But as Chinese waters are increasingly depleted of sea turtles, Chinese poachers are going further afield to find them. That includes hunting in waters that both China and the Philippines claim, like the waters around the Philippine island of Palawan.

The area is home to the endangered hawksbill sea turtle, a species so ancient it predates some dinosaurs. It can grow to be as large as one meter across, according to Glenda Cadigal, of the Palawan Council on Sustainable Development.

“It lays 1,000 eggs,” she said, “and when it lays the eggs in one area, all the hatchlings that hatch from that area will go back to the same spot to lay its eggs at the time it is mature.”

But fewer turtles are making the journey of late, she said. She estimates that their population around Palawan is down about 20 percent from a decade ago, because of poaching, mostly by Chinese.

Sea turtle entangled in net (Photo: NOAA/Wiki Commons)

Cadigal said that some Chinese boats caught near Palawan had tools onboard for stuffing turtles.

The Philippine navy, which patrols those waters, captured a Chinese boat of poachers in December. The boat had two big outboard motors, according to Giovanni Bacordo, deputy commander of the Philippine Armed Forces, Naval Forces West. He said it tried to ram the patrol boat, and then it fled.

“So we gave chase for about 19 minutes until their outboard motors bogged down,” Bacordo said. “While we were giving chase, they were throwing away some equipment overboard, and maybe some dead sea turtles, we don’t know. But the following day, we recovered a fishing net, weighing about a ton, and three more dead sea turtles. So all in all, we recovered nine dead sea turtles, and three live ones.”

Six Chinese were arrested. The alleged poachers said they came from China’s Hainan province, more than 600 miles away. There’s a thriving black market there in sea turtles — a single sea turtle can go for $3,000.

Chinese police in Hainan do periodically crack down on turtle poaching. Still, General Juancho Sabban, who heads the entire Philippine Armed Forces Western Command, suggests the Chinese poachers aren’t operating entirely on their own. He thinks they must have a mother ship, perhaps just commercial, and perhaps not. He said some Chinese poachers have befriended Palawan locals, and have even offered to buy sea turtles from them, which makes him suspicious, as a military man.

“By doing so, they are able to step on Philippine soil, befriending the populace, which to us in the military is a very common ploy in a more advanced planning. You have to immerse and know the local culture, as well as mingle with them and establishing a support base,” Sabban said.

So far, there’s no proven link between the poachers and the Chinese military. But other Chinese fishing boats have been known to lay down markers in contested waters near here.

As for the accused poachers, the six caught in December await trial. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman has said China is watching, and wants the Philippines to treat them fairly. Glenda Cadigal of the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development said, if anything, Chinese poachers in the past have been treated too fairly. They’ve been allowed to post bail and leave — or the Chinese embassy posts bail for them.

“I’m not into the bailing, because the lives of these wildlife species – you just pay a certain amount, and then you’re free? For me, it’s not fair,” Cadigal said. “They don’t have their voices, and we should be the ones protecting them.”

There’s now a group in Hainan called “SeaTurtles 911,” which is trying to rescue captured sea turtles, and spread awareness in China that hunting endangered turtles is bad for the environment.

But demand lingers, and the supply near Palawan seems too tempting for poachers to resist – especially with the Chinese government insisting that these waters are China’s to exploit.

Eighteen-year-old Sarah Osorio, bubbly and beautiful, is enjoying her reign this year as both Miss Palawan and Miss Kalayaan – the name of a contested chain of islands in the South China Sea. Osorio shows me a scene from the video of the beauty contest, where she’s wearing a red bikini.

She said she wasn’t so keen on showing so much skin. She joined the pageant to make a serious point — about the Kalayaan Islands.

“China’s claiming Kalayaan as its own,” she said. “The Philippines don’t have any capability to fight China. China is very big, compared to Philippines.”

Osorio grew up spending a month each summer on Kalayaan’s biggest island. It’s just a tenth of a square mile.

“We’re a small island — no activities, no entertainments,” she said. There’s no electricity so after 6 p.m. there’s nothing to do but sleep.

When I asked her why people choose to live there, she said: “To show that it’s ours, that we have that island for the Philippines.”

Osorio’s parents are among the 60 civilians who claim residence on Kalayaan’s main island, Pag-asu. The idea is just to have a presence – and Osorio’s family is doing its part. Her dad’s a local legislator. Her uncle lives there, too; he’s a fisherman. According to Osorio, he’s had problems with Chinese boats near the island.

“He told me Chinese people were around their area, fishing and fishing and fishing. If you talk to them, they harass you,” Osorio said. It’s mostly shouting matches, she said. But there’s been more physical contact than that, on the broader South China Sea.

Over the past year or so, China has become increasingly aggressive about asserting its claim to almost the entire South China Sea, and the oil and gas reserves its seabed may contain.

When ExxonMobil announced in October that it had found what looked like a sizable natural gas field near the Vietnamese city of Danang, China warned that foreign companies shouldn’t proceed in waters that China claims.

The Philippines has had its own challenges. General Juancho Sabban, who heads the Western Command of the Philippine Armed Force, shows off what he calls a “Chinese donation” to his marine patrol boats – a confiscated Chinese fishing boat.

“They had GPS, they had radios. They had air compressors, for deep sea diving,” which, he pointed out, you normally wouldn’t find on a fishing boat.

