Losing Steam

Santa Fe

My ninth reflection.

A few days ago my translators and I rode a jeep out to Santa Fe, a small farming community about an hour away from Tacloban.  The town was a collection of houses surrounded by rice paddies and connected by a two-lane highway, and because the sun had finally emerged after several days of rain the locals had spread their harvest on the asphalt to dry.  Buffaloes sloshed through the water on either side of us. The weather was hot and shade was hard to come by; welcome refreshments were provided by groups of boys who had climbed up santol trees along the road and would toss down fresh pieces of fruit.

friendly harvesters

This free fruit fascinated me.  Who planted these trees?  Who tended to them?  Why weren’t these boys in school?  We didn’t locate any lenders in Santa Fe (an interesting finding in itself), but that afternoon as we very slowly rolled back to Tacloban on a bouncing and baking jeepney my head was still buzzing with questions. 

rice on the highway

I wouldn’t say that I’ve lost interest in loan sharks, but my energy for the project has definitely waned.  Part of the apathy is due to the extremely lukewarm reception from most of the lenders in Tacloban (the few of them who do seem to enjoy talking to me spend most of the time proselytizing, one of them to such an extent that I had to feign a bathroom emergency just to get out of the house), part of it is due to the hours of mind-numbing office work that accompany each interview, but mostly it’s because there are so many other interesting things to investigate here.  Last Tuesday, for instance, my translators and I camped out in the central market for several hours.  We found some lenders but much more interesting was the row of flamboyantly gay chicken butchers who sang along to American pop music as they separated the bird carcasses.  The most outgoing one was a twenty-year old named Mario; if we wanted to find him after dark, he told us unnecessarily, we should ask around for Marianne.

These fruit-picking truants and cross-dressing butchers are an entertaining diversion from my work.  But are they, I wonder, interesting because they are a diversion?  If I had been sent to the Philippines to research homosexual culture, for example, would I have shaken my head when I met these guys and thought ‘oh no, another drag queen butcher’?  Perhaps all research topics lose their luster as soon as the work begins.