In days when Britain ruled the seas and ruled the world, colonies were properties on a global monopoly board.
The more real estate you had, the more money flowed into royal coffers.
Real estate, however, requires expensive maintenance and security. Britain lost the U.S., lost India,lost Africa, lost all but a few Caribbean islands who are still attached to the Queens petticoats.
These days, the third world exports raw materials and people to industrialized countries that need cheap, skilled labor. Kids in Mogpog leave for jobs overseas and send money back to support their families. They go as housemaids,nannies, construction workers,nurses, hospitality workers, cooks, engineers, computer programmers, soldiers.
This flyer recruits in Mogpog. For every exploitation story, there is a success story.
Since Colonial days disappeared we have a New Colonialism.
Now, countries send raw materials and people out of their country, but don’t get security or infrastructure in return. Foreigners line up at Western Union offices around the world to pick up their wired cash from family and friends.
The price of Independence is high.
Buildings on Marinduque run the gamut from simple to complex.
They can be as small as this tiny wood frame square box with a thatched roof, unscreened windows, padlocked front door, built off the ground, no air conditioning ,no electric, no plumbing.
They can also be more modern with fancy windows, air conditioning, tiled bathrooms and kitchens with huge refrigerators, huge electrical panels and hot water when you want it.
Buildings here are nailed or screwed together, formed in concrete pours by the wheelbarrow,walls bonded by rebar to hold up to flooding and typhoons that can last for days.
Local wisdom says to start your building from scratch in Mogpog to get the best value for your money.
Local legend has it that the last family to rent this little wood house saw their kids playing with ghosts and moved out in the middle of the same night.
It hasn’t been occupied since.
Every day is laundry day in Mogpog.
A few do their laundry at home in washing machines.
Most do it at home in their front yards using buckets of water, one for soapy suds and the other for rinsing.
Some few still go the river to clean their clothes, using cane sticks to pummel their laundry into submission, then rinsing the laundry in the river and hanging it to dry on bushes nearby. Around town you can hear clothes pounded with boards throughout the day, slapped against rocks like a potter slaps clay at his wheel, shirts and trousers rubbed together hard to work out the dirt and grime.
When laundry is done, these kids swim in the river, in a pool scooped out by a backhoe.
On this day three girls stand on the bridge above the swimming hole and drop pebbles to startle the boys swimming below. Giggling, they run when one of the boys stands up and tosses a rock back towards them that falls harmlessly into the river
Norman Rockwell would be pleased with this moment.
Kids seem to be the same all over the world.
There are relic hunters who still roam the mountains and valleys on Marinduque searching for World War 2 memorabilia.
They sometimes find helmets, bayonets, mess kits, a lucky photograph of a wife or children in a leather pouch, pieces of uniforms and occasionally, by the side of downed aircraft, bleached bones.
This great world conflict, in the early 1940’s,finished eighty years ago and what we know of it now comes from secondary sources. The generation that fought the war has followed it into history and has left us boxes of stained photographs, old movies and books by historians who have no longer have any living soldiers or architects of the war to interview.
.At celebrations on Veteran’s Day there are a few grizzled vets left who fought in these Philippine jungles, but time has rolled over most of them.
By the side of the road, just outside Mogpog, is a tall piece of ordnance propped up outside a food mart. It is like the biggest ball of twine somewhere in the Midwest, an Indian teepee hotel along Route 66, the Brown Derby in Los Angeles.
To people in the Philippines, Japan is not liked. People remember their grandfather’s killed along with Americans, remember Japanese death marches.
World War 2 fades in significance, buried as generations pile one atop another.
Now, we are into the entertainment age and World Wars are far from people’s minds.
What is funny is that the people that were drawn into World War 11 weren’t thinking about it either.
It is easier to describe this place by telling what isn’t here.
There are no condos, resorts, blue water swimming pools, water slides, fancy cabanas with fully loaded bars. There aren’t people wearing sunglasses and expensive thongs. There isn’t a paved road to get here, or fountains, or water features.There aren’t staff moving from room to room cleaning, maintaining grounds, loading luggage into taxis.
Ulong Bay is where locals go to cool off on hot days.
It is a fifteen minute bumpy ride in a tricycle from Mogpog, and, for a moment, you wonder if the sea is really out there. You walk over a rickety bamboo bridge, down a small path, and then you see water to the horizon, as flat as a surfboard.
This evening kids ride pieces of plywood on the slippery beach, dogs swim, families play in the sea as the sun goes down. Fires have been lit and our sun begins it’s swan dive into the sea.
There are better beaches and clearer water in the Philippines, but those cost one hundred to two hundred a night and come with tourists, high prices, and New World extravagances.
Ulong Bay is attractive for what it isn’t, and what it is isn’t bad.
There are fires burning in Mogpog.
They are kept simmering all day and into the night, started with the skins of coconuts peeled and shredded to make tinder, reinforced with dead coconut tree trunks, branches too small to be used for anything else.
