Corruption, Immorality, And Rape:
Memories Of The Philippines Refugee Processing Center

by Tom Riddle ©
2002, Bangkok, Thailand

It has been almost 20 years since I lived in the Philippines Refugee Processing Center. I arrived shortly after the camp opened in 1982. Working with the refugees from America's war on Indo-China—fourteen months in the Philippines, and about three years in Thailand— was wonderful. However, living in the Philippines was the worst experience of my life. My lasting impressions of the Philippines are of corruption, immorality, and rape. Living in the Philippines and in the Philippines Refugee Processing Center, what we called PRPC, did, however, give me a insight into the problems that Vietnam veterans, the desperately poor, and refugees face.

The camp could hold about 19,000 refugees and 300 staff. Most of the staff lived in the camp in poorly built dormitories. I shared my dorm with 14 other people. There were two toilets and seven small uncomfortable and hot bedrooms in each dormitory. Living conditions were the worst that any of the Americans there had ever experienced; they were better than most of the Filipino staff had ever known. Shortly after we moved into the dormitory it rained and the roof leaked like a sieve. I inspected the roof and saw that there was a finger-width gap between two of the roofing panels. This, I would come to understand, was a symbol of the ridiculously low building standards and the level of corruption in the Philippines. A long-term expatriate resident later told me that to understand the Philippine mentality you have to understand rape. Rape often makes the victim feel hateful, violent, and filled with feelings of self-worthlessness. The Philippines was repeatedly raped by its colonizers—the Spanish, the Americans, the Japanese, and finally, worst of all, by the Filipinos themselves. The country is a monument to the evils of colonialism. When I lived there, the biggest rapist of them all, Ferdinand Marcos, was in power. Many of the people I worked with thought he was "the smartest man in the world."

There was a Ph.D. linguist who worked with us in the camp. He used his expertise with words to come up with a catchy phrase to summarize life in that country. "The Philippines," he told us, "is a continuing disappointment."

Here is an immorality tale from the Philippines. Many refugees in the camp had heard from their relatives in the West earlier that large families in the West were a curse. In the US, they heard, too many children made housing hard to find and big families were very difficult to financially support. Because of that and other reasons, many of the refugees wanted birth control and what is known as the West as “sex education.” During this time the refugee education programs in Thailand were developing textbooks for refugees. When those texts were shipped to the Philippines the officials of the International Catholic Migration Council, who ran the refugee education program in the camp, ripped out the pages that explained birth control.

(The population of the predominately Catholic Philippines is exploding as are poverty and environmental degradation. As long as the plague of the Catholic Church grips the country, the economy will never keep up with population growth. Since I lived in the Philippines, conditions have become and much more desperate as the country has spiraled downward. The only hope lies with the Philippine intelligentsia who understands that there is no hope for the country as long as the Holy Roman See holds it in a death grip.)

Everything in the camp went wrong. The Western administrators of the programs I worked in were drunks, deluded, petty, and incompetent. I never liked any of them enough to want to take their picture. Now I regret it. The head of the English teaching component looked remarkably like Bozo the clown. Most people found it very hard to work with him.

After I left the Philippines I spent three years working in the Panat Nikhom refugee camp in Thailand. As I was leaving Thailand I wrote a letter to one of the program administrators that went something like this, “Before the admin staff in the Philippine camp were hired they were given a mental health test. If they passed it, they weren't allowed to work there. Now you know why I've always appreciated working here.” After the Philippines, Thailand was a never-ending relief. Thailand was not a continuing disappointment.

Under the conditions in the Philippines Refugee Processing Center the mental health of me and many of my Western colleagues did not hold up very well. In retrospect we were a little like the American soldiers in Vietnam and like them we found our escape in sex, drugs, alcohol, and bickering. It would, like the Vietnam War for the veterans, be an experience that would take us years to recover from.

Many of the refugees, however, have very pleasant memories of their time in the Philippines Refugee Processing Center. For many of them this was the first time in years that their physical security was secure. They could also eat fairly well and most people felt that their lives would soon get better.

Ten years later a Vietnamese woman I met in New Orleans told me that living in the camp was her last experience of living in a community filled with warmth and cooperation.

Teaching the refugee students was a continual joy. I taught what was called "cultural orientation." That meant I told people what I thought would help them in their new lives in the West. I explained ways to to get a job, how to open a checking account, pay bills, find a house, and anything else I could think of.

One of my students, a 40-year-old woman, never smiled. A sadder face I had never seen. As the one-month class was ending I finally asked one of the other students about her. “Oh," he said, "her 15-year-old daughter was kidnapped by pirates."
“Kidnapped by pirates?"
“Kidnapped by pirates and she doesn't know what happened to her."
After the class ended I became aquatinted with the woman and her husband. They were traveling on the open seas when their daughter was taken from them. They never heard anything about her. She simply vanished. As they were leaving the camp I gave them a picture of the Buddha. “Thank you," the husband said, “we believe that getting a picture of the Buddha before a trip will bring us good luck."
"I hope so."

I've never lost interest in the refugees and I've tried to document their lives.

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