AN Irish woman, Cris Mulvey, lived in a Manila slum in the course of preparing the superb Education Study Pack on the Philippines which is available to Irish schools. The people hung plastic bags filled with rubbish at the door of the but where she slept, in the hope that would keep the rats busy all night and they would not come in.
The women used to search the garbage dumps. They would squeeze the very last bits of toothpaste from what tubes they could find into a jam jar. Then one of them would stand on the street maybe for days - trying to sell the jam Jar.
This is the context in which the buying and selling of Filipino bodies must be placed. The throwaway children of the Philippines have been lost, or abandoned, or have run away from intolerable homes, or were displaced by huge disasters such as flood and famine and volcanic eruption, or fled local wars, or abandoned physical environments so depleted that humans could no longer sustain life in them.
The cities are swollen with resourceless people who have come in from the country. The supply of their women and boys and girls and children meets the demand from foreigners. They see that they can readily, easily, get money in exchange for being used. Good money to them: nothing to the men who pay.
A French national, arrested last month and accused of sexually molesting young boys - he said he was a tourist, but in his room there were photos of nude children, unprocessed film and a cosmetic gel - had paid the equivalent of £2 to have a boy perform oral sex on him. A bar girl will be paid perhaps £5 for a night with a man. According to one of the many Australian owners of bars in the former American Clark Air Base city of Angeles - now a sex tourism city - the Philippines "is still the cheapest f..k in the world".
Children who were once throwaways come home from school to the sheltered house - Father Shay Cullen's Preda Foundation - where they live, high above the tropical beauty of Subic Bay. They straggle up the path between flowering bushes, dragging their schoolbags after them, neat as pins in their uniforms. They look like any cared for kids. But there are the brothers, Richard and Francis: mother very sick from working in bars when the US Marines were here. There is Irene: raped in kindergarten, then raped again by her stepfather, and then sold to a neighbour. Merlyn: abused by a foreign paedophile when she was 10. Gerry, a runaway: was earning £1.50 a night with foreign homosexuals in Manila. Franco: no one knows his name or where he is from Jordan and Jacky: AfroAmerasians: mother dead of TB.
There are twenty three more. And one who is special: Hazel is studying psychology and hopes to be a therapist. She was sexually abused by her father. The unusual thing is that he is in jail - the first Filipino father to be jailed for incest.
This triumph on the domestic front for Father Cullen's crusade against child abusers will perhaps soon be matched by the first conviction in the Philippines of a foreign paedophile. The priest and his helpers spend a lot of time now gathering evidence with hidden cameras and tape recorders. They are involved with 25 cases to do with under age sex, eight of which are active. In the courtroom in Olongapo City - where until recently 16,000 prostitutes serviced American sailors, and "everything" was on offer - it is hard to assert the dignity of a child. Yet that was what the senior social worker from the Preda Foundation was doing a few weeks ago when she stood in the dock and patiently recounted - harassed all the way by defence counsel - the details of the rescue of one child from one paedophile.
By being there in court she was reversing the values of the seedy town around her. She was saying that using children for an adult's sexual gratification does matter, even if the children are only unwanted paupers whom the police routinely imprison for being homeless, and even if the man was a foreigner and relatively wealthy. The Philippines have been so long the colonial possession of others - the Spanish. the Americans, the Japanese that it is nearly impossible to assert the value of a native child. But this is what is asserted when the law is invoked against a child abuser.
Other foreign men come to the Philippines, but to help. There are many other expressions of compassion beside the Preda Foundation's. In just one district of metro Manila, a French priest shelters about 100 former child prostitutes. There is a married Irish priest, Father Ed Kelly, who 30 years ago threw his lot in with 25,000 squatters who were rounded up in Manila and dumped in a wilderness, 30 miles away.
Over the years, he and they dug wells, built houses, opened schools and clinics, trained young people in skills. Such work strikes at the heart of the monster, poverty. So does political work - like the anti establishment stands Father Niall O'Brien and other religious sustain - which confront the causes of social injustice instead of offering relief to its symptoms.
BUT taking on the corrupt judicial system, on behalf of children and young people, raises the possibility of a transformation of part of the Filipino self image. It asks Filipinos to take power for themselves not to keep conferring it on outsiders. Up to now, the state just deported paedophiles. Insisting on taking cases in a Filipino court means insisting that the words of justice and public life in the Philippines is full of fine words - have a meaning. This point is worth making even if actual convictions are never secured.
