And when September goes, we shall all be counted

FEASTING on its national heroes on the last day of August, the country began counting its people on the first day of september.

It was census all over the archipelago. Except for a few places where the spread of Covid-19 was surging, the entire country was subjected to the national census of population. Even as two young man and woman were at our gate, the other households were also experiencing this intervention on a grand scale. You could hear the command: Go forth and count them all.

This census was supposed to take place in May but the pandemic halted everything—from schools to offices, from parties to the holy sacrifice of the Mass. And now this intervention was happening.

The last census in 2015 counted us at 100.9 million people. Under Spain, we would have been counted as souls. And yet, the colonial histories under Spain, then the United States of America always involved a kind of counting. Population was marked by colonizers because any decrease in the number of men could be a victory in the colonizer’s battle against the insurgents, or any noticeable diminishing in the general population could implicate the presence of diseases.

Even as late as 1912, the publication date of the book by James Blount, entitled the american occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912, the discrepant description of the Filipinos as colonized had not been altered. Blount who described himself in the book as “Officer of the United States Volunteers in the Philippines, 1899-1901” and “United States District Judge to the Philippines, 1901-1905,” had this to say of us in his preface: To have gone out to the other side of the world with an army of invasion, and had a part, however small, in the subjugation of a strange people, and then to see a new government set up, and, as an official of that government, watch it work out through a number of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, especially to a lawyer.

“Strange” as we were, we were counted. It also appears that the invasion started with the military but continued with health practitioners whose idea of the islands was as a

place of contagion. The present-day census aims at counting population—living human beings. In colonial Philippines of 1900, the counting of deaths was obvious. Death then was always connected with a report on diseases, with smallpox and the vaccination made for its eradication appearing in many documents.

In one online document, Immunization and Hygiene in the Colonial Philippines, by Warwick Anderson, there is a mention of the American civil health service reporting about its enforced smallpox vaccination in the islands. The paper notes how the “annual deaths from smallpox during the Philippine-american war were estimated at 40,000; yet in 1913, only 823 deaths were reported.”

Published in the Journal of the History of Medicine, January 2007, the paper has vignettes about us as a people: “Most Filipinos, mindful of the smallpox outbreak during the war, came voluntarily to the vaccinators, but the few who did not were tracked down. During the early vaccination programs, soldiers often accompanied the vaccinators. Sometimes Filipinos actively resisted their serological protectors.” Citing the case of Batangas, it writes how in 1902, the teams would “enter first the most crowded houses and drive the inmates to the farthest room, then working at the doorway, natives are led out singly and each of any age not showing pock-marks, vaccinated.”

The report mentions“pacified areas,where va cc in at ors depended more on the cooperation of local officials.” Perhaps, because of the political situation then, the military was very much a part of the health operations. The memories of an army medical officer startle even now: “No small problem to sanitate eight millions of semi-civilized and savage people, inhabiting scores of islands with the aggregate area of a continent.”

These facts appear to resonate at present where the military is also at the forefront albeit with different, always distorted results. The difference is that, in the case of the American colonial government, the health officers were part of the military campaign: “Mass vaccination against smallpox was evidently an important activity of American colonial health authorities in the Philippines. These campaigns, conducted with a military rigor, permitted the early registration of the population of the archipelago.”

Personal and domestic hygiene meant in those years the building of structures that will provide clean supply of water. Heiser, the chief health official of the colony, was quoted as imagining himself

“washing up the Orient.”

The said health official is also the source of observations, where he cites as obstacles the “unsuitable dietary of the people, their peculiar superstitions concerning the contraction of the disease, their almost unshakable fear of night air as a poisonous thing, a fear which has kept their houses tightly closed at night for generations past, their habit of chewing betel nut which has made the custom of expectorating in public.”

Nearly a century later, our health researchers are bound to encounter the same situations. It would be more interesting if the present-day census will take up health-seeking behavior. They will not; the census, despite its coverage, will not be dwelling on health matters. It is a census of population.

These enumerators will not be accompanied by soldiers, the assumption is that the people will cooperate. If they will not, then they must be ready to shell out P100,000.

There are other instructions for the field enumerators: they should stand outside the gate (assuming the homes have gates), they should maintain distancing, and they should wear face mask and shield. There is also a report saying that when the budget for this census was made, Covid-19 was not yet present. As a result, there is no fund for the testing of fieldworkers.

Welcome to the new census. Welcome to new carriers of virus and/ or victims.