After the Malpasod Sur debacle and a lunch of humble pie, it was time to put things in perspective, shop, see some new sights and learn some things in the process. So our group headed out in the tricked out jeepney and a couple of SUVs to Dumaguete City, north of the Atlantis resort.
It's home to Silliman University, one of the Philippines' leading institutions of higher learning, where a reef conservation program is in place. The campus is right at the center of town, shrouded in towering shade trees. Silliman is also home to a very educational Anthropology Museum, where the entire group toured the four-story building where there were artifacts dating back centuries, from the Malays, Chinese, Negritos and Ifugao -- the last two are indigenous Filipinos, with the first having dark skin and African features and the second, mountain dwellers from the Luzon island highlands. Well-drawn maps catalogued the hundreds of different regional language and ethnic groups that define the Philippines.
The Philippines, after all, are a group of 7,107 different islands, each with personalities, topographies, histories and cultures of their own. But as a history exhibit taught us, the Spanish conquest, followed by American occupation, Japanese occupation, liberation and finally independence, is something all the islands shared. It was disturbing to confront the fact that the American "acquisition" of the Philippines from the Spanish after the 1898 Spanish-American War and resulting occupation, was equally brutal as what the Spaniards perpetrated on Filipinos. Though it's not well-known in American history textbooks in school, Filipino nationalists engaged their American occupiers in a war for freedom that immediately followed the Spanish-American War. It was only after the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in World War II that Americans saw Filipinos as their equals and jointly fought to liberate the islands. Yet even after independence was "granted" by the United States to the Philippines on July 4, 1946, Filipinos the world over recognize their true independence day as June 12, 1898, their liberation from the Spanish. And even today, those still-living Filipino World War II veterans who fought side by side with American troops to defeat the Japanese were not -- despite the efforts of U.S. Congressmen, who sponsored bills -- extended benefits or granted automatic U.S. citizenship, as America extended them to soldiers from dozens of other countries who fought alongside her. Dive leader Ramcel Eloy told me his own grandfather is one of those soldiers.
Outside the museum and the Silliman campus Dumaguete pulses with activity. There are no traffic lights, but traffic ebbs and flows with hundreds of tricycles operating as taxis, ferrying people to their destinations. The covered city market we visited has a maze full of stalls, with virtually everything imaginable being sold, from clothes and jewelry to medicines and food. The most overwhelming sights and smells came from the fish market, where thousands of fish were being cleaned and packaged for people shopping for their households.
But I found the most welcome sight outside the City Market -- Jollibee. It's a Filipino fast-food chain specializing in burgers, spaghetti and fried chicken and in Filipino favorites like palabok, halo-halo and lumpia. I first had food from Jollibee back in 1999 on my first visit to the Philippines in the town of Puerto Princesa, after an all-day trip to the St. Paul Subterranean River, which included a strenuous hike through the jungle to the sea. Since then, Jollibee has made its way across the Pacific and has stores in Filipino-American communities in California like the San Diego suburbs of National City and Mira Mesa and San Francisco Bay Area ones like Daly City, Vallejo and San Francisco. After all, who can resist the adorable bee mascot?
Not me. And thanks to a San Diegan, dive buddy Jason Bradshaw, for snapping this image of me, with the bee.
Photo Copyright Jason Bradshaw 2009.
