AUTOTOMY

In the supermarket we were buying mangoes and bananas since we’d been too lazy to hit the street market on the weekend, where you get the best prices for fruits and vegetables. Normally there’s a store attendant in the produce area and that person weighs and stamps the prices on your items for you. But that day only the armed security guard was available. So he left his post, gun at his side, and weighed the mangoes for us, smiling, as if he were the produce man.

For the first time in a year, I was able to meet a friend from the US who was visiting here. I’ve placed so much distance between myself and those I knew, that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to connect on a regular basis. The time has passed quickly this year, but obviously distance has changed me. Though surrounded by happy, smiling people, I am still isolated, such that I’ve become more a hermit or a monk, culturally, that is.

Cebu is full of walls. Walls close off residential compounds, businesses, and even open lots. Usually they are made of concrete, or cinder blocks, are about six inches thick, and rise anywhere from six to ten feet. Depending on the area, they can be made from old boards, bamboo sticks or tin and have an uneven height. Some of the concrete walls are topped with rusty barbwire rising up a few feet above the wall. Others have broken glass embedded in the top of the wall so that no sane person would ever try climbing over. Your hands would be sliced up if you tried grabbing hold of the top. The glass comes from shattered coke bottles, dingy windows, whiskey bottles.

A wall along Escrario Street, one of the main thoroughfares in the Uptown area of the city, has broken glass embedded in the top, but it also used to have mural segments painted along the side. It was a religious theme, the creation. A verse from Genesis was written along the top, just below the line of broken glass. Where it was not painted, the wall was a dirty gray and spotted black from exhaust and weather. It had been there a long time and was as neglected as a garden overrun by weeds.

I once noticed a woman sitting outside that wall, under the shade of a small tree. There was probably as much residue from exhaust on her face as there was on the wall. She was probably homeless. The following week she was still there. She might have been a cat eyeing prey, except that her eyes were vacant. Then they cut down the trees along the wall. There was no longer any shade there. I haven’t seen her since.

They then painted the wall solid black. It was striking to walk by it and I wondered what possessed them to change it over, but then a mural started to appear, slowly, beginning at one end and working toward the other, greens and whites and some maroon. The theme was societal conflict, with some images of war. That one lasted about as long as the woman under the tree.

The next color on the was a bleak, flat tan. This has remained over the last few months and no other murals have gone up, though they are now selling some space for advertisements since you can see the wall without obstruction.

Hawkers ply the main streets where you’ll find tourists, especially the Fuente Circle area in Cebu, which is the heart of the city. They sell everything from shoes to puppies to watches and drugs for erectile dysfunction.

A guy once followed me half way up the Juana Osmena Street holding a Cialis box and a fake Rolex watch in front of my face. With each step he lowered the price and I walked faster to try to outpace him, and finally he ran out of breath and couldn’t keep up with me, though I could hear him still quoting lower and lower prices to me. But I’ve learned that they’re just fixtures on the street to be seen and ignored, like a newspaper hanging in a stall. You might glance aside to read the headline, but you’re not going to buy the paper.

Yesterday on the way to the mall, our taxi got stuck at a long light. I glanced out the window to the right, where there was an empty lot. A very ragged, haggard man was standing on the corner of the lot in full view of the major streets that intersected there. He was thin, bearded and his clothes hung off him like toilet paper stuck on the end of a tree limb. And he was urinating. I turned away and started making jokes to Juvy, that at least he could have walked over to the wall on the other side of the lot and could have faced away from traffic. Public urination is common, but usually men choose walls and they turn away from traffic.

Then I heard the shing-shing sound of a stick instrument to my left. These instrument are just round branches that have pieces of metal nailed to them like stacks of coins, so that you can shake it and it sounds something like a tambourine hitting a brick wall. Some of the street kids who can’t afford a branch and metal bits resort to using plastic bottles half filled with water.

But the man shaking the stick for his jeepney audience was the same guy who’d been urinating in the lot a moment before, and then I said to Juvy, “Oh, he’s a performer. The lot was just part of his act.” He probably didn’t want to get too far away from a potential audience when he was taking a break, so that’s why he stood on the corner rather than going over to the wall. He was taking advantage of a long light.

