by Larry Farmer
“Well, I just think it’s pathetic how much the poor have to pay for food,” she repeated, unfazed by my explanation.
I looked at her, trying to hide my distaste. It was like talking to a liberal. There’s something about moralists in general, I decided. One more try.
“It’s the rural poor that grow the food. Meaning the rice. They don’t buy much, they sell it. If they could get more for their produce, meaning rice, they wouldn’t be as poor. They eat from what they grow, they don’t buy that much.”
“Well, they can’t buy much rice because they’re so poor,” she said. “If Marcos lowered prices they could buy more. He’s just protecting the rich. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”
“I have to go,” I said. “My jeepney leaves soon, and I have a long trip. It was nice to meet you. I pass by Midsayap now and then. Maybe we’ll meet again.”
“Sure, that would be nice.” I turned to go and find my jeepney. And I hope I never see you again. It was so good to see another conservative, until reminded now how it wasn’t.
Perhaps it made me more open-minded, I hoped. To be equally disgusted with moralists of all persuasions. Moralists drive through the void in their vehicles of clichés, I thought defiantly.
I went as far as the jeepney took me. To the end of the road. I thought back to the map. I was sure there was a line on that map crossing the interior. But there were no more roads from here. That’s why people took the national highway, I supposed. It was the only through road. But for now I was still filled with principle. I was not going to take the national highway and go on a rectangular circumference for anything.
“How do I get to Cagayan de Oro?” I asked the jeepney driver who brought me here to this dead end.
“You must go to Cotabato City and take a boat, then a bus. Or to Midsayap and take the bus on the national highway. It’s a full-sized bus. Very nice.”
“No, from here, I mean.”
“There is no transportation from here,” he answered. “Except this same road back to Midsayap. Even if you had a car, there is no road.”
“So, I’ll walk. Where is the direction? Where do I start?”
He looked at me in disbelief. “Get in the jeepney,” he said. “There is a path through the rainforest.”
There’s a path? I sighed in wonder. A path? That stupid squiggly line on the map was a path through a rainforest.
The driver took me until the one-lane dirt road we were on ended. Right at the edge of a rainforest, just like he said. But I loved the idea of walking through a rainforest, as I stared at the trees and vines. I’d never walked through a rainforest before. I had ridden through parts of one in Mexico, but our bus didn’t enter it.
“How far does this path go before it reaches a highway?” I asked.
“About ten miles,” the driver answered. “No one travels it much. I am not really sure. The rainforest ends, and the path leads to a small dirt road like the one now, and soon there is a village with more transportation. Good luck, my friend.”
Tropical rainforests are beautiful. Tall canopy tree rooftops, vines, bushes, flowers, streams. And animals. Birds I couldn’t see but could hear in abundance. Monkey screeches like in a Tarzan movie. The only animal I saw up close was a large iguana. It saw me, too, from just off the trail, but was unconcerned.
I was glad when the trail ended, but only because I had so far to go, and it was taking forever. This seemed Biblical to me, in the sense it was a search. Not a safe, structured journey, but a journey with a goal. No set itinerary except a vague, determined destination, and what it took to attain it. On a path through chaotic paradise.
The path out of the rainforest soon led to a dirt road that led to a village. Just like the man said. A village with a jeepney. I asked where I was, but no one spoke English. People communicated to me that I was now in Lanao del Sur. A Muslim province. I expected to be in this province, the one on the map as predicted, so was encouraged.
The jeepney ride got me to a bigger village on the gravel highway going toward Cagayan de Oro. This village even had a passenger bus, the kind found on the Davao highway, though smaller and older.
“Do you speak English?” I asked a small, bent, wrinkled man smoking a cigarette. He wore a dirty, blue bandana as a head cover.
The man nodded while holding up his thumb and index finger slightly to indicate he understood English a little bit.
“Cagayan de Oro,” I said slowly and clearly. “Bus.”
