First Impressions of Manila

 So I have just finished my first week in the Philippines and I thought I would reflect on some of the things I experienced here so far. After you leave the airport, the first thing you notice is how crazy people drive here. The lines on the road seem only to be decoration and most Filipinos ignore them. I have to admit that I am one to be a bad back seat driver and get ancy when I'm in a car with someone I think is driving badly but I just didn't know where to start when the guy from my organization picked me up. But amid the chaos there is a system which only now I'm starting to understand. A Filipino guy explained that driving in the Philippines is easy, if there is space in front of you take it and honk your horn continuously.

The road next to my place is six lanes across on both sides. Now on this road are massive trucks, buses, SUVs, normal size cars, Jeepneys (I think these only exist in the Philippines, imagine a sort of mini-stretch Jeep, I'll put pictures on Facebook soon so yinz can appreciate just how sweet/ridiculous these things are), those sort of put-put motor bikes with a passenger buggy on the side, people riding bikes, and then tons of people walking on the edges since there are no sidewalks but everyone has to walk up and down this road everyday. My first day here I rode on of those put-put motor bikes with the side car (they call them tricycles) and my two friends took the side car so I was sitting behind the driver on the bike. You have to sit as if you were a lady riding a horse and you just have a rusted piece of metal attach to the bike to hold onto. As he was puttering along, vaguely in one of the lanes, massive 18-wheelers plow within feet of me and I got to admit I haven't felt more vulnerable in a long time. But it was fine and I ride those things all the time because they are pretty cheap. Now Jeepneys are a different story, they're similar to buses because they have regular routes but they stop if you flag them down and you can also try and jump on while it's at a light or even still moving if you're fast enough. The only problem is that it isn't clear to me where they are actually going half the time and because I am too tall I can't even look out the windows to see where I am.

The place I'm living in is modest at best (no AC or hot water) but my rent is so cheap that I don't really care (3,000 pesos a month which is around $85 US). I share my room with two other guys who are pretty cool, everyone in the house I'm living at are either students or volunteers like me so it works out. The only concern is the mosquitoes. There isn't any worry about Malaria in Manila but the mosquitoes here occasionally can pass on Dengue Fever. The fever comes on at first feeling like cold but after a few days the symptoms disappear and then the bug has entered your system. At that point you start hemorrhaging all over your body. Basically you bleed from the pores in your skin, eyes, nose, ears, and everywhere else in your body and you die a slow painful death. It's especially dangerous right now because it is the rainy season and so there is a lot of stagnant water around for the mosquitoes to breed in. I would be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about catching Dengue but honestly my life is at risk just crossing the street here so I'm not overly afraid of mosquitoes.

Aside from the traffic the poverty also jumped out at me. Manila is a place where you have massive malls, bigger than any I've seen in the US, with everything you would expect in an American mall. They even have Dairy Queen, Wendys, and Taco Bell but for half the price. But right outside the malls are thousands of people living in slums. Some the slum houses that are visible from the train station even have billboards plastered to the side of them advertizing dish soap or Honda SUVs. I also heard of massive trash dump known as Smokey Mountain an hour outside of Manila where supposedly 30,000 people live. I'm planning a trip out there pretty soon to see how it is but I heard the stench is almost unbearable. In the city of Manila it's common for young children to approach you and ask for money. Some of them sell these white flowers which I later found out is the national flower of the Philippines but no Filipino will buy them because my friends claim that all the money supports the children's vicious glue addiction. Now I find hard to believe that all poor children are addicted to glue and that none of them would buy food if they were given money. It reminds of the common excuse people give for not giving money to the homeless, you know that homeless people are pretty much all alcoholics or addicts of some sort. I always found that to be a pretty lame excuse but here the problem is so bad that if I were to give a little money to everyone that asked I would be poor myself in a few weeks. I could say a lot more about this but I'm going to wait until I have more experience and I can express more than just mere impressions.

Anyway, my work so far is reasonable and laid back. I'm the only man in the NGO and the first American that's worked their. My NGO is called the Maligaya house and is run by a Japanese woman. We help Filipino women who had been married to a Japanese man and had a child or children with him but he for whatever reason abandoned them and returned to Japan. So mainly we collect information from the ladies and convey this to our Tokyo office so they can locate the guy in question. Than we send some letters from the woman and the children in an effort to have him recognize the children as his own. The main goal is to secure child support and possibly apply for Japanese citizenship for the kid. If the guy is reluctant to cooperate we have some lawyers around who can bring the case to court in Japan but ideally it doesn't come to that. My role so far has been translating their website from Japanese to English and I think I might be teaching some Japanese classes to the kids pretty soon. It's kind of funny I think because my original plan was to go to Japan to teach English but now I'll be teaching Japanese to Filipinos but that's how things worked out. Now I'll finish this post with an interesting but completely unrelated anecdote I heard from one of my Filipina co-workers. She told that me that the rise of Chinese today was actually prophesied in the Bible. Apparently, there is some vague reference to group of people that will rise up and take over the world and I guess some Protestant churches in the Philippines have put their money on the Chinese. I really doubt that whoever compiled this part of the Bible had the Chinese in mind but you never know...