a continuation..
Marriage is sacred here in Mindanao, but the manmade religious and/or civil ceremony is much less so. The commitment outweighs any other concern, legal or otherwise. Lest one imagine that by "commitment" I am referring to a promise, it is enshrined in action. A "commitment" to a woman can take the form of a house, property, business, or financial investment benefitting the girl and her family.
The country's powers that be love to sell a line of bullshit that has the country as some sort of Moral Majority circlejerk and buttfuck fiesta. Proudly noting that there is no abortion (at least legally), the government forgets to mention the hundreds of thousands of homeless , or otherwise unsupervised street children (out of an overall population of 12 Million)...Loudly intoning about a minimum age of 18 for marriage-and how even 25 year olds need both parents' written permission to walk down the aisle...while neglecting to discuss the more than 100,000 single mothers under the age of 18. The Philippines is no different than any other Southeast Asian nation. Glaring contradictions
are the rule of the day, but navigating these huge disparities can vex most any Westerner.
After the aforementioned Group Chat between Lovely, myself, her mother, and her eldest sister- the latter being in the US (see Part VIII)- Lovely and I began discussing our plans. Unlike most girls her age on Mindanao, she had been able to travel to not only the southern coast of Mindanao, but Cebu City, and even Cavite and Metro Manila on Luzon, thanks to her eldest sister's remittances. Still, she had never been out of the Philippines. Still, when asked
where she would like to live, she offered that it truly didnt
matter where, as long as she was with me.
Some might recall that even while still with Rizza, I had wanted to live in the Cambodian capital, Pnohm Penh. I had first arrived in Cambodia back in 1994, as the Khmer Rouge were finally pushed into the rainforests bordering Thailand, their original baliwick. At the time Poi Pet was nothing but a muddy field on the Thai border, filled with canvas tents courtesy of the hypocritical baby piddling United Nations. It took nearly 24 hours over (mostly) ox tracks to arrive in the marvelously preserved city. Although Cambodia had been through nearly thirty years of incessant warfare, the inner precincts of Pnohm Penh had been left unscathed, albeit badly tarnished by a programme of deliberate neglect by the Khmer Rouge, who ideological platform viewed urban environments as the epitome of all that was wrong in the world. Therefore, facades of buildings might be literally coming apart at the seams, and all innards might have been cannibalised for desperately needed hard currency but the city's wide boulevards, reminiscent of a mid-20th Century Paris and the Art Deco architecture to match (I have a deep passion for that genre), are almost all still there.
Although the city, and Cambodia as a whole, have changed in immeasurable ways since 1994, the city- for now anyway- remains the only locale within Southeast Asia where an opiate/opioid addict such as myself can live a life of relative ease. Police do not hassle foreign users, an entire district (Beong Keok aka The Lake) is left alone to exist in decadent squalor. One can sit on wooden decks belonging to various guest houses, watching Cambodians in dugouts as they harvest water lillies, a local delicacy, while chowing down on a slice of Happy Pizza, pizza with cannabis, sold by a handful of lakeside eateries.
For $5 a day you can get a very clean and very, very quiet room with private loo, ceiling fan, and colour TV with cable. If you are really on the flint, the average price for a room with no private loo nor cable TV is just $3. Meals? All you can eat Indian for $2, or a Western salad for $4. Transportation? $2 will get you and your group anywhere in the city via a tuktuk, the quinessential form of transport in that corner of Southeast Asia.
Cost efficiency is not really a factor at this stage of my life. I just find it a great place though I reckon a large part of my love affair with the city is its storied recent history as a junkie's paradise. Until 2006 you could walk into any large pharmacy and buy morphine over the counter. Of course, at $18 per ten extended release capsules, this at a time when that same amount of money could rent you a guesthouse room for a week. While the thrill of buying morphine as easily as Skittles might be a novelty on a two week look see, morphine really only existed as a novelty for virtually all users.
The real attraction, then and now, was the relatively pure #4 heroin from Burma (Mynnamar). In 1997, the first year I saw heroin in the capital, it cost a whopping $120 a gramme, a Cambodian Senator's monthly salary. The good news was that that gramme waas as pure as it gets, which for the Golden Triangle is almost always between 92 and 98%. Today prices are down two-thirds, but then so has purity- if you buy in the street.
When measured against any other Southeast Asian locale, Pnohm Pehn offers the best place to settle down for me and mine. So I told Lovely that, all things considered, I would have us live up in Cambodia. Her response, "Sure Daddy ko (my daddy), anywhere as long as I am next to you all the time." Sounded perfect to me but then the eldest sister had a meltdown in Maryland.
I opened up Lovely's Facebook page and then I noticed that the eldest sister had made an alarming statement while updating her "Status." Basically, she came right out and admitted how unhappy she is with her now 56 year old American husband. Her words were so poignant and emotional that I was honestly worried for her safety. I called Lovely and told her my concerns. Immediately the family contacted the eldest sister and by the enf of their conversation she had vowed to take her baby and return to Mindanao. The problem? The eldeat sister had not been back for a visit since October of 2010.
After thinking about the eldest sister's homesickness, I realised that I had overlooked an incredibly important consideration; IF I moved with Lovely to any foreign country, and failed to bring her home at least once a year, she will be just as depressed and miserable as her eldest sister. It was then that I realised that Lovely and I would have to live on Mindanao.
to be continued...