Sabban thinks this boat was doing surveillance. It tried to ram a smaller Philippine patrol boat, so, he said, the patrol had to shoot to disable the engine.

The Chinese who were arrested on the boat said they were just fishermen. But Sabban said they were bailed out by the Chinese embassy, and then they disappeared.

He said similar boats have left construction materials near islands the Philippines claims. Sabban has promptly cleared them, because when this happened on Mischief Reef in 1995, the Chinese erected a structure almost overnight, and now have a permanent presence there. It’s about 130 nautical miles from the Philippines and 600 from China.

According to the International Law of the Sea, a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone extends 200 miles from its shores. But China maintains it has a historical claim to islands even farther away, because it found them and named them first.

“In layman’s terms, it’s absurd, unbelievable,” General Sabban scoffs. He points out that the Philippines can also cite historical records of its fishermen who went to China. “So are we also legalized to claim South China Sea?” he asked.

Sabban sees China’s new assertiveness in the South China Sea as being less about protecting questionable historical claims than about the fact that the Philippines and Vietnam are both opening up waters they claim to foreign companies. Shell and Chevron are already active in the Philippines, and the country is soliciting bids for 15 more offshore exploration blocks.

“This year, there will be more drilling in the West Philippine Sea, and we expect that by the end of this year, more rigs will be in place,” Sabban said.

Protecting an oil rig will be one of the military exercises the Philippines does with the US military this spring. A Philippines delegation was just in Washington last week to talk about enhanced US military support in the South China Sea. Admiral Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations, spoke about US interests at the Center for a New American Security in Washington last month.

Spratly islands map showing occupied features marked with the flags of countries occupying them. (Graphic: US govt)

“This area is vital to the United States,” Greenert said. “It’s been an area vital to our navy and our focus for decades, because of our economy, our trade routes.”

Greenert said the challenge is to keep those trade routes open – and peaceful – while keeping belligerence to a minimum. “How do you have a conversation with someone who is insistent that you’re in the wrong place? You either stop talking, or you keep talking, and you watch how you ratchet up the rhetoric,” he said.

China’s view is that the United States should mind its own business and stay out of the South China Sea. In November, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said, “disputes in the South China Sea should be resolved through friendly consultation between directly involved sovereign states.” He added that any interference from outside forces would only “complicate matters.”

China would rather point out, one-on-one, to the Philippines that the $30 billion in trade it has with China could double in a couple of years – or China could punish it, as the Communist Party-owned newspaper The Global Times has suggested, for turning to the US for more military muscle to counter China’s claims. The Global Times has also remarked that these “little countries” in the region should stop challenging China’s interests, or they’ll ‘hear the roar of cannon fire.’

“The Chinese shouldn’t be telling us to get used to that,” responded General Sabban. “We have been hearing the sound of cannons for 40 years.”

General Sabban added, have they forgotten the Vietnam War? A small country can hold out against a superpower, when its core interests are at stake. It can hold out even better – when another superpower stands ready to come to its aid.

The island was slammed with a storm that spawned flash floods and mud slides.

More than a thousand people have died in the disaster.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to the BBC’s Kate McGeown who is in Mindanao in Southern Philippines.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: In the Philippines authorities are investigating what went wrong on Mindanao Island over the weekend. The island was slammed with a storm that spawned flash floods and mudslides. More than a thousand people died in the disaster. The BBC’s Kate McGeown is in Mindanao in the Southern Philippines. She says residents were not expecting the storm to be so dangerous.

Kate McGeown: This storm brought an awful lot of rain; it brought 12 hours continuous rain in some places. And the banks of the rivers just flooded, huge areas were inundated with water.

Werman: I mean these sorts of massive storms are a regular feature of life in the Philippines, why wasn’t the government better prepared for this storm and its aftermath?

McGeown: Absolutely, I mean there are about 20 major storms or typhoons in the Philippines every year, but they usually hit the north of the country, such as the island of Luzon, where the capital Manila is. And very few of them hit the south. So critics are saying that the authorities here in Mindanao were maybe a bit complacent, and partly they say that local people as well just weren’t used to it. That they went to bed on Friday night and they didn’t think. And the next thing they knew about it in the middle of the night they were woken up to find that their stuff was floating around them. And many of them had to grab on to the roofs of their houses in order to survive.

Werman: Now, Philippine President Benigno Aquino is now on the scene where you are. How’s he being received by the local residents?

McGeown: Well, certainly when we were there at an evacuation center and he came to visit there to talk to people and to promise government support, people applauding wildly when he arrived you know. Evidently, people are glad to see him, but behind the scenes people were kind of saying well look, this happened early Saturday morning…how come it’s taken until Tuesday for him to come down and see it? There was a lot of criticism in the media today about the fact that the president went to a party yesterday and he wasn’t thinking about people in Mindanao, which is a long way away from Manila where he’s usually based. And how did the government not realize that this was something so big because every day the death toll is rising and really now it’s become a pretty major disaster in Philippine history.

Werman: We’ve also heard the effect of the storm was much worse because of rampant deforestation and logging in the area. I’m wondering if you’ve seen any evidence of that?

