In Cebu city, the green hills behind the city merge gently into the smoky horizon and the turquoise sea laps softly at the dirty shore. Tower blocks look down on the mazes of the shanty towns and wooden shacks sit precariously among solid concrete. Advertising shouts down from every wall and roof top and rubbish builds up in silent piles in every corner. The traffic roars, the engines splutter, the crowds swirl and in the midst of it all, the people sit by the market stalls and on the kerbs, staring out at it all in quiet contemplation.
In Cebu city lives are lived piled on top of each other, wealth, desperate poverty and everything in between. Trying to understand its endless contrasts and contradictions was the most culturally difficult part of my trip, but when the end came and it was time to go home, Cebu city was the place that I didn’t want to leave.
I didn’t want to leave because I hadn’t finished with it yet. I didn’t feel that I had completely understood. When I went to the Philippines I knew that I would see poverty on a scale that I had never seen before, and I did. Whole families sleep on cardboard boxes, mothers desperately try to bathe naked children in the gutters of the main road and frail elderly women pick through the rubbish looking for things to sell. I was anxious about seeing all of these things and not liking my reactions, of feeling guilty and finding it all to easy to flee.
What I wasn’t expecting were all the other layers of the tapestry, the interwoven threads that twist and merge and make it impossible to straight away point a finger and say, yes, this is what I see. For me, part of the difference was due to the climate. It’s not shocking to spend a large part of your day out on the streets when the weather is consistently hot but it is shocking to have nowhere to go at night. It doesn’t matter if the bus has no glass in the windows, but it does matter that people’s homes can be blown or washed away when a typhoon comes.
A second element in the picture is the fact that there are plenty of rich people in Cebu as well. Large 4x4s with blacked out windows wend their way between the tricycle taxis and the jeepneys. If you want to buy designer clothes, or even just shop at Promod, there are three air-conditioned shopping malls to shop at. The Philippines is poor compared to Europe, but per capita income is four times higher than in many of the poorer African countries, for example. But because on equal distribution of wealth, it scores relatively badly, there are extremes of poverty and extremes of wealth, as well as everything in between. There are plenty of sad and shocking things in the Philippines, but they don’t jump out and strike you straight away. You have to look carefully at the tapestry to begin to understand the picture.
In Cebu city lives are lived piled on top of each other, wealth, desperate poverty and everything in between. Trying to understand its endless contrasts and contradictions was the most culturally difficult part of my trip, but when the end came and it was time to go home, Cebu city was the place that I didn’t want to leave.
I didn’t want to leave because I hadn’t finished with it yet. I didn’t feel that I had completely understood. When I went to the Philippines I knew that I would see poverty on a scale that I had never seen before, and I did. Whole families sleep on cardboard boxes, mothers desperately try to bathe naked children in the gutters of the main road and frail elderly women pick through the rubbish looking for things to sell. I was anxious about seeing all of these things and not liking my reactions, of feeling guilty and finding it all to easy to flee.
What I wasn’t expecting were all the other layers of the tapestry, the interwoven threads that twist and merge and make it impossible to straight away point a finger and say, yes, this is what I see. For me, part of the difference was due to the climate. It’s not shocking to spend a large part of your day out on the streets when the weather is consistently hot but it is shocking to have nowhere to go at night. It doesn’t matter if the bus has no glass in the windows, but it does matter that people’s homes can be blown or washed away when a typhoon comes.
A second element in the picture is the fact that there are plenty of rich people in Cebu as well. Large 4x4s with blacked out windows wend their way between the tricycle taxis and the jeepneys. If you want to buy designer clothes, or even just shop at Promod, there are three air-conditioned shopping malls to shop at. The Philippines is poor compared to Europe, but per capita income is four times higher than in many of the poorer African countries, for example. But because on equal distribution of wealth, it scores relatively badly, there are extremes of poverty and extremes of wealth, as well as everything in between. There are plenty of sad and shocking things in the Philippines, but they don’t jump out and strike you straight away. You have to look carefully at the tapestry to begin to understand the picture.
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