Oh, the streets! They are a disgrace to civilisation, for I have never, no, not in Morocco, not in little towns in the Canaries, known such neglect, such dirt, such squalor, and such smells!
Grass grows at the sides of the streets, and in wet weather many stagnant pools appear on pieces of waste ground and between the houses, looking very pretty indeed amongst the brilliant greenery when the sun comes out again, with beautiful reflections mirrored in their shallow depths, and making little gems of scenes like bits out of a fairy pantomime. All the same, one could quite willingly sacrifice their beauty in the cause of health, and for the sake of matter-of-fact drainage!
Mosquitoes breed in the swampy places in which the native houses generally stand, and at night the inhabitants frequently light fires under their flimsy dwellings to dry the ground and destroy the insects. At first sight these fires look very strange and alarming; we often pass them as we drive in the evenings, and it is yet another of the local miracles to see the dry thatch huts not taking fire from a pile of leaves and grass burning underneath.
In connection with the swamps too, or I suppose so, the Filipinos have another curious custom, which is, as soon as anyone is taken ill, to shut the house up tightly, with the screens let down and fastened over the openings that serve as doors and windows, and whenever you pass a house all dark and hermetically sealed with tiny slits of light here and there, you know some unfortunate soul is ill inside, and in all probability dying, for the Filipinos have no physique, and if they get seriously ill, they snuff out like a taper. When a poor person is dying—really at the point of death—he or she is taken out of bed and carried to the priest to be assoiled, which generally has the effect of killing the invalid outright. Only two evenings ago we met one of these melancholy little groups going along the Jaro road, two of the men carrying a long bamboo pole on their shoulders, with a canvas hammock slung to it, and I think the poor woman, whose head was lolling out, was dead already.
An American hospital, to which we have all contributed by request, is being provided for the town, and when we drive out, we often pass down the road where this remarkable building is rising slowly from a pile of beams and planks, all stacked ready, and cut to certain lengths. I say it is remarkable because the hospital has apparently been designed in America by someone who has never heard of the Philippines, for the main supports (the arigis), instead of being made of great trees of hardwoods, are quite slender posts of Oregon pine; and the cross-beams and, in fact, all the timber work, are of the same wood, which is about as much good as so many pieces of cardboard against insects, typhoons, earthquakes, and so forth. I daresay these plagues do not prevail in the country where this fantastic building was evolved.
Awaiting Shipment.
Coffins containing Bones of American Soldiers stacked in Malate Cemetery, Manila.
But if the substructure of the hospital was the laughing stock of the town, and the subject of many rather acid jests on the part of those who had contributed to such a monument of folly, you can imagine what was thought and said when the wards were seen in the making, and observed to consist of screens of nipa and bejuco matting! All so hasty, so shoddy, such a piece of blatant jobbery—but to hear its advocates talk you would think the finest hospital in Eu-rope was being rendered silly and out of date!