Ma'am

Ma'am is the polite term used by people in customer service. Sometimes it gets a little overused and sometimes Filipinos use it for white women or to fill space while they look for a word. I was on a very crowded public jeepney when I had this conversation with Sunny, a male college student who lived in my host family's community in Sanghay. Everyone around us can hear this conversation.

Me (in broken Visiya): How many brothers and sisters do you have?
Sunny (in beautifully spoken Enlish): We are a dozen, ma'am. Twelve brothers and sisters in all.
Me (genuinely shocked): Wow! That's huge, even for a Filipino family!
Sunny: Well, ma'am, you see, ma'am. My mother, ma'am, doesn't use... contraceptives, ma'am.
(The people around us nod in agreement, as if to say, "It's true, we know this woman. No contraceptives.")
Me: Oh. Umm...
Sunny: Yes, ma'am.

Two months in less than 2000 words, as I watch everything opening in front of me.

Originally I had wanted to post a blow-by-blow account for you of the past two months but really, the details that matter here (and anywhere) are rarely the who, what, where, and when, so let those be an afterthought and not the heart what I say and who I am. The past two months have been filled with puppies and parties and teach-ins and immersions. In my ever evolving environment, I keep reminding myself that I didn't become a missionary to make cool new friends and have my own room and access to a shower. That's hard isn't it though? When what we've imagined comes face to face with our realities. Even worse I think is when the people we thought we were meet the people we've become. I like this woman I've become, the one who rides water buffalo and whom the villagers call Esai. I like when I hear visiya come out of her mouth and I like that she knows how to harvest kamotes and slaughter a chicken (it's true!) The old me is shocked when I see her happily eating meat and doing laundry by hand.

I spent most of December on the east coast of Mindanao, near a tiny city named Mati, the better half of my three weeks living with a family in this little barangay called Sanghay. (There are pictures of my host family and the farm shack where they live at www.flickr.com/slavishtubesocks) I rode a horse (falling on my rear when I tried to mount him), I rode a water buffalo (they don't move until forced to, so are easier to board), and I climbed a mountain to a remote(r) community where a priest performed the first mass that the people had in a month. He baptized babies, though it was just really a formality. Due to the high rate of infant mortality in many countries, the Vatican has extended the right of baptism to the child's mother, so children in remote provinces are blessed almost immediately after their appearance from the womb. The Vatican no longer states that unbaptized babies wait in purgatory, but the people are still afraid of this possibility.

I spent Christmas at the Benedictine convent near Sanghay. It was amazing and spiritual experience: vespers, prayers, lauds, and some of the best food I've eaten in a long time. The nuns grow their own food and tend to their own animals, along with being the medical, social, religious, and activist outreach to the communities around them. On Christmas Eve afternoon I took a nap at the convent and had a horrible nightmare that when I got home everyone else had just gone away. When I woke up I had to run into the chapel for lauds and during our prayers I began to weep openly. The Reverend Mother left prayers and brought me tissues. After I washed up and came out for Christmas dinner I began to weep again and Reverend Mother held me. I will never forget what she said. "Oh, Esai. Why are you crying? You are so beautiful and the sisters and I bought you all sorts of beautiful things for you, didn't we?" (Affirmations from the nuns) "Oh you know those puppies we have that you've liked playing with? You can have one! Two if you want! I know how hard this is."

All of the nuns there had been foreign missionaries for a time and they shared stories about their first Christmases away from home. The Reverend Mother had been a medical missionary in Ughanda and had spent her first Christmas in a bomb shelter cooking wild chickens for terrified women and singing them Christmas carols. Sister Stella contracted influenza as her first Christmas present away from home while working in an orphanage during an epidemic. I know it seems atrocious but these stories were told to make me laugh. And I did. I ate the fabulous dinner they'd grown and prepared and opened the beautiful presents they'd given me. I had to leave the puppy at the convent (there's no way I could take him home) but Sister Stella (the dog lover there) said she's taking extra good care of him and texts me updates as to how he's doing. In case your wondering he's grown to be 65 pounds and they're trying to teach him only to eat the leftover chicken they put in his bowl and not the live ones that are running around the yard.

