Deep Field

by Tom Bamforth

  Over dinner that night in the fake marble dining hall of a swanky hotel back in Davao, the donors declared themselves moved by the experience. The cash-strapped Spanish representative, remembering the good old days of Spain’s dominion, pledged a paltry amount on the spot—as much as the dire conditions of the Spanish economy allowed. Other in-principle emergency pledges were made—still well short of the total amount needed.

  ‘There seem to be a few people who need a house,’ observed one of the more astute and generous representatives.

  But the word ‘emergency’ as experienced by a villager in Mindanao and as understood in the fluoro-lit corridors and behind the office partitions of bureaucratic power in Canberra, Oslo, Brussels and Washington were clearly very different. Five months after the typhoon had hit, contracts were still being drawn up and funding criteria finalised. As we finished our reports late that evening, one of my colleagues looked up mournfully from his computer. ‘I’ve been googling for half an hour and I can’t find any good jokes about donor visits to underfunded disasters,’ he said.

  It was a strangely detached experience working to coordinate the humanitarian response. Overly zealous security restrictions meant that for the first few weeks we were unable to leave Davao, the main city of Mindanao—which had not been affected by the typhoon. The security rules were devised by someone who genuinely believed that we would be instantly captured and sold into captivity in order to fund the electoral aspirations of corrupt politicians. This was the fate suffered by an unfortunate Swiss birdwatcher, who had strayed, in hot pursuit of a rare and exotic ‘twitch’, into territory controlled by an insurgent group several thousand kilometres to the south.

  We were stuck in an office overlooking the fake marble reception of an up-market hotel, where everything seemed like an elaborate and very earnest exercise rather than the real thing. We worked sixteen-hour days, seven days a week hunkered down in our office, attending meetings and gathering information remotely without actually seeing anything of the effects of the typhoon or talking to anyone who had first-hand experience. Below us, the crooner in the hotel restaurant played ‘Born free’ and the theme tune from Superman on his synthesiser.

  After a week of being locked up, I decided I couldn’t legitimately do any more without seeing for myself what had happened. As I finally drove out of Davao on a wet, grey morning, the devastation that I had been reading and meeting about was immediately apparent. Torrential rain had continued to cause massive flooding and, while the roads were at the high point, some villages lower in the valley were flooded up to roof level. By the sides of the road, men and women had constructed makeshift shelters with tarpaulins over the portable frames of string beds, piled high with family possessions, and occasionally articles for sale. The family rooster would be tethered at a high point nearby, out of danger.

  Lining the highway out of town, stark evangelical billboards in black and white added an apocalyptic edge to the sense of catastrophe:

  MY WAY IS THE HIGHWAY.

  —GOD

  As we went on, it was clear that some aid had reached the people living in villages by the main roads, but it did not take much to find places that had received nothing. The floods and immensely strong winds had caused huge damage, and the landscape, under the grey clouds and incessant rain, evoked the Western Front in places—scarred earth, shattered trees and farms, the strewn wreckage of lives, homes and livelihoods across vast tracts of Southern Mindanao. The earth, deeply disturbed by years of mining and deforestation, had been churned by the typhoon. Where villages had stood, great mounds of mud, rock, and splintered wood remained.

  Occasionally, as the rain stopped, the sound of chainsaws started as people began cutting up the debris and trying to re-make their homes. But these were few and far between—vast deforestation caused by the economic exploitation of Mindanao’s famous hardwood trees had finally led to a government-imposed ban on chainsaws. But even those that were in circulation came at a cost. At about twenty cents per plank, the cost of wood was unaffordable to many of the tenant farmers who had lost everything. In the absence of an effectively funded aid effort, some people had started to build back using what resources they had. But for the majority, most were living in pathetic lean-tos made of the debris and rubble of their former homes. Rusty and bent corrugated-iron sheets had been carefully twisted back into shape and secured with stones and rope, while tarpaulins and bits of wood provided cover for families huddling in the rain amid the desolation of their destroyed farmland.