McGeown: We certainly have seen that there’s people living cheek by jowl right next to the rivers, and this is an area where we know there is quite a lot of illegal logging going on. There’s a lot of unregulated mining industries that deforest areas, and just generally Mindanao itself has pockets in it where there’s rebel areas. So things aren’t particularly well-regulated in this area. So it’s no surprise about the illegal logging. We were talking to people here who said that it’s not just the logging that’s the problem, it’s also the fact that the deforestation brings with it a lot of mud because the soil erodes easily. And that was part of the problem because the mud was at the bottom of the rivers, which made it much easier for the rivers banks to burst with those heavy rains.

Werman: Finally, Kate, I guess mass burials are expected to start today where you are. That’s a grim prospect. I’m wondering is it happening now and how is that affecting the mood of people there in Mindanao?

McGeown: It is, yes, I mean it’s a very difficult subject and it’s something that the local authorities have said they really have to do because there are just so many bodies. There was a bit of an outcry when they initially said this, and so they’re making a specially constructed big grave that the bodies are going to be put into individually. The aim I think is that if identification is needed later to run it might be possible to do that, but certainly for people looking for loved ones it’s just yet another thing because they’re obviously, they see it as a race against time to find their loved ones before they’re buried in one of these mass graves.

Werman: The BBC’s Kate McGeown speaking to us from Mindanao Island in the Philippines, a region ravaged this weekend by a tropical storm.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

He was first man to defeat Muhammed Ali in what became known as ‘The Fight of the Century’ in New York City in 1971.

Of Frazier, Ali said: “I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration.” After the Fight of the Century, Frazier would fight Ali two more times.

For our Geo Quiz, we’re looking for the Asian city where the third fight took place in 1975.

The answer is Manila, where the final of three fights between boxing greats Joe Frazier and Muhammed Ali took place. Host Marco Werman talks with Ronnie Nathanielz, a sportcaster in the Philippines who had a ringside seat for the ‘Thrilla in Manila’.

The two sisters were born in the Philippines. In 1961 they moved to California and discovered rock and roll.

They became full blown rock stars in the 1970s with their group Fanny.

The sisters have a new album out, it’s called “Play Like a Girl.”

Below, Lisa Mullins asked June Millington about her striking white hair.

Fanny’s appearance on the Sonny & Cher show.

They work in so-called hostess clubs in Tokyo.

But according to the US government, they are victims of sex trafficking.

Rhacel Salazar Parrenas is the author of “Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo.

She spent months working in a hostess club in Tokyo.

Perrenas speaks with host Lisa Mullins about her book.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: Bangkok is among a number of Asian cities battling an unsavory reputation for sex trafficking. Another such city is Tokyo. Every year thousands of Filipino women travel to Japan’s capital to work in so called “hostess clubs”. According to the U.S. government they are victims of sex trafficking. Rhacel Salazar Parrenas disagrees with that. She is a Sociology professor at the University of Southern California. Salazar Parrenas spent three months working in a hostess club in Tokyo to get a firsthand look at the work. She’s the author of the book “Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo”. Here’s how she describes the duties of a hostess.

Rhacel Salazar Parrenas: You have to flirt professionally and flirting often just entails sitting next to a man in the club, telling them that he’s the most good looking person you’ve ever met, you know, holding his thigh, perhaps even sometimes holding his hand. So that was the extent of the physical contact you usually had with your customers and so sometimes the flirting would involve singing and dancing in very scant attire. Oftentimes it could be platonic. Sometimes it could be very raunchy, sometimes clubs would require a woman to undress while they’re dancing on stage.

Mullins: Could you consider these brothels?

Salazar Parrenas: No, because prostitution was not required in the job and that’s why it’s surprising for me that these women were labelled “sex trafficked people” who were “forced into prostitution according to the U.S. Department of State” because what they do for a living is far from prostitution. I would define it a sex work because I look at sex work very broadly, to not just be prostitution, but it could be like stripping, pole dancing, but in this case, sex work would just be professional flirting.

Mullins: Who were the clientele?

Salazar Parrenas: So the clientele were regular Japanese men. The club where I worked was a working class club and so most of our clients were plumbers, like janitors, very low level salary men.

Mullins: How were the women paid?

Salazar Parrenas: So the women that I worked with, some got paid directly, so they would be paid directly by the boss, but some were actually not paid until the end of their six month contract because they were contract workers and so their brokers were paid and so the brokers didn’t want them to quit and what the brokers would do was that they would withhold their salary until they would have to return to the Philippines at the end of their six month contract and that they would be paid at the airport actually.

Mullins: So how do they make ends meet before that?

Salazar Parrenas: They would make ends meet by relying primarily on tips and then the commission that they made and so you receive commission from the amount of times that a customer requests for your company inside the club and also for the amount of times that a customer takes you out on a date. So for every date that you would go out, you would receive about 30 U.S. dollars and then for requests for your company inside the club, that would be around 10 dollars that you would receive.

Mullins: So, give us one of your experiences Rhacel. I know that you say in the book that you were a little bit older, you were not, you know, 100 pounds like most of these women were. So they would kind of show you the ropes and tell us how they did that.

