Much, little

PINOY KASI


Much, little
By Michael Tan
Inquirer

Last updated 01:47am (Mla time) 03/30/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- An American friend of mine, railing about our poor sense of time, finally exclaimed: “Even your roosters can’t get their crowing right.”

I was tempted to agree, having tossed and turned through the night because of neighbors who keep battalions of fighting cocks that ti-ti-la-ok at 2 or 3 in the morning, rather than around sunrise. But you know, I suspect their crowing time is actually an adaptation to us humans. The birds stir when there’s movement in households, and that can start very early in the morning.

It’s not just farmers and rural people who start their day early. Our urban areas buzz with activity long before the sun rises. How early? Go to any of our wet markets and you’ll find vendors coming in with their fish, meat, vegetables and fruits at 3 or 4 a.m. And if you think that’s early, many of them have already gone to their suppliers, who start even earlier.

Dawn to dusk

The middle class thinks the poor are indolent, but try visiting the slums and you’ll be amazed at the work that goes on, way before dawn and long after dusk. I’ll describe the working activities in a typical day, pieced together from my field notes:

At 6 a.m., the "sari-sari stores" [neighborhood variety stores] are already open. Sometimes even earlier than that, you’ll find parents bringing their children to school. They do this because it takes so long to commute to the schools, and also because they will have to rush off to work right after.

A few sari-sari stores have tables in front to serve breakfast. I’m always amazed at how many people buy their breakfast, mostly younger ones, migrants from outside Manila who rent bed space inside the slums, and therefore cannot cook. There are also a few women, and men, who look like they are just about ready to turn in. “We’re classmates,” one woman once told me, laughing, and I knew she wasn’t referring to night school.

One time, at around 6:30 in the morning, I saw an ambulant vendor coming around with caged birds. I asked who would buy birds this early. It turned out he was there to collect from one of the slum dwellers, who had bought some birds on credit a few days earlier. “If you don’t come this early, they go off to work and you can’t collect,” he said.

Other ambulant vendors come later in the day, selling an incredible variety of goods, from fruits to plastic pots and pans, from ice cream to guitars, from plants to kapok pillows.

The day wears on with the sari-sari stores and the ambulant vendors. Admittedly, it isn’t hard manual labor, but it is time intensive. Toward the afternoon, the streets become even more congested as people come out to put up stalls selling “dirty food” like fish balls, barbecue, fruit juices. Their buyers are students coming out of school, and the occasional office worker on the way home.

After dusk, some of these sidewalk vendors, who live in the slums anyway, just stay on, hoping to catch the last few office workers on their way home—or one of the “classmates” going off to work.

Oh, and who can forget? Between 9 and 10 at night, the lonely cry of one last ambulant vendor: “Balut ... balut.” The sari-sari stores stay open, too, offering tonic drinks to go with the balut.

At least

So much time goes into all these activities, but the earnings are meager. One vendor once complained to me that although she only charges P5 for a cup of rice, there had been people asking if they could buy just half a cup. But, she sighed, at least she earned some money each day. “At least” is a translation here, expressed in different ways in Filipino, mainly “buti na lang” [thank goodness], “sa awa ng Diyos” [in God’s mercy].

One reader, Enteng Vicente, alerted me a few weeks back to an article by Ninotchka Rosca in the Inquirer, in which she refers to our frequent use of the term “at least” and how she sees this as a “cop-out” mentality. She talks about Filipino-Americans working 18/7 (18 hours a day, 7 days a week) for a pittance, but who will be contented: At least we have a job. Here at home, Filipinos have to put in so much more, for much less.

Let me add my thoughts here. The “at least” syndrome goes with “bahala na,” often erroneously translated as fatalism. "Bahala na" is not at all passive; it’s an expression we use after we’ve done all we can, and that can be a lot. After all’s said and done, we then wait for the results, and when they come, we say “at least...” sometimes barely able to conceal our disappointment.

The roots of our “at least/buti na lang” syndrome go back to a feudal era, when we were taught to be content with whatever crumbs the "datu" [tribal chief], the "hacendero" [landlord], and later, the politician, throw to us. We accept the leftovers with gratitude, even seeing it as heaven-sent.

Paradox

Coping is fine, but I worry about how our national life has become one coping after another even as new, more serious problems arise, and in paradoxical ways.

“At least” distorts our sense of proportion. We have Filipinos giving up jobs here to earn $200 to $400 a month in war-torn countries, hardly much more than what they’d get here, but “at least” it’s abroad and “at least it’s dollars.”

Sometimes we get weary from having to do so much to get so little, which is why we become vulnerable to get-rich-quick scams: the latest search for Yamashita’s lost gold, the pyramiding scams, the politicians’ grand poverty eradication schemes.

And when good fortune comes around, we quickly squander the bounties: “At least we lived the good life, as one-day millionaires.”

“At least” can be dangerous in the way we suppress our frustration, too often, too long, until we run amok, berserk. The hostage-taking incident last Wednesday, and the frequent reports in the papers about people running amok, are classic sequelae to this “at least” mentality. Call him crazy, call him a publicity-seeker, Jun Ducat was really a more dramatic version of Juan de la Cruz, quietly bearing the pain until something snaps. In this day and age of extreme this and extreme that, hostage-taking is a grand performance, grand "diskarte," to make a point.

All for what? Ducat will fade from public memory by the weekend, another guy who did too much to get too little. The politicians win again, with their promises to do something. “At least” lulls us to accepting the system.

The corrupt, the venal, the greedy -- they know the Filipino. The drug industry knows it can get away with charging us some of the highest prices in the world. There are others -- the tobacco industry, the junk food manufacturers, the firms that pollute our rivers and our air—who know they can get away as well because even if we do occasionally complain and cry “Foul!” and pass new laws, we’ll eventually quiet down and simmer with our "at least."

The powerful know that for them, it takes so little to get away with so much in this country.