He motioned for me to follow, then led me to a bus nearby. “Here,” he said.
“Thank you,” I replied.
“Where are you going?” a young man on the bus asked from a window of the bus.
“You speak English,” I said.
“I went to college,” he explained. “I learned there. I worked in Cebu for awhile, too, and picked some up.”
“I’m trying to get to Cagayan de Oro,” I said.
“You have a long way to go, but this bus will get you on the highway that goes there. But it does not leave until tomorrow morning.”
“Aha. So, is there a place I can stay?”
“You better stay on the bus,” he said. “If you stay in a lodge, the bus will fill up and you cannot get on it. It’s only half full now. You should find a seat now or it will be gone by dark. Get something to eat and use the restroom. Do not eat much or drink much. You will have to protect your seat and sleep in it. If you leave even to use the restroom you will lose it.”
I took his advice and didn’t eat or drink anything the rest of the day. While in the village, I found a toilet, then returned to the bus to get myself a seat. I spent the night sleeping upright in it. The bus departed just after sunup the next morning. I slept until we reached a village with a bus that would take me the rest of the way to Cagayan de Oro. On the next bus, I rode on the roof part of the way, since all the seats on it were taken. A lone white American riding exposed on top of the bus going through a Muslim province. A woman asked if I was scared. I said no. It was the only option I had. To not be scared. Soon afterwards, enough passengers got off that I was able to get a seat inside.
I knew the name of the bank in Cagayan de Oro where my friend worked, and that’s where I headed as soon as I arrived. I saw one of the clerks looking at me when I walked in the door.
“Are you the Peace Corps Volunteer we’ve been waiting for?” she asked me.
“Probably,” I responded.
“Wait just a moment, please. Everyone is in the back office.”
I walked to one side of the entrance and laid down my belongings. Soon, my bank PCV friend and a short, stubby man appeared. My friend’s face turned to surprise, then bewilderment when he spotted me.
“I was going to comment, look what the wind blew in,” he said, smiling as he held out his hand in greeting. “But you look more like a castaway. What happened to you? We were expecting you yesterday. I’ve been cooped up here instead of out in the field with our clients. We were afraid you changed your mind. But I guess the worst happened, going by the looks of you.”
“Yeah, well.” I shrugged apologetically. “I’ll tell you the gory details, but first can I shower and take a nap? Maybe shower, a cold beer, and a nap. We’ll talk on the way.”
“This is my supervisor,” my PCV friend said, introducing the bank owner. “The computer is at his house. That’s where we’ll work. He has that Filipino clone. That’s what you said your bank has.”
“I brought my manuals just in case you haven’t bought yours yet,” I explained. “I’ll need to take them back with me. And I brought diskette copies of our word processor, spreadsheet package, and database package. I brought some floppies of spreadsheet formulas and macros on spreadsheet, and some programs for the database I’ve written. That’ll get us started. We can talk about it. Mostly, I’ll show you what to look for in the manuals, things to make your priorities. They’re user-friendly manuals. After I leave, you can start from scratch and do what you need.”
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” my friend suggested. “People will wonder who this vagabond is. There better be some stories behind the mess called ‘you’ right now.”
“You can believe that,” I said with a laugh.
“I’m sure I can, Mississippi. You’re living up to your reputation. Watch out, Cagayan de Oro, the Marines have landed.”
Chapter 11
It seemed as though I hadn’t seen Lois in months, when in reality it was a couple of weeks. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d spent so long apart. Which was why I didn’t want to fall for someone in the first place. The feeling of obligation. And I felt that way because of me, meaning my feelings for her, but I knew she felt the same.
When she came to see me that first weekend after I returned from Cagayan de Oro, it seemed more like seeing my wife again. Seeing her satisfied the longing from missing her. No more empty gap inside. Within five minutes of being together, it seemed like we’d never been apart.
