by Larry Farmer
Depsite how long Lois and I had been away from our home base, we had one more excursion left in us after we said goodbye to our departing parents. To celebrate our official honeymoon. The just-the-two-of-us one. We flew into Davao rather than Cotabato City, for nearby, a ferry ride away across a small inlet, was Paradise Island, a well-named tourist resort that lived up to its billing. There was nothing but coconut trees, brilliant sandy beaches, restaurants, and tourist cabins. It was as if some unwritten law prevailed that kept problems and fast-paced living at bay. There was nothing at all to do but swim in the ocean, bask in the sun, and make love in your cabin. A cabin with electricity and running water.
“I wondered if you would eat kinnilaw,” Lois teased me as we sat across the table from each other at what was now our favorite restaurant. “It’s raw fish, and that isn’t kosher. Right?”
“It’s cooked,” I answered back with a straight face.
“Kinnilaw is raw tuna or anchovy, love of my life,” Lois informed me.
“Yeah, well, raw but cooked. They leave it several hours soaked in vinegar, calamansi, ginger, soy sauce, and I forget what else. Cooked. That’s what they say. The acidity of the spices cooks it. Get it?”
“Does your God accept this definition of cooked, sweetheart?”
“To be honest,” I said with as straight a face as I could manage, “I’m not sure. I’ll ask my rabbi as soon as we get to Mississippi.”
Lois picked up a pinch of the delicacy and pushed it playfully into my mouth.
“Somehow I knew it,” she said, laughing. “I have the feeling I’m going to have fun being a Jew.”
“We Jews, as a species, learned to survive,” I replied. “Not just in world history. There’s enough problems and rules meshed throughout our cultural DNA. We have to survive ourselves, too, you know.”
Our waitress came with the main course. A huge head of a tuna lay on a platter surrounded by massive amounts of white rice.
“Have you ever had this?” I asked Lois.
“Never even knew you could have it,” she answered. “I’ve had fish head vegetable soup in our village. I guess you have to live on the coast to get tuna jaw. That’s what I thought you were getting us. Tuna head soup, not just the head of a tuna, big as it is. I thought kinnilaw was the main dish and soup the appetizer. How are we going to eat all this?”
“Somehow,” I replied. “I guarantee, you’ll die trying. But it’s to die for.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of, sweets,” she said. “There’s so much food here.”
“The meat inside the jaw of the tuna is so tender. So succulent. And it absorbs the juices as they steam it. It’s my favorite Filipino dish. Even more than adobo.”
“Nothing’s better than adobo,” she answered.
“Well,” I rebuked her, “we’ll see what you say after you’ve had this.”
“How are we going to make love after all this food is what I want to know.”
“The moon is full,” I replied. “We’ll walk along the beach holding hands, then sit in a beach chair and look at the light reflection in the ocean. And then nature will figure the rest out by the time we get back to our cabin.”
“Can you believe this is the first real beach I’ve been to since we’ve been in the Philippines? I’ve seen Manila Bay. I’ve seen the port area of Cotabato City. We’ve always been so short of time we didn’t want to waste it going to the beach there. I guess we could have tried.”
“Any spare time we had, you always wanted to shop.”
“Hey!” She scowled. “My only chances to do so, you know. Anyway, we’re here now doing this, and I’m going to pretend it was some cosmic plan. Because this all made a special imprint on me. The first time I saw a glorious tropical beach was Paradise Island, Davao, Philippines, with my husband on my honeymoon. So there.”
Those were the magic words. We leaned across the table and kissed. Husband and wife in Paradise.
Just as we sat back again, a waiter walked by pushing a cart with a whole roasted pig. A celebration of some sort was taking place a few tables away. Lechon, as Filipinos call it, is the ultimate delicacy. For a rich wedding reception, a barrio fiesta, or a graduation, or perhaps landing a large contract for your corporation.
Lois saw my eyes bug out and immediately tapped me on the head to bring me back down to earth.
