The cold – the water is cold. Every morning I take a cold shower, crouched under the spout. I don’t use the shower attachment because I can only handle the cold water in isolation. The few times I tried, I huffed, gasped and scrambled out of the flow of water in reflex. I was quick to give up and opt for the isolation method.
The hot – the temperature is usually around 28 to 31 degrees Celsius, although it often feels hotter because of the humidity. When the day turns dark from storm, it still maintains a hotness, but wetter. Recently, the temperature dropped to 25 for two days due to a typhoon. This was the first time I felt cold here. I even had goosebumps to show to Jed.
The water – here, I consider it good fortune if restaurant comfort-rooms have faucets that offer more that a broken, trickle-flow and have liquid soap – even if it is so watered down it slips through the cracks in my fingers and doesn’t reach a lather. I am constantly asking whether it is ok to brush my teeth in this hotel or that comfort-room, although, I suspect that since the water is not ok to drink, and often emits a corrupt stench it’s probably never a good idea. But I continue, seemingly without consequence.
The driving – There is a hierarchy to the roads and it goes something like: the bigger the vehicle the higher up on the rung. Scarily, it can also be said that the object which would have better chances of surviving an impact with other objects on the road has the right of way. This leaves vulnerable pedestrians’ soft skin, battling hard bumpers of steel, rank really low down. As a pedestrian, I have developed methods. It helps being a visible minority – people slow down to look.
The food - The people I’ve met here have an uncanny awareness about what foods will repulse the ‘average’ Canadian. Perhaps it is the 8 year history of picky interns and CUI home-office visitors that caused to develop in the local office staff here a particular delight in watching foreigners squirm. Us foreigners struggle between our desire to be polite and our absolute disgust in what is put before us. Some time ago, and not without warning (she had been talking about it for over a week!), Arlene arrived with three balut. She was excited by the worried tilts of our eyebrows as she revealed the eggs from the white paper bag. She offered a demonstration: ‘yes, you just knock the wide end of the egg to crack it, see, but lightly enough not to let any of the juice escape.’ Here, I thought out loud: ‘Juice, why is there juice in the egg if it’s hard boiled?’ To that there was some laughter about a popular hypothesis, which was shared to further disgust: ‘some people claim that it is the urine of the embryo.’ To me, eating partially developed bones and feathers of a fertilized duck foetus is enough to sufficiently disgust me. To take it farther is a pursuit in futility.
THE religion and THE gender – Rather than talking about religion and gender in the Philippine context, I am going to talk about them in regard to an insidious Hollywood movie I recently saw called Knowing. In it Nicholas Cage, a genius, runs around solving impossible puzzles and heroically protecting those around him, including a single mother who somehow gets roped into his ridiculous plans. When at one point in the movie the circumstances change, the woman becomes unable to deal with a new ‘reality’, she screams, cries and then goes against Cage’s new plans. For this independence of thinking, she dies, her death slowly splayed for show. He adapts and she fails.
As in most Hollywood movies, this hero role, this man who has a plan, could have been staffed by any number of male actors; I don’t have to try hard to imagine the super masculine Brad Pitt or what’s-his-name-Die-Hard-something playing the same role – I’ve seen them in almost identical ones! At what point does Cage’s character become a man’s role, I wonder? And further, why is the weak (in mind and body) person, the one who is punished for disobeying a man’s plan, a woman? Is this reflective of life or an idealized version of it? What aspect is idealized and what real – the situation or the gender roles?
The film, from the beginning, presents sides of an argument between determinism and randomness, religion and science. I discuss this perverted movie only to point out how gender roles are still very much entrenched in North American culture and they are enforced by Judaeo-Christian values that make up our ‘secular’ society. Alongside the movie’s plot are very strong core values that place God and man at the centre of humanity, God representing the creator and man representing an active, empowered person who negotiates with God’s design, which is some sort of modern day Noah’s Ark. Women are the opposite of man, man’s object. In grammar the object does something to the subject, for example ‘he kills her’. ‘She is killed by him’ doesn’t work, it’s passive. In the culture I am familiar with, gender roles are reinforced by religion, history, and the centuries-long production of gendered knowledge.