  LOST? MY WAY IS YOUR ROADMAP.

  —GOD

  And many lived by the side of the road because their land was still underwater. Hovels had sprung up alongside the main arterials—in some cases little more than tarpaulins wrapped around bed frames. In one ‘spontaneous settlement’ I entered, a well-meaning NGO had delivered a number of tents sent by a donor in the Middle East. Lightweight and made of non-waterproof canvas for arid climates, this ‘aid’ only made the situation worse.

  Amid the chaos, destruction, and occasional signs of hope and reconstruction, I noticed again and again the neat, well-spaced triangular shelters in which the fighting cocks were kept. They were everything that, in many ways, the shelters provided during the relief effort were not. Understanding the territorial ego of the cockerels, the shelters were well-spaced, allowing for dignity, privacy and harmonious living. They were built on the high point of a hill and therefore not subject to flooding, and drainage trenches lined the huts in neat rows. Seed was scattered in designated areas to avoid crowding and confusion. In short, unlike the arrangements for humans, the arrangements for cocks met and even exceeded most humanitarian standards as set out in the field guides and handbooks of aid workers. But what these animals had, which many of their human counterparts clearly lacked, was an economic value.

  FOLLOW ME.

  —GOD

  The god squad billboards listed a telephone number, and as we stalled in an intersection I rang up to find out whether the deity had any views on traffic congestion. A recorded message advised that the number was no longer attended.

  With the flood waters receding, I decided to walk down from a ridge where World War II was commemorated by restaurants and plaster models of Japanese soldiers, and back through the streets choked with autorickshaws and jeepneys belching diesel fumes. I walked past corner stores and retail outlets selling pirated DVDs, clothes and food; shops with names like Jolly Ant and Pot Dog. I walked on past the great malls of the city—upper-class malls and middle-class malls—and deep into the bridge-side slum where, clustered round a mosque, there were autorickshaw repair shops deep in oil, and clouds of dark soot from coconut husks being converted into charcoal. The upper- and middle-class malls were deeply aspirational: Western goods at Western prices and modelled by Europeans. The centrepiece of one mall, beneath a fashion boutique whose gothic script announced that it was called Bum, was a set of plastic European manniquins acting out the family ideal. A blond, muscular male manniquin stood over a reclining, bikini-clad female manniquin, while two blue-eyed plastic toddlers played with equally synthetic toys in a plasticfantastic universe of fake beachside glamour. Further on, glass cabinets advertised Fairlane homes—designer pre-fabricated houses dominated by enormous garages where outsize models of American cars asserted that, in this miniaturised world, the occupants had arrived. A sleek young woman handed me a flyer. ‘Fairlane Homes,’ it said, ‘moving to a better future.’

  But if these malls were the new commercial and cultural centres of Philippine social life, then the cockfighting arena represented the brutal and bloody opposite end of the spectrum. The ice-cold synthetic paradise of the shopping centres gave way to the death, dust, beer and cigarettes of the cock pit. Walking past the Matina Gallera, a large, octagonal wooden building on the way down from the ridge, I heard a massive roar of noise. A barrage of sound—male voices in unison—erupted from the Gallera. As I got closer, the sound stopped. There was complete silence again as anoth
er bout started amid the deep concentration of men absorbed in a blood contest. It was a sport so important that wealthy politicians were known to fly their favourite beasts by Lear jet to major derbies. One international competition organised by American and Filipino enthusiasts was won by an estimable bird from Louisiana known as ‘The Rapist’.

