I’m writing from the southeast corner of the Silliman University campus, across from a bustling team of steelworkers putting up a 4-story structure across the street. That reminded me to make note of another big difference between Asia and the USA, one which I first learned about as a contract employee at DEC (the computer company) back in 1993: all, not just some, major construction projects operate far more than 40 hours per week. Here they seem to run 2 shifts each day except Sunday. I worked at DEC in the early 1980s when they built a plant in Colorado that cost, oh, a hundred million plus and took 3 years to get running. In 1993, a coworker in management presented a slide show of his trip to Penang, Malaysia, with images of a vacant lot and adjacent office-park buildings of other Western companies. He and other managers promised we’d have a 600,000 square foot building running in 7 months at a cost of US$15 million – I thought no way – but by June 1994 they were indeed producing hard drives in that plant. Saws are spinning, welders’ sparks are flying from multiple points across the street every time I glance up now at 8pm on a warm February Monday.This morning Luis was glancing at CNN-World on cable and I noted a story about mass transit being proposed somewhere. The reporter interviewed some locals, they were mostly opposed. Two reasons: mass transit doesn’t go when you want, and it stops earlier than you want. In the background was an image of traffic very much like what we see here in Dumaguete: jeepneys and tuktuks. Growing up in the USA, it’s hard to comprehend until you actually live it here. You don’t need a car here unless you carry a lot of stuff all the time. (Even if you need to carry stuff, you can cheaply have it couriered instead of carrying it yourself.) I’m telling you, the economics of these places are just plain dramatically different! Put your hand out at virtually any hour of day, on virtually any street and within seconds you will have an eager driver pull out of the constant-flowing stream ready to take you wherever you want – direct, point-to-point – at a cost perhaps a tenth of a mass-transit fare (whether in the USA or installed here at a place like this). An informal taxi system like this is dirty, noisy, and won’t scale to the needs of some big cities – but it gives this Navy brat some food for thought as to what the public-spending priorities of a small city should be.
It would never work in America. Why not? I can spell out the difference between America and the developing world in one word: insurance. All the liability, medical, housing and other forms of insurance that we feel the need to carry in the USA basically doesn’t exist here. Perhaps this lack does impose hardship on those who are victims in a place like this, but the overall social cost of insurance in the USA is immense and growing. Everything we do in the USA carries a cost, typically several times the actual underlying cost, that can be directly attributed to insurance. I’ll skip the analytical details but ask this simple question: if I take a taxi in the same Toyota 4-door vehicle here, running on the same $2.50/gal gasoline as anywhere else, how come the fare for a 10km trip is 75 pesos ($1.60) here instead of $20 back at home? We’re looking at something that goes way beyond a simple currency exchange rate.
So much for economics. We had a simple day today: one excursion and then a long nap. The excursion took us to what is probably the most remote spot of the whole trip, a twin-lakes natural park situated 14km off the main highway to the north of here. We took a jeepney (most of the ones here look more like modified vans, holding just 12 passengers in back plus one in front, vs. the bigger elaborately-decorated ones of Manila and Cebu) to a turnoff 12km north of town. (Dumaguete is a mid-size town of 102,000, dominated by campuses of Silliman University and Negros Oriental State University.) A man jumped into the jeepney one stop after me, cradling and caressing his cock in his big, gentle hands. It kept crowing every few minutes. (What kind of cock did you think I was talking about?!?) At the turnoff we paid our 12 pesos fare, and hired a motorcycle guy to take us up to the park. The road is mostly paved, just a half-dozen dirt section; it takes you up to elevation 2900 feet. Park admission is 10 pesos for “locals” (including balikbayans) and 100 for foreigners (unfair? perhaps–think about those taxi surcharges we hit people with coming from Logan Airport).
At the park we were introduced a species that I’ve begun to call (fondly, of course) predatious boatmen. Quoted a price of 250 pesos (on top of the 400 we’d agreed to pay our driver), we said sure, we’d like to take a ride out on the lake.
Business accomplished, we were treated to one of the most serene, pastoral views of untrammeled nature that I’ve ever seen. Very little of the forest cover on the island of Negros dates back to primitive times, but much of the forest in this particular place is indeed primitive. Our driver pointed out where a few natives had been relocated away from the park (houses still being reconstructed, the park itself appears to date back to recent years). In fact our driver also pointed out one other major factor in the Negros tourism business: rebel guerillas had controlled some areas here as recently as 1994. So it’s only been safe for tourists for a bit over a decade, and developers have yet to build any major resorts.
Locals continue to say hello and make eye contact. I have a big language barrier and even Luis has some issues because some people only have limited Tagalog ability. But like everywhere else in the Philippines, most signage is printed in English and most businesses employ people with fluent English.
We saw an ad for a hotel chain called Shangri-La or something like that on TV last night that made us think about how much we prefer to interact with the locals wherever we go rather than cocooning ourselves in the isolated shelter of big corporate resort operations. How lucky we are to be able to settle into a place like Dumaguete, even if only for a few days!
Those smiles and, shall I say, furtive glances just pull you into a whole different attitude toward life!