“I want to see more of the world,” I explained casually between bites as we sat at our favorite carindaria, “but mostly I’m hoping to get to Hawaii someday. When our time’s up, I’m booking my flight for Honolulu and looking for work—if I don’t arrange something from here somehow. Trade a third world tropical setting for an American tropical paradise.”
“Just stay here the rest of your life, slick,” she said. “Hire yourself out to a multinational or to an agency like Save the Children.”
“Lois, I’ve only got so much of this line of work in me. One of the reasons you and I are such good friends is that we want to make a difference here. I feel just as strongly as you about helping people who are down and out. But I couldn’t do this forever. We’re talking burnout. And I don’t mean room temperature beer. I’m talking culture shock. The mindset. I don’t blame the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank one iota for their stiff policies. That’s what’s needed here and in most third world countries. Fiscal responsibility. Doing what it takes to pull yourself out. All this third world stuff just keeps going and going. It feeds on itself.”
“People talk about you for saying things like that, Mississippi.” She sighed. “You’re the only one in the whole Peace Corps who is for the IMF.”
“They talk about me anyway, Lois. So much for open-minded liberals. Nice to know the state of Mississippi isn’t the only place that stereotypes.”
“You back it all up, though, when you talk trash like supporting the IMF. I bet you’re a Reagan supporter.”
“Glad I don’t need a bumper sticker for the car I don’t have.”
“Aren’t Filipinos poor enough for you?” Her frustration showed. “I hate to think what I’d be doing right now if I hadn’t gotten the grant that got me into college. Give somebody a break, Mr. Banker.”
“Yours wasn’t a grant so much as an investment, Lois. There’s helping people help themselves, and there’s throwing money down a sewer.”
“You haven’t seen how desperate these people are.”
“Yes, I have. I work with them every day. It reminds me of parts of Mississippi, to be honest. Except, somehow, even worse.”
“It’s worse than that, and they’re stuck.”
“There’s one way out of here, Lois, and I don’t mean a ticket to America. I mean learning fiscal responsibility.”
“You’ve been working in a bank too long. In my barangay, people can’t get loans. They’re lucky to have food.”
“We give loans to people in your barangay, Lois. You have a cooperative there, the one where we ate the dog. Don’t pretend otherwise. Uncollateralized loans for the riskiest clientele, loans that seldom get paid back. I guess that’s a grant, but we didn’t intend it that way.”
“Maybe it should be a grant,” she barked. “The big farmers here own less than twenty acres. Most farmers own less than three. How do we expect these people to survive, much less pay back a loan?”
“Lois, we’ve been over this,” I said, showing my own frustration. “I was there with you last year when that Australian agency talked to the village leaders about the earthen dam. They said the same thing, including the analogy of throwing money down the sewer. Even the grants get corrupted. Even rich countries have limited resources. I know you don’t believe that. Things have to work or it’s a bad idea no matter how it sounds on paper.”
I could tell she wasn’t convinced.
“You told me how you babysat to make money growing up, while some of your friends and some of your brother’s friends sold drugs,” I lectured her. “How you helped support yourself in college as a waitress, or as a student worker. Your brother, you said, had friends who are dead now, and some of your friends are crackheads, while you’re accepted into Berkeley Law School. It takes what you did, not what they did.”
“You’re white, from Mississippi, with a daddy who is a doctor,” she said, getting testy. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“The hell I don’t! My grandfather owned a corner grocery, and the only reason my father was a doctor was because of the G.I. Bill after World War II. For services rendered fighting the Japanese. He would have been one anyway—he’s a survivor. He makes things work. Plus they had quotas against Jews in those days. He had to get past that, too. And even if my family was rich and had it made, so what? It doesn’t change reality. People still have to pull themselves out.”
“Don’t come at me with your economics,” she snapped back. “I took some courses at OSU. I’ve heard it until I’m going ape. I just know it was President Lyndon Johnson that gave the poor a chance.”