Salazar Parrenas: I was actually one of the least skilled hostesses and so I’m also not the most feminine woman and so I don’t often have a feminine posture, meaning like my legs are often spread wide open. I’m often slouching. The management and my co-workers often micromanaged my actions and so once in a while I would just be spaced out and then all of a sudden I would realize that there’s a spotlight aimed between my thighs and it was the way for the management to tell me to close my legs. I was really horrible, but my co-workers were just, they seemed to be so attuned to to their femininity, but I was so bad that they often relegated me to be the woman standing outside distributing flyers. So I would be often standing outside, screaming, wearing a very scanty outfit and feeling actually very degraded.

Mullins: So let me ask you this, you argue in the book that Filipino women who are working in these bars in Japan are not victims of sex trafficking, and sex trafficking now, as you say, is a specific label. At the same though, you’re talking about these women being uneducated, basically being held hostage to thier salary, in some cases not being given a salary for like six months. So are you making a semantic difference? Is this just about the terminology because it does sound like exploitation.

Salazar Parrenas: The definition of trafficking is, like there’s a three part definition to it, is that first you have to be transported, second you have to be duped in the process or coerced, and then third you have to be exploited. The problem is, for people who look into trafficking, they just reduce the definition to the third part which is exploitation.

Mullins: But why does that bother you?

Salazar Parrenas: Because it doesn’t take into account the will of individuals. These women made a decision to go into the situation, that they agreed to enter a situation of servitude. They knew that they were going to be in this job for six months. They knew that they were going to have a hard time quitting. The problem arises is when they want to quit their job and they cannot. Then they become trafficked victims.

Mullins: For you, what’s the bigger picture here? Is it how we help these women? How we try to prevent human trafficking, sex trafficking or not?

Salazar Parrenas: Yeah, in the case of the women that I studied, I would say that the solution to their job is not “rescue” as advocated by the U.S. government, meaning we shouldn’t pluck them out of their situation. Instead, we have to work on making them free workers or we have to ensure that they have greater control over their labor and migration. So we do that by freeing them of middle man brokers, allowing them to negotiate directly with their employers – the club owners, allowing them to choose their jobs, and not limiting their visa to one club. It’s redefining how we look at the problem for the purpose of coming up with nuance solutions to their problems.

Mullins: OK, thank you. Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Sociology professor at the University of Southern California and author of “Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo” Thank you Rhacel.

Salazar Parrenas: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Now, about that catamaran: it’s attempting to circumnavigate the globe relying on solar power. It’s going to take a while, as this catamaran’s average speed is a whopping six miles an hour. So you have plenty of time to name that large Southeast Asian archipelago where the vessel stopped recently.

Reporter Simone Orendain took a tour of the world’s largest solar-powered boat when it docked temporarily in Manila in the Philippines, the answer to our quiz. The catamaran “Turanor” is now on its way to Singapore.

Some charge the government isn’t doing enough to change the culture that makes rido possible.

What rido is, why and how it happens is not the easiest thing to explain. On one level it looks like a relatively simple Hatfields versus McCoys type of feud. But on another level it’s more like gang warfare.

Take Fatmawati Salapuddin’s example. She has spent countless hours mediating between clans enmeshed in ridos.

In the 1990’s in Salapuddin’s hometown in western Mindanao, her father’s family and her mother’s nephew fought over the same piece of lucrative farm land – with landmines, mortar shells and other weapons.

“There were about 20 people killed on each side. They were already firing bombardment mortar, shelling, to the other side,” Salapuddin said.

In Muslim Mindanao, family squabbles like these can easily escalate into mini-wars, because of the sheer number of people involved. First of all “families” here aren’t just mom, dad and the kids. They are clans made up of hundreds of parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents.

Salapuddin said deadly fights can erupt over power, disputed land, or simply trying to preserve someone’s “good name.”

“It’s a terrible thing because people get killed, people get displaced, properties are burned, you know,” she said.

And like many seemingly senseless conflicts, ridos can last for generations.

“If the clans say, ‘we need to fight this group so we’re not vulnerable to predation,’ family members and clan members, will join in that fight,” said Francisco Lara, an anthropologist who studies the phenomenon in Mindanao and schedules meetings with peace workers during hurried lunches in Manila. “Able-bodied men from a very young age will be trained in the process of involvement in clan wars.”

What’s more, some clan members belong to Muslim separatist groups or private militias, which mean they have easy access to weapons.

Lara said part of the reason that ridos persist is cultural. Well before the Philippines became a country, Muslims in Mindanao had something similar to a feudal system. And as in any feudal structure, power struggles are inevitable.

“Mindanao has never really been part of the fold, so called, of the country, of the archipelago. Definitely represents something that is part of the old,” Lara said.

Another problem is geography. Because the region is far from the seat of power, governments have been unwilling, or unable, to provide support.

Instead, he said, Spanish colonizers in the 1500’s and Americans in the late 1800’s co-opted leaders of elite families to keep order, plying them with money and political power.

“The government has not even been able to extend its administrative reach, so in those areas only the clans can provide protection, only clans can provide welfare to local community members,” Lara said.

Peace workers say constituents don’t see any perks from the deals with the government, so basic needs like school upkeep and infrastructure go unfunded. Plus, jobs are scarce. They say constituents would just as soon pick up a gun to survive in this type of environment, helping rido to flourish. And, they say, from the outside, parts of the region look like the “wild, wild west.”