You see smoke as you stroll,smell it as you take a shortcut through a back yard with a pen full of chickens, stop to see what your Uncle Fernando has been drinking last night.
There is never a straight line here anywhere. Point A and B are connected by a wavy line that leads you through the brambles like a pirate’s map.
All family and friends here are tied on a charm bracelet wrapped safely around your wrist, and you visit them as often as possible.
Smoke from these fires keeps mosquitoes at bay.
Insects are at the bottom of the natural world, simple, basic, enduring, omnipresent. We take them into account wherever we travel.. Small, out of sight, insects live close to mankind, largely invisible till they bite.
Mosquito’s have much to do about giving pests a bad reputation.
Typhoid fever isn’t something anyone wants to dance with and keeping a fire going is a small price to pay.
Mosquito’s may be small, but they pack a big punch.
Pigs are popular on Marinduque.
They are particularly popular for large family get together’s and celebrations. Like Ecuadorians and Mexicans, Philipino’s like pork and many households have a pig or two staked out in back yard mud holes. On this day, the man who makes his living cooking pigs over a fire, on a spit, comes to get one for a family wedding. After looking in Alma’s pens, he chooses the right sized pig for the celebration, then lifts it out of it’s cage.
The pig squeals and hollers but is no match for this big man.
The pig man grabs one pig foot and ties it with a piece of line, then grabs the other three feet and wraps all four together. Finished, he lifts the squirming squealing pig and carries it to his tricycle. Tomorrow, this pig will be lunch. After a life of indolence, this well fed boy only has a few hours to live and he hasn’t even had a fair trial.
Pigs get slaughtered.
The most important thing to remember is not to name them, and not to get attached. It is hard to love your pork chop when it used to be your pet.
Rice is a staple.
The rice plant grows about a foot high and then men with machetes separate the part of the plant with rice grains from the rest of it. The rice grains are shaken from the leaves, gathered, then laid out in the sun on mats to dry in the intense sun, turned with a rake to bake evenly.
When dry, the rice grains are loaded into bags and taken to a machine that separates the husk from the rice inside each grain.
Rice production is labor intensive and men standing in water bend over all day wearing broad hats and long sleeved shirts to bring it out of the fields.
Rice is served here three times a day with vegetables, chicken, fish, pork, and, occasionally- beef. What is not eaten is dished into food bowls for dogs and cats,and pigs.
Coconut trees are also a staple.
Coconut shells are burnt in little fires near houses so the smoke keeps mosquitoes under control. Coconut water is prized in European and American health food stores. Coconut is used to make culinary masterpieces and give texture and color to cosmetics. The leaves from coconut trees make roofs that keep heads dry and kids sleep in bunk beds made from the trunks of coconut trees.
Rice and coconuts leave their fingerprints on everyone here.
In a world of nearly eight billion people, and growing, we often have to wait our turn.
On a Tokyo runway, our jet backs away from its boarding dock, follows air traffic control orders, gets in line with a string of jumbo jets to take off for Manilla.
Thousands of planes land and take off from major international airports, 24/7, and behind technology is people making quick decisions that try to keep us safe.
From the air,at night, there are huge spaces of darkness all around us, then darkness with scattered lights, then, as we close on Manilla, millions of lights for millions of people. From space, astronauts can see continents, the Amazon,the Grand Canyon, the Himalayas. At night they can see large metropolitan cities sparkling and know that home is down there when they get back and someone has left the lights on for them and is planning a ticker tape parade.
The things I know about the Philippines are that in World War 2 men died in jungles up to their knees in mud, banana trees cut in half by bullets and coconut trees sent up in flames. The islands are rural and poor and wicker chairs on Uncle Steve’s front porch were made here. Most shells in gift shops come from the Philippine archipelago.
When Ali met Foreman, Manilla was put on the map.
Tonight, the third leg of this flight is finished and the Philippines turn real. You never know a place till you have been there.
You never know people or places till you spend time with them.
In the universe of coffee table books, there must be one about airports of the world.
The intrepid author would have traveled to major airports of the world, taken photographs, picked images that best describe the country visited.
The Denver airport has a blue bronco statue reared up in an open area as you drive to its terminals. The Dallas Airport has a bronze statue inside of President G.W. Bush. The Albuquerque Airport has Zuni turquoise jewelry and Indian Anasazi pottery. The Detroit Airport has photographs of Henry Ford and industrialization in the early 1900’s.
This Narita Airport in Tokyo shows me stylized Samurai warriors, gentle and inscrutable Asian women holding fans partially obscuring their emotions, upscale shops with duty free items for world travelers. There are a few English words on signs to help visitors, but the scribbles on signs remind me that I am halfway around the world and it is dark when it is usually light.
Somewhere in this airport, there must be a Memorial to those who died at Hiroshima, victims of the world’s first nuclear explosion.
Next stop is Manilla, Philippines.
The statue in the airport there should be of the Ali/Foreman prize fight, but will probably be a ten foot tall rooster with gold feathers and sharp talons.
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