Maraming Salamat

February 18th, 2008 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | 1 Comment »

Thank you to the Eurotel Hotel in Manila, and especially to manager Heidi, for making me feel so welcome. Your generous spirit and comfortable rooms made my work in Manila much more successful! 523-5164

“No Money, No Honey”

February 16th, 2008 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | 1 Comment »

I spent this Valentine’s evening exploring Fields Avenue, the seedy, glittery red light district outside the now closed Clark Air Force Base. Paunchy white men wearing Hawaiian shirts pulled as tightly over their tummies as the spandex skirts that cling to the upper thighs of their young Filipina escorts strut the rutted streets.

The scene is so ubiquitous, I have to get a photo. One man, white pony-tail trailing down his black t-shirt that reads No Money, No Honey, refuses my request and invites me instead to join his date at the Atlantis, where he’ll take my photo. I politely decline.

But Galvin from Australia, positions himself under an overhead light for me, joking, “Oh, National Geographic!” as he poses with his date, Rose. “I have a daughter named Kelly,” he enthuses, putting his arm proprietarily around my waist after I introduce myself. She must be so proud of you at this moment, I think, inching away from him and turning my attention to the beaming young woman holding her wrapped Valentine’s roses like Miss Universe.

Hustling starts early on Fields Avenue. A girl not more than six or seven pursues me for half a block to buy her roses. “They will still be the same color tomorrow,” she says seductively, grazing my elbow. How does a girl so little know how to be so suggestive? (more…)

Brother Arrested to Silence Sister’s Activism

February 13th, 2008 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | 5 Comments »

She starts dispassionately, telling her story that she has retold time and time again: “There were four men who entered my house by jumping over the fence. I looked through the window and saw a man wearing a white T-shirt and brown shorts. He held up a gun and told me to open the door. They entered the house, all four of them, looking for Lenie.”

Lenie is Lolita Robiños’ daughter, her “activist” daughter.

She didn’t know these men, “but if I ever saw them again, I’d know them.” (more…)

“I Don’t Have Anything Left to be Afraid Of”

February 11th, 2008 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | 5 Comments »

“My father was taken in broad daylight!” says Lorena Santos, who was 24 at the time. “He was abducted in northern Mindanao. It was 10:00 in the morning, while he was walking across the street.” That was February 19, 2007, a year ago next week.

Leo Velasco was 53.

“A van stopped abruptly in front of him and men threw him into the van. At first, it was two men, but he struggled, and so more men came,” Santos, whose friends call Aya, reports. “These accounts came from witnesses: a security guard at a building and a cigarette vendor from whom my father had just bought cigarettes. Immediately, the car sped away.”

“That was the last time anyone saw him,” she says softly. Steely. She’s told this story before. (more…)

Aboard the Lady of Good Voyage

February 11th, 2008 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | No Comments »

The weekly ferry from Puerto Princesa to Coron is much bigger than I expected. And safer. I was patted down twice, an eager dog declared my bags acceptable, and I passed through an airport-style X-ray and several ticket inspections.

I chose the cheapest ticket – 834 pesos ($22, about $80 cheaper than the biweekly flight) – non-air conditioned, non-food – and was met with surprise by the cheery Super Ferry man who shuttled me aboard and assumed I’d be in the air-conditioned orange section.

Instead, I’m up on the top red deck, lying on the top bunk in open-sided, airy quarters. It’s a pleasant, overcast day and the seabreeze is gentle. Downstairs, in the more expensive air-con section, people lie cramped in their windowless bunks. Cheap prevails!

But, then, a familiar, annoying sound breaks through the TV showing cartoons and the loudspeakers playing soft rock.

Roosters.

Roosters! Who ferries roosters? And where are they in the evacuation pecking order? Women and roosters first?

John Martinez ferries roosters. Three of them. He’s on leave from the Navy and heading back to his province outside Coron, bearing breeding roosters he hopes will bear even more roosters. The birds are in marked boxes with air holes; their feathers crest through the cardboard cracks. Box after crowing box tantalizingly line the boat’s railing. I fantasize about fowl play.

