Smooth seas and bumpy roads

Last Monday was a public holiday in the Philippines as in many other places. Around the streets where I live you would be forgiven for attributing the day off work to the celebration of Halloween, that strange product of the modern American fascination with the macabre that manifests itself in a super-abundance of witches, ghouls and trick-or-treating children. The affluent gated village where I live allows the children of domestic staff and their relatives to patrol the leafy streets collecting sweets and other treats door to door. It's all fun and good-natured and in-line with the country's American inheritance. The witches originated somewhere in Mitteleuropa I suspect, as German immigrants brought Walpurgisnacht with them to America. The name, on the other hand reflects what the long weekend holiday is really all about - 'hallow' being an old word for saint and Hallow e'en, being the Eve of All Saints' Day. On the 1st of November many Filipinos go to tend the graves of their relatives, often picnicking at the graveside in a manner highly reminiscent of the Day of the Dead in Mexico. And of course it is a fact that many of the foot soldiers securing Spanish rule in the colonial period originated in Mexico, bringing with them a number of Mexican traditions, including the humble camote or sweet potato that is now the staple food of extremely poor uplanders in many areas.

I could ramble on like this for a long time, but I'll stop. This was not intended to be a reflection on globalisation. I will just say I think it has been with us for a lot longer than some pundits seem to think.
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Anyway, I was lucky enough to spend my long weekend on a diving trip to Apo Reef, out in the middle of the sea half way between the islands of Mindoro and Coron. I am not a fanatical diver. I have learnt to dive three times in my life and dived for a short while simply because it was a convenient thing to do in the place I happened to be living. The Philippines is such a place. The other two were Mexico and Egypt. But Apo Reef is special. To begin with it takes a certain amount of planning and exertion to get there.

I will come back to the journey later.

The take off point for the reef is a beautiful little low key resort - Nipa houses, Indian Walnuts, mangroves, coconut palms, fireflies at night, nature rather than aircon -  on Pandan island just opposite the river mouth fishing port of Sablayan. The dive boat is an overgrown bangka, stabilised against the wind-blown waves by two flimsy looking outriggers, and you sleep on the deck under an awning, rising to wake the sharks that sleep in the sandy patches twenty metres down. The reef is quite extensive and behind it the sea is calm, the energy having been sucked out of the waves as they crash onto the wall of coral. The high mountains of Mindoro are still visible far away to the east, while the nearest small islands of the Coron group are just visible to the west. But nearby there are just two tiny coral islets where the reef stands high enough out of the water, one of them big enough to have a bit of a beach. They are a comforting feature of the seascape, though, a little bit of terra firma in a watery world to bear in mind as the waves rock you to sleep at night and the wind begins to freshen.

The first time I tried to get to Apo Reef was one of those epic failures. Arriving with a friend on the afternoon flight in San Jose airport with no clear idea of how to get to Pandan island, I found myself sitting three to a narrow metal bench in an overcrowded country bus setting off up the road just as the sun was setting. After a few kilometers the tarmac ran out, just as the rain began to fall. The road became an endless Gorgonzola of massive potholes and the rain turned into a furious and unrelenting tropical thunderstorm that became heavier and heavier as evening slipped into night. The bus crawled on, occasionally stopping so that the driver's assistant could go ahead to check that the next stretch was safe, especially at the various bridges over the rivers, swollen with rain water from the wall of mountains, invisible but menacing in the darkness, between which and the sea the road threaded its way, until at last we came to a grinding stop at a point where the bridge ahead was half swept away, the other half being blocked by a broken down truck. The driver bravely set off on an alternative route that took us into the mountains and eventually became so narrow that the bus was pushing its way through the jungle that overgrew what was by now little more than a track.

It was almost midnight by the time we reached Sablayan. The road was a river, filling the bus halfway up our shins and incidentally soaking all the clean clothes in my rucksack which I had foolishly placed on the floor. I stepped out into the pouring rain into the fast flowing flood and sank dramatically straight into a manhole. My friend, a calm, physically strong Aussie of the sort you ideally want to have around on such occasions -  grabbed me by the scruff of the neck as I went and pulled me up like a half-drowned rat. In the darkness I looked and in my ignorance of rural life was surprised to see a large number of passengers seated on the roof. It was hard, even in my sodden state, to imagine the misery of the journey they had been through.

Miraculously a 'tricycle', as the little motorcycle and sidecar taxis are called, sped up out of the darkness and after a few mutually unintelligible exchanges carried us down to the boat harbour at the river mouth, where, even more miraculously, we found a bangka captain who did not mind being woken up and asked to carry us across to Pandan in the rain. The engine fired up and we chugged out of the river mouth into the rough little stretch of storm tossed sea, across which, miraculously close, lay our destination. A light had been left on in the bar above the beach, guiding us like the light emanating from the Grail Chapel luring two Arthurian knights towards their destiny, in our case a welcome bottle of Tanduay rum.