  But what I assumed had been the roar of victory—the cockfighting equivalent of scoring a goal, a kill—was in fact the round of betting before the next fight. A sandpit stained with blood and covered in feathers stood at the centre of the Gallera, while advertisements for chook feed and rising politicians adorned the walls. Rising steeply on each side surrounding the pit were the packed stands, with special ringside seats for dignitaries. I took my seat at the back, in the ‘gods’ of the cockfighting world, peering down at the diminutive chickens below. Suddenly the roaring started again and the stadium erupted, everyone on their feet waving their hands and offering ten-fingered odds to everyone else in the stadium, attempting to find a series of betting partners who would offer compatible odds for opposing roosters in a kind of chook-centric version of traders on the floor of a stock exchange. Fearing that if I waved my hands around I might end up owing thousands of dollars to the rest of the crowd, I made a quiet bet with the man next to me—100 pesos for a large white rooster with an imposing manner against a smaller but potentially more agile darker bird.

  The bout was almost over before it had begun. After the roosters were paraded for the betting public, they were then ‘aggravated’ by being held down while other roosters pecked at their heads. Once sufficiently annoyed, both roosters were placed on the sand and pushed encouragingly towards each other. The dark agile one moved immediately, leaping high above the head of its larger and more threatening foe and kicked back with its right leg in a single elegant leap. A five-inch stiletto razor (sharpened only at eclipses and the dark of the moon) attached to the rooster’s heel sunk deep into its opponent’s neck and the white bird, without having moved a step, sank lifelessly to the sand in an instant kill. The death of the rooster came as a shock, and I immediately regretted the bet that I had so cheerfully and unthinkingly entered into a few moments before.

  The subsequent bouts were neither quick nor pretty. There was no majestic athleticism to the fight or the ritual of sporting bravery that provides a thin veneer to the brutality of blood sport. Following each round of crazed betting, more roosters would be ‘tooled-up’ with vicious spikes, tormented and set against each other in contests than usually resulted in a lethal stalemate in which both animals, hacked and bleeding, would collapse alongside each other only to picked up, roused and set against each other again. Outside the cock pit, trails of blood led to teams of men trying to stitch up wounded birds that could be repaired for breeding or to return to the ring again.

  But there was more to the fights than the numbing succession of death and gore. As I left, crowds of beggars asked if I’d been successful with my betting and pointed to their stomachs for food. Inside, the betting, while complex, saw the exchange of small amounts of currency in minute bills folded many times so they could be kept between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand. It was, in a phrase of Jeremy Bentham, made famous by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, an exercise in ‘deep play’—a game in which the stakes were so high that no rational person would play it. They played nonetheless, because the deep play represented not only a need for cash by people who had little and in the typhoon had lost much, but a cultural interpretation of reality. Gone were the sanitised shopping malls. The tiered walls of the Matina Gallera were themselves a cyclonic formation around the still eye of the cock pit as the commotion of the betting formed a wall of sound around the death ritual at the centre. This was, in a way, an avian passion play in which the (known) outcome was less important than the performing of it.

  In a country where newborns are carried until they are six months old because they are thought to be come not from the prosaic act of birth but descended the from the heavens, the cockfight is counter-reality, the experience that underpins, and is the frightening opposite of, the sterile aspirations of economic and social progress. As the crowd roared, pitiful amounts of money changed hands and, in the still of the storm, animals in a way more valuable than their owners fought to the end. The intensity of the betting, the socially hierarchical tiered stands and the concentration of the crowd during bursts of feathered fury stripped back the layers of interpretation, and began to merge in my imagination with the cyclonic churning of mud, stone, water and earth, where poor villages paid the ultimate price for being at the bottom the economic and status pyramid and thus at the front of the destructive social power of natural disasters.