The challenges he mounts have made Father Cullen very unpopular. He was a welcome figure in Olongapo City when he concentrated on rehabilitating drug addicts, and when his only impact on the local economy was the small trade in handicrafts he organised. He was even allowed to sell his co op's craftware inside the Subic Bay US Naval Base which was, for decades, the size of a large and very prosperous town. He was on friendly terms with the local ruling family, the Gordons - one Gordon is the local Congressman: his father was Mayor of Olongapo until he was assassinated; his nephew is a councillor, his brother's wife is Mayor of Olongapo, and his brother is director of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority. The important post here is director of the SBMA (the economic zone which the former naval base has become). While much of the rest of the Philippines may have hardly anything left to plunder, the SBMA promises profit on a Marcos scale.
The base is synonymous with exploitation. And not just of the women and children whose degradation underlay its "Sin City" days, but of the US soldiers many of them less privileged Chicano and black Americans who were obliged by macho convention to "sin".
Now the place is half way to a new exploitative role. It is eerie at night - spreading around the great bay on its dark hills half lit up by fairy lights, half black as pitch. The McDonald's is boarded up and ghostly. Hundreds of ranch style homes for officers line dark roads through what was virgin jungle where the fires of the tribes people who live further back flicker through the trees. There are golf courses, a 9,000 foot runway, a VIP hospital - the whole thing a legacy from Uncle Sam worth $3 billion or more.
The new SBMA has been given all kinds of exemptions from such planning and employment laws as exist. But there aren't many post naval base jobs yet. An enlisted men's barracks has become a hotel. The former Officer's Club is a casino. A road is being gouged through the forest to facilitate the heads of state who will be staying at Subic Bay for this year's APEC summit. After that display, all the money making opportunities the base presents will be opened to well placed cronies. Bad publicity for Olongapo, such as Shay Cullen can attract, is not welcome.
Already, the cycle of injustice, which in the end leads inexorably to the prostitution of the most powerless, is back in place. The Americans left excellent housing for 10,000 people. The surrounding area is full of the shanties of Filipinos made homeless by volcano, typhoon and flood. But the housing is being sold to the rich. There are huge duty free shops in operation. Filipino people stream down the avenue to the base's gates, past what was once an unbroken kilometre of sex bars, to pass through heavy security to buy American goods, or perhaps goods landed from the Taiwanese and Chinese ships that anchor in the bay. Filipino business is harmed.
The place is kept spic and span by "volunteers". These are unpaid workers who, after six months or so cutting grass with a shears, say, for no pay at all, will be entitled to get a job for themselves or for a family member. All over Olongapo City, big painted notices from the Gordons thank the "volunteers".
A recent visitor from the International Monetary Fund is quoted in the Subic Freeport newspaper as offering special congratulations to the 8,000 volunteers. "To see the degree of commitment, the degree of solidarity and also the high level of discipline," IMF deputy managing director M. Outtara said, "among those who are working for several months without pay and gradually getting into the paid labour market is a route that can cut down unemployment and also help the "welfare of the people at large. I think it will be a source of inspiration for me." It may, however, strike others as the most gross exploitation of a local population already disempowered by the years of easy money and easy virtue with the Americans. Not to mention, the very apogee of capitalism.
FATHER Cullen is barred from the base. His work harms not just its image in the world but the self image of the local oligarchs. He first started to expose child prostitution around the base in 1982 when he was tipped off that a number of small children had VD and gonorrhea. The authorities didn't want to know. They didn't want any difficulties in their relationship with the Americans. Olongapo City was booming at the time, with money coming in from "swindling, prostitution, pimping, begging and vending," a Filipino man who worked in the base told me. "And all this was accepted. Street children were the most abused sector. They were jailed - 300 at a time would be jailed. Then there was one incident. A child was beaten by a security guard for looking for food in a garbage can, outside a restaurant. Shay went down and filed charges." This man works with Father, Cullen and the Preda Foundation now.
Irish priests are not, however, the answer to the complex Filipino problem. The people of the Philippines themselves, who have already demonstrated their strength and courage in the long struggle that brought about the non violent revolution symbolised by Cory Aquino, have the only answer within them. But the choice to approach the answer has been made nearly impossible by crushing poverty. And anti prostitution campaigners are up against a world system so powerfully sexist and racist that the debasing of poor women and girls who are not white produces no great out rage.
It seems normal enough to the world that stick thin 14 year olds should stand on the corners of hot, foreign streets in boots and miniskirts - the uniform of "provocation". It is only when their small sisters and brothers - still in nappies, maybe - are part of the same sex scene that sentiment is aroused. Yet "it is from the prostitution of the women that all the rest springs," Cris Mulvey says. How can we recognise our responsibilities in this? How can we respond?