“You’re a Jew,” she yelped. “Down, boy! Get a hold of yourself. We already have more than we can eat, and, no matter how much you wiggle the truth, lechon is still pork. I will write your rabbi myself.”
I looked at her with a glazed stare, huffed, then returned to my now blasé tuna jaw.
****
Once back home in Cotabato City, Lois and I got superstitious thinking about it. How the weeks spent together during her school break were a prelude. A warm-up. Spring training for our serious life together.
For now, with our marriage, the regular season began. For the rest of our lives.
I had loved going to visit her before, in her village on the edge of no-man’s land. Staying with her in her Nipa Hut. It was a different world. I wanted something different. I got it. I felt like real Peace Corps then.
But suddenly, Lois was with me and life felt tranquil. And with the tranquility it seemed surreal. We went to work together. We shopped together. Went out together. We were an eternal pair. We were really together now. Married. And the Philippines had a charm we appreciated in our married life.
But every day we were reminded of our other circumstances. The not-as-charming parts. We still had to put up with poverty, overcrowding, a different culture, cockroaches, rats, mosquitos, standing in long lines, poor transportation, and being the center of curiosity everywhere we went. Which was life in a third world country. But the Philippines was our third world country.
The Philippines has a natural beauty, however, in spite of the problems. And we saw that aspect every day. A tropical paradise of beaches, orchids, fruit trees, plush vegetation, and mountains. We didn’t feel like Peace Corps Volunteers anymore except for our mission. Which now felt like a job. A low-paying one, but we were young newlyweds. It was fun.
“This is the movie I was telling you about,” Lois said. “My mother told me about it when she was in Manila. It’s playing here now in Cotabato City. Let’s go.”
“Have you been to a movie here?” I asked.
“We went in Manila together, silly.”
“Yeah, in Makati, their Manhattan,” I answered. “I took you there because their movie theaters are comparable to those in America.”
“Just what are you saying?” she asked.
“It looks like you’re going to experience a new cultural exchange,” I said.
“Exchange means I experience something and then offer something cultural back.”
I nodded my head. “I meant exchange, just like I said. Your reaction will be the exchange.”
She seemed afraid to ask anything else.
The movie was called The Secret Of The Lost Treasure. The American title for it was Romancing The Stone. I liked Michael Douglas, but I was in love with Kathleen Turner. After I saw her in Body Heat I’d wanted to be vamped like that. But this was a romantic comedy, according to Lois.
“Why is there a stench in here?” Lois asked as we looked for a seat.
“You’ll find out.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’ll find out,” I repeated.
“Why are we going to the balcony?”
“To avoid the stench,” I replied.
She was ready to say something else, but she resigned herself to finding out on her own.
We had not seen a Tagalog movie since culture training in Zamboanga. Lois knew Tagalog well enough, but there were subtitles in English, as well. We didn’t want to go to any more Tagalog movies, though, and language wasn’t the problem. Culture was. I liked much of their music. But their movies were melodramatic. I’m using that word because I can’t think of a stronger word.
Melodramatic on steroids might be more accurate.
Halfway through the movie, two boys in front of us got up and walked to the railing at the edge of the balcony. The light from the movie screen silhouetted the boys as they unzipped their trousers, aimed their body part, and released their excretion into the area below.
“My God,” Lois shrieked. She looked at me, disgust mixed with disbelief in her expression. She shook her head, then eased into a humored sneer. “Cultural exchange. I get it now.”
This coincided with what proved to be our favorite line in the movie as Danny DeVito screamed into the telephone at his thug cousin and expressed his displeasure at being stuck in a third world cesspool. That fit perfectly as we watched the boys zip back up and return to their seats. The roaches crawling among the spilled popcorn on the floor barely fazed us after that. The rats at our feet came close to an exchange, however.
