Poverty And Some Effects Of It That We Do Not Perhaps Think About As Carefully As We Should.

[Medic Mike]

It can be done: let me share a tale of a young Filipino. This young Romeo married and started a family as a day laborer. Once first born came, he realized something had to change. He made his living the next 40 years as a jeepney driver working 14-16 hour days 6-7 days per week.

He raised 7 children:

A physician

A mechanical engineer

An army colonel

An army general

A registered nurse

An international merchant marine ship's master

And professional actress.

All college educated, and most with advanced degrees. This is what came from a determined family of squatters in a shack with no electric or running water.

This is the brief story of one of the men I have most respected and loved in my life: my father in law.

May not be easy, but character can conquer a lot.

You are soooo right! It certainly can be done. All it takes is guts and determination. I have lots of pinoy friends, that only had that and nothing else, pulled themselves out of the shanty towns and made something of themselves.

[Paul_QLD]

I know it can be done, just need to make my girl realise its not "luck" as she calls it to get anywhere and it's OK to get knocked down occasionally and when you get back up again, you get back up to a higher level than before. Create your own luck I keep saying to her ... one day she will, after all she found me bahaha :)

[Methersgate]

It can be done, but it is rare and one must not expect it.

 

At risk of stirring contention, I have noticed that 100% of those of my friends who have "pulled themselves up" from the barrios, with the help of poor but determined parents, strong family values, a terrific emphasis on education and on saving money, are part Chinese.

 

THis figure may not be typical.

 

And, in fact, these are the typical values of the Chinese everywhere. Mao Zhedong spent a life time trying to stop the Chinese being bourgeois; he failed miserably and completely. The Chinese are the only nation on the planet who are 95% middle class, in their thinking if not in their living standards!

Edited August 10, 2014 by Methersgate

[Miguk]

 

And all these sensitivities are right beneath the surface, and all the foreigner does is to say "It does not bother me" - it bothers THEM.

Yes, the head of the household is usually delighted to see a foreigner to see a foreigner paying court to his pretty daughter, but

he is also worried that the foreigner may just leave her "in the club" and disappear, and he also hates himself for having to hope

that that foreigner will give him money.

Hello Andrew,

 

Another great insight about the weak and the poor!  You are certainly a student of sociology, unique to the

Far Eastern region and their street level culture.  You got into the mind of the poor farmer, thinking about

what to do about his daughters when the whole family is starving.   

 

I wrote a piece a long time ago about my tears flowing freely when I witness this old and fragile Lola and her

niece making the rounds through the Olongapo bars.  The Lola would silently stand at a dark corner of the 

nightclub, while all the sailors and marines were whoopin' and hollerin' -- within 5 minutes of the floor show,

her niece was already naked, dancing to the tunes of Proud Mary (mid 70's).

 

That was their livelihood.  I immediately gave the Lola all my loose change (about 20 bucks) and ask them to

go home for the night.  Their thankful eyes of tears of joy......and I felt so ashamed.    

 

Fast forward to Mt Pinatubo's (1991) devastation of land and people of epic proportion.  Many of those young

daughters ended up in Angeles City.  It was a dark reality for farmers to contract out their little girls.  Again, it

was the matter of sheer survival, deep sacrifice and deeper shame.   

 

Is there a light at the end of their tunnel?  

 

Thank you for a good read, my friend.

 

I don't like to take issue with you shipmate but there are thousands of other ways to make a living.  It sounds heartless but they could have done anything else besides be bar girls - but they liked the lure of big and "easy" money.  I disagree on the focus on them being "victims"....there are others who deserve that title, not them.  It was a conscious choice on their part.  There used to be thousands of them in Olongapo during the Navy's heyday.  How many do you think were actually from Olongapo?  I guarantee not many.  No girl from Olongapo would be doing that and risk becoming talk of the town.  The pokpok were all from somewhere else....which means they chose to come there and they chose that life.

[Miguk]

I know it can be done, just need to make my girl realise its not "luck" as she calls it to get anywhere and it's OK to get knocked down occasionally and when you get back up again, you get back up to a higher level than before. Create your own luck I keep saying to her ... one day she will, after all she found me bahaha :)

And tell her to forget the phrase "bahala na".  I hate that fatalistic, responsibility-killing phrase.  If she insists on attributing her luck to some invisible sky deity they the corollary should be "god helps those who help themselves".