When I came home around New Year's I was excited to start my "real work". Fascinating that after four months I had learned nothing. But, third immersion is the charm. This time there were no kind nuns to care for me (though I will be visiting them again soon!). I was sent to an urban poor community in north Davao City. Only a half hour ride from where I "live" but most of the homes in this community were without electricity and all of them were without running water. Some of the houses didn't have toilets. I stayed there for two weeks with two different families. I did "work"- I spoke to the people (in Visiya!!) about the Visiting Forces Agreement and Balikitan (the US military exercises here). They have sewing machines in the community that were donated as a microloan concept for the women to make dresses and bags to gain lucrative employment. The project has gone by the wayside, so as the activists got them to reorganize around the idea, I tinkered with the machines and put them in working order, along with talking to the women about idea possibilities for modern bags that would sell easily. I made some prototypes. I worked in the dress shop, in the town "hall", on my host families farm. But I think the crucial moment for me was when I was sitting in my host-family's "living room" after having walked a 3 km trip to the stream to bathe and do laundry. It had gotten dark and I was staring at a blank page in my journal. I wrote this:

Today was the perfect day to search for beauty. As will be tomorrow and every day I breathe. I see it everywhere in this one moment, in the mud on on my feet, the rice on the table, the rain coming down into the buckets outside. I understand this wholeness, these precious moments and this precious rain water, drop by drop caressing the earth, to be so much more than what I do or where I go. Being is not just solidarity and living is not just for social change. It's beauty, it's all just a search for the beauty in creation, and my desire for busyness and effectiveness can suffocate a more perfect world around me. Long blades of grass grow two feet high across the path in my atte's garden. They're reaching up and bending over and worshiping the sky and loving the rain. There's no other place they'd rather live, no other planet where they'd rather be. I myself have also grown fond of this one.

I leave on February 1 for Cagayan de Oro where I and my coworkers will be helping at conferences and seminars about Balikitan and the US military presence in the Philippines. We'll be there for three weeks and during that time I'll be taking a short trip to Thailand to meet up with a fellow UM missionary. I wonder about the tea and the peanut sauce, the temples and the landscape. I wonder when this world opened up for me. I didn't see it happening but I'm so glad it did. May the Lord punish me, be it ever so severely, if I fail to thank the earth properly.

Ocean of Pineapples

I never wrote at length about the time I spent on the Dole Pineapple plantation in Polomolok, at least not on this blog. This is an article I wrote for InPeace about my time there:

When Polomolok children first see the ocean, they see it from the shores of the Sarangili Bay. The public beaches there aren’t particularly clean, but they’re swimible and so the Filipino children dive in clad in shorts and t-shirts. It’s a metaphorical lesson- when Polomolok children grow up they will need to be ready to swim in the sea. Though not a sea of water, but an ocean of pineapples.

This tiny community on the southern shore of the island of Mindanao has a one-fruit economy. More than 50 percent of the work force punches their time card at the Dolefil cannery and plantation. The other 50 percent works mostly in the service industry (caring for the workers) or on small farms (most selling pineapples to Dole.) An undetermined number wait outside of the Dole industrial complex each day to see if they can fill an open spot.

Polomolok the Dole Pineapple is not just an ocean, but it’s the air and the land as well. The sweet smell of pineapples mixes with kalichuchi flowers, exhaust fumes, and sewer openings. Land that used to grow rice and vegetables for consumption now produces pineapples for export.

Polomolok is not alone. The whole economy of the Philippines now revolves around exportation. Whether it’s foreign call centers, cash crops, or workers moving abroad globalization has changed the way Filipinos do business. Certainly it’s changed things for Americans too. When Americans call a credit card help line then end up talking to someone in Asia, when Minnesotans want coconuts in the middle of February they need only go to the grocery store. Many young Filipinos move abroad in search of higher, often just living, wage. It’s the brain drain- the best and the brightest in the Philippines move to China, Europe, or North America to do work for which they are over-qualified. Doctors work as nurses, nurses as caregivers; lawyers and teachers become cabbies and janitors. And they still make more money doing this than they will at their previous profession in their home country.