  DISSONANCE IS A FEATURE of humanitarian work—both in the field when international aid workers are dropped into emergencies in countries and during circumstances that are very different from the comfortable homes they have left, and when viewed from afar. Most of us are aware of emergencies and humanitarian crises through papers, the internet and television, and are confronted on an almost daily basis by the realistic, yet constructed, images of suffering in distant places. Generally, these are not images of the dead or those who have paid the ultimate price for the catastrophe that has engulfed them, but of the living. In the words of a French war correspondent, ‘I think we have gone beyond the stage where it had to be the bodies and the blood. What is required today is suffering—particularly the suffering of women and children because it moves and mobilizes people more easily.’ For some humanitarian workers, however, living amid the suffering can be almost the opposite. One of the most bizarre and disconnected moments I have witnessed was seeing the aid workers in Darfur watching Milan Fashion Week late in the evening on satellite TV—images of wealth, glamour and desirability that were the polar opposite of the locations in which we found ourselves. In some ways these oppositional images—suffering brought to stable domestic households on the evening news, or fashion shows beamed into an unstable desert war—reinforce the prevailing order. Aid workers can escape to a more glamorous reality via a short flight to consumerist civilization in London or Dubai (or even Milan), while the horrific nightly vision of suffering reminds viewers of the comfort of home and relative political and economic stability. Suffering prompts compassion and, as aid agencies hope, potential donations from an audience whose power to give funds for distant crises is itself a luxury.

  We are moved, and often intentionally so, to sympathise with and assist as much as we can the ‘survivors’ whose ‘stories’ are briefly told—stories that make a claim for an entire life in a moment of suffering as if this is all that we need to know. Emergencies, taking aside for a moment the reality for those who experience them directly, can also be ‘consumed’. It was no coincidence, as Susan Sontag observed, that Robert Capa’s famous photograph in Life magazine of a Republican soldier in the Spanish civil war taken at the precise moment he was shot was positioned next to an advertisement for brilliantine with which an elegant city gent could slick his sophisticated hair.

  Wars and crises draw the lens like nothing else, perhaps with the exception of sex. But in doing so, emergencies are presented in humanitarian terms. It is the life caught in the moment of suffering that becomes the ‘story’ and is often all that is told, or known, or thought necessary to know, about a given situation. It has become commonplace, for example, when seeking to understand what is happening in ‘Africa’ (as if the continent itself were a single country) to interview an aid worker. ‘Africa’—the focus of so much of our contemporary images of suffering—becomes reduced to just that: a place whose history is a series of unconnected catastrophic dots whose totality, one is lead to believe, is history. This is the ultimate irony of working in crisis—the people whose stories are in fact history are those who cannot be helped. The dead cannot speak and we cannot know what they experienced, no matter how realistic the presentation of the crisis may be. The role of journalists and aid workers then becomes one of witnessing in differ
ence ways—speaking for those who have died, representing the suffering of those who remain and interpreting, in messages designed to induce action, the meaning and response to these events.

  This is a process that can be strange, especially for those not accustomed to media performance. While in the Philippines, I was asked for an interview by a Spanish TV crew who were covering the aftermath of Typhoon Bopha. While the majority of my work took place in government offices and meeting rooms trying to coordinate the response and help develop strategies for recovery, the TV crew had other ideas. They wanted images of action and for an hour I rehearsed with a colleague a series of made-up dialogues that featured us pointing at maps, moving pins, and posing in various stages of intense discussion. With the sound off, our improvised discussions turned to Spanish football and the relative merits of Barcelona verses Real Madrid, Lionel Messi against Ronaldo, while we simulated the frenetic activity of a relief command centre. In the end, only a thirty-second clip was used and clearly my acting skills needed improvement. Similarly, during a radio interview to describe the overall situation and give my observations from a recent field visit, I was asked by the interviewer what the public could do to help. At the time there were no appeals, and no organisations in Australia were taking public funds to support the Philippines response. The immediate answer, in short, was ‘nothing’, although this was not what I said. As I contemplated, with a sense of deflation, the reality of a media interview that did not end in an appeal for funds, it occurred to me that this had not been a waste of time. Rather, the absence of an appeal was part of something that I think is of longer-term importance, at least in the West—informed public discussion and understanding of history, politics and current events that is not necessarily reducible to an appeal for cash (useful as this is) or the manipulation of images of suffering.