The Very Small (Obviously) Book of the Philippines: An Englishman's View of What Should Be Paradise

By Graham Michael Barton

This is one mans slightly cynical view of the Philippines, a group of islands tucked between the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. These are his experiences as a middle-aged foreigner living on a tiny island where there are no cars and fewer than 3,000 people. He is the only Englishman in the village. His snapshots of daily life and incidents that perhaps anywhere else in the world would come under the headings of Are you sure? and Really? are designed to entertain, amuse, and perhaps even tempt you to visit the Philippines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491886243

Graham Michael Barton

Graham Michael Barton, the Englishman in question, stayed in school to about the age of fifteen. He was expelled and considered a bad boy, with no qualifications and a learning curve that had gone steeply downhill from the age of ten. His patient-but-mystified father sent him to an Army Apprentices College location, where his older brother had excelled. Unsurprisingly, in less than six months, Graham was again discharged as a bad boy. Graham’s dad refused to tolerate his son’s singular lack of enthusiasm for education and insisted he find work. As jobs were plentiful back then, the uneducated, unqualified, slightly angry, and frustrated young man started working in a frozen-food factory. He moved swiftly to a rope factory, became a furniture salesman, worked in a supermarket, and had a spell as an ice-cream salesman. All this was before the age of twenty. Graham soon realized that to make serious money, he had to work for himself, and he chose his hobby of martial arts, where fighting and winning gave cash prices. But winning wasn’t a given. Losing fights in spectacular fashion gave him the time and opportunity to sell specialized products to his fellow martial artists. Many asked him to find particular weapons, and he sourced these from manufacturers in Spain and Europe. From his one-room flat above his family’s taxi office, Graham sold Japanese swords, martial arts equipment, replica guns and knives, and militaria. Then film companies producing movies such as Shogun, Enter the Dragon, and the James Bond series recognized Graham as the supplier of all things weapon-related. As the years passed, orders from many other film productions including Gladiator and the Lord of the Rings movies took his business, Battle Orders Ltd., to number one in this admittedly limited field. During this time, Graham travelled to the Philippines to have products manufactured to his design. Emily Poyos, Graham’s business partner and a naturalized Filipino, advised him on one such trip to buy land there. Over the years, they developed Emponet Barton Beach Resort, where Graham retired a few short months before Typhoon Yolanda interrupted his plans. His book The Very Small (Obviously) Book of the Philippines reflects his unique experiences in the Philippines. This book, his second, contains his observations on what happen after the super typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) visited the Philippines. Graham promises that this is his last book about the Philippines, but if enough people buy copies of the first two books, he may be able to write something else equally entertaining. Those of you who have been to the Philippines will recognize the phrase, “It’s up to you!”

Book preview

Cock Fighting

There are a few countries left, mainly in Asia, where the barbaric mob sport of inciting a couple of chickens to tear each other to pieces is not banned or even frowned upon. And the Philippines is among them. Cock fighting is almost a religion, and also involves massive gambling—and I mean massive. Games range from a dozen or so Pinoys sitting around a makeshift earthen fighting pit to a sort of huge wooden-ringed gladiatorial arena with a thousand baying gamblers and a few curious, but quickly revolted, foreigners. Bets fairly commonly run $US100 to $US200, which is three months’ wages in the Philippines. Amazingly, no paper betting slips change hands, and seemingly nobody defaults on a bet. The reason, I discovered, is that there is every likelihood that the offender would be taken outside and hacked to death with a machete!

Pinoys rear and cosset these birds with special houses, food, and grooming. Watch a Pinoy place his bird in a bucket and wash each feather with soap and water and croon over it. If they treated their women as well, the women wouldn’t marry fat, old, ugly foreigners!

Despite the special treatment, the birds are often exposed to other fighting cocks and are egged on—sorry… that pun is so common—to fight. When they are ready, their bright red combs are hacked off for better vision. Feathers, feet, and beaks are hardened with a mysterious potion, and small razor-sharp knives are attached to their feet.

Needless to say, the fights and the gambling system are equally chaotic. The Pinoys sit around this ring and, rather like the traders in the old pre-computer stock market floors, shout incomprehensively at each other, flicking fingers and betting eye-watering amounts. Shouting at the top of their not-inconsiderable decibel level, they gesticulate and point to each other, calling the odds, waving wads of pesos, and throwing random and sometimes extremely large amounts at each other. No paperwork is evident.

There are simultaneous fights in various rings, and the Pinoys leap between them. The fights don’t last long. The chickens tear into each other. I forgot to mention a hen is introduced to stimulate aggression between the males. Hey, if it works on a Friday night in most downtown cities, why not with the chickens? There are no rules, except that there is to be no interfering by humans—and the dead, shredded chicken loses. The winner collects the stake money and whatever he gambled and gets to take the loser home to eat. Well he gets to eat the chicken; sometimes I wish it was the owner.

Another type of ‘game’ is last chicken standing. Ten or so are thrown into a ring—sadly chickens not their owners—and the last chicken to survive wins. If you thought the betting was complicated for a one-on-one, try unravelling this one. There is a veritable feast for the winner, as he gets to keep all the dead chickens and feed his family for days.

