“The sun goes down in the blink of an eye in the tropics, but the evenings stretch out wonderfully. People amble, gratefully inhaling the night breeze. Friends laugh, families meander companionably, couples nuzzle. Vendors, alert and awake, cater to everyone’s desires. In upscale places like The Fort or the Mall of Asia or the Podium, stylish people flock to coffee shops and bars.
Yet not far away, cardboard shacks hover on the banks of fetid canals thick with unspeakable garbage. The night breeze and the family and friends and vendors are here too, but the options are limited and the milieu squalid.” (Adeney, 13-14)
This is the Philippines. Small Islands known for their big cities with apartments of concrete and tin roofed shacks. Tropical foliage, mango trees, palms, and flowers. The crowded streets full of bikes, trykes, food carts, jeepnies, and people in flip flops wearing thin clothing. White powdered faces coming in and out of convenient stores selling home goods, local movies and music carrying sun umbrellas. Food carts with roasted chicken and other items on a stick, open-air markets with chickens bound at the feet, and fast food Jollibee standing happy guard outside. This is one version of this country. City life.
The other is right outside the gravel or concrete streets where the road becomes mud and dirt. And the homes become thatched collages of spare sheet metals, dried palm leaves, and old pop music or political posters. Built around waterways where children play in the local dumpsite, sewage waste, drinking water and swimming pool all in one. Wires and antennas strung from home to home held on by pieces of bamboo and duck tape connecting these villages and neighborhoods to the tube. Dirt yards with plastic chairs outside where children play with stones, sticks, and if they are lucky a cheap colorful plastic ball. They wear even thinner clothes some with holes, small dirty shorts, skirts, and t-shirts advertising off-brands in Tagalong, English, or Chinese or with skewed images of famous cartoon characters on them. This is another version of the country. Suburban life.
The last is even further out of town in the arid wasteland. Where the foliage disappears and mango trees do not offer fruit falling down a crevice of a tin roof. The roads are dusty and wide connecting one larger suburb or city to another. But there is life in-between, ignored as an unpleasant blur and smell on the side of the roadway. Some small huts outside known as sari-sari stores house small amounts of products from the city: candy and soda, chips and cosmetics, soaps, shampoos, and laundry powder. The entryway is met with a few homes-the nicer version of what is to be seen further and deeper into the village. They are made of spare parts and pieces: more tin siding and roofs, posters, rotting wood, a bamboo strung door, and rusted and crooked nails or duck tape holding the leaning and buckling structures against each other. Here a meal is served once every three days. Children run around with even thinner clothes that look more like cloth napkins with holes bigger than quarters in them. If the children are wearing clothes at all-it may be washday and they lack pants or a shirt or both. They run around trying to find ways to waste their energy, too young to work. Those who can work are found further back in the village in the mountain landfill: the dumpsite. Where unmarried women and men of all ages work picking through the trash and leftovers from the city scavenging for goods that can be kept, or polished, reshaped, and sold. Blackened by their hours in the sun they are treasure seekers, looking for money in another man’s trash hoping to find enough to provide the family’s dinner in two days. Or to find a new siding to the house, a new piece of cloth for carpet, a new stick to poke the garbage with the next day they work. This is the often untold version of the country: the outcasts: the squatters: the Dumpsite people.
These are the poorest of the poor.
So what happens when all three versions of this country collide?
To be continued . . .
P.S.- for those of you who can relate to seeing similar situations (any of the three pictures I describe) in other countries please feel free to share your memories, feelings, and reactions. If you have not, feel free also to comment of course on your thoughts in reading this :)
-sorry if the pictures are too small-anyone know how I can make them bigger?