It’s difficult not to think about the financial meltdown of 2008, even though I’m sitting on the opposite side of the world. The news is unavoidable even when I don’t have a TV.

But I have weird feelings about it, not because I’ve lost anything. It’s the timing of it that’s been strange. I started planning my trip around the world at the beginning of 2007. This was sort of at the culmination of the housing bubble talk, where the doom-and-gloomers were predicting an imminent burst. But I wasn’t making any of my decisions based on the economic climate, but rather my internal barometer, which said the existential pressure was mounting and it was time for a change. After a year of spending every moment of free time to plan — an I mean thousands of hours, I had settled on coming to the Philippines first, to see if I wanted to stick around. I wanted to know how low to the ground I could live. As it turned out, I wound up loving the place and found a way to keep a very basic budget. In other words, I found a way to keep getting meals out of a relatively small nest egg.

As I read the stories of layoffs — today it’s AT&T cutting 4 percent of its workforce — I have to wonder what would have happened if I’d stuck around in the US this past year. I could be out of a job and eating up my reserves at a frantic pace while seeking another. I can’t help but think there was some kind of graceful serendipity spinning about me during my planning, giving me ideas for how I could hibernate economically. I don’t mean to say that providence was looking out for me, because that would mean it wasn’t looking out for the huge number that are now suffering. I can’t imagine how that would be true. But I do know that it seems I found the best path for myself to cut around the storm without having any idea that a storm was coming.

Of course, I have no idea how this all will turn out in the future. I could be standing on the beach like so many were when the tsunami hit. The water washed out and there was a pause, just before the deluge hit. If that’s the case, oh what a pause this is.

While walking along the street, I’ve been called many things. Usually, it’s kids running out and smiling and then exclaiming, “Hey Joe,” sometimes followed by “give me money.” Even when I’m riding in a taxi the street kids come up to the window and ask for money and if you shake your head, they let out a string of expletives in English, probably not understanding the obscenities they are labeling you. I won’t repeat those here. I’ve also been called “Kano,” which is short for Americano. Every western, white guy is a kano, even if your an Aussie. One local man called me “gringo.” Sometimes it’s “hey friend.” Other times the kids ask me my name, and then the next time I pass by they smile, wave and say, “Hey Ronald.” More so than not, people are very friendly and hospitable. Sometimes overly friendly or familiar for my comfort level. The other day a group of teenage girls walked by laughing, and one looked up and said, “Hey Dad.”

The Philippines is a country of smiles. So why is there a billboard advertising a concert for a band and none of the guys have smiles? They’re scowling. In fact, stuck up there giant-sized, they look mean, thuggish, the kind of guys you wouldn’t want to meet in an alley, much less up the bean stalk. They’re all tattoos and metal bits, as Bruce Cockburn would say. The name of the band is the auditory equivalent of “deluge of noise.” But this is a “praise band,” with songs like, “Thanks Be to God,” and “Let Us Come Before Him in Worship.” Considering all this, the concert is being sponsored by the Philippine equivalent of pepto-bismal.

It’s a noisy country. There are trikes, jeepneys and motorcycles making an incessant loud level of noise. Motorcycles drive by around the clock. There’s always construction work going on, some guy sawing or hammering. The children living next door scream and cry and stir up whirlwinds of laughter as they play. But not only that, there are dogs, roosters, big stereo speakers, videoke and video games. Even when I was staying at a hotel, I couldn’t escape the sounds of amateurs butchering pop songs at the outdoor videoke stall across the street. The volume is always turned up to about 115 on a system that goes only to 10. All that sound gets in my head and it’s difficult to keep it out, even with earplugs. I stare at the computer screen and focus on the writing at hand, and then the noise grates and I find my eyes full of static.

Living in an emerging economy, or what used to be called the “third world” I’ve had to get used to some aspects of daily living that could be more easily avoided or dealt with in the West. This will be an ongoing installation.

Lets start with cold showers.

I take a cold shower every day. Some days I can take it, some days I can’t. Even though it’s a hot country, water running through the pipes can be cold in the mornings and at night. When I put my head into that water and let it hit my shoulders, I always think we should install a heater. But what I have gotten used to is the routine of bracing for the cold.