imeldific

On the day that Michael Jackson died I saw a six year old girl with an appallingly disfigured spine begging in the street. As mourners started lining up at Neverland to view the body, I caught sight of a stray dog whose leg had been mangled by what I assumed was a passing car. Surprisingly, the wound wasn't fresh and the poor creature was clearly trying to continue walking on it. It looked like a tree that had lost its bark. Fleabag, Bim-Bim's cat, disappeared some time ago - either because of the bad shellfish we ate and gave to her or because she too, got hit by a car. I've now seen the comically flattened bodies of at least three cats lying by the side of the road.

In a recent meeting, municipal planners were discussing the fact that to their surprise, it wasn't just the human waste from informal settlements that was contributing to the high coliform count in the city's water, but the waste from stray dogs. Their dilemma (apart from trying to move the informal settlers) was that despite having restrictions on stray animals, the enforcement was lax because it was generally understood that in times of scarcity, poor families would eat the dogs.

The only potable tapwater flows through aggressively expensive hotels and I've gotten used to the faint smell of sewage when I shower or brush my teeth. On my way home from work, I often see former gasoline cans lined up awaiting their turn to be filled from the leak in the municipal water pipe. A child died last week from Dengue fever and I was surprised to learn that you can have cholera more than once and learn to recognize the symptoms.

In Boracay, the crown jewel of Filipino tourism, I tired of small children plaintively selling green mango, young men pushing boat rides, women selling, 'thaimassagesir, thaimassage', Mindanao muslims selling pearls, and baklas selling themselves for $15.

Years ago, I remember seeing a placard at an anti-poverty rally that read, 'we're poor because you're rich.' I keep returning to that idea. To confine the Philippines to simple discourse of globalized poverty because of the wealth of the west would be doing a great disservice to the graft and cronyism that exist here (and the wry and tacit discussion of such), though we westerners are implicated in the many articulations of poverty that I've just described. My obvious (and tired) analogy is that these articulations are like symptoms of a mysterious disease - all I can ever see are the symptoms: the cause, (the tumor, the virus) is still unnameable, invisible.

Imelda Marcos suggests that 'Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.' Perhaps she was right, in her own Imeldific way - who doesn't want beauty? The question is whether or not you can afford it.