Soon we were back in Manila. Since Lois had been reassigned to Cotabato City with me, it was arranged that she was part of the Central Bank group of Peace Corps Volunteers. Now the Central Bank funded us both on our trips to Manila for meetings with the Rural Bank section. Until now, I had stayed in a hostel in a boy’s dorm area. This time, at Central Bank expense, we got to share a private room all to ourselves.
We felt like a mom-and-pop store as we rode the buses and jeepneys to my sources of supplies and research. While in Los Banyos to see the scientists and engineers at IRRI, I included a stop at an accounting cooperative, where we shared spreadsheets, database formulas, and programs. They used the Philippine clone desktop, and we exchanged ideas and information on both software and hardware.
There was no denying that we used Manila as a recreational ground during our stay while also accomplishing business objectives. Though the allotment the Central Bank gave us for our time there wasn’t much, it and our Peace Corps salary allowed for a few choice restaurants, a night to see Freddie Aguilar sing “Ang Bayan Ko” at the Hobbit House, and, since it was now football season back in the States, enough money left over to spend at an American-owned strip joint that had TVs linked to American sports channels. Even if Ole Miss wasn’t playing, I got off to anything resembling Southeast Conference football.
The only Filipinos in the whole bar were the strippers. The rest were Americans. Tourists, servicemen, embassy staff, and businessmen. Lois wasn’t sure how much football I had watched in my days here before now, and just how many strip shows I might have enjoyed. She became intrigued, of her own accord, with the life and subculture at this strip joint. She enjoyed studying the atmosphere as much as cheering for my football teams on TV while we sipped on our beers.
“You’re working with refugees in Pakistan?” Lois asked a young American man at the table next to us. An American woman his age was attached attentively at his side.
He nodded a yes as he took another sip of his beer.
“This is his last night here,” his female companion said, as if answering for him.
“You seem stressed out,” Lois said to him.
“He is,” the girl answered for him yet again.
“Why’s that?” Lois asked.
“Islam,” the guy said as he set his beer bottle down in front of him.
I turned my attention to the conversation.
“What about Islam?” I asked with a smile.
“I work with Afghan refugees from the war against the Soviets there,” he explained. “There are refugee camps just south of the Khyber Pass. I don’t mind the work so much. I was with the Peace Corps here in the Philippines. I worked with refugees in Mindanao a couple of years ago. But at these camps inside Pakistan, a Muslim country, working with Muslim refugees, I’m going bonkers.”
“You were in Mindanao in the Peace Corps?” Lois asked.
“We both were,” his companion explained.
“So what do you do here?” Lois asked her.
“I got a job, after the Peace Corps, here in Manila with Save The Children. He comes and visits me a couple of times a year now. To try to get his life back, and his sanity.”
“Is it so bad, working with Muslims?” Lois asked.
“Not the work,” he stated. “But the culture. No alcohol, no scandalizing movies or books. No women. No nothing.”
His companion began to stroke his neck in exaggerated displays of concern, as if on cue.
“Lois and I live in Mindanao as Peace Corps Volunteers,” I said.
“So where are refugees in Mindanao?” Lois asked them.
“All over the place,” the girl answered. “Mostly central Mindanao. At least a half million. Displaced from the civil wars and skirmishes there. And poor people still moving in, looking for a better life, hoping to get something going.”
“Central Mindanao. You mean like on the national highway?” Lois asked.
“All along the highway, the marketplaces, the outlying villages. There’s nothing for them there. Not for that many. But they had nothing where they came from, either, so Mindanao at least offers a breath of hope. Aid money from the UN and America or Japan comes in for them. They are left alone by the military elite goon squads and the NPA, for the most part. They have enough problems already. They are harmless. They have nothing except hope, false or otherwise. Or maybe to be breeding grounds for propaganda indoctrination, you never know. A lot of the aid money is detoured by the Marcos thugs. Somehow, Marcos and his cronies never have enough. These people have nothing, and Marcos still takes his cut.”
