06-JAN-B-11
THE
DEPARTURE DAY FROM PHILIPPINES
AFTER A VISIT TO GEORGE GARCIA IN HIS “ASIAN
HOSPITAL” AND A TOUR WITH DR. “JUN” GARCIA INCLUDING A STOP AT FRONTIER MISSION AND A HORSE DRAWN CARRIAGE TOUR OF
THE HISTORIC “INTRAMUROS” OF MANILA BEFORE THE PAL 104 FLIGHT FROM MNL TO SFO
January
30A—30-B, 2006
Welcome
to the “Two Mondays” of January 30 A and B for a day starting out in Shalom Center
and a tour all around Manila, followed by the
same day spent over the Pacific through two sunsets arriving in San Francisco and
transferring up to North Bay Santa Rosa to check in at the Sonoma Hilton in
Wine Country.
So,
for orientation—or better still “occidentalization”---of your bearings on these
two Mondays, I began at Manila 14* 36. 70 N and 121* 00.70 EAST and have
wound up after PAL 104 from MNL to SFO to arrive at Santa Rosa in Sonoma County
Wine Country SONO at 38* 28.39 N and 122* 43.46 WEST. So, I may be across a continent form
being on my East Coast home, but I am still exactly halfway around the world
from where I started on my earlier Monday 1/30A as I am now a 1/30B
Californian.
I
began my day(s) in the Shalom
Center from which I
checked out in US dollars. The rates have doubled since my earlier visits here,
now reaching the high point
of $26.50—so you can see why I have a Mayfield Guest House Nairobi staging area
and a Shalom Center Base in my Philippine missions. I mailed my last cards which I had bought at
too-high a price on Corregidor and checked out
with Dr. “Jun” Garcia carrying me around all day. He is a surgeon eager to participate in a
mission with me as was the case with Reagan Espina from Leyte
on my earlier trips, a good friend of his.
Jun has taken the Board exams a couple of times and would benefit from
the SOS book, which I hope to send him along with the SHDW book which I will
print out another time. I went with him
to MNL where he phoned his friend in the PAL office who came to meet me as I
checked my two bags in and got my boarding pass with seat assignment, carrying
my carryon bags only from this point to the takeoff over twelve hours
later. His friend was very helpful and
checked my TWO Mabuhay numbers to be sure I got accredited with my mileage so
that I can achieve a free round trip to the Philippines by about the next
year’s missions.
WE
then went through a suburb of a rpaid expansion in Manila
to the Asian Hospital
a first world standards facility which George Garcia from the Washington Hospital
Center has run since its opening
three years ago. George is “retiring”
meaning he will cut back form over a thousand coronary bypasses each year to
maybe seven hundred or so! He it was who
did Keith Carr’s bypass and about every other one in Washington DC, since he
ran a “factory” of a dozen hearts a day with my former residents Paul Corso,
Lou Mispereta, Lou Canda and a large team working with him. He also has a charitable arm of the
foundation he runs which is Asian Heart Foundation. I was supposed to meet with him and Juan
Montero, but the latter was stuck in Cebu for
another day and called in. He and I were
to see the woman who is the Rotary president and the biggest newspaper
publisher in the Philippines
who would help us get the ten thousand gallons of diesel fuel to run the 185
foot San Juan SAR ship to Palowan and to set up a mission through this vessel
under PFP in the coming year. But, we
had a good visit with George Garcia who took us around his state of the art
heart facility, and showed us the 30% turnover in Philippine nurses who have an
annual salary of $4,000 here and can go to his unit in DC to do exactly the
same thing for the same surgeons for ten times that figure. Thus it is that ALL the nurses in Washington Hospital Center
heart program turn out to be Philippine—and many of the nurses there were
doctors here!