Marriage is sacred here in Mindanao, but the manmade religious and/or civil ceremony is much less so. The commitment outweighs any other concern, legal or otherwise. Lest one imagine that by "commitment" I am referring to a promise, it is enshrined in action. A "commitment" to a woman can take the form of a house, property, business, or financial investment benefitting the girl and her family.
The country's powers that be love to sell a line of bullshit that has the country as some sort of Moral Majority circlejerk and buttfuck fiesta. Proudly noting that there is no abortion (at least legally), the government forgets to mention the hundreds of thousands of homeless , or otherwise unsupervised street children (out of an overall population of 12 Million)...Loudly intoning about a minimum age of 18 for marriage-and how even 25 year olds need both parents' written permission to walk down the aisle...while neglecting to discuss the more than 100,000 single mothers under the age of 18. The Philippines is no different than any other Southeast Asian nation. Glaring contradictions
are the rule of the day, but navigating these huge disparities can vex most any Westerner.
After the aforementioned Group Chat between Lovely, myself, her mother, and her eldest sister- the latter being in the US (see Part VIII)- Lovely and I began discussing our plans. Unlike most girls her age on Mindanao, she had been able to travel to not only the southern coast of Mindanao, but Cebu City, and even Cavite and Metro Manila on Luzon, thanks to her eldest sister's remittances. Still, she had never been out of the Philippines. Still, when asked
where she would like to live, she offered that it truly didnt
matter where, as long as she was with me.
Some might recall that even while still with Rizza, I had wanted to live in the Cambodian capital, Pnohm Penh. I had first arrived in Cambodia back in 1994, as the Khmer Rouge were finally pushed into the rainforests bordering Thailand, their original baliwick. At the time Poi Pet was nothing but a muddy field on the Thai border, filled with canvas tents courtesy of the hypocritical baby piddling United Nations. It took nearly 24 hours over (mostly) ox tracks to arrive in the marvelously preserved city. Although Cambodia had been through nearly thirty years of incessant warfare, the inner precincts of Pnohm Penh had been left unscathed, albeit badly tarnished by a programme of deliberate neglect by the Khmer Rouge, who ideological platform viewed urban environments as the epitome of all that was wrong in the world. Therefore, facades of buildings might be literally coming apart at the seams, and all innards might have been cannibalised for desperately needed hard currency but the city's wide boulevards, reminiscent of a mid-20th Century Paris and the Art Deco architecture to match (I have a deep passion for that genre), are almost all still there.
Although the city, and Cambodia as a whole, have changed in immeasurable ways since 1994, the city- for now anyway- remains the only locale within Southeast Asia where an opiate/opioid addict such as myself can live a life of relative ease. Police do not hassle foreign users, an entire district (Beong Keok aka The Lake) is left alone to exist in decadent squalor. One can sit on wooden decks belonging to various guest houses, watching Cambodians in dugouts as they harvest water lillies, a local delicacy, while chowing down on a slice of Happy Pizza, pizza with cannabis, sold by a handful of lakeside eateries.
For $5 a day you can get a very clean and very, very quiet room with private loo, ceiling fan, and colour TV with cable. If you are really on the flint, the average price for a room with no private loo nor cable TV is just $3. Meals? All you can eat Indian for $2, or a Western salad for $4. Transportation? $2 will get you and your group anywhere in the city via a tuktuk, the quinessential form of transport in that corner of Southeast Asia.
Cost efficiency is not really a factor at this stage of my life. I just find it a great place though I reckon a large part of my love affair with the city is its storied recent history as a junkie's paradise. Until 2006 you could walk into any large pharmacy and buy morphine over the counter. Of course, at $18 per ten extended release capsules, this at a time when that same amount of money could rent you a guesthouse room for a week. While the thrill of buying morphine as easily as Skittles might be a novelty on a two week look see, morphine really only existed as a novelty for virtually all users.
The real attraction, then and now, was the relatively pure #4 heroin from Burma (Mynnamar). In 1997, the first year I saw heroin in the capital, it cost a whopping $120 a gramme, a Cambodian Senator's monthly salary. The good news was that that gramme waas as pure as it gets, which for the Golden Triangle is almost always between 92 and 98%. Today prices are down two-thirds, but then so has purity- if you buy in the street.
When measured against any other Southeast Asian locale, Pnohm Pehn offers the best place to settle down for me and mine. So I told Lovely that, all things considered, I would have us live up in Cambodia. Her response, "Sure Daddy ko (my daddy), anywhere as long as I am next to you all the time." Sounded perfect to me but then the eldest sister had a meltdown in Maryland.
I opened up Lovely's Facebook page and then I noticed that the eldest sister had made an alarming statement while updating her "Status." Basically, she came right out and admitted how unhappy she is with her now 56 year old American husband. Her words were so poignant and emotional that I was honestly worried for her safety. I called Lovely and told her my concerns. Immediately the family contacted the eldest sister and by the enf of their conversation she had vowed to take her baby and return to Mindanao. The problem? The eldeat sister had not been back for a visit since October of 2010.
After thinking about the eldest sister's homesickness, I realised that I had overlooked an incredibly important consideration; IF I moved with Lovely to any foreign country, and failed to bring her home at least once a year, she will be just as depressed and miserable as her eldest sister. It was then that I realised that Lovely and I would have to live on Mindanao.
to be continued...