Photos et lettres des Philippines, de France et d'ailleurs

Whew! On March 16th I was back in the Philippines after three months in France in the chill of a particularly long, snowy and icy winter.

My stay started well with our Christmas dinner with my family and Alexis's family the boyfriend of our daughter Christelle.

(Our family)

(Alexis's family)

Then it was December 31 when in addition of the New Year we also celebrated the 25^th birthday of our son Fabrice and my 65 summers as well.

(Our New Year eve guests)

(Our Bithday's cakes)

This is about my new vintage that began my anxieties. In fact my doctor thought rightly that it would be a good idea for me to go for a complete medical check-up which stresses me and took me a lot of time until almost two weeks before my departure. Well I came out fine even though the doctor told me my arteries were no longer 18 years old.
I did not do so much during my stay in France except meeting friends, and attending a reunion with some former classmates in Normandy.

(Le Tréport in Upper Normandy and my classmates and wives, batch 1971. February 27, 2010)

Therefore I helped a little my son in taking photos of his 7 models of T-shirts that he designed with motifs evoking the Japanese Mangas comics. He is now ready to sell them on the Internet with his new Website.

http://www.mangawear.com/

(The seven models of T-shirts)

So I arrived in Manila on March 16, at 1:15 pm after a flight of 12:30 hours from Paris to Singapore in a Singapore Airlines Airbus A380 and then a flight of 3:30 hours from Singapore to Manila.
I should however be used but I continue to be shocked by the first thing seen by all the passengers through the windows just before landing, which are the slums near the airport with skyscrapers of the business district of Makati in the background.
Later in the taxi that takes us into the city, it is the same sad sight just before getting on Roxas Boulevard along Manila Bay with its luxury buildings and a giant shopping mall housing a skating rink. The Philippines have never so well deserved their plural name.

(Roxas boulevard)

In this country, Manila or rather Metro-Manila is a world apart. This metropolis of nearly 12 million inhabitants (20 million with the suburbs) is the center of nearly everything. It has the banks, the businesses and the hotels.  Each year enormous new shopping malls spring up, each of them housing many large cinemas.

It has two-thirds of the country's vehicles and consequently most of its traffic jams.

(Manila bay)

Metro Manila is the center of education, with 750,000 college and graduate students. Some of them are in colleges and universities that predate the first universities in the United States and are among the best in Asia, while others are a little more than degree mills.

It is a place of great diversity, of great affluence, and great poverty. Just over the wall from wealthy, guarded suburbs of expensive homes and private clubs you can find thousands of flimsy squatter shacks. An estimated one third of the 10-12 million inhabitants live in the Manila slums.

(Golf course 10 minutes drive from Roxas boulevard)

(Squatters area also 10 minutes drive from Roxas boulevard)

Overall the country has had a steadily increasing growth with an average of 4% / year since 2001. 7.2% in 2007, 4.8% in 2008, 2.5% in 2009 and a forecast of 3.5% for 2010. Yet it is a euphemism to say that the distribution of this growth is perfectible.
Philippines poverty remains an endemic problem. General elections will take place in May but these figures that follow cast a shadow on the results of 2 successive terms of the current president.

In 2006, 27.6 million people lived below the Philippines poverty threshold (probably more than 30 million today).  This represented 27% of Philippines families and 33% of the population. According to international data, 44% of the population subsisted on US$2 or less a day.

(Homeless people along Roxas boulevard)

While poverty in the Philippines is predominantly rural and may vary by region I can see the evolution by myself. In Dumaguete, new buildings and business are mushrooming. Cars are becoming more numerous and the first shopping mall opened its doors last December. Yet in my area 25 kilometers south of this prosperity I see no change except more and more kids. Brownouts are becoming more frequent and longer. It is true that the country does not produce enough energy and urban areas are preferred. Moreover, the phone coverage is weak and uneven; the Internet speed is lousy with only GPRS connection, light years away from the DSL connection of the city. The only good thing is because of my successive claims; the garbage is now collected once a week. Before we had to burn or bury it.
Among the multiple reasons for this poverty the high birth rate mainly affecting the poorest and least educated is responsible.

(Street kids along Roxas boulevard. What future they have?)

The Philippines accounted for 92.2 million inhabitants in 2009 and the fertility rate per woman was3.3 children. Yet more than half of the 3.4 million annual births are unwanted. In this country more than 80% Catholic all initiatives aimed at birth control are strongly opposed by the Church despite its separation from the state included in the Constitution. It uses its enormous political influence to counter all the measures taken nationally or locally like advertising condoms on TV or con the municipality of Cebu City, which had planned to distribute them for free to its inhabitants.
After the elections of May 10, 2010, the new President shall have to take the necessary steps to stay away from this Church so prone in giving lessons and forgetful of his own faults that makes regularly the headlines of all the Medias.
So I stayed three nights in Manila where I had reserved a room at the hotel Rothman in the Ermita tourist district at the rate of 30 € per night.

http://www.rothmanhotel.com/

(Folk dance at Zamboanga restaurant near Rothman hotel)

The day after my arrival I visited my sister in the suburbs to see the renovation of the small family home.

(My wife's family simple house under renovation)

I take this opportunity to reconfirm that the taxi drivers in Manila are probably among the most swindlers in the world.
On March 19 at 2:15pm, I boarded a Philippine Airlines plane to Dumaguete where I arrived 1 hour later.
I was still surprised to see now the direction of Mecca shown on video screens in this aircraft while Muslims represent up only 5% of the Philippines population. As in Manila I had never seen in thirty years as many women wearing the Islamic veil.

As everywhere in the world, Islam is gaining ground. Meanwhile in France more and more churches are closed and some sacraments administered by laymen due to the lack of priests. As for Judaism, which represents only about 0.77% of the French population, yet its importance tends to decline through intermarriage more numerous.

This opinion is only mine and can seem contradictory to what I said earlier about the Church in the Philippines but it is an entirely different context. This is only based on my observations and informations found on the Internet about the Judaïsm in France.

Moreover I assert not being islamophobic at least as long as my freedom of thought and the principles of secularism of my country will be respected.