[Methersgate]

And tell her to forget the phrase "bahala na".  I hate that fatalistic, responsibility-killing phrase.  If she insists on attributing her luck to some invisible sky deity they the corollary should be "god helps those who help themselves".

 

My two pet hates:

 

"Bahala na!"

 

"It's up to you!"

[Miguk]

I work "it's up to you" to my advantage.  After numerous attempts to get a price on something only to be met with "Up to you" I say "ok, fine free then" which promptly elicits the long awaited price!

[Methersgate]

I don't like to take issue with you shipmate but there are thousands of other ways to make a living.  It sounds heartless but they could have done anything else besides be bar girls - but they liked the lure of big and "easy" money.  I disagree on the focus on them being "victims"....there are others who deserve that title, not them.  It was a conscious choice on their part.  There used to be thousands of them in Olongapo during the Navy's heyday.  How many do you think were actually from Olongapo?  I guarantee not many.  No girl from Olongapo would be doing that and risk becoming talk of the town.  The pokpok were all from somewhere else....which means they chose to come there and they chose that life.

 

I am going to take issue with you, cautiously, in part

 

What follows is a cut and paste from something I wrote earlier, at greater length

 

 

Certainly no girl is going to work in a bar in her home towm and risk  meeting her father and her uncles and her brothers!

By and large girls from Luzon work overseas; girls from the Visayas work in Luzon.

~

In 2011, the US Ambassador to the Philippines, Harry Thomas Jr., suggested that 40% of tourists coming to the Philippines were “sexpats” (sex tourists), 

There is ample demand. The supply comes from three places:

 

 

Extreme Poverty:

A pretty daughter may find work as a "GRO" to support her parents and to pay for her siblings' schooling.This is particularly likely if something has happened to the family's breadwinner and if she is the eldest daughter. In the case of many of the Waray families of Samar and Leyte, who combine being exceptionally good looking with living in the very poorest provinces of the Philippines, this is almost traditional, and a young girl may be taken under the wing of an aunt who is already a prostitute, brought to the Pinoy bars of Cavite to work as a waitress and in due course she will find out how to make more money and will learn some words of another language.. 

Students

There have been articles in the Press suggesting that some 10-15% of Filipino students are part time prostitutes - more especially at the start of the semesters when they have books to buy and tuition fees to pay. 

Such as in this article.

Single motherhood

Many other young women find themselves working in a bar because they are an unmarried mother with a child to support.

There were 195,662 teenage pregnancies in the Philippines in 2009, according to the United Nations Population Fund. (For comparison, there were 38,259 in the UK., but the age profile of the UK is rather different, so a direct comparison is unfair). 

At 53 births per 1,000 teenage girls, this is the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in ASEAN; put another way, one teenage Filipina in twenty is a mother – very often a single mother. This rate hs since increased dramatically.

The risk of getting pregnant does not stop when a girl turns twenty, of course.

In a conservative Catholic culture, the young single mother is a “fallen woman”. 

Employment is hard to come by anyway; creches are almost unknown, nobody wants a domestic servant with a baby, so the young single mother can either dump her child on her own mother - often already in poverty - or try to take care of the child herself, in which case she is left with with only two ways to support herself and her child – to become the mistress of a man who can support her and her child (unlikely) or to work as a "GRO" or a dancer in a bar, which at least allows her to spend some daylight hours with her child.

This is a side effect of the lack of sex education in schools and of the relative unavailability of contraception. 

The illegality of abortion adds something to the pregnancy rate, although the rate of illegal abortions is also shockingly high, with estimates of the number of abortions in 2005, made by the University of the Philippines, at between 400,000 and 500,000 cases. (For comparison, there were 189,100 legal abortions in the UK in 2010.) 

So the Philippines, a conservative Catholic society, has roughly five times number of teenage pregnancies that occur in Britain, and double the UK's abortion rate. The Law of Unintended Consequences is operating, to produce effects that are, no doubt, very far from those that the Catholic Church intends.

It is no simple matter to get a job if you are a single mother and cannot dump your child on your mother. There are no creches. There is no child care 

Almost the only job that a single mother can do without the help of her own mother is bar "work". 

Edited August 10, 2014 by Methersgate

[Miguk]

 

I don't like to take issue with you shipmate but there are thousands of other ways to make a living.  It sounds heartless but they could have done anything else besides be bar girls - but they liked the lure of big and "easy" money.  I disagree on the focus on them being "victims"....there are others who deserve that title, not them.  It was a conscious choice on their part.  There used to be thousands of them in Olongapo during the Navy's heyday.  How many do you think were actually from Olongapo?  I guarantee not many.  No girl from Olongapo would be doing that and risk becoming talk of the town.  The pokpok were all from somewhere else....which means they chose to come there and they chose that life.

