Manila, Philippines
By Bambina Olivares
Iwake up every morning to piercing blue skies and candy-floss clouds, my bedroom window a frame for a canvas of lush green leaves, and I think: “This is the Manila of my dreams.”
It’s a blissful, soothing yet deeply unsettling sight. The slight sliver of street I’m able to glimpse from the guardhouse of my gated community is deserted, and the air isn’t choked with pollution. Just before dusk, the sky is streaked with bands of soft pink and violent orange and I can only imagine how glorious the sunset must be over Manila Bay. It’s an alternate Eden, where everything is just picture-perfect but dystopian. Where are the people who give the city its soul?
A city on lockdown is a city silenced. The pandemic has even dictated its own dress code: face masks, face shields, disposable gloves, accessorised with disinfectant wipes and alcohol spray or hand sanitiser. For those who take their fashion cues from Naomi Campbell, a hazmat suit could become a wardrobe staple.
I’m not sure what the “new normal” will bring, but the pandemic normal, I confess, rather suits me. As the days blur into each other, they go swiftly and I haven’t once been bored in the almost two months of what the government calls “enhanced community quarantine”. Perhaps it’s because work takes up a lot of time, but there’s also a marked absence of the frenzy and stress that typified a regular day for me during the old normal.
Comfortably caged as I am in my home with its bamboo-fringed garden, there’s a side to the pandemic normal in this country that’s become increasingly alarming. Granted, the lockdown was necessary to flatten the curve, but is militarising the official response to so-called quarantine violators — the joggers in the streets, those taking in the sun in their private gardens, or those not wearing a mask — the solution?
Of course, the police in this country only go where they’re ordered and assert their right to threaten, arrest, detain and shoot for as long as they have permission to do so. And if that permission comes from the very top, then what chance does the ordinary citizen have?
If only leaders heeded the science of infectious diseases rather than their own unconstitutional, despotic instincts. Herding people into detention in crowded holding cells is exactly the kind of milieu the coronavirus adores; hand it a cocktail as it goes about broadening its circle of social acquaintances, will you, Sergeant?
It baffles me that men of authoritarian bent think that a campaign of fear and repression is more effective than education and compassion, and yes, ample preparation. You only need look at the example of nations led by women who’ve responded realistically to the pandemic with a combination of straight talk, common sense and empathy, to see what a difference an extra X chromosome makes.
Here we lack a leader with the grit of Angela Merkel, the kind-heartedness of Jacinda Ardern, the steely practicality of Tsai Ing-Wen, the foresight of Carrie Lam and the quick thinking of other women heads of state like Katrin Jakobsdottir, Sana Marin, Erna Solberg and Mette Frederiksen.
But just as some governments have chosen to weaponise their response to an invisible but lethal enemy, concerned citizens have weaponised the internet and called out the unwarranted abuses of power. And that tells me that as long as its inhabitants express their outrage and fight for decency, accountability, respect and kindness, Manila has not lost its soul. And that the Manila of my dreams is still very much alive.