Inquirer Opinion / Columns
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20110313-325094/Coming-home
HIGH BLOOD
Highblood : Coming home


By Belma Villa
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Posted date: March 13, 2011


THE FIRST thing that greeted me was a blast of hot air. I breathed in deeply, trying to take in as much of the warmth as possible. Home, I thought blissfully. How could I have ever left it? Twenty hours earlier, I was shivering in the freezing rain and snowy landscape of wintry Seattle in Washington State where I have resided these many years. I was back in Manila for a short reunion with my group mates from the University of the Philippines, English Majors’ Class ’69.

My visit turned out to be not just a reunion with my college friends (and a precious, stolen moment with my high school classmates) but also a much-needed reunion with my home country. Seeing Metro Manila again, up close and personal after many years of absence, was alternately invigorating and exciting, frustrating and annoying, but also inspiring and uplifting. So much had changed in the intervening years since I left; some good, some really bad, and a few were downright comical.

Condos. I don’t know when this new trend in housing began, but it was certainly not during the time I lived in Manila. The present-day Metro Manila skyline is dotted with condo high-rises, and in the short time my friends and I were there, we were able to enjoy the comforts of three condo units that had all the modern amenities of Western living. It seemed that each person I met during my trip either owned a condo or was related to/knew someone who did.

I dare speculate that condos are the new status symbol in the Philippines. A condo can be the perfect summer vacation home for balikbayans, a handy bachelor’s pad, a rental property, a convenient pied-à-terre for the rich, and a good nest egg for the smart investor. Whatever the reason, I found the boom in condos initially perplexing, as I have always believed the Filipino people to be industrious and hard-working but essentially poor. “Who has money to buy all these condos?” I mused.

Shopping malls. The question of who has money to spend takes me right to my daughters’ favorite past time—shopping. There were only three department stores worth mentioning when I left: Rustan’s for the more exclusive shoppers with money to burn; Shoemart and Robinson’s for average folks like me. The Manila I came back to had evolved the concept of department stores into huge shopping complexes and malls: Glorietta, Rockwell, Shangri-La, Greenbelt, The Podium, Landmark. There were SM malls (Shoemart’s progeny) everywhere we went including the nearby towns of Laguna, Batangas and Cavite, and doubtless all across the country. And there was the biggest of them all (fourth largest in the world and third in Asia), the SM Mall of Asia. “MOA,” as the natives call it, combines the finest in Philippine shopping and entertainment and boasts average daily foot traffic of 200,000. Two hundred thousand!!!

Again the question: “Who has money to spend in all these malls?”

OFWs. The answer, once I got it, was pretty obvious. OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) and their hard-earned dollars are changing not only the landscape of our home country, but also our shopping habits, our language and the hopes and dreams of our children. Many of our countrymen toil at menial jobs abroad so their families in the Philippines can build new and better homes and their children can go to good schools that in the past, only the rich could afford. OFWs come home with heads held high, money in their pockets to buy SUVs and condos and iPads and other tech toys. They throng the malls and restaurants and movie theaters—God bless them—but alas, they also clog our streets even more.

Traffic. This one is under the category of “really bad.” My friends and I discovered to our chagrin that it is no longer possible to spend the day hopping from place to place in Manila and Makati as we used to do in our youth. Traffic has gotten so bad that you have to factor in hours of frustrating time spent on the road waiting for the vehicles around you to move. Filipino drivers do not let lanes, or traffic rules, or common courtesy deter them from reaching their destination as quickly as possible. As a result, driving in Manila has become a test of courage, cunning, resourcefulness and ruthlessness. On the other hand, I’ve never seen such skillful driving in all my life, as our drivers Jing and Sonny exhibited. I guess you need to, if you are to go anywhere in Manila.

Our people’s propensity for disregarding rules was most apparent in some of the signs I read along the road. “Accident-prone area,” one such sign read. To emphasize the point, the next line warned, “May namatay na dito.” Coming up the toll area from Cavite was a large sign, “Exact Toll,” and under it in equally large letters: “ABSOLUTELY NO CHANGE.” I had to smile in spite of myself. Only in the Philippines!

Still, even with all the changes that I found coming home, getting together with my college friends was joyous and memorable. We quickly made a pledge to meet again in two years. Australia, or Oz, as the Aussies call it, or Spain, to trace whatever of our roots can still be traced, then on to Provence in France. It didn’t matter. The plan would come together just as this first one did and we would be there to share impressions, trade stories of heartaches and triumphs, and try not to think of our waning years coming quickly upon us.

God willing, we would look once more into each other’s eyes and see only the 18-year-olds that we once were.