larger groups telling the stories of their earthquake experiences in Bisaya. There was also a small circle of mostly older men doing the same. There were a lot of long faces and blankly staring eyes in the men’s group, and the women’s groups had lots of tears, back rubbing, arm-touching, and tissues. It was powerful to see the reactions of these locals, even though I couldn’t understand the stories. The kids, on the other hand, were separated into three groups by age, and were basically just having fun and playing games.

I asked Juvy what I should do, and she said I should sit and rest in the shade. Having just ridden an hour in the pickup and wanting to get my hands dirty again, I asked if there was anything I could be involved in, anything I could carry or move or anything at all. I guess I should have realized that with the big guys inanimate and the Silliman guys drinking coffee and cracking jokes, there wasn’t too much extra to do. Juvy said that right now it was just “debriefing”, and everyone was gathering stories and helping the locals explain what happened, a sort of psychological healing. Since I couldn’t understand any of the dialogue, I couldn’t really join in on that. Everything was already set up, so I couldn’t really help with that, and all the food was already made for lunch, which was a few hours away.

It was another hurry up and wait for me. I had gotten up super early, and made sure I was awake and had energy to carry rocks away from buildings or help nail some lumber. And now, with largely nothing to do, I was being told to grab a seat and cool down for the next few hours. Since this was another rural community full of people who had probably never seen a white man or an American in a long time, I was getting distracted stares from most of the talking groups, not to mention the children. Apart from not doing anything, my presence was actually taking away from what was happening.

So, with John’s offer on the table, I decided to go back to them and help any way I could. I was handed a camera and told to take pictures of the three girls during their little play they put on for the kids. They stared at me and said “Americano” for awhile, but then I became old news, and they started to pay attention to the show. After that, we handed out snacks, and they also got a chance to draw something related to the earthquake, a kind of sneaky way to let them keep having fun but also give the workers some info about their earthquake experience. I wasn’t doing much but helping distribute things and giving out high fives since the kids didn’t know much English and I know less than 30 words of Bisaya, most of which are numbers or greetings, but I was at least not just sitting in the shade. Later, after the end of the debriefings, they asked the kids at each place what they learned or remembered most, and the said the American. I’m not sure if that is good or bad: I keep thinking bad because my mere presence was more meaningful to them than these people that took the time to put together these intricate ways to entertain them, but I can’t say I wasn’t a bit flattered that my being there meant even a little.

After a yummy lunch, where I talked to one of the local college students who spoke very good English and told me a little about the situation at hand, we hopped in the pickup again to go home. I was more than a little ticked off. I had come all the way to Bohol, and had woken up super early that morning expecting a day chock full of hard physical labor, and after a half hour of packing snack bags in one place and an hour of taking pictures and giving high fives to kids, we were heading back to Tagbilaran. But, I have long since learned that volunteers cannot be choosers, and neither should I expect to personally solve any problems by my self. This was one of those days where I had to accept whatever impact I had, no matter how minimal, and get back out there and do it again tomorrow. It was not the easiest pill to swallow, but I knew there was more relief ahead of me, and to keep going.

On the way back to Tagbilaran, we drove past and stopped in a few towns that were closest to the epicenter of the earthquake. There were many churches that were just piles of rubble, and one town that was damaged so badly that there wasn’t a single building that didn’t have significant damage. Everyone was living in tents, either in the grassy square near the city hall or on the church property.

We also passed a lot of people sitting on the side of the road and holding up signs. There were lots of small kids, ribs showing, holding up signs that said “We are hungry and thirsty, we need food and water”, and such. My heart went out to these visibly struggling people who were begging on the main road to each passing car, and I couldn’t help smiling when the guys on the truck bed threw some extra snack packs and waters to them as we sped by.

That night and the next morning went similarly to the previous one. I was exhausted because of the minimal sleep the night before, and I had gone out to walk in Tagbilaran for a bit before turning in. The Silliman guys were awake late, and woke up early. I was awake late as a result, but we got to leave a little later the next day, so I was looking forward to a few more winks of sleep that morning.