The Great Escape

"Oíd lo que dicen los santos concilios! -decía-. Cuando un indio encontrase en la calle a un cura, doblará la cabeza y ofrecerá el cuello para que el among se apoye en él; si el cura y el indio van a caballo, entonces el indio se parará, se quitará el salakot o sombrero reverentemente; en fin, si el indio va a caballo y el cura a pie, el indio bajará del caballo y no volverá a montar hasta que el cura le diga sulung o esté muy lejos. Esto dicen los santos concilios, y el que no obedezca estará excomulgado.'

-Y cuando uno monta un carabao?' -pregunta un escrupuloso labriego a su vecino.

-¡Entonces... sigue adelante! -conteste éste, que era un casuista.

-Sermón de Fray Dámaso, Noli Me Tangere, José Rizal

"Hear what say the holy Councils!" he said. "When an indio meets a priest on the street, he will bend his head and offer his neck for the among to lean on; if the priest and the indio are on horseback, then the indio will stop and take off his salakot or hat reverently; finally, if the indio is on horseback and the priest on foot, the indio will get off the horse and will not get back on until the priest says 'sulung' or is almost out of sight. This is what the holy Councils say, and he who disobeys will be excommunicated."

"And if one of them is riding a water buffalo?" a scrupulous laborer asked his neighbor.

"Then... he keeps going!" answered the other, who was a Casuist. 

-Sermon of Friar Dámaso, Noli me Tángere, José Rizal

It's the 15th today, which means it's officially been a month since I arrived in the Philippines. I'll admit that, before I arrived, when I was imagining where I would be a month into my fellowship, I figured I'd be out in the field somewhere doing surveys and everything. Of course, nothing goes as planned, ever, and it turns out that getting in touch with people in a big city where everybody is busy is harder than I had anticipated. So here I am in the library of UP Diliman once again, using writing my blog as an excuse to avoid doing yet more literature review. 

I'll never get tired of this view, though.

I definitely get frustrated here sometimes, when it feels like I'm (figuratively) stuck in the mud and just spinning my wheels trying to get out. Of course, I knew that doing independent research with little to no supervision was going to be a new challenge, and none of this is a particular surprise for me. But that doesn't make it any more frustrating.

But I'm not writing this blog entry just to complain about things. I'm not going to pretend things aren't going well overall. I have 42 pages of notes for my literature review, email conversations with several different NGOs, and a meeting next week with the organization that will hopefully be helping me carry out my actual field research. And, perhaps most importantly, I've been getting out of my routine and doing interesting things with my life, rather than just spending every day at the university studying in the library.
I mentioned in my past post that finding friends was a particular struggle here, especially without a routine where I regularly meet people. Now, I'm used to life as a college student, where friends are essentially shoved at me, and it would probably be harder not to have a somewhat active social life. Here though, I actually have to make the effort to reach out to people and set up dates to spend time together. It's a little frustrating, but I've been forcing myself to actually do it, and of course it's rewarding. Two weeks ago, I was invited by a friend to a microbrewery festival in Manila that I hadn't realized was going on. One thing I'd really been missing from the USA was decent craft beer, and it was one of the best surprises to find out that there was actually a nascent brewing scene in Manila. Besides being able to hang out with cool people and get to know even more cool people, it was a great way to enjoy things I'd been missing- good beer, good burgers, live music that wasn't karaoke... Definitely a satisfying experience.

Life is good. 

Besides socializing, I've tried to get out and explore a little more of Quezon City and the neighborhood where I live. I'm still working up the courage to do some real street photography in the area, but in the meantime I've just been walking around with my camera, finding new parks and neighborhoods, as well as enjoying the view from my apartment complex- another view I'll never get tired of.

The building to the right that looks like Superman's Fortress of Solitude is the main cathedral of the Iglesia ni Cristo (Church of Christ), a Christian sect that began in the Philippines, and is the third-largest religion in the country, after Roman Catholicism and Islam. It shouldn't be confused with the United Church of Christ in the USA, even though their names mean the same thing. While the latter is a liberal Protestant denomination, the INC is Unitarian and fairly conservative. It's also as much a political power as it is a religion, and resembles Jehovah's Witnesses or (less so) the Church of Latter-Day Saints in terms of the amount of social control it exerts over its followers. 

This is a beautiful little park I found in my neighborhood, along the edge of the river that flows through my apartment complex. It would probably be a more popular place for walking around if the river didn't usually smell like an open sewer and/or landfill. 

You didn't think there would be an entire post without a cat picture, did you?

I like Manila. I really do. Lots of people have said they really hate it here, and I kind of expected to hate it as well before I got here. I'm not exactly a city person, and Manila is pretty much the city-est city of all of them. But I actually find myself enjoying my time here. Public transportation is fairly easy to figure out, people are generally extremely kind and helpful, the food is great, and everything is really cheap. There are also a bunch of different communities of people with similar interests to me, who I'm sure I could use to find a lot of new friends if I were staying here longer. I don't know if I would choose to live here long term, but I feel like I can survive here, which is definitely not something I've felt about every city I've lived in. However, I also had a realization last week that I haven't been outside of Metro Manila once since I got here. I'm someone who like seeing green things and roads that aren't constantly snarled with traffic, so I realized that what I really needed to do was escape Manila. Thankfully, this last weekend I finally had the chance to do that.

