My next door neighbors were robbed recently. One of them was an Iranian student at Silliman–who lost several thousand dollars in U.S. cash.
Another woman lost her I-pad, her laptop, her jewelry, and anything else that looked valuable and could be carried away. She was very upset.
As it happened, this woman owned the building. It was already surrounded by high walls and barred gates, but the walls weren’t high enough or sharp enough to discourage an invasion, so she hired this crew to add more bars.
They were banging and welding for almost a week, and now the building is safer, surrounded by sharp yellow steel teeth, cut off from the streets and land around it. When you look out the window, what you see are bars.
In the barangays here, theft is regarded as a minor crime, and is more or less taken for granted. If not watched, your sheets and shirts will disappear from the clothesline. After a party in your house, good things are always missing.
For foreigners who come to live here it takes some time to adjust to this.
Of course, theft happens in western countries- pockets are picked, houses are looted, -but not by people close to you, friends and helpers, as happens here.
Often the people involved don’t even think of this as stealing:
“Do you know what happened to my other cell phone? I can’t find it.”(smile)- “Oh, I just borrowed it for a while.” (giggle)
The theory seems to be: “You have much more than you need, and I have much less. Whatever I take from you, you can certainly manage without it. I’m only trying to help myself, my children, my family. Is that wrong?”
Under the circumstances, you have to treat anyone much poorer than you with suspicion all the time. It’s kind of like the situation that developed in the hippy communes in the ‘60s: Peace, love, flowers, -and hide your valuables.
I was watching an American movie with a family here. The camera was moving slowly down a typical middle class suburban tree-lined street- houses set back with lawns, cars in driveways.
In front of one house, kids were running on the grass, tossing a baseball back and forth. The little girl beside me stared at the screen with surprise “They don’t have any walls or fences around their houses!”, she said
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Author’s email: john.stevenson299@gmail.com