Something Jed and I have discussed numerous nights over Tanduay and calamansi is the way gender roles are enforced, here and there. This is where culture comes in; culture has a different interior and exterior design for gender roles. And before coming here, I was wilfully ignorant and comfortable with those designs in my own culture, I grew up with them, learned to ignore or negotiate them. I ignore them, usually, in popular cinema and music and I negotiate them in social and professional situations.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the way gender roles are enforced here is unfamiliar to me, like the hot-cold-water-driving-food as explored earlier in this post. Un-negotiable and un-ignorable. Gender roles seem so severe here, from my NW-ern perspective. But Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is the Philippine president, the second woman (…and then there is Imelda Marcos). And Stephen Harper is the Canadian Prime Minister, following an all-male line of elected PMs. I learn. I’m learning. How to be more rigorously critical of my understanding of gender and how I culturally negotiate them. And the movie, 60Php. A bad movie; a cheap epiphany.
The ‘developing’ consciousness – for this I have to quote Foucault:
“…I believe that by subjugated knowledges one should understand something else, something which in a sense is altogether different, namely, a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. I also believe that it is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges… that criticism performs its work” (Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Colin Gordon ed. New York: Pantheon, pp 78-108).
Foucault is at once a million relevant thoughts. I keep encountering the “…because we are a 3rd world country.” In response, I don’t know what to say. I usually feel like the speaker is needlessly putting their country down (the country has year round food production, an educated population and good healthcare), but sometimes, regarding corruption, not so. Yes, the country has everything, which is why there are the extreme rich. And the country has corruption, which is one reason why there are the severe poor.
The ‘developing’ consciousness is a difficult thing since it has been learned throughout centuries of colonial rule. Colonial rule and then neo-colonial rule and then ‘development’ agency authority - these have all reinforced that local knowledges are inadequate to do their task, which is: develop. Develop along ‘western’ lines, race up the trajectory, become like the ‘developed’. I am sure I sound naïve when I say there are resources here that dwarf those of developed nations. Of course it isn’t as simple as empowering local knowledges to eradicate poverty; there are systems in place that streamline profit to individuals. Infrastructure is haphazard and serves just subsistence. The water is cold and isn’t potable. People are poor and animals poorer, living off leftovers from hungry people. They run around, unchecked, fornicating until their reproductive parts sag from overuse.
The CUI is interesting in that it works through local partnerships – it is not an old development dinosaur – though I’m not sure of the extent it is still perpetuating the ‘developing’ consciousness. Or, rather, I’m not sure how effective it is in dislodging it. The Urban and Regional Partnership Program (URPP) challenges the centuries of learning that says local knowledge is inadequate to deal with its own development. Further, its development doesn’t necessarily have to follow existing development models. Rather than using the word ‘develop’, CUI focuses on capacity building, good governance, bioregionalism. I think that as far as development work, the URPP is a move in the right direction. ‘Development’, as the CUI has apparently recognized, is itself in a process of development.
Open windows on the bus, Antique Province
'How's my Driving', Iloilo City
Swells' shadows, Boracay
Condos, Boracay
Boat ride, Boracay
Speedometer and Rosary Beads, Boracay
Carver painting, Iloilo
Scraping away the meat that made me sick for four days, revealed beautiful shells, Iloilo
Maritime high school students lined up for a kilometre, Iloilo 
Packing eggs, Iloilo
Rice Forms, Everywhere
Open air pet shop, Iloilo
Open air pet shop, Iloilo 
An impossible intersection of vehicles, it works out though. Always does, Iloilo
Recycling, Iloilo
Hanging out in uniform, Molo Plaza, Iloilo
Dragon flies, Ortis Wharf, Iloilo
Graffiti and cashews, Iloilo
Books bound for destruction, UP, Iloilo
A dog's turn to pick through the trash, Iloilo
Flooded entrance gate, Iloilo
White powder packets, Iloilo
Graveyard statue's hair painted black and running, Iloilo
Graveyard statue, Iloilo
Graveyard, Iloilo
Acquaintance, Manilla
Flying bat, Mambukal
Hanging bats, Mambukal
