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Life of a Reef
The air is thick with the smell of dead fish, freshly
caught and iced, but already beginning to stink in the blistering
heat. It’s 9 AM, but the day is already in full swing. Any
residual coolness of the morning is long gone, and sun is beating
down on the wet and cracked concrete, turning the air thick and
heavy. The Municipal Fish Port of Mercedes, or more accurately,
according to the partial
sign, the
… cipal Fish Port,
…des, Camarines Norte
is bustling with people and crates of fish, ice and seawater. It
is the sort of wonderful, ordered chaos that can only be found at
a market. There are scales and hagglers and heavy buckets of water,
awkwardly sloshing between sun-darkened, shirtless men as they waddle
up the wet concrete ramp to the covered market shed. Men slide blocks
of ice across the slimy concrete, chop them and mix them with seawater,
and then use them to chill and rinse the overflowing plastic baskets
of fish. The pace is busy but not frantic, and a few men, presumably
already exhausted from a full day’s worth of work, sit idly
in the shade and watch the hubbub.
From where we stand, crowded into the shade with
our bags, trying not to interfere too much, the fish themselves
are not all that impressive. There are buckets filled with them,
but almost without exception, they are rather small and unremarkable.
The statistics about chronic over-fishing seem very plausible.
A number of small to mid-size bangkas are crowded
at the base of the concrete ramp, anchored to metal rings and to
each other. Except for two modern, out-of-place, fiberglass motorboats,
every watercraft here is a bangka, or long, thin outrigger. For
most boats, even up to 30 feet long, the hull is made from a single
hollowed-out log, perhaps 18 inches across. Slightly flared plywood
panels rise up from this, so that sides are almost waist-deep, but
still no more than two and a half feet wide. At the bow and stern
they come together in a thin edge and draw up sharply in a slightly
ornamental way, like a significantly more seaworthy gondola. It’s
a sleek and efficient design, but also one that won’t remain
vertical, so at two or possibly three places, wooden or bamboo crosspieces
are laid perpendicular to the hull, jutting out seven to ten feet
on either side. Toward their ends, they bend toward the water, slightly
in the front, and dramatically toward the rear. A single bamboo
outrigger four or five inches long is then lashed to these crosspieces,
often with thick fishing line. When viewed endwise from a distance,
the outriggers give a bangka the appearance of a giant waterbug,
its legs delicately splayed on the surface. I don’t know that
you could exactly call the result stable—the occupants still
have to carefully alternate which gunwale they sit on—but
it works. And to boot, the bangkas are fast, track well, and only
draw a few inches of water, so they can easily slide over the reefs.
Anchored a few meters farther out in the bay, larger, commercial
bangkas are essentially just scaled-up versions. Their hulls are
more traditionally paneled, and their outriggers, while still lengths
of bamboo, are often made of five or six pieces each. They are decorated
in brilliant swirls of red, and vaguely remind me of dragons at
a Chinese New Year celebration.
The Institute of Social Order (ISO), has its own
two-toned teal and white bangka. In addition to transporting staff,
the “Bantay Sanctuaryo” (Sanctuary Guardian) banner
on the side reveals its primary purpose to serve as a patrol boat
for the fish sanctuaries that ISO has set up in the area. Today,
it is apparently in need of a few spare parts, so the five of us
who have come from Manila get to observe the fish port for half
an hour, while the local coordinator, Mike, gets the bangka in order.
Forty-five minutes of bangka riding later, the
pace of the scene is completely different. In Camarines Norte, ISO’s
base is on Quinapaguian Island, the former bastion of illegal fishing
in the area. In contrast to the other nearby islands, Quinapaguian
is perfectly flat, a strip of white sand and green palms set on
a wide, shallow reef. Mike cuts off the motor, and we glide onto
the beach next to half a dozen other bangkas. We then follow him
along a flat, sandy path to the ISO staff house. Quinapaguian is
home to only 140 families, and with the exception of a few roosters,
it is startlingly quiet. The staff house, it turns out, is “downtown.”