There’s a restaurant downstairs that serves fairly unappealing beef in gravy over rice, hot bowls of boxed soup and dumplings the size of baseballs. And there’s a cell phone charging station on each deck. More text messages are sent in the Philippines than anywhere else in the world, I’m told repeatedly. Even my Super Ferry reservation was conveyed via text message from the Super Ferry office clerk to some unseen centralized operator. Filipinos are aghast that I’m traveling without a cell phone, textless and alone.

I spend an uneventful day sleeping, reading and writing…and wondering where the roosters roost in Coron.

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Puerto Princesa Diving Something to Crow About

February 9th, 2008 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | 1 Comment »

Word got out: Every rooster in Puerto Princesa knows where I live and feels an obligation to greet me. Whoever said roosters “cock-a-doodle-do” romanticizes. They have a forlorn, throaty err-erer-er-EEEERRRRRRRR that is contagious to every other rooster like a gargling cough among phlegmy old ladies. And they feel the need to serenade me, continuously, from 4:00 in the morning. (more…)

The Hidden Cost of Cruising

February 8th, 2008 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | 4 Comments »

My second day in Manila, I tour squalid sections of a flimsy warren that could be called “rooms” only by the very generous. Ducking in from the sidewalk, into a gloomy passageway barely big enough for my medium five-foot-six frame, I stumble over a broken board bridging a stream of wash water flowing from a young girl’s public shower into the street.

The girl grins, startled, unaware of how to act in front of a stranger, in spite of the fact that a group of mah-jong playing neighbors sit within sight of her soapy, T-shirt-clad body. Privacy is so non-existent, she allows me to take her photo, and laughs when I show her her image in the digital camera.

(more…)

Cruising for Freedom

February 8th, 2008 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | No Comments »

“When you buy mangoes on the street, you have to be careful,” warns Nilo, a 47-year-old Filipino, “because you only see the pretty mangoes on the top, not the rotten ones on the bottom.”

Nilo is a seafarer, one of the 25 percent of the world’s seafarers who come from the Philippines and work for months at a stretch on cruise ships, tankers, cargo ships. For a year, he was one of those faceless seamen who keep Americans gorging at the endless buffets on cruises.

After his year-long contract with Holland America ended in Miami, he took his $7,000 of annual earnings and finishing bonus and “jumped ship,” entering America illegally.

“When I saw the first ‘Miami Vice,’ (more…)

Through the Porthole

February 8th, 2008 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | No Comments »

“We’re not criminals, we’re seaman!” Alex Quinzo pounds his chest defiantly. When his tanker recently docked in Miami, he wasn’t allowed ashore, as seamen routinely are. Quinzo committed the crime of being from the Philippines, one of the countries on the U.S. Homeland Security’s terrorist list.

“For three days, I couldn’t go to shore because I had no U.S. visa. I could only look through the porthole.” We are standing in his hot boarding house in downtown Manila. Up to 20 seamen between jobs share a room overflowing with bunk beds, paying 2,400 pesos ($60)/month for a room with air conditioning, or 1,400 pesos ($35)/month without.

Every day, they go down to Luneta Park, where up to 2,000 seafarers vie for jobs in a permanent sidewalk employment market. Two hundred get hired. Seventy-nine agent-employers set up shop in rows of white-tented booths. Young men in crisp white polo shirts mill through the crowd displaying plastic covered xeroxes of job descriptions and salaries.

“They’re floating sweatshops,” says pastor Reynoldo Lopez, of the many cruise ships that hire the unseen workers who make cruises possible – and profitable.

A quarter of the world’s seafarers come from the Philippines; but, they may be allowed to see the U.S. only through a porthole.

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Miracles Know No Borders

September 13th, 2007 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | 4 Comments »

While feeding her infant son dinner, a shot came through her window, piercing her son’s head. For the next 9 years, Imad el-Ali lived with the bullet lodged precariously, paralyzing his right side and threatening to send him into seizures should he fall wrong.

Today, at 26, his engaging smile belies the years of surgeries and therapy that have miraculously restored most of his motor functions.

A Palestinian refugee living in Burj al-Shamali after his family fled their home in Sidon where Imad’s father had been rounded up, imprisoned and beaten so badly he died from internal bleeding, Imad had little chance of surviving the random bullet fired by the Israeli army during the 1982 war.

Unable to get medical care, the infant was patched up and sent home with little hope.

Until Hugh Storey stepped in. (more…)