 

I am going to take issue with you, cautiously, in part

 

What follows is a cut and paste from something I wrote earlier, at greater length

 

 

Certainly no girl is going to work in a bar in her home towm and risk  meeting her father and her uncles and her brothers!

By and large girls from Luzon work overseas; girls from the Visayas work in Luzon.

~

In 2011, the US Ambassador to the Philippines, Harry Thomas Jr., suggested that 40% of tourists coming to the Philippines were “sexpats” (sex tourists), 

There is ample demand. The supply comes from three places:

 

 

Extreme Poverty:

A pretty daughter may find work as a "GRO" to support her parents and to pay for her siblings' schooling.This is particularly likely if something has happened to the family's breadwinner and if she is the eldest daughter. In the case of many of the Waray families of Samar and Leyte, who combine being exceptionally good looking with living in the very poorest provinces of the Philippines, this is almost traditional, and a young girl may be taken under the wing of an aunt who is already a prostitute, brought to the Pinoy bars of Cavite to work as a waitress and in due course she will find out how to make more money and will learn some words of another language.. 

Students

There have been articles in the Press suggesting that some 10-15% of Filipino students are part time prostitutes - more especially at the start of the semesters when they have books to buy and tuition fees to pay. 

Such as in this article.

Single motherhood

Many other young women find themselves working in a bar because they are an unmarried mother with a child to support.

There were 195,662 teenage pregnancies in the Philippines in 2009, according to the United Nations Population Fund. (For comparison, there were 38,259 in the UK., but the age profile of the UK is rather different, so a direct comparison is unfair). 

At 53 births per 1,000 teenage girls, this is the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in ASEAN; put another way, one teenage Filipina in twenty is a mother – very often a single mother. This rate hs since increased dramatically.

The risk of getting pregnant does not stop when a girl turns twenty, of course.

In a conservative Catholic culture, the young single mother is a “fallen woman”. 

Employment is hard to come by anyway; creches are almost unknown, nobody wants a domestic servant with a baby, so the young single mother can either dump her child on her own mother - often already in poverty - or try to take care of the child herself, in which case she is left with with only two ways to support herself and her child – to become the mistress of a man who can support her and her child (unlikely) or to work as a "GRO" or a dancer in a bar, which at least allows her to spend some daylight hours with her child.

This is a side effect of the lack of sex education in schools and of the relative unavailability of contraception. 

The illegality of abortion adds something to the pregnancy rate, although the rate of illegal abortions is also shockingly high, with estimates of the number of abortions in 2005, made by the University of the Philippines, at between 400,000 and 500,000 cases. (For comparison, there were 189,100 legal abortions in the UK in 2010.) 

So the Philippines, a conservative Catholic society, has roughly five times number of teenage pregnancies that occur in Britain, and double the UK's abortion rate. The Law of Unintended Consequences is operating, to produce effects that are, no doubt, very far from those that the Catholic Church intends.

It is no simple matter to get a job if you are a single mother and cannot dump your child on your mother. There are no creches. There is no child care 

Almost the only job that a single mother can do without the help of her own mother is bar "work". 

 

And after she has wasted her youth and has not husband because of her job - but put her siblings through school and supported the family she is going to be shunned by the same "family".  I have seen it too many times to count.  There is always a choice....and working in a bar is not the only one - and certainly not a good one.

[Methersgate]

This is a calendar from an association that I belong to - officers  who served in the merchant shipping and oil exploration and production businesses of the Swire Group - Cathay Pacific have a sister organisation of course.

 

It is a photoshop of a genuine Christmas card produced by one of the most famous of the old MH Del Pilar bars in Ermita, before Fred LIm closed them in order to strengthen his run for Mayor. The year I fancy is 1988:

 

I would like to draw your attentionto the two girls left and right foreground.

The girl left foreground was Melanie and she was a Sergeant with the Manila Police and I kid you not.THis was her second job to support her sick father's medical treatment .The girl right foreground was Julie and she was dumb. I do not mean she was stupid. I mean she was from birth unable to speak, and she supported her mother and her kid brother. Dancing was perhaps the only job for which she got paid the same as everyone else. 
 

Don't just write off these people. Melanie might be a Judge these days!

Edited August 10, 2014 by Methersgate