In a surprising break from the hard-packed footpath, there is a
narrow concrete road, maybe 100 meters long, and then two closed-in,
concrete courtyards. The first is the basketball court, where half
a dozen kids are playing, and the other is the baranguy hall, essentially
the town council building. This sudden prevalence of concrete is
perplexing, especially on the road because a couple of ailing bicycles
are the only wheeled transportation on the island. The ISO staff
house is an understated, tin-roofed house made half of concrete
and half of woven bamboo on a wooden frame. There is, of course,
no water, but the communal water pump is in the baranguy courtyard,
right in front. The main room of the house is partitioned into a
couple of smaller ones, each with its own cot. As the ISO’s
director warned, it is fairly “primitive,” but I suspect
it is also the nicest accommodation on the island.
Just after dark, the power suddenly turns on in
the staff house. Ochog, a longtime staff member and clearly the
center of ISO’s Camarines project, explains that the power
is privately generated from a building about 50 meters away. The
real purpose of the generator is revealed a few minutes later when
the relative quiet of the island is broken by the blasts of a karaoke
machine. A few minutes later, I discover that this source of both
power and entertainment has a competitor, as a second karaoke machine
blares from a few meters in the opposite direction. The staff house
seems to be directly in the crossfire.
Karaoke (or videoke, as it is known in the Philippines) is essentially
the national pastime. And in places as isolated as Quinapaguian,
it is also the only pastime. To my great surprise, my co-workers
have actually have turned me into a willing—occasionally even
eager—participant, and I’ve learned that being in the
center of a videoke duel can be excruciating.
Even if the singing weren’t off-key, or the
tunes such poor electric imitations, there would still be something
unfortunate about the ubiquitous speakers and TV screens. The Philippines
must have its own musical traditions, but outside of a few left-leaning
cafés in Manila, I have yet to see them. On the whole, Quinapaguian
Island feels far removed from the glossy, powerful, homogenizing
grip of consumer pop culture that seems to saturate the air of Manila.
But as videoke shows, it is not as far as removed as it seems, as
American and Filipino pop culture is diffused completely through
the videoke bars. And really, that’s probably a good thing.
Much as it may grate on my ears or disrupt my idyllic notion of
an “enchanting island paradise” (to borrow the newly
trademarked slogan from the Mercedes office of tourism), videoke
brings a little bit of modernity, leisure and joy to this place
that is poor even by the standards of one of the poorest regions
of the Philippines.
I’m never exactly sure how poverty is measured.
Depending on the location, the Philippine government says people
make 8,000-12,000 pesos a month, which is about $145-220. It was
hard to get exact numbers, but clearly fishermen here come nowhere
near that threshold. The ones we interviewed said they made, at
best, about 3,000 pesos a month, and even that is only during the
nine months when fishing is relatively easy. So that’s about
$65 dollars, barely more than $2 a day, and in the remaining months,
their income is essentially zero. It’s definitely poor, but
it’s twice the rather arbitrary “dollar a day”
threshold set by the United Nations. In some parts of the world,
perhaps $2 is enough to no longer be living in poverty, but that
clearly isn’t the case in the Philippines. Still, it’s
probably easier to stretch a peso in Quinapaguian than in Manila.
But regardless of the specific numbers, money doesn’t seem
like a very accurate way to understand poverty, especially with
a group like fishermen, where much of their catch is used for subsistence,
rather than retail.
Still, the debate may be purely academic. Numbers
aside, it is clear that people here are very poor. Ochog brought
that hard reality home when we discussed the changing seasons and
their impact on fishing. The water was already starting to get cloudy,
he said, and by November it would be too rough to fish. And even
if there were a calm enough day for the bangkas, there would be
almost nothing to catch. This lean season could continue all the
way through February. When I pressed him about how people got by,
he told me that they sold what few fish they could catch, and got
by on almost nothing but rice gruel. Suddenly, “Enchanting
Island Paradise” took on a decidedly ironic ring.
Bad as it is, though, things seem less desperate,
less hopeless here than they do in Manila. People have a livelihood
here, and they seem proud of it. There are gardens and hedges along
the sandy paths of the island, and occasional flowers in flowerpots
made from old tires. These little beautifications don’t make
the water safe to drink, the rice gruel any more nourishing, or
health care and education any more accessible, but they are not
meaningless either. They suggest that people have a sense of dignity
and pride and at least a little bit of control over their lives.
