Okay, so I've posted about eating dog meat and drinking cat poo, visiting rice terraces and touring slums, spraining my ankle and visiting markets, and at this point you may be wondering, "but Camila, are you actually doing any research?"
To which the answer is - hi there grant sponsors - YES! I have so far interviewed over 35 activists. I think the exact number is 38 or something. And I have scheduled for the rest of my time here almost 30 more, with lots more possibilities
That is... that is many, many interviews. My soul is quivering at the thought of having to code and transcribe them, let alone extract a single story out of them. (if I have grant money left over, can i hire a research assistant??? oh well, at least I won't be bored for the rest of my summer...)
So, in case you were wondering what exactly these interviews are like (okay, I realized probably nobody cares enough about my research to actual sit around going, "golly gee, i wonder what the experience of taking interviews is like for camila?" but you're going to hear about it anyway, 'cuz i'm the one writing this here blog) here are a few snapshots from interviews I took in Manila. I'm not using any real names here because I'm going to wait until I have really carefully thought about what I write when I use real names, and this is bloggishly off-the-cuff. Also, the quotes here are from my notes, not from my 50+ hours of recordings, and we all know what my handwriting is like, so. Yes. No real names and I claim some wiggle-room rights here on the quotes. illustrative purposes only - kthnxbai!
Sitting in the back room of one of the party-list's many offices, with galvanized steel overhead and, thanks to the rain, the occasional cool breeze coming in through the gaps in the wall, I listen to a campaign manager describe the response of Filipino men to the women's partylist. We are drinking rice coffee, despite the heat, and she doesn't appear to be sweating, while I am finding it hard to breath in the absence of air conditioning. She says something in Tagalog that I hope I'll be able to transcribe, and smiles. "Strong woman," she says. "That's what it means. They would say that to us as we campaigned in the street - 'Ay, strong women! Strong!' And fifty percent of our votes come from men, did you know that?" I didn't. Inside the house, young party-list members are on netbooks, shopping and playing games. I bring up the NPA, with which this group is idealogically aligned, although they distance themselves politically, and the campaign manager leans forward. "I don't agree with their methods. I don't. But I cannot help but sympathize with their cause, you know?"
On the 30th floor of a gleaming glass tower, behind three layers of security, riding elevators with well-dressed European development officers, I finally reach the offices of the UN-FPA. A young woman beams as she meets me, and I'm infinitely relieved to find that she's wearing jeans and a sweatshirt instead of a suit. We sit an empty conference room and laugh as she explains that her offices are with the IT staff, in a corner of ther frigid server room, and we get serious as she describes her first time working with young positives - youths living with HIV. I ask about what it was like transitioning from a distant town in the provinces to life in the big city, and she shakes her head as words fail her. She describes an awakening gender consciousness, the struggles of being by far the youngest person in her office, and how she travels back to her home community to provide leadership training to youth so that they, too, can have the chance to make decisions about their own futures.
In the second floor of a community health clinic in an "informal settlement," the PC term for a squatter community, I am listening to two young women - younger than me - describe what it's like to pass out condoms to the youths in their community. How their parents responded, how the other youths laugh and tease them, how they're grateful. We fan ourselves with woven palm-fronds and scrap paper and lean forward in our plastic seats as they talk to me, helping each other with their English. They plan and run EDs, educational discussions that cover issues of STIs, early pregnancy, kinds of contraception, abortion, and other RH issues. I ask what they think of abortion, and they say it is a mortal sin. I ask what they think of contraception, and they say the youths need it - since they're having sex anyway, and they might as well be protected. I ask, finally, why they have chosen to dedicate so much time and energy to this particular issue - in a slum, with few jobs, incredible poverty, sanitation issues, so many things to worry about, why reproductive health? They look at me for a few seconds, seeming surprised by the question, and then one says matter-of-factly, "Women are dying from having children. All the time, women are dying. What we do saves lives." And I have no words.
On the top floor of an upscale mall, in a ritzy coffee shop, N. drinks pink guava juice and talks cyber-activism, political processes, mass movements and the line between activism and advocacy. She came straight from her job in Congress, and is beautifully dressed. She smiles and laughs often, even as she discusses government corruption and youth disengagement. "I'm not an angry person," she says. "I'm a positive person. I want to build consensus." I ask about women's rights issues, and she pauses, and her smile fades. "In my advocacy, I actually don't really focus on women's rights issues. Things like violence against women just... they're just too close to home." There is a silence.
