The Attacks Continue . . . .

In today's newspaper:

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This is the same mob that wreaked havoc on our project.  It seems there's no stopping them.

Sensible Governance

In a country that has so many grindingly poor people this seems like an eminently sensible way to spend tax payer's money (NOT):

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What were they thinking?  And to place it on the side of an active volcano.  It defies belief.

Protection Racket

I don't know if it's a case of intuition, foresight or experience but when we were awarded a project in Mindanao I decided that principally due to the security risks I would make the centre of our operations remote from the project.  There were other considerations: the possibility of several projects on the go at the same time meant that it would be more cost effective to have one administration centre, rather than one on each project; not having to move our office from project to project with an ever increasing amount of documentation and not having to dismantle and reassemble the IT set up definitely has it it's benefits

It wasn't a popular decision with the hierarchy but to me it made sense on so many levels.  I don't visit the project sites on a daily basis and don't really have the need to as we have a good team to manage the site works. I'm here for the project management and administration, not the day to day site management.

As you may be aware (if you've read earlier postings), to date I have visited the site in Mindanao (Taganito) on several occasions (I usually refer to it as Kidnap Central) in order to attend meetings, do presentations and generally take an overview of the site and how things are progressing.  I do think it's good to show your face to the workers and site staff occasionally, rather than being perceived as being a remote entity with the danger of appearing aloof from the coal face.  But my visitations have been scarce, partly due to it being a nigh on 3 day turnaround to get there and back from Subic, and hence my exposure to any security risk or threat has been minimised.

My understanding was that the significant threat was from a Moslem group called Abu-Sayyaf, whose modus operandi consists primarily of kidnapping foreigners for ransom and the occasional bomb attack.

What I didn't figure into the equation was the communist NPA (New People's Army) who decided to pay a visit to the project site in force last Monday morning (2nd Oct) and proceeded to wreck havoc.  You can read the press reports here:

• News Report 1
• News Report 2

From what I was told by our guys on site, around 200 "soldiers" of the NPA, consisting largely of 15, 16, 17 year olds carrying Armalite rifles, walked onto the site and immediately started to round up all the foreigners (mainly Japanese and Taiwanese) and herded them into one of the site offices.  Without doubt this would have caused some considerable anxiety.  The Filipino workers were told not to worry as the NPA were "against the corporations and not the people" - although that didn't stop them from reportedly shooting and killing 3 security guards in the process.  

They then proceeded to set fire to significant items of equipment, including dump trucks, cranes, barges and lorries and burnt down buildings and set fire to equipment.  And just for good measure they smashed all the computers.  We were incredibly fortunate in that most of our equipment was spared and the only damage we sustained was a bullet through the radiator and fuel tank of our crane lorry. 

Below are photos of the site in the aftermath:

The photo above is where they tried to blow up the boiler house for the power station.  They only succeeded in wrecking one of the legs and the structure remained standing.

Then when they had finished their acts of wanton vandalism, the NPA left the site apparently completely unmolested and with no attempt by the Philippine army or police to engage or counter attack them, thereby giving them a free hand to do exactly what they wanted, which amongst the cynical might lead them to suggest that the local police, politicians and army were complicit in the attacks.  Or were hiding under their beds

Once the NPA had left the locals population proceeded to loot the site.  Really, there is no hope.

The consensus of opinion is that the NPA are running a protection racket and because the mine owners either didn't or wouldn't pay they incurred the wrath of the supposed commies.

In the past, the mine owners had shipped all the raw materials to Japan for processing.  However, they had undertaken to do processing at the site, investing considerable sums of money in the building of a processing plant and power station, thus providing employment to a considerable number of locals.  At best that has now been significantly delayed and at worst will be cancelled.  Well done to the communist NPA, who purport to support the poor and exploited workers but have in affect removed the possibility of many earning a living or at best, caused many to lose wages as the mining operation have been suspended pending a review of security and replacement of damaged equipment.

In all this, the government has been conspicuous in its absence. I wonder if they will be compensating the mine owners for their damage and losses as surely this is an issue of national security. I very much doubt it.

For us, we're now left without a project to work on and we've had to stand down the vast majority of our labour.  It will certainly be weeks, if not months before the site gets back to some semblance of normality but in the meantime we'll just be twiddling our thumbs and wasting money in the process.