Later I lay below the high nipa roof of my cabin watching the fireflies flash and glow above my head on the outside of my mosquito net and listening to the endless rain, safe and sound, but also well aware of the fact that I would not get to Apo reef that time around.

Last weekend, more than a year after that first trip and half a year after the elections, I found the road had if anything deteriorated. If you think I am making a mountain out of a molehill, I should point out that the coastal road from San Jose to Sablayan and beyond is the main road, in fact the only significant road in the entire province of Mindoro Occidental and this is not at the back end of beyond, like the Tawi Tawi archipelago a stone's throw away from Sabah. San Jose is a forty minute flight from Manila. Yet this one important bit of infrastructure remains all but unusable in bad weather and a slow, vehicle suspension-challenging pain in the derriere when the sun is shining. All along it, moreover, there are posters advertising its repair as a priority project of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, whose face framed by a builder's hard hat beams down from the billboards at the bruised and battered traveller.

Hang on a second, though! I thought she was the last president, who left office at the end of June. Don't they know about the election down here in Mindoro?

It is something to think about when even the most basic infrastructure, which the development pundits have so often reminded us, is a key ingredient for growth and development, is left unattended. Despite the comfortable news about growth projections for the economy published by the IMF and World Bank at frequent intervals, we are also told by UNICEF that 40% of all the children in the Philippines, more than 9 million in total, are growing up in poverty. Somehow one thing is not being converted into the other; economic growth is not delivering an end to poverty. And the roads are full of potholes.

Why is it like this? How does a country remain locked into this sort of elite-capture stasis? Of course there is the geography. This is not just a country of seven thousand islands, it is a country of seven thousand mountainous, volcanic islands, where remoteness is more a function of the terrain than it is of distance as the crow flies. In this landscape, for example, a pregnant woman in a mountain sitio has little chance of conforming to the government's plan  that she should give birth in a facility, meaning the barangay health station, even if that is only a few miles away, because those few miles are along a steep, slippery, muddy path, not a paved highway.

But this geography is also the backdrop and partial cause of a decentralisation of authority that is chaotic and politicised to an extent that the long term planning necessary for real sustainable development is repeatedly compromised by the political expediency of electioneering and local elites assume power dynastically within the bizarre framework of an Americanised political system, adopted with the same enthusiasm as Halloween, to rule their fiefdoms from generation unto generation. Some of the mayors and congressmen are enlightened, concerned to deliver services, promote development, improve governance. Others are warlords with private armies and mobsters to support them. It is all down to the tradition of the locality and the personality of the individual. And personality is the big thing, not policy, as the endless rows of grinning faces of would be local legislators that line the highways and byways of the country confirm.

The USA has just had its midterm elections, which we are informed were the most expensive ever with billions of dollars poured into brash, extravagant campaigns. Something like the approach to politics that underpins such a system prevails in the Philippines. A disproportionate amount of the national budget is diverted to the so-called special projects funds of congressmen, the so-called 'Pork Barrel'. The use of these funds to secure votes converts development into patronage. It makes it difficult to see through a solid health reform when so much funding for such things as enrolment of the poor into free health care, is dependent on the whim of a mayor or congressman or woman seeking re-election.

Meanwhile, even though surveys show that the vast majority of Filipinos, especially women who are too poor to pay for their own contraceptives or even after having ten children to obtain a tubal ligation, favour access to modern family planning, a small conservative elite in the Catholic Church has been able to block the passage of a reproductive health bill that would pave the way to making these services and commodities widely available. The fact is that the representatives of the people don't actually pay much attention to the wishes of the people, power stays in the hands of the few. The rest get tee shirts and other merchandise at election time. Now it seems with the new regime there is a glimmer of light at the end of this particular tunnel. The health reform will go forward, there is a commitment to universal health care and the reproductive health bill may get through the system and be passed into law. But it is worth remembering that even then, the extreme nature of decentralisation here means there is no guarantee that that will deliver full access for everyone. At the local level there will still be mayors and governors and barangay captains who will decide on their own priorities and will have their own views on what is right and what is wrong, just as they do already. Which means that from one municipality to the next everything can change. In one locality a woman from a poor farming village will find that not only can she have her babies in the relative security of a health station, but she can also take advantage of services that allow her and her husband to decide how many children they want to have. In the next municipality, there will be no access whatsoever to any form of contraceptives as the mayor curries favour with influential conservative clerics.

That's the way it is.

I'll stop here for today, but would just like to leave fellow development workers with the thought that whatever the gurus tell you, decentralisation is not a solution, it is simply a part of the landscape.