If you were to take all of the 7000 islands of the Philippines and cram them together, the combined land area would resemble that of Kansas or New Mexico. It's not a big country. However, recent census figures estimate the population to be around 95 million people, give or take a few million due to all of the people squatting on government land and without birth records. Upon arriving here as a volunteer, I had two nagging questions concerning these figures.
1) How in the world do you cram that many people into that small of an area and expect them to be able to live?
2) If Filipinos can coexist with that sort of population density, then we have a lot of potential for growth in the states where the population density is much lower, right?
When sitting watching the fishermen earlier make raw fish with vinegar (Kinilaw) for lunch, and nodding off with the fresh monsoon winds that were whipping against the floating guardhouse, I decided that now, at this point in my service, I have answers for these two questions.
Question 1: Filipinos are very social and are able to be happy in the tightest of conditions (Refer to Post #51 What Really Matters.) Natural resources, although greatly denuded here, are utilized to their entirety. Every single animal that lives here is eaten. There aren't any taboo animals, well, except for puffer fish, I can't figure that one out. Snakes, rodents, dogs, water buffalo, pigs, monkeys, lizards, and salamanders are all eaten, along with birds, poultry, fish, sharks, rays, squid, seaweed and a lot of other stuff. I think of the fat, healthy looking herbivorous groundhogs at home that people shoot and just let lay due to some sort of choosy taboo we have about eating rodent-looking animals. When a ray is caught in the ocean in the states, it is often thrown back even if it is dead, because we're just really choosy. One time, early in service, the family Dog of a fellow volunteer's host family got Tetanus and died. Within a day, a neighbor had come and carried it away to cook for supper for his family. No joke. People here eat fish heads, pig face (Sisig), pig and poultry feet, barnacles, all sorts of filter-feeding shellfish. Whatever isn't eaten, is given to the livestock pigs, and then in turn, those pigs are also eaten when they are of roasting size. Small filter fish are eaten raw and dried. People just don't have qualms about it. Ofcourse there are problems of over-harvesting of timber and fish here, along with pollution and soil conservation, but those are education-related issues it seems. For the food though, there is just very little waste, nutrients all enter and exit the cycle over and over again and this sustains a population that is incredibly too high for the land area it occupies. There is a general lack of money here, and lots of malnutrition, (too much rice, lack of protein, stuff like that). This high resource use is very different, I feel, from the situation in the America where there is incredible waste of food resources. We're really really picky, and I didn't really see that until I came here. An old lady whom we lived with for a couple months at the beginning of our service here in Babatngon pulled me aside one evening, her ancient withered hand yanking at the sleeve of my shirt, and huge false teeth gleaming white "You know, us Filipinos always say that we would never go hungry if we moved to America. We would just eat all the fish heads that you people throw away."
Question 2: No, Americans don't have a culture that would support this level of population density. We like our space, our autonomy too much, and there would be an all-out war if we attempted to squeeze 100 milllion people into New Mexico. It just wouldn't work. Filipinos though, thrive on closeness, on what I call crammed quarters. That's why you can get 45 fairly happy people into a the back of a pickup truck here without so much as a complaint. At a Peace Corps conference, my counterpart was placed in a big, nice hotel room with only one other person and she nearly freaked out, said that there were spirits in the room, and vowed to never stay in such a large area nearly alone again. Similarly, the family of 8 downstairs prefers to all sleep together in one little room instead of spreading out throughout the house like they could. It's just a really different mentality here. Closeness is comforting, space makes for intense loneliness. Most people agree that the population density here in the Philippines is way too high, but it continues to work for the most part because, although unsustainable in terms of jobs or livelihood, the culture makes it possible.
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