At a café in Manila, Mussolini Lidasan assesses the situation in his western Mindanao province. He said plain old ignorance is a big culprit in rido. He said it’s reaching a point where they can’t see beyond the next personal affront or the next power-grab. And Lidasan said it’s time the government stepped in directly to help.

“As long as injustices are there, as long as our people are illiterate they have no access to education and as long as there are no clear government programs to uplift their socio-economic conditions,” Lidasan said, “then this will go on, on and on and on.”

It may be hard, though, to change the culture, either of rido or the government itself. Many say that clan leaders have become akin to mob bosses. And like organized crime leaders, they get involved in politics, delivering votes for national politicians, allegedly reaping financial perks for their efforts.

Gelmer Suganob has been teaching special education classes for four years in Prince Georges County, a suburban district near Washington, DC. The Filipino teacher started an autism program in a local middle school and received glowing job reports.

He’s one of thousands of foreign teachers who have been filling the ranks of US classrooms for the past few years, spurred by a shortage of American teachers and new testing requirements for math, science and special education. Like Suganob, many of these teachers come from the Philippines. They’re hired by recruiting companies in their home country and pay big fees to land lucrative jobs in the US.

But despite his stellar reviews, Suganob recently got a double dose of bad news. He received a call telling him that he had overstayed his visa, and that he no longer had a job.

“Of course, I was so shocked about it,” Suganob said.

Suganob was told that his visa had expired back in August 2010. Suganob said he had been applying for an extension of his H-1-B visa with Prince Georges school officials since July 2009. It’s the same kind of visa used by high-tech workers, doctors, and other skilled professionals.

E-mails between Suganob and district school officials confirm his account. He’s since found out that the district didn’t file his paperwork properly. As a result, Suganob learned that he’s been here illegally for 10 months.

“I’m kind of nervous that immigration will come to my door and knock and say, okay, we have to handcuff you, we have to deport you,” Suganob said. He added that he trusted the school district to take care of things.

There are about 1,000 foreign teachers in Prince Georges County and Suganob says he knows of at least two others who are still teaching on expired visas and there may be dozens more.

The foreign teachers here also have another problem. They each paid recruiters thousands of dollars to get here, money that the school district should have covered. The US Department of Labor ruled in April that the foreign teachers in Prince Georges County are owed nearly $6 million. But the county doesn’t have the money. It has stopped hiring new foreign teachers, and suspended all visa extensions.

School district spokesman Briant Coleman said he could not comment for this story because of the pending legal case.

Worried About the Future

Lewis Robinson, director of the Prince Georges County Education Association, the local teacher’s union, said the Filipino teachers are worried about their future.

“They’re absolutely intimidated by the entire process and afraid, and they recognize that they are caught between a rock and a hard place,” Robinson said.

He said teachers came here because of the salaries — up to 20 times what they could make back home. The teachers figured that with a clean record and hard work, they would be in line for permanent residence status or a sought-after green card.

But that didn’t happen.

Now, federal authorities may revoke the county’s power to sponsor foreign teachers; Prince Georges could lose all of them by 2014.

Robinson said that county school administrators apparently didn’t understand what they were getting into when they signed agreements with foreign recruitment agencies.

“It’s a wide-open, unregulated business where almost anything goes,” Robinson said. “They have to consider the risk of entering into that kind of market where you don’t have control of what happens in another country.”

Salary Violations

Since 2005, the Department of Labor has cited 17 districts across the country for salary violations involving foreign teachers. In Baton Rouge, LA, teachers allege the recruiting company that brought them here held onto their US visas until they agreed to sign contracts that charged them huge fees to secure their jobs.

Shannon Lederer of the American Federation of Teachers, who’s studied the issue of foreign recruitment agencies, said the teachers’ troubles started shortly after they arrived in the United States, and met with recruiters.

“While their passports were out of the room they were asked to sign a second contract that they had never seen before they left stipulating additional fees and committing them not to speak against the recruiting agency,” Lederer said.

The federation and the local teachers union have filed a federal suit against the recruiting agency and the East Baton Rouge school district.

Back in Prince Georges County, MD, Gelmer Suganob is just bitter about how things ended up.

“I’ve been loyal and I’ve been trusting the county, and this is what I got,” he said.

After consulting with an attorney, Suganob decided to pack his belongings. He thinks about his Special Education students and the progress they made together.

“I miss them, and the other day I received notes from them,” he said. “What can I do? This is the end of my journey here.”

Suganob is preparing to return to Aklan Province, famous for its white sandy beaches. He said he’ll be happy to see his family again after years away from home. But he admits he probably won’t stay put for long. He’s thinking about taking a new teaching job, this time in Canada.

By Marina Giovannelli

The Jefferson Reaves community health center in Miami provides care to people who cannot afford it elsewhere. The clinic helps patients control diabetes, treats colds, gives vaccines, and offers other sorts of general care.

Dr. Robert Schwartz, who trains young physicians at the clinic, said it has become difficult to find doctors willing to practice this kind of medicine.

“There’s been a significant decline of medical students who are interested in family medicine,” he said. “I see this as an enormous challenge to the delivery of care.”

The United States suffers from a shortage of primary care physicians, and the problem is expected to worsen. America’s baby boom generation is aging, and health care reform could put greater demands on doctors as more Americans gain medical insurance.

A potential solution to the physician shortage would be to allow more foreign-trained doctors to work in the United States. In fact, thousands of such doctors are ready to step in, but some say the system is stacked against them.