Certainly the brain drain is known in Polomolok, but it’s the land drain that has the people here most concerned. There’s a tiny Bla’an Lumad community on the edge of one of Dole’s massive pineapple fields. The men travel to the next town over to work on farms there. When asked where their ancestral lands were, the Datu pointed out at the field. But we don’t even work there now, he said.

“The pineapples are bad for the land,” said KMU Union President Jose Tuelad. Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) is a nation-wide union; the Polomolok KMU was chartered in 1985. “Big companies rent the land for a small price and when they return it to the people in 20 year it will be destroyed.”

Small-scale farmers get around problem of pineapples being nutrient-draining by performing extensive crop rotation in cycles over years and years. But according the Tuelad corporations like Dole don’t see the land as a irreplaceable resource, but rather as a short-term commodity. If the soil is depleted, they’ll just find somewhere else to grow their pineapples.

“Pineapples that aren’t even for us,” Tuelad goes on, shaking his head. Like all the other multi-national food producers in Mindanao, their crops are for export only. After being collected, the vast majority of these pineapples are immediately processed at the cannery down the street from the fields. Those fields, that used to yield vegetables and rice for the people’s consumption, surround the people with a bountiful harvest but the price of their personal foodstuffs continues to climb. Pineapples, pineapples everywhere, but there’s nothing for the people to eat.

For its own part, Dole insists that it’s a responsible corporation that takes care of the people in the plantation communities. The question of course is how can a corporation truly be responsible to working people? If the corporation by-laws state (which they do) that Dole’s first and foremost responsibility is to make as much profit as possible for its shareholders, how can the needs of the community truly matter?

Naysayers would point to the vast amount of charitable contributions given by Dole to Polomolok. The backs of the chairs in the Catholic Church near the cannery are stamped with the words “Donated by: Dole Philippines, Inc”. In fact, Tueland says that the whole church was funded by the company- from the sanctuary, to the priest’s quarters, to the statue of Christ on the top of the building, dressed as a conquestador. Hardly a donation as much as a purchase. Can a priest speak out against the company who paid for his house and church? Can the people sit on chairs marked with Dole’s name without being reminded of its power?

The charity extends to health services for families and to schools for children. Temporary clinics are set up in Polomolok and other Dole plantation communities every few months to treat certain health problems and do general check ups. Elementary schools wear huge signs that say “This school is funded by a generous donation from Dole Philippines” or more simply “Dole Philippines Cares!” Workers and managers alike pass these sign on their way to work. Who are these signs for?

In their hurriedness to provide all this charity, at some point it must have occurred to the higher-ups at Dole that the company is the reason all of this charity is needed. There’s no reason why men and women working six days a week, 10 hours a day for a large corporation should need someone else to fund schools for their children and churches for their families. But the average pay for steady workers averages about 200 pesos per a 10-hour day. Roughly this is one-tenth the amount a minimum wage earning American worker would receive for the same amount of labor.

And those are the steady workers, the only group of workers at Dole who make at least minimum wage and only 25% of the work force. The way Dole “saves” the largest amount of capital (or exploits labor the most) is by abusing the contractual labor system. Under labor laws, companies are allowed to higher contractual workers (often through service providers) for temporary work, like construction or consulting. Dole uses loopholes, and just out-right law breaking, to employ contractual laborers as the vast majority of its work force. Contractual labor is more exploitative (and in turn cheaper) for a number of reasons, the first of which is that contractual laborers are not required minimum wage. Many young people work in the cannery for less than 125 pesos a day. Even though canning and harvesting are far from temporary work at a pineapple cannery, these contractual laborers are only guaranteed their jobs for a few months at a time. This lack of stability keeps them quiet to company abuses. They’re not allowed to join the union and so any success the union achieves (ie benefits, higher pay) does not apply to the great majority of the workers at Dole.

In light of these contractual labor abuses it’s no surprise that one of the primary goals of KMU is to get as many contractual laborers switched to permanent labor status. In 2004 the union was successful in such a case. After long and complicated negotiations with Dole Philippines 1,500 contractual laborers were granted full-time labor status and admitted to the union. This raised the union’s membership up to 5,200 workers, or 25% of the Dole labor force in Polomolok.