On Thursday and Friday of last week, I attended a research symposium at UP Diliman with my advisor here. The topic of the symposium was "Multi-Hazard Exposure and Vulnerability", which essentially is exactly what I'm researching here. There were people there from a number of different countries and universities, and it was great to see the research currently being done in the field of Disaster Risk Reduction. I'm not really sure how I managed to talk my way into attending, since I wasn't presenting and didn't pay a fee, but the symposium included free meals and, even better, a free tour of the area south of Manila.
Our first stop was Lake Taal, a lake occupying a massive volcanic Caldera about three hours south of Manila. Taal Volcano is considered one of the Decade Volcanoes, a group of 16 volcanoes considered to be among the most dangerous in the world. It has had a large number of historical eruptions, some of which had a great deal of fatalities. The most recent eruption was in 1977, and while it's currently not erupting, it's on Threat Level 1 on a 0 to 5 scale. That means that there are daily small earthquakes around the volcano, the lake water is fairly acidic, and the ground around the volcano is rising very slowly. All of these point to lava moving up into the chamber beneath the volcano, meaning that another eruption will occur in the future.
The volcano itself is located in an island in the lake, where there are 37 different craters from various eruptions. There are a few thousand people living on Volcano Island (as it's called), despite its designation as a permanent danger zone. The government refuses to allow land titling on the island in an effort to discourage settlement, and there are a great deal of programs educating people living there on the grave danger they face. However, given that it's an extremely popular tourist vacation and good spot for fishing, they choose to stay there anyway. Really, it's all economics- people are willing to live with the theoretical possibility of a hazard sometime in the future as long as the area provides them with a livelihood in the present. Really, the same logic for why people live in San Francisco or the Pacific Northwest. Naturally, this place has been on my bucket list for a long, long time.
Unfortunately, we didn't get to spend as much time there as I would have liked- the only place the tour visited was the office of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, which is essentially the USGS of the Philippines. We got to talk with experts there about the hazards posed by the volcano and the emergency procedures in place, but of course I had hoped to see a lot more of the actual volcano itself. Which, I guess, just means I'll have to go back there in the future.

The volcano is the island in the distance- the steep cone on the right is a crater that was last active in the 1700s.

After an all-too-short visit to Lake Taal, the next stop was to Lipa, a city nearby the lake. Lipa was first settled somewhere around the 11th Century, when it was settled by Javans from the Srivajayan Empire from what's now Indonesia. Their leader, Datu Puti, is now mostly known here as the namesake of a popular brand of soy sauce, but the area he settled is still a city today, 900 years later. It was later conquered by the Spanish, but destroyed in 1724 by an eruption of Taal Volcano, after which it moved to its present spot. It became the center of coffee production in the Philippines, and thus one of the richest parts of Spanish Philippines. As such, it has a suitably impressive Cathedral, one of the few remaining Spanish-era cathedrals in the country. Our tour guide called it "a church that coffee built", because it was paid for by the massive coffee revenues coming into the region in the 19th century. Apparently there's a verse in the Bible that says "Thou shalt construct an empire by subjugating entire races of people, and steal the fruits of their labor in order to construct opulent temples to the Lord" (spoiler alert: there's not).

It looks squat and fat in this picture because it is- it's built in the "Earthquake Baroque" style that was common in the colonies of the Spanish Empire to create structures that were more resilient to volcanoes and earthquakes.

I have, shall we say, a conflicted relationship with Catholicism, especially in Latin America. I spent a long time going to a Catholic church regularly while I was living in Bolivia, and I feel at least somewhat familiar with the religion. I can appreciate its functions as a means of social cohesion and support, and, studying disasters, I also know that faith is an incredibly important tool in the Philippines for people who've been devastated by typhoons, volcanoes, earthquakes, or other hazards. Not to mention I have a huge amount of respect for many of the projects the church carries out with regards to poverty and disaster relief. 

On the other hand, I can't forget that the Church was essentially used as a means of social control by the state in the Spanish colonies; once people had been forcibly converted to Catholicism, and the Empires were supported by the priesthood, it became much harder to foment dissent. This isn't true in all empires- Protestant countries like England and the Netherlands didn't put too much effort into converting their colonies (see: India, Indonesia); nor did France, which is also a Catholic country (see: Vietnam, Morocco). But in colonial Spain and Portugal, it was essentially used as an excuse for conquering entire continents and massacring their populations. That's especially true in the Philippines, which, compared to other colonies, was left out of a lot of efforts towards development and good governance. Spanish was never widely spoken here, unlike in Latin America, because Spain never really worried about building schools or integrating Filipinos into the wider society. Similarly, it was never the destination of large-scale settlement of Spaniards, which might have provided another incentive for development. Instead, the Church was essentially put in control of everything.