An additional and very chilling extension of chicken fighting here in Asia is stallion fighting. Again a female is involved—a mare in season is shown to the opposing stallions, and they fight over her. It is nasty and messy. What does it say to the rest of the world about the Pinoy psyche? There is a callousness about the people here born of degradation, need, lack of education, and, I suspect, just plain meanness. But until then those about to die will—crow!

Environment

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Look at me laughing hysterically and falling on the floor. Basically, they don’t give a shit. Well this is not strictly true, as there is shit everywhere. One resort—not mine—has a net in the sea to protect the beach, and a man to scoop the poop from their beachfront that makes it through the net. That is… human excrement. The local population just squat and shit, and the tide does the rest. They are adept at the concept of Nimbyism—not wanting unpleasant things in their own surroundings, but not caring about those same things being in other people’s surroundings. Each man and woman is an island. The islands are islands. And the barangays (villages, or smallest administrative divisions) are islands. (There can be fifty or more barangays in one city!) This results in no one giving the slightest toss about anyone else, least of all what happens to the rubbish, which they indeed just toss.

It is everywhere; it scars the landscape and seascape. Small kids eat sweets and chuck the paper on the ground. Eating bread and biscuits on the boat? Toss the bags in the sea. When it gets too much even for the Pinoys to ignore, they pile it away from the house in a spectacularly beautiful empty area and burn it, toxic waste and all.

There is now a lamentable attempt to encourage recycling. Bins are now randomly dotted here and there. A few enterprising companies are buying plastic, tins, and bottles, but in the main, the Pinoys cannot be arsed to separate rubbish, even for pesos. A prime example—our island is famous for its beautiful shifting sandbar, a wide expanse of pure white sand that is covered by each tide and ‘shifts’. (As does not often happen here, it does what its name implies.) This is a bit dodgy for the boats, but it is a superb visitor attraction.

It also attracts all the rubbish from various islands and the sea that separates them. The local government cannot ignore this, so it magnanimously employs a man with a shovel to clear it. Then, industriously, he digs a hole on the sandbar. Well, it is too far and too hot to shift it elsewhere, so he buries it—until the next tide, when it is washed away only to reappear on the following tide. When you ask the many rubbish chuckers why they throw trash into the sea, they say, wide eyed (well not quite… sort of almost wide eyed), ‘It goes away!’ Yes, to another island. And where do you think the rubbish on your island comes from? Yes, that’s it. From other islands. Not exactly the type of recycling I had in mind.

Personal hygiene levels all add to pollution—pissing anywhere and everywhere, spitting constantly in the street, crapping in the sea, and throwing and burning rubbish. It is all at a basic street level. And unless you can get each and every Pinoy to take individual responsibility, then in a couple of generations the turquoise sea will be grey and just a distant memory, and all 7,130 islands will be barren except for mountains of rubbish.

Weather

The Filos do extremes, and top of the list is extreme weather. They are not so good at coping with it, but the gods have ensured that they are given more than their fair share of searing heat, wind, driving rain, and more heat. Let’s start with wind—not just side-to-side breezes, but full-on, typhoon-strength wind. Quaintly, the Filos identify the typhoons during rainy season by naming them alphabetically rather than randomly. They start by naming the first with an A (maybe Alice), and the typhoon season finishes officially with a Z (Zelda?). I’m currently experiencing N for Norma and am reliably informed that Z will take us to the end of January. Of course, no one can explain why, and there is no base of scientific evidence, but amazingly it works. Year in year out, the literate gods send their horrendous winds A to Z.

‘Regular’ winds in the Philippines can be ferocious, but add a typhoon… Typhoon sounds sort of macho, sexy, dynamic… wow! Wrong! It’s bloody scary. Your beachfront cottage and idyllic views are turned violently into a maelstrom of howling winds, driving rain, lightning directed for certain at you! And there’s booming dog-dog (Filo for thunder). Whatever country you come from, and whatever weather you know, trust me, you do not want to experience a typhoon on a tiny, flat island in the Philippines.

Then add rain. Oh, yes, the rain. There is an assorted variety of rain. You’ve got the sheeting, sting-your-face type, usually accompanied by shrieking winds, massive waves, and your actual typhoon. It’s scary and kills people. Then you have squally rolling sheets of rain. You see and feel it. When it is chased away by the sun, you are just wet and steaming. Invariably, Filo rain is warm and unpredictable—yep a bit like the people themselves. If it is accompanied by wind and it’s over the sea, all bets are off. It’s simply horrible.

Of course, although rainy season happens every year, in true Filo fashion, citizens are totally unprepared and are shocked, nervous, and frightened every year. News reports tell of flooding on a mega scale in the mega cities such as Manila and Cebu, but of course the thousands of smaller islands are woefully unprepared and suffer badly. My island is no exception. It’s flat and exposed. Water drains away at an alarming rate. It is not unusual during a fierce storm to see the rickety Nepa huts constructed of rushes, wood, and prayers take off and whiz past Emponet Barton Beach on their way to China. The family is left sitting around the open fire with a few pots and pans, and numerous crying children and dazed elderly relatives. Stagnant water is everywhere; disease and bugs abound. It is tragic, but ‘be prepared’ is not a Filo