“Still a long way to go,” Tuelad said lighting a cigarette, “(but) the workers can do everything if there is unity.” The long way stretches out before them. As corporations like Dole continue to grow and take over whole communities, the workers continue to see the cost of staples like rice and vegetables on the rise while the promise of permanent work is often uncertain.

Smoke escaped Tuelad’s nostrils as he writes union dues tallies on the chalkboard in his office, the cigarette exhaust a bit reminiscent of a dragon. Unlike in Europe, in Asia the dragons are the heroes; symbols of good luck and fortune. KMU may need both to stay afloat in the pineapple ocean.

Sanghay Mountains

If I could say one thing about the Filipino terrain it’s that this whole nation teems with life. My experience is quite limited, but Mindanao is far from the exception of this observation. Whether it’s the lizards on the ceiling, chickens on the street corners, or homeless children tucked under the overhangs, something is always being born, and in turn, beginning to die. The countryside is even more so, being overrun with hungry livestock and fruit bearing trees that tower above miles and miles of vegetables and flowers. I was deposited in this threatened land of promise, particularly a barangay named Sanghay for two weeks during the Christmas season. It’s always hard to vocalize the intended benefits of these immersions. Certainly it’s about education and solidarity, but there’s a certain part of just being that comes into that, a certain reality that has to be based upon person-to-person interaction. This time together can hardly summed up in terms of issues or political ideas.

Sanghay is high in the mountains- the rain comes everyday and everything seemed damp against my skin. My washed clothes never seemed to dry and at night I would listen to the drops of water falling from the ceiling to a bucket near my bed. The rain was like the mountains exhaling, a quiet but constant rhythm. In the daylight I would see them towering above the town basketball court. I would see the clouds rising like a winter’s breath.

Only a few hundred years ago the people lived here with enough, with plenty. The land and the Lumads belonged to each other in the way that there was enough food to go around from the trees and the land and the animals and the bay that there was no reason to break down the mountains and tear up the forest. Certainly I’m not the part of the group that came in to take that away, but I’m part of a race and a country that benefits from the societal ‘evolution’ of Mindanao and no matter how much I ally myself with the activists here, I cannot change that.

And so to truly understand the people and the mountains as much as I could during my brief stay I felt I had to divorce myself from my self. Easier said than done. It’s a daunting task anyway, human beings are full of self-awareness, and in a tiny barangay tucked so far away from a real metropolis, the rarity of white presence attracted a fair amount of finger pointing, staring, and shouting. Often my self would become the most obvious part of my experience.

A few days into my stay there I was invited to make a trek up the mountain to New Kamotes, an even more remote village a bit of a motorcycle ride away. The local priest was going there to attend a festival and I was invited as his guest. My host family would, of course, be accompanying me.

“Cars can’t up there,” the priest said with a laugh. “And there’s no sweet potatoes.” I asked him the nature and purpose of the festival, but never got a real reply. The trip up was a bit painstaking. It had rained for hours the night before and so the motorcycle my host sister and I had had hired to take us up the mountain kept tipping over. After falling off a few times, we decided to walk the steepest parts and only use the bike when the terrain looked clearer. The mud covered my clothes, speckled my face and stuck in my hair.

It would be ridiculous to say that the trip to New Kamotes was any sort of right of passage, but there’s something to be said about commonality in new experiences. When the people stared at me when I arrived in the town for the festival (it turned out to be a baptismal celebration) I couldn’t tell if they were staring at me because I was white or because I was covered in filth. Chances are it was the former. Regardless, walls come down. They’re Western walls- walls of perpetual disparity and cultural theft, globalization and racism. And they’re my walls- walls of personal space and foreign ignorance, guilt and discomfort. And when the walls began to crack I could move out of my emotional barricade and move into a more accessible place, in the space between my self and the farmers around me.