Wilson Questa practiced family medicine in Colombia before moving to the United States five years ago. “Medicine is my passion,” he said. Questa would like to practice in America, but he cannot. “I don’t have any type of license,” he explained.

For a doctor trained abroad, getting a license in the US requires several things. First, the physician must to take board exams and an English language test. Questa passed those tests quickly.

Second, a foreign-trained physician must go through a residency program. For Questa, that requirement has proved difficult. He has applied for hundreds of residency positions, but so far he has not been offered one.

Residency positions

If Questa had been trained in the United States, he likely would have been accepted for a residency position. Among doctors who went to medical school in the US, nearly 95 percent of those who apply for residencies get one. Yet for doctors trained in other countries, fewer than 40 percent of those who apply for a US residency are accepted.

About 10,000 international medical school graduates are in the US and are trying to practice here but cannot. Questa considers the residency system unfair, biased against people like him.

“If you have the same knowledge as a graduate from the United States, I don’t see any difference,” Questa said. “We are going to give the same level of care as any other doctor.”

But residency programs do not just consider talent when offering slots to doctors.

Prof. Fitzhugh Mullan of George Washington University School of Medicine studies the global migration of doctors. He said there are several reasons why US residency programs prefer US graduates.

“A doctor in almost every country in the world is a product of the taxpayers or the tax base of that country,” Mullan explained.

Because governments spend money on medical education, countries want a return on their investment. For that reason, he said, it is appropriate for US residency programs to select US graduates over those from foreign countries. On the flip side, Mullan said that if the US made it easy for foreign doctors to work here, that would be unfair to other countries.

“Should we count on the government of India or the government of the Philippines or the government of Colombia to train our doctors?” Mullan asked. “[That] isn’t good for the countries who are losing their doctors to the United States.”

As things stand, many counties are already losing their doctors to the US. Although foreign-trained doctors have trouble getting residencies here, some succeed. 
In fact, a quarter of the doctors currently practicing in the US were trained abroad.

Dependent on foreign doctors

Some health analysts would like to see the US become less dependent on foreign doctors. And soon it will be. With new medical schools being built across the US and existing schools expanding, the number of American medical graduates is expected to jump 30 percent in the next decade. That may provide enough US-trained doctors to meet the country’s needs.

Yet Colombian doctor Wilson Questa says he won’t give up trying to practice here. He did not get a single interview for a residency this year, but he recently landed a job at a pediatric clinic – in the billing department.

“Even though when I come [to the clinic] I don’t see any patients,” Questa said, “at least [when] I wake up in the morning, I say, ‘okay, I have to be ready to go to the medical office to work.’”

• Charmaine Clamor’s official site
• Global Hit Podcast on iTunes
• Global Hit Podcast via RSS
• Global Hit Archive (prior to June 2009)
• Global Hit on Facebook
• Marco Werman on Twitter

As citizens in countries throughout the Middle East clamor for new leadership, the Philippines is marking the 25th anniversary of its own “People Power Revolution,” which ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The nearly bloodless revolution ushered in a new leader and democracy.

In Manila, Father Larry Faraon stands at the corner of Ortigas Avenue and Epifanio de los Santos Avenue – or EDSA as it’s commonly called, where 25 years ago, more than half a million Filipinos celebrated Corazon Aquino’s toppling of Marcos.

His 20-year regime was marked by corruption and brutality. Aquino, the widow of Marcos’ strongest opponent, was thrust into the spotlight after her husband Benigno Aquino Junior was assassinated three years earlier.

It was harder back in 1986 to organize demonstrations. There was no social media, but there was radio. “Radio Veritas, I would boldly say, started it all,” said Father Faraon, who was program director at Radio Veritas, the influential Catholic news-talk station.

Faraon said his in-depth coverage helped fuel the revolution. Faraon was behind the microphone when Juan Ponce Enrile, Marcos’s National Defense Secretary, called in and told listeners that he’d cut ties with his boss and was holed up at the military camp Aguinaldo with defecting soldiers.

Ready to die in the fight

Enrile fully expected a fight between his rebel troops and Marcos’s men, and he said he was ready to die in the fight. Over the air, Enrile asked for prayers. And Manila’s powerful archbishop responded. He implored listeners to provide both defecting and government soldiers with food and water.

Catholic masses were held on EDSA. “We had nuns, priests, seminarians and they’re all dressed in their cassocks and habits so people saw in the priests and the nuns some sort of, ‘hey, hey, hey, hey! No to violence! No to violence!’” Faraon said.

The participation of the church made it hard for Marcos’s military to fight their countrymen. This peaceful revolution led by military men in conjunction with the clergy appealed to people’s deep faith in this staunchly Catholic country.

On the fourth day of protests, the US pressed Marcos to leave and gave him and his family safe haven in Hawaii. The revolution resulted in fewer than a dozen reported casualties.

Father Faraon, remembering Aquino’s early years, said Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries that manage to topple their dictators should make sure their new leaders give plenty of time for transitional governments to take root. “Aquino installed a revolutionary government, cancelled the congress, and she was the sole leader.

She could have taken advantage of that, because everybody believed her, everybody loved her. But after a year or so, she started to normalize things, calling for elections.”