The girl kept stroking her comrade’s neck with superficial affection, then turned to look at us.
“What do you guys do in Mindanao for the Peace Corps?” she asked curiously.
“We work for a bank,” I answered.
Both of them turned toward me to stare.
“A bank?” the girl sneered. “You work for a bank? You came to the Philippines to work for a bank as a Peace Corps Volunteer? To repossess small farmers’ farms?”
“We mostly have projects,” I replied. I wanted to roll my eyes in sarcasm. I didn’t feel like explaining or taking up for myself. “We’re computerizing it.”
Their stares turned to revulsion.
“Computerizing? You’re robots, in other words,” the girl said.
She turned away from us and gave even more exaggerated attention to her friend who was ready to return to Pakistan.
This was good, I thought. I have to remember how he did this. The guy knew exactly what he was doing. And got everything he wanted from this girl. I felt honored to help on his behalf. Even at the expense of looking like a nerd.
Lois and I returned our attention to SEC football.
Chapter 17
“Marcos called for snap elections for this coming February,” Lois said in place of any greeting as I woke up one morning. “It’s so sudden,” she continued. “Why?”
“America’s feeling the heat from backing another despot,” I opined. “Reagan doesn’t like deserting his friends, but Marcos causes problems. Including the unrest here. It even jeopardizes our military bases here.”
“Some in the news this morning say Marcos is doing the snap elections to please Reagan,” Lois reinforced. “But not leaving much opportunity for opposition to get anything going. Three months. That’s it. The elections will be in February. Except for Cory Aquino, there is no real opposition. She’s so popular as a figurehead. Her name alone might defeat him.”
“Marcos isn’t going to let himself lose,” I said. “He’ll do whatever it takes, including rig the election. To be honest, I wonder if he could win an honest election.”
“What do you mean by that?” Lois asked, incredulous.
“I know he’s hated. I believe that. But so many look to him as a paternal figure, almost like royalty. Some are boisterous about him, and the hate for him is very loud, too. But there’s this underlying respect for status quo. I think so, anyway. If people just went out and voted today, I wonder what it would be like. But it’s going to be interesting. We’re watching some kind of his
tory in the making.”
“Aquino is popular and represents the future,” Lois said. “She’s Begnino Aquino’s widow. That may be all it takes. We’ll see what the three months bring. You might be right. Marcos is counting on you being right. But we’ll see how she handles the next three months.”
“She’s a housewife. He’ll make her look a fool.” I sighed and kissed Lois on the cheek. “It’s history in the making, like I said. Probably nothing will come out of this, but we’re here to see. The election will take place two years to the month after we arrived.”
Cory Aquino had taken up her husband’s mantle following his assassination in late summer of 1983. She was active in demonstrations and protests against Ferdinand Marcos and his ruthless hold on power. A confidant of Benigno Aquino, Salvador Laurel, was the seasoned politician expected to take the forefront against Marcos, but after a million signatures urged her to run, Cory became the candidate instead, with Laurel as her vice-presidential running mate. Soon, another figure entered the scene and was increasingly evident, Cardinal Jaime Sin. It was he who persuaded Laurel to back down and support Cory. With a staunchly Catholic population in the Philippines, Cardinal Sin used his influence, direction, and optimism so that change would take hold.
Marcos followed suit by getting Arturo Tolentino, who was a key opposition figure to him until then, to run as his vice-presidential candidate. Marcos held control of the media and had the machinery and money to get his way. He accused Aquino of being a communist sympathizer and of being inexperienced and naïve. She reminded her countrymen of the dedication of her husband, and of the corruption of the Marcos years.
On election day there was yet another political assassination. In the province of Antique, on the island of Panay in the Visayas, in central Philippines, the governor was gunned down. This added to massive intimidation and fraud at the ballot boxes. Then thirty technicians monitoring the election counts walked out. They claimed that as they monitored the votes, Aquino votes were changed to votes for Marcos.
