Philippines / Metro Manila / Bad Image

Manila is a city with an internationally tarnished reputation. The Deutsche Presseagentur DPA (German Press Agency), in a report reprinted in the Manila Standard of July 11, 1989, pictured an-archistic Metro Manila under the headline "After beautiful sunsets, a dark, dangerous city". DPA depicted that at night the Philip-pine capital turns into a "gloomy metropolis", with constant trouble, shootings, murders, rob-beries, break-ins, drug buys and cars stolen at gunpoint at traffic lights. DPA quoted an unidentified policeman warning: "Anyone who ventures onto the streets of Manila at night must be ready for any-thing." The report con-tinued describing that beneath the palm trees still decorating the "once luxurious" Roxas Boulevard along Manila Bay stand the jerry-built shacks of squatters and piles of garbage rot along the seawall.

While DPA called Manila at night danger-ous, it has been portrayed as beautiful by the local media. Nevertheless, on salient points the above cited foreign and the below cited local media essentially agree: "Manila is beau-tiful only at night because then you do not see the scars. You do not see the scarred buildings. You do not see the scarred streets. You do not see the wounded looks in its in-habitants' eyes, or the poisoned air. If wounds and scars are symptoms of death, then the city of Manila could be dying."(Sunday Inquirer Magazine, November 19,1989) According to a sociologist quoted in an ar-ticle of the agency Associated Editors and printed in the Philippine Daily Inquirer of Oc-tober 10, 1989, all problems of the metropolis, the stink of garbage blended with factory smoke, the continual flooding in low areas, the violence in the streets and the "assorted crimes" are all just a matter of size or over-size: "There are just too many people in Metro Manila, particularly in the core city, for comfort."

The Manila Standard of October 28, 1989, argued that the international image of Metro Manila is a deterrent to tourism. Filthy streets, uncollected rubbish, rampant crime, the paper reasoned, dampen the possibility to earn more from foreign visitors. Allegedly, a foreign tourist sight-seeing had taken shots of the ill-kept streets in Ermita and sent them to the Department of Tourism.

Expecting the worst after reading such re-ports, the visitor will be surprised that the daily worries of the ordinary people in Metro Manila are not much different from the daily worries of the ordinary people in any other Third World country. Even more surprising must be the impression (judged by the fre-quency of laughter and smiling faces) that the common people in Metro Manila seem happier than the common people in Munich, Manch-ester or Moscow.

Certainly, the common people of Manila are poorer than those of Munich. But poverty, shared by many, is not necessarily a deterrent to happiness. Poverty, or common shared ne-cessities, also can foster solidarity and friend-ship. For exactly that reason, the poorest city of the world, Calcutta, was named 'City of Joy' in the title of a famous book. Mother Theresa, too, has talked about the happiness of sharing life in Calcutta.

During Marcos' times, when Imelda Marcos was her governor, one of the many names tagged onto Metro Manila read city of man. It was supposed to mean humane city but moral critics also ap-plied it in the literal sense, as city for males; they understood it as a syn-onym for sin city.