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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