The Long Rain

"The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped."  

• The Long Rain - Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

It was just over a year ago that I was writing about the extended drought in Panay (see Water, Water Not Everywhere and Green, Green Grass of Home).  Now there's been an endless, ceaseless rain over the past 3 months.  It has rained most days and generally all day.  I can't remember the last time we had a sunny day.  In fact it has been raining so much of late that it reminded me of a book I'd read as a lad called The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.  It's a collection of short sci-fi stories with one entitled "The Long Rain"; the opening quotation at this posting is taken from that story.  Here's the synopsis:

A group of astronauts are stranded on Venus, where it rains continually and heavily. The travelers make their way across the Venusian landscape to find a "sun dome", a shelter with a large artificial light source. However, the first sun dome they find has been destroyed by the native Venusians. Searching for another sun dome, the characters, one by one, are driven to madness and suicide by the unrelenting rhythm of the rain. At the end of the story, only one sane astronaut remains and manages to find a functional sun dome.

I don't know what my equivalent of a sun dome would be but it would have been nice to find it here.

I must admit, I don't think I appreciated the book back then as much as I might if I re-read it now.  Of the short stories it was The Long Rain which sticks in my memory as being particularly depressing, particularly when one of the astronauts becomes so despondent with the rain that he stops walking, tilts his head back and opens his mouth and slowly drowns.  Okay, so I don't feel like that but it can be pretty depressing when it's just grey and wet all the time.

And getting laundry dry has been a nightmare; the house is damp and mildew and mould are prevalent. I'm glad I made the investment of buying dry cabinets to protect my camera gear!

Drift wood washed up on the beach following the recent  typhoon

The people I feel the most sympathy for is the local farmers working the fields.  Already grindingly poor, they seem to have suffered more than most.  I know rice paddies are supposed to be flooded, well for part of the time at least, but they were never meant to be submerged under 5 ft of water for weeks on end.

And then, when there seems to be a respite in the weather the farmers start working the fields again, only for them to be completely inundated soon after.

Then last week this culminated in typhoon Nalgae hitting the region on the 26th September followed by a lessor one the following weekend.  Nalgae was very severe.   I woke up on the Tuesday morning having slept through the worst of the storm the night before (large quantities of beer probably contributed to my slumber but it's also a reflection of the quality of the house I live in, built by the American military).

I was up at 7:30am and feeling rather foggy from the booze the night before.  I went out to the front of the house and my neighbour Barry was just passing the driveway.  "Where are you going?" he asked.  "To work", I said, "some of us have a job to to".   "You're not going anywhere, there's a tree across the road".  And so there was.  So I went back to bed for a couple of hours.  At 10am the power went off and stayed off for the rest of the day.

Later that morning I decided to try and head out again and the tree blocking our road had been chopped up although some large branches were still blocking the road, so I jumped out of the car and in horizontal rain dragged the mossy branches out of the road and I was already I was soaked, mucky and covered in twigs not having travelled 50 yards.  I headed off in the usual direction but at the guard house I was stopped and told the road was impassable due to fallen trees and power lines (that would explain the power cuts), so I headed out on another route.

The garden covered in debris from the storm

This route was also blocked by a small tree.  The car in front of me stopped.  I stopped and then 3 cars stopped behind me.  I was thinking that the tree wasn't going to move itself but no one seemed willing to tackle the problem.  Then a car from the opposite direction pulled up and an expat jumped out.  Seeing that there was someone else willing to give it go, I got out into the horizontal rain too and met him in the road, where we agreed to have a go at dragging the tree out of the way.  No one else offered to help, they all just sat in their cars and watched us.  Worst than that, once we had dragged it out of the way and were thoroughly soaked through all the other cars sailed past without so much as a thank you or even an acknowledgement.

That day I had to head to Clark to drop colleagues off at the airport.  The road out of Subic Bay was nigh impassable from fallen trees, flooding and downed power lines.  It all rather reminded me of the morning of the hurricane that hit the UK in 1997 and trying to get to work the same day.

The road to Clark from Subic

But to give credit where credit is due, the local authority has done a sterling job in clearing up and within a few days all was back to relative normalcy (or what passes as normalcy in the Philippines).