We
left to go for a “fried fat” lunch (I see why the coronary business in booming
in rapidly Westernizing Philippines!) and then Jun had to go to his feeding
program board meeting, while I read Juanny Montero’s autobiography “Halfway
Through.” We then went to visit his
friend in an all-volunteer program called the “Frontier Mission” which is an
evangelism of Moslem countries. Sumatra is the largest unevangelized island in the world,
and it is easier for the brown Philippine to get in there than a white
Westerner, so they have five teams ready to go.
They also have Pakistani and Afghanistan
missions, many of them in Kandahar. I put them in touch with both Rick manning of
Project Concern and then also with Don and Martheen and their friend the
converted Imam from Dacca Bangladesh. So, we have common interests in Islamic
areas, including the South Cotabato areas of Philippines.
We
then drove around the downtown area of Manila
in his diesel Pajero SUV to the Intramuros old Spanish capital. In a horse drawn carriage we toured all
around the Intramuros Historic preservation area with four universities and
their students milling about, the Manila cathedral twenty years younger than
the St. Augustin Cathedral, the Philippines’
first church built in 1571. A wedding
was in progress, as I clip-clopped way in my horse cart from the same era as
the church’s construction. We saw the dungeons
the Spanish used, the place where Dr. Rizal, the founding George Washington of
the Philippines,
executed by the Spanish, and the balluarte fortress walls where Douglas Macarthur
and his friend President Quezon stayed during the WW II.
We
had gone around the billboard laden freeways of the new and glitzy manila
consumer society, in the shadow of which lived the street people and squatters
who have mushroomed evening Makati, a plush urban center with all the designer
labels shown in glamorous ads over their bewildered heads. We stopped in the new areas of reclaimed land
form Manila Bay, all of it not yet finished as
welders and workers were putting the last touches on the Government insurance Building,
the Senate building and huge malls for the consumerism that is the rising deity
of the Philippine state. It is good to
see that folk like Jun have medical missions in mind despite the glamour of the
consumer labels advertised all around them.
THE PAL 104
FLIGHT THROUGH TWO SUNSETS
I
entered the queue for emigration and uneventfully boarded the plane. There was a very large Philippine woman
sitting in my seat brandishing her four footed cane and not about to move. When I pointed out that she had my window
seat, she said, in an attempt to show that she knew no English, “You want to
sit there”—indicating the middle seat.
It was for this that I checked in to get the window seat twelve hours
ago? I gave my boarding pass to the
stewardess and said “We all have assigned seats!” She then dumped all her things on the aisle
seat in time to have an African American San Francisco bound woman “nobody
gonna diserespect me by rollin’ her eyes at me!” announce that there was no way she was going
to sit next to this woman. So, in the
majestic dumb silence of someone oblivious of the language, she moved into seat
29 C with an open seat between us into which she piled her stuff. This flight, however, like almost all 747 PAL
flights is completely full, so the stewardess went to the rear of the plane and
brought forward a Tagolog speaking patient and sat her in the seat 29 C and
moved the big Mama over to the middle seat, whereupon she gradually shifted all
her stuff into my lap, leaning over the armrest to my side, and then
establishing her cane in my space. As
the flight went along, however, my choice of seat was fortunate since I never
left it and she got up to make here cumbersome way to the restroom, whether or
not the seat belt sign was on, at least a half dozen times crawling over the
luckless 20C occupant, whereas I stayed hunkered down and trying to nap. I bagged the movie –Reese Witherspoon
again—and read more of the Juanny Montero book on his career form the bamboo
hut in the Cagayan del Norte of Mindanao to his role as a pillar of Norfolk
surgery practice
I would have enough to do at
arrival in San Francisco that I did not want to
get into a shoving contest with an imperious dowager form the Philippines,
and waited as she got a wheelchair escort out to the immigration point as we landed. As soon as she saw she was in a row of
wheelchair passengers awaiting escorts to take her in to customs, she rose to
her feet and carrying her cane, pushed to the head of the line. Infirmity can be a useful offensive strategy
if cleverly marshaled for effect if not already blown as a cover. I do not feel especially guilty about
re-claiming my assigned seat for a cane wielding woman less elderly than I!
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