At least on the surface, it’s a striking contrast to the squatters’
areas of Manila, with children begging on the streets or men wading
through the foul, oily, chest-deep canals of the Pasig River just
to collect plastic bottles from among the floating trash and sell
them for a few centavos. Obviously, there are reasons why these
people come to Manila, but it is hard to imagine that migrating
to these slums is an improvement in their standard of living.
Back on Quinapaguian, it turns out that videoke
is just the beginning of our night. After joining a few locals at
one of the bars (though it seems that most residents just “appreciate”
from afar), we head not to bed, but down to the beach, and onto
the bangka. Tonight, we will get to use the boat for its intended
function, patrolling the fish sanctuary with the Bantay Dagat (literally
“guardians of the sea,” a volunteer enforcement patrol).
The sanctuary is on the edge of the reef, a little less than a kilometer
north of the island. During the day, the clear line of sight makes
the fishing ban fairly easy to enforce. But much of the fishing
here is done at night, as are almost all of the sanctuary violations.
It is a perfectly moonless and almost cloudless night, and the sky
has more stars than I think I have ever seen. As we cut off all
flashlights and wordlessly push the bangka off of the beach, the
water flashes with thousands of tiny phosphorescent lights, mirroring
the thousands of lights above us. For the first time since very
early morning, the air is no longer hot and sticky. We take off
our white shirts to be less visible, and as we motor out to the
sanctuary, cutting a soft, phosphorescent trough through the water,
the breeze comes in waves that alternately cool and warm us.
At the sanctuary, we kill the motor and descend
into almost complete silence. With the exception of occasional,
hushed whispers of potential sightings, the only sound is the soft
lapping of the waves. We wait like this for maybe 45 minutes when
the whispers gain a certain urgency and several of the Bantay Dagat
members start pointing off the starboard side of the bangka. As
I strain to see in the darkness, I realize that I have only the
vaguest idea of where we are at all, and it amazes me that we have
been able to find the barely marked sanctuary with such ease and
confidence.
Suddenly, the engine roars to life and several
powerful flashlights are turned on. It still looks to me like we
are rushing blindly into the night, but sure enough, a small bangka
emerges from the darkness with one man in it and another in the
water beside him. He is spear-fishing inside the sanctuary. We tie
the smaller bangka to ours, and the man in the water is ordered
onto our boat. They speak in Bicol, the local language, and I don’t
understand much of what is said. Apparently though, there are extensive
negotiations as the man tries to plead his case as a law-abiding
citizen who accidentally slipped into the sanctuary. The latter
part of his argument seems suspect, considering how well the locals
know the area, but he is a first-time offender so no one is quite
sure how to proceed. Somewhat comically, the final authority keeps
getting passed from one person to another, and no one seems to want
the burden. In the end, though, it turns out that he is related
to one of the sanctuary volunteers, and this is the deciding factor—it
is important that the Bantay Dagat not project an image of favoritism.
The boat is tethered to ours and dragged back to the island, where
the patrols write the fisherman a ticket and confiscate his gear.
The next day, I have a chance to see the sanctuary
in daylight. It is my first time snorkeling, which is a surprisingly
awkward experience. But once I get the hang of it, I am able to
look at the reef and I am captivated. Though I’ve never actually
seen a reef before, it is quickly apparent that this one is not
in terribly good shape. The fish are beautiful, but there aren’t
very many of them, and they are all tiny—a few inches at most.
In some sections, the coral is broken or gone, and only a gray rubble
remains that is a tell-tale sign of dynamite fishing. Our interviews
on the shore have suggested a major drop in blast fishing, but looking
at the reef suggests that there is still a long way to go.
Ochog leads me over to another area of the reef.
Here, the pink coral is white at the tips. Then we reach an area
where the corals are entirely white, “bleached,” and
dead. On the shore, Ochog tells me that the bleached coral has nothing
to do with dynamite or cyanide or illegal fishing in the sanctuary.
The bleaching is a result of global warming.
It is a sobering thought. Even if we can solve
all the local problems, weed out all the corruption and convince
all of the fishermen to fish sustainably, it could all be for naught.
All the work that ISO and countless other groups are doing may be
rendered completely irrelevant by global change. In this light,
the spear fisher in the sanctuary starts to seem much more like
a victim than a perpetrator.
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