A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

In the following June a part of the older pupils were separated from the others and placed in a room in the tribunal, as the nucleus of an intermediate school. I was in charge of them, and noticed one day a heap of rags lying on a pile of boards underneath the opposite wing of the building. Presently the rag heap began to twist and turn and throw arms about and then to scream. I went over to investigate, and found a girl of fourteen or fifteen nearly dead. Her skeleton body was covered with sores, her eyes seemed sightless, and the flies had settled in clouds around them and her nostrils. She would lie on the hard boards a few minutes until the torment grew unendurable, and then break into screams and lamentations. The rooms of all the municipal officers were about her, she was in full sight of the police, and yet there she lay and suffered with no human being to help her. Naturally I went to the Mayor, or Presidente. He wanted to know, with some irritation, what was to be expected when the School Superintendent refused to let the school building be used by the poor. After some talk the girl was removed to a house and assistance given her. She was past the need of food, and died in less than twenty-four hours.

The aforementioned nipa house between the two schoolhouses was utilized for janitors’ quarters, and the arrangement was such that pupils leaving the room temporarily passed through it. One day one of the children casually remarked that some one was sick in there with viruela (smallpox). I went in and found a child apparently in the worst stages of confluent smallpox. Now in our own dear America this would have meant almost hysteria. There would have been head lines an inch deep in the local papers, the school would have been closed for two weeks, a general vaccination furor would have set in, and many mammas and little children would have dreamed of confluent smallpox for weeks to come. But we did none of these things in the Philippines. We merely requested the authorities to remove the smallpox patient, and ordered the janitor to scrub the room with soap and water. Nobody quitted school; nobody got the smallpox; and the whole thing was only an incident.

Later I was destined to pass through the cholera epidemic of 1902–03, and I realized how great a factor a daily paper is in creating public hysteria. Part of the time I was in Manila, where the disease was under much better control than it ever was in the provinces (where it was not under control at all), and there was about five or six times as much worry, talk, and excitement in Manila as ever prevailed outside,

I have lived in towns with newspapers and in towns without them, and have come to believe with Gilbert Chesterton that the newspaper is used chiefly for the suppression of truth, and am inclined to add, on my own account, the propagation of hysteria.

The Filipino’s Christmas Festivities and His Religion

Autumn Weather—Winter Weather—A Christmas Tree for Filipino Children—A Christmas Eve Ball—Early Mass on Christmas—Visitors—Attitude of the Filipino to Religion—His Ideas of the Fine Arts Formed by the Church—Joys and Sorrows Carried to Church—Religion Not a Source of Party Animosity—Filipinos More Likely to Become Rationalists than Protestants.

What with typhoons, earthquakes, talk of insurrection, the novelty of military life about us, and the effort to comprehend the native, the days sped quickly by at Capiz. October and November came and went in alternate stages of storm and sunshine. For days at a time the fine rain drove like a snow storm before a northeast wind, and it was difficult to realize that the deluge was the remnant of a great blizzard which, starting on the vast frozen plains of Siberia, had swept southward, till crossing the China Sea it gathered up a warm flood and inundated us with it. We spoke of its being autumn at home, but we could not realize the fact. When clear days came, they were so warm, so glinting with sunlight, that it seemed all the world must be bathed in glory. It would rain steadily for a week or ten days, and then there would come one of those clear days when every breath of vapor was blown out of the sky, the heavens were a field of turquoise, and the mountain chains were printed against them in softest purple.

With the month of December the weather changed, the rain ceased, and the dry chill winter of the tropics set in. The nights were so cold that one was glad to nestle into bed under a blanket. The northeast wind still blew, but fresh and cool from the sea, and hardly a cloud floated in the sky. We drove often out to the open beach where the surf came in gloriously, and the great mountain island of Sibullian, away to the north, hung half cloud, half land in the sky.

Christmas was near at hand, and we began to think of turkey and other essentials. Presents to home folk had to be mailed early in November, and after that an apathy came on us. Thanks to Mrs. C——, the energetic wife of a military man of private fortune, Christmas was destined to wear, after all, an Anglo-Saxon hue.