“How does having a vibrant economy not give the poor a break? The poor had more chances in a market-oriented economy than anything the Job Corps did for them under LBJ,” I snapped. “None of LBJ’s programs worked, if you look at the results in context. Higher taxes stolen from the private sector for artificial but visible programs inflicted by government doesn’t help industry and the wealth creation process. For all those billions of dollars he totally wasted, he got minimal results. He should have just let the private sector keep it, and real prosperity would have occurred even more so, and the poor would have benefited more from that than from the handouts they barely accessed. With a vibrant economy there is less need of poverty programs and more wealth available to help the helpless.”
Lois all but sneered at me. “I hate to throw the race card into all this. But here’s this white guy from Mississippi not wanting blacks from Mississippi to get any federal aid. Capitalism didn’t help them very much, now, did it?”
“What happened to blacks in Mississippi was not capitalism, it was racism. It wasn’t exploiting cheap labor, which I’m for, it was suppressing the market through blind social bigotry. Mississippi hurt its economy, not to mention its society, with unfair laws thwarting drive and talent. Manmade laws sucking the air out of God-given opportunity that provides for a wealth-creating mechanism at the marketplace. Just shows that mixing politics with economics works as well as mixing state and religion. It was Jim Crow laws, let me emphasize the word ‘laws,’ manmade laws, that hurt blacks where I grew up. Laws that set them back to keep them out of a thriving economy. Laws made to keep them on the plantation and out of the marketplace of opportunity and ideas. And a lot of Mississippi still isn’t thriving because of those same laws. They hurt even the people hoping to be kingpins from these stupid laws.”
“Say what you want,” she countered, “it makes the poor bitter.”
“Well, people will stay bitter,” I replied, “because they’re going to stay poor with that mindset. Our interest rate at my bank is sixty percent. Outrageous, huh? Otherwise, they get money where they always did, if they get it at all, from Chinese traders who charge three hundred percent. And these traders collect their loans, whereas ours are defaulted on by many. So, you tell me. Liberals like you never like the marketplace, but this is the true cost of money, and the marketplace deals with it truthfully. Those that pay back our loans get more below-market-priced l
oans from us. They get cheaper money and learn responsibility, too. They have a larger success rate than those without loans or those stuck with the traders. Funny how the hell that works, speaking of the IMF. We give loans vastly under market value, and you’re still bitching, and we still can’t collect from those that choose to lose. They’re stuck with the reality they insist on keeping.”
“Typical!” She angrily shook her head while refusing to look at me. “Everyone brings poverty on themselves. They’re just lazy or stupid. You’re so simplistic, Mississippi.”
“Give me a break. I’ve heard this stuff. You’re the one that’s simplistic. There’s poverty until you create wealth. Just like the natural state of the universe is chaos. There’s chaos until order is created somehow. Created is the key. Get it? So, you may have bad luck, you may be lazy, you may be stupid, you may not know how. But until you create wealth, there’s no wealth. And the best mechanism for wealth creation is the free market. You can’t even redistribute wealth if you don’t create it. The free market is the golden egg, if there is a golden-egg-laying goose to be had at all. It provides the mechanism. And the losers I brought up to you in this example are the ones who chose to lose, because that’s what the bank is going through now. We provided the cheapest credit available, and so many even of the small farmers who cooperatively own the bank have chosen to abuse it. And are stuck without our loans now.”
“The Chinese merchants are bad,” Lois conceded, as if throwing me a bone.
“Where’ve you been, Lois? Look at the people you try to help. We feel so proud to give them charity and then don’t give the one thing they need, just like with the blacks in Mississippi. Opportunity. Let them work their way out instead of denying them by our protectionist laws. Teach them responsibility. Teach them skills. Give them a break, not a handout. I’m even for a few handouts for those that really, seemingly can’t.”
“You’ve made a science out of being a redneck,” she said. “Is it a major at Ole Miss? I thought Jews were liberals. You sure you’re Jewish?”