Priests were given almost complete control of the country- it's said that all towns in the Philippines were "under the shadow of the cathedral", as that was always the biggest building in town, bigger than the government offices. Individual friars would seize massive tracts of land and force locals to work under them in what was essentially indentured labor, and the church was the deciding factor in pretty much any issue of governance in the country. It was also common for priests to have the first pick of attractive local women and girls, and to essentially blackmail them into sleeping with them. By the end of the 19th century, dissidents nicknamed it the frailocracía (friarocracy), for the massive power that the Church exerted over the country, and the rampant corruption associated with it. One of the reasons for the downfall of Spain in the Philippines was that they finally allowed native Filipinos to become priests, and many of those who did began to protest the injustices in the country. Of course, the first dissidents were executed or disappeared, but the tide slowly began to turn.

I should probably add a disclaimer here that I don't really associate the beliefs of Catholicism itself with the past behavior of the Catholic Church as a political entity. You'd be hard-pressed to find observant Catholics who really think it's okay for priests to order women into their bedrooms, and I think Pope Francis might have a thing or two to say about building expensive churches from the profits of local slave labor. I may have gone to Middlebury College, but I'm very far from being anti-religion or anti-theist; I'm a regular churchgoer back in Vermont, after all. Nonetheless, it's difficult for me, personally, to think see religion here independently of its historical context.

After the cathedral, we were guided to the Casa Segunda, one of six Spanish-era houses remaining in the city. The house is named after Segunda Katigbak, who's known as the "first love" of José Rizal, one of the national heroes of the Philippines. Rizal was an all-around genius- he was the first trained native Filipino opthalmologist, discovered several new species of lizards and insects, and was an accomplished painter and sculptor. However, he became best-known for his two novels, the first of which, Noli Me Tángere, I quote at the beginning of this post. In these novels, he dared to criticize the corrupt friars who ran the country, and called for equal rights for Filipinos and white Spanish. Rizal was one of the ilustrados, a class of wealthy Filipinos who traveled to Europe, the only place they were allowed to get a secular education, and returned to the country with radical ideas about how the country should be run. The Spanish feared Rizal so much they ultimately had him executed for sedition, even though he never actually called for Filipino independence. Predictably, this backfired, and the rest is history.

Casa Segunda from the outside.

The granddaughter of Segunda Katigbak, who still owns the house.

Even though Dr. Rizal was only briefly associated with Segunda (she was already engaged to someone else), it's still the primary claim to fame of the house- they even have a chess table with a plaque saying that he once played chess on it. It was, however, nice to see a little bit of historical architecture in the country. There are very few colonial buildings left in the Philippines because, during World War Two, the Japanese chose to take over the nicest buildings in each town they occupied. When the Americans returned and began fighting for control of the islands, they went with the strategy of "bomb everything that looks like it might have Japanese in it". If there were reports of two Japanese soldiers hiding in a church, they would level the entire town, just to be sure. I'll go into World War Two in the Philippines in a later post, but I'll mention that here to give some context for why the house is important.

After the house tour, we went into the main part of Lipa to get some freshly ground coffee. The mere thought of coffee makes me gag, and I wouldn't touch a cup of coffee with gloves on, but it was a good excuse to walk around a little with my camera and enjoy a town that wasn't Manila.

It's hard to describe how nice it was to get out of Manila for the first time on Sunday. As luck would have it, though, I actually got to leave the city one more time on Sunday, for yet another cheap excursion. This time, it was a hike in the southern Sierra Madre, the mountain range that runs down the eastern part of the island of Luzon. The hike was organized by a group of people on meetup.com, the Manila Weekend Adventurers. It was great because that meant that the van ride to get there was already taken care of, as well as the hiker registration- all for about $12 total. Not to mention, it was great to meet other hikers- meeting people! Yay!
Our destination was Mount Pamitinan, about a 2-hour drive from Manila. The beginning of the hike wasn't terribly difficult, through a small town in a valley, then up the jungle on the slopes of the mountain. Of course, even though it was easy I was still sweating buckets after the first 20 minutes or so. I'm adjusting to the heat in the Philippines, but very, very slowly. The second part got harder, as there was a lot of rock climbing to get to the top part. The rock climbing wasn't too technical, but it was over jagged limestone rocks that looked like they would slice me into ribbons if I fell the wrong way. I'm still in one piece, but I can't say the same for the pair of shorts I wore up the mountain, which now look like they were attacked by a wild animal. Still, the view from the top was beautiful- as long as I looked in the right direction, it was just one long expanse of green. Such a wonderful change of scenery from the big city.

The small town we started the hike in.

A look back at my fellow hikers- note the Iglesia ni Cristo off to the side.

Proof Filipinos are obsessed with basketball: they'll build a basketball court literally anywhere.

GREEN THINGS!!

Just before my shorts were destroyed.

I'm here to study disasters, so I had to include this picture- that appears to be an area where there was recently a landslide. If you look closely there's a house built directly underneath it. Vulnerability.

This little girl saw me walking by and demanded I take her picture.

I'm back from Manila now, after my brief escape, and things seem to be finally picking up with my research. I'll hopefully have another update next week, before I head out for more traveling. Until then!

DISCLAIMER: This is a personal blog, and does not in any way represent the views of the US Department of State or the Fulbright Commission. I encourage readers to reach out with any complaints or inaccuracies.