‘We are free’

At a recent reception for the opening of the EDSA revolution museum, former National Defense Secretary Enrile said the people power movement essentially changed the nature of the Philippine government. “We were free,” Enrile said, “and we were able to enhance the economic life of the nation based on a free market, instead of crony capitalism. Now even the landscape of the center of power has changed.”

Or has it?

“Society has largely been taken over again by the oligarchy,” said Edna Estifania Co, dean of Public Administration at the University of the Philippines. She said Aquino-era constitutional reforms aren’t being followed.

Part of the problem, Co said, is that idolizing leaders is engrained in Filipino culture. “It’s the same patronage system; it’s the same support for those who would be in the ruling group.”

Co has this note of caution for would-be democracies in the Middle East: make sure to create new institutions that are more powerful than any one leader or personality.

• Philippines marks 25th year of revolution

(Photo: Jason Strother)

After a decade behind the wheel, the traffic is really getting to 33 year-old Manila bus driver Ronnie Asahan.

“Yeah it’s really bad in Manila, the traffic here. I’m very so tired about traffic, Asahan says as he heads out into rush hour traffic in one of Manila’s busiest districts.

Urban dwellers around the world may claim their own city has the worst traffic anywhere, but here in Manila, they may really have a case. Along with the usual private cars, taxies, motorbikes and trucks, the streets of the Philippines’ capital are jammed with privatized buses whose drivers are paid per passenger, competing for customers as well as space on the road.

The private buses weave in and out of traffic and make sudden stops so conductors can step off and call out for potential riders. Residents complain that their aggressive drivers make Manila’s streets more congested and more dangerous.

Now some city officials say they have a solution: female drivers.

All of Manila’s bus drivers are currently men. But the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority is training women for the job.

Less aggressive and reckless

MMDA chairman Francis Tolentino asserts that most of the accidents in Metro Manila are caused by male drivers. The fact is that there are also a lot more male drivers on the road here, but Tolentino says that based on their “attitude and latent harmonic composition,” female drivers are less prone to be aggressive and reckless.

Whatever her latent harmonic composition, 50 year-old trainee Olivia Pabriga says she knows her stuff.

“Change oil, change tires and everything, pressure of tires, you have to know that,” Pabriga says. “Before you start the car you have to check the water and the oil and what you call this, the air brake fluid.”

Pabriga says she used to drive a truck, so she’s comfortable behind the wheel of big vehicles. She says during her first bus driving test, she remembered to do everything, including using the signal lights.

“That’s why they told me ‘you passed the training.’ Of 32 of us, I’m the only one to use the signal light,” Pabriga says.

Pabriga agrees with Tolentino that women drivers keep their cool better then men.

Lack of law enforcement

But some Manilans say the problem isn’t aggressive male drivers but the lack of traffic law enforcement.

“If the rules are not being followed, then still we will have traffic problems,” say Father Broderick Pabillo, a Catholic bishop and government critic. Pabillo says the fact that bus drivers and conductors are paid on a quota system gives them incentive to violate traffic laws.

Bishop Pabillo points out that in many other big cities, public transportation is subsidized by the state, and drivers get paid a regular salary, regardless of the number of riders. But in Manila, they get paid depending on how many passengers they get. “So naturally they will run after more people,” Pabillo says.

And some Manilans think women bus drivers might actually make things worse.

“It’s hard for them to drive a big vehicle like this,” say one bus rider who believes that women are physically incapable of driving buses.

Long-time driver Ronnie Asahan, meanwhile, says women can drive buses, but he worries that they tend to drive more carefully and slowly, which will only anger passengers and lead them to harass the drivers.

Driver in training Olivia Pabriga shrugs off the concerns. She says whenever Filipina women try something new, they always get the same reaction from men.

“They are always talking, no lady drivers in the Philippines,” Pabriga says. “They always say they cannot do that, only men can do that.”

But once we start doing the job, Pabriga says, they’ll know better.

Manila’s first class of female bus drivers will complete its training by the end of February.

Ampatuan is the place where the massacre took place in 2009 (Image: Magalhães)

The brutality of the killings shocked a nation used to violence against journalists.

On November 23rd, 2009, 58 people traveling in a convoy to register a political candidate were ambushed and massacred. The main suspect was a political rival, Andal Ampatuan Jr. He’s the son of a powerful clan leader in the south. And he’s accused of ordering his private militia to carry out the killings.

He is one of the 197 people charged in the crime. But only about half are in custody. And the trial itself is dragging on.

Nenen Momay- Castillo is the daughter of one of the victims. She and other relatives take turns flying to Manila to attend the hearings. Until now, they have been held on Wednesdays.

She says for now, she is just listening and watching. “The importance of our presence there was to show the perpetrators that we are interested in this fight.” Her father, Reynaldo Momay, was among the dead, but his body was never found. So he isn’t part of the official count of 57 victims. Nenen says it should be 58.

She has been fighting for that number since December 2009 because she can not accept that they can not include her father. “He should be included in the count,” she says.

Even though her father isn’t included, Momay-Castillo continues to attend the hearings. But she’s frustrated by the pace. “Honestly, the case is running slow, very, very slow. its almost a year now and we have only presented 4 witnesses.”

That’s out of a possible 300 witnesses.