In another fancy mall, I sit down with K. over fancy pastries and breads, and she points at the bean-paste loaf I'm about to bite into. "The cost of that bun could buy dinner for two people, you know," she says, and I pause. She picks up her own snack and takes a bite, and we start to talk about her past, and what inspired her to abandon the possibility of high-paying jobs to work as a counselor for victims of violence against women, and why she soon might be leaving her activist position for a job with a paycheck. She says there is no hope of justice for women who have been victims of domestic violence - not in the Philippines and not right now. There are laws, she says, but laws are just paper, and in reality, there is no hope of justice. "So what do you say to the women who come to you?" I ask, bewildered by the depth of her despair. "I say, you have a choice: you can take this to the court, or not. If you file a case, at least you are fighting. Win or lose, I tell them, you can say that you fought for your rights."
On the fourth story of a colorful building way up in the north of Metro Manila, I eat rice cakes and listen to NGO employees plan a project to attract the out-of-school youth to the new SRH-education group they're starting. They discuss rock concerts and outreach programs, movie nights, guitar lessons. They discuss the problems of petty crime and early pregnancy, the sheer boredom of youths with nothing to do. I ask about how many young people in the community are out-of-school youths - there's a tagalog word for them, which means vagrant - and they look at each other, raising eyebrows, shaking heads. "Way, way too many," they say.
In a hip cafe in Baguio, over vegetarian meals, J. and I discuss her work as an activist, advocate and journalist. She works with an anti-trafficking group that fights various forms of violence against women, and when I ask about motivations for becoming an activist, she pauses only briefly. Her father beat her mother, and sexually harrassed J. herself. Her older half-brother raped his own children, and before she joined this group, she said, her sympathies were with her brother - not the children. She describes the camp that taught her that domestic and sexual violence isn't normal or okay, and is, in fact, illegal - and there are tears in her eyes as she describes filing a case against her father and testifying against her brother in court, and as she recalls many members of her family turning against her. But when she saw her half-brother jailed for life, she says, "I knew that this was justice."
This is taking way too long - there's too much to write about - I took so many interviews, and I think they're all fascinating! In her UP office a polisci professor explains to me the complex dynamics between the different members of the leftist movement. In a garage office, young activists with the youth movement explain why they stopped studying in order to fight for the right of others to study. While one talks, the others take smoking breaks. In the familiar-feeling setting of a small, private, religious college, a young woman from a wealthy background talks about a documentary that she watched as a teenager and that turned from her from a life of complacency to one of advocacy. (Documentary-makers of the world, take heart!) In a nice restaurant, I convince three community organizers - who work full-time and for free - to let me buy them dinner, and the three of them split one entree as they explain the challenges facing poor Filipinas. In what must be the world's fanciest Pizza Hut, C. explains her work educating young people on gender issues and counseling survivors of sex trafficking. After the interview, I ask her boyfriend, who has been playing with his iphone the whole time, if he, too, identifies as a feminist - and he gets a deer-in-the-headlights look, stutters, says, "I'm working on it." Over hot chocolate and pancakes, A. explains that radical nuns brought her to the world of feminist theory.
The congresswoman fell just short in the elections - in her office, the boxes are already being packed. While I wait for our appointment, a news crew comes in to shoot video of the moving-out process. Halfway through the interview, she is pleased when I ask why she, personally, supports the reproductive health bill, and says, "you know, that's a question the bishops never ask. They make many personal attacks, but don't ask personal questions." At the end of the interview, I show her a letter to the editor I clipped the other day, a priest writing that condoms are "intrinsically evil" and encourage the people to become "pleasure-loving" instead of morally responsible. She sighs as she reads, then throws up her hands and says, "Pleasure-loving! How dare the people love pleasure! There must be no pleasure, at all!" and I laugh, but she shakes her head in disgust.
I am talking to two advocates for legal rights of women, and ask how they got in this line of work. One says, "I came from a very normal family, you know?" and explains how she started doing research here because she needed a job, and got inspired by the things she learned. The other laughs and says, "well, I came from a family that was normal for me, but for me, normal included a lot of violence." And she explains how her father beat her mother, and her brothers abused her, literally dragging her home from school when they caught her talking to boys, and how her battered mother cried and blamed the children, and how she later saw her mother attempt suicide in front of her. And since we've been talking about "normal," I ask, "when did you realize that this level of violence wasn't normal?" and she said, "i went to girl scout camp, and we were all telling funny stories, and when I told mine - normal stories, you know, for me, 'and then he hit me here, and threw me there, and I FLEW across the room and hit the wall, you should have seen it' and they started crying! And I was like, 'why are you crying?'" And she laughs, and the other activist and I try to laugh, too, but don't quite manage it.
C's face is perfectly calm. "I just wanted to understand - why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this? And when I joined this organization, I finally understood that it wasn't me. It wasn't my fault. It is the whole system." She starts to smile, just a bit. "And I was finally able to forgive him."
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