And in that space I could hear when people spoke about the mountains about the over-flow of life and death around them. In a country plagued with the colonized love of the foreign and with a government encouraging labor exportation, the peasants I met in Sanghay are at the same time both a foil and a mirror to the national societal changes going on around them. Certainly the fascination with the West was obvious in their intense reception of a white visitor and in the vast quantity of American pop songs on the town’s token karaoke machines, but it was clear to me the people are in belonging with the land. I saw it especially with the farmers, willingly sharing knowledge about their crops and enjoying the fruits of past harvest prepared in coconut milk. The questions I fielded about America were theoretical and humorous, very different from the specific questions I received in Manila about visas and green cards. That’s the foil.

Sanghay also reflects the most recent threat to the environmental and economic survival of many mountain communities.

“Up there,” a local man said, pointing to the top of the nearby hill. “They’re starting mining, on the other side.” I asked him who owned the land and he replied that a company had bought it from a local farmer. The specific questions I asked about the transaction and price of the sale were shrugged away.

Doesn’t matter, he said. There’s going to be mining everywhere soon. I wondered what that would look like- those beautiful mountains full of machinery. I wonder if they would be able to breathe in the rain under all that garbage, if they would get cold when they were naked of trees.

My host father Titing and I talked about what this would mean for the community.

“All that is mine is the land,” he said. “The land, the goats, the chickens.” He went on to say that, that was all any of the families here had and if the companies came in the land could be ruined. It wasn’t just the actual mining sites, but the places below that would suffer under the erosion, the communities that would have to be plowed through to make access roads.

“Maybe (the companies) will give (the people) a little bit of money. It’s a lot for us so they take the money. Do they know the land will be destroyed?” he asked. His wife brought us out a place of bananas.

“Sagin,” she said, pushing the plate on the table towards me. “Esai, sagin.” (Bananas. Lindsey Bananas.)
“Buso ko,” I replied smiling at her and touching my stomach. She frowned at me. (I'm full.)
“Kaun, kaun sagin,” she said and took one off the plate and extended it to me. (Eat, eat bananas.)

“Oh, oh,” I said, taking the banana. “Salamat,” I turned back to Titing. “It seems like the people need education,” I said, peeling the banana. I felt fat.

“It’s happening right now. Organization. We need to organize,” he said, nodding. I noticed when he feigned being full his wife took his word for it.

I’m far from knowing much about the mining issues affecting Mindanao. And as both a foreigner and a Westerner I think I would be quite out-of-place in offering any in-depth analysis or a tangible solution. But I have my perspective, an outside perspective, I have quite enough of that to go around.

A place like Mindanao with so much life and unknown promise seems to be a rare gem in the face of an over-industrialized and hyper-developed Western world. To deny any mining or development for the sake of a rustic nostalgia would be seen as irrational, especially in a country crippled with foreign debt and mass poverty. I fear the biggest problem facing Sanghay is not the mining itself but the very present reality that decisions that could destroy this community are being made on a different island (cynically one could say in a different country) by people who have undoubtedly never had to survive harvest to harvest, one day at a time. The minerals mined in the mountains of Davao Oriental will undoubtedly be shipped abroad and the only time Filipinos will ever see the wealth of Mindanao is when it reenters their country via shopping mall as electronics and hardware the vast majority won’t be able to afford.

I wonder what the people in Sanghay would make with those resources if it were up to them. Modern farming equipment so farmers could yield a profit at the end of year? Tougher motorcycles so the people in New Kamotes could still get into town even if there’s been rain? Or maybe low-cost computer technology so their children could have a better education?

Certainly the people know what’s happening: They know the government doesn’t have the people’s interest at heart, that the wealthy will only get wealthier from these mining operations. What they need to know is that other people know, too. People in different cities, people on different islands, people from different countries. Clergy and reports and activists know. Education on these issues will start with making sure people know they’re not alone in their struggle. Titing knows better than anyone- this is happening right now and if the people don’t organize so much could be lost. Everything, really.

Among all of the life on Mindanao, none of it belongs to foreign investors, big companies, and none of it belongs to the government. The people here belong to the land; the tillers and workers shepherd the life that springs from the ground and lives off the soil. So if anyone should speak for resources and potential here it can only be them. It’s hardly a political theory or a radical idea. It’s really just what makes sense.