Nenan says the fight is really hard because it seems that they are fighting a big wall. She says her enemies have so much money and they can buy anything, even justice. Some feel the trial could take years.

Attorney Gemma Oquendo is a member of the prosecution team and she is hopeful there will be justice in the end, thought it may take some time. “The wheels of justice may be square but its still turning. It is turning- it may be square, may be slow but its turning.”

And James Ross of Human Rights Watch says the fact that there was a a prompt arrest of those accused of ordering the attacks, not just those who carried them out, is a positive sign. Ross says there’s a culture of impunity here. “The fact that the people responsible for this killing genuinely believed, obviously believed that they could kill over 50 people and not have anything happen to them is astonishing but really reflects the view that these ruling families and politicians often have in the Philippines that they could commit murder and get away with it.”

But Ross is concerned that many of the conditions that allowed this to happen haven’t changed, despite government promises. He says, “Our concern is the broader issue, that just getting justice in this one case isn’t sufficient to address either the problems in Maguindanao and the use of private armies there and the far bigger problem of private armies existing throughout the Philippines.”

The Ampatuan clan has reportedly tried to bribe family members into silence. Some witnesses have been killed.

Nenen is worried about what might happen to her and others pursuing the case. She says, “personally [I] have a different life now. I cannot go to the places where I used to go.” She is also worried that if the case continues to drag on, and the public loses interest, no one will be held accountable for the massacre.
Download MP3 (Image: Magalhães )

• A year after massacre, delays in trial persist
• In pictures: Philippines massacre
• Ampatuan family ‘plotted Philippines massacre’

Mary Lee's shanty home is made of rusted box spring mattresses (Photo: Simone Orendain)

Trash is cash for many living in the Quezon City dumpsite near Manila in the Philippines but it’s also perilous. Ten years ago a pile of rain soaked garbage crashed down, burying nearly 300 squatters. That set off a move to convert the site into a controlled waste operation but the program is due to end by December – and the trash continues to grow. Reporter Simone Orendain visited the dumpsite. (Photo: Simone Orendain) Download MP3

• Audio slideshow from the World archives: Tijuana garbage culture (2007)
• In pictures: Manila slum fire

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Ten years ago, a garbage dump in the Philippines was the scene of a tragedy. A towering pile of trash collapsed, burying some 300 people who lived and scavenged at the dump. The collapse prompted authorities to intervene to make the 74-acre Payatas dumpsite safe. But time is now running out for the site and its residents, as Simone Orendain reports.

SIMONE ORENDAIN:  As you approach the Payatas dumpsite, the road is lined with junkshops and shanty homes piled high with the precious commodity of trash. Behind them looms a massive gray mountain of garbage. But as you get close, that gray pile also has a lot of green and it barely smells.

JAMEEL JAYMALIN:  So this is the sample of this vetiver grass.

ORENDAIN: Retired Colonel Jameel Jaymalin stands on an incline planted with trees and flowers. He’s especially excited by the grass. Vetiver grass has seven-foot roots that grab onto the garbage, crushed rock and soil beneath, stopping erosion and absorbing odors.

JAYMALIN: And this is very effective. We’ve been using this, planting this for the last six, seven years and no trash slide has been noticed here.

ORENDAIN: Jaymalin heads the operation that revamped this site. The dump was once deadly towers of trash. It’s now a series of gently sloping hills. Before the disastrous slide that prompted the landscaping, people came and went on their own, looking for plastics, aluminum and other recyclables to sell. Entire families including small children converged on the trash heaps. Now the government facilitates the scavenging in two shifts. About 1,200 people come in during the day and some 700 at night. Children aren’t allowed. This picture of orderly waste management is only temporary. With some 1,200 metric tons of garbage dumped daily, it won’t be long before this place is deadly again. But Jaymalin says the dump will soon close so the scavengers and nearby squatters won’t be in any danger.

JAYMALIN: They should prepare and look for alternative jobs because the garbage will not be here forever. In fact we are closing this, we are planning to close this by December, the end of the year. So we are preparing them, in fact.

ORENDAIN: Jaymalin says 75 people have so far completed a government-sponsored training program for jobs such as mechanics, drivers and electronics repair. Not a lot, compared to the thousands of families who live off of picking, and processing, the trash. About a mile away, Mary Lee sorts through huge sacks of used plastics. Her shanty home is made of rusted box spring mattresses. The 46-year-old remembers when the government temporarily closed the dumpsite after the tragedy in 2000.

SPEAKING TAGALOG

ORENDAIN: Lee says, “When the dump was gone, of course people went hungry. You started to see theft. There were very angry people who started hurting and killing each other because there was no way to earn.” Lee predicts the same thing will happen if the dump closes for good. She says her work helped put her daughter through high school, which is out of reach for most of this country’s poor. Garbage pickers can earn up to five dollars a day. That’s around half the daily minimum wage and just about enough to buy a day’s supply of rice for a family. After speaking with people who live off garbage, few seemed to have much faith in the government’s job training plan and they don’t believe the government will actually close the dumpsite. Colonel Jameel Jaymalin says the Payatas dumpsite will definitely close this year and soon after will be transformed into a park. And he says the scavengers who rely on the trash will have some time to adjust. A new 10-acre landfill will open next to the old dump, which he says will take two to three years to fill. For the World, I’m Simone Orendain in Manila.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.