I guess the statute of limitations on getting in hot water with Peace Corps staff has expired so I can finally tell this story:
Every place has its gangs; LA has the crips and the bloods, El Salvador has MS13, West Side NYC had the Sharks and the Jets, and the Philippines has the New People’s Army. They are a fun-size communist insurgency that was founded as a group opposing the oppression of the country by Ferdinand Marcos (his wife Imelda had the 4000 pairs of shoes) and the US bases around the country. During my Peace Corps service, all my local friends would call them the NPA or the Nice People Around. Bikol, where I was stationed, is a particularly “nice” part of the Philippines. Since everything I said was in the local language, I will do my best to translate from my broken dialect into English.
One of the pipelines I designed and built was for an INCREDIBLY rural upland barangay or “hood”. To get pipes and sacks of cement to the main work site took a 40 minute drive from the city and then a 20 minute hike over steep, sharp limestone terrain. Cellphone signal in this area was spotty normally, on more than once occasion I had to climb small trees to send text messages.
All of my local friends and counterparts had told me that the project area was within about a kilometer of the regional base for a platoon of these nice people. While I was a little nervous at first about working on this project, I decided that since I didn’t have any money and my organization was internationally neutral, no one would bother me, or I would just woo them with my totally amazing language skills. I managed construction on this project for more than a month with no interruptions and without even seeing so much as a single nice person. In fact, since if anyone from my agency knew what I was doing, I would probably be sent home, I had only told one or two close American friends where I would be working. The only safety precaution I had was a pre-written text message with the location of the project and the fact that I had been kidnapped by the NPA. I practiced sending it with one hand with the phone in my pocket and got good enough that I could send it out in 2 seconds using only 5 clicks. This was my safety plan.
One day, right after lunch, my buddy councilman Jimmy, this short, nervous guy, took me aside, and said, Page, there’s some PEOPLE who want to TALK to you.” At that point, I could have run, I could have hidden in the woods and snuck back to the main road after dark, but I decided that I had morality on my side and I had no reason to be scared of a group of clearly idealistic “communist” rebels. I was totally ready for this and had my morals all puffed up to defend myself and the work I had been overseeing.
Jimmy led me another kilometer into the jungle, down a steep series of cliffs, along a creek and behind a giant boulder. If there was had been any chance of using my texting skills to save my ass that ship had long since sailed. As it happened, earlier that week, the nice people had blown up a nearby cellphone tower when the tower company refused to pay their “revolutionary tax.”
Waiting behind this boulder were 6 guys in camo t-shirts and shorts, flip flops, baseball caps, ammo clips and AR-15 assault rifles; if these aren’t the NPA, they are at least giving them some serious competition. So what do I do, having gone into this thinking I could talk my way out of this situation? I introduce myself to the wrong guy. I walk up to the first nice guy, shake his hand and start talking to him like we have known each other for years. After a few sentences, he starts to get a little bit nervous and is looking over my shoulder. I follow his eyeline and find myself staring at someone who is clearly the leader; he has dark, deep-set eyes, is pretty built for being 5’ tall and has way more full clips of ammo than anyone else.
“do you know who we are?”
“you are the NPA”
“you are building a project near us, do you know what we want?”
“no”
“we want respect”
Now this would have been easier to handle if he had said something concrete like money or food or gas or something but how do you give someone respect? Does he want me to follow him and his platoon around and compliment his leadership style?
“ummm”
Again: “We want respect" then “How much is the total amount of your project budget?”
“500,000 pesos” (about $10,000)
“we want 10%” or 50,000 pesos worth of respect
This is where I should have said “yes sir no problem sir I’ll get it for you as soon as I can sir.” But I have a big mouth and I thought my morals were in the right. The workers on this project had all taken a cut in their daily pay since they were the ones getting the new pipeline.
I said “no, I can’t do that; these people are working hard and if I give you that money, we won’t be able to finish the pipeline and all this work will all be for nothing.”
Not to mention all the paperwork I would have to do and receipts I would have to forge to hide 50,000 pesos in the project budget….
And then I said “What class of communists are you, trying to stop a project that is for helping the people?”
I know he must have been a little miffed because he said a bunch of words very quickly that I didn’t understand to some of his buddies and spit a little bit when he said them.
“golly gee these negotiations are unexpected”
After a couple more minutes of going back and forth, he realized I didn’t have a briefcase full of bills with me in the jungle so I had two days to go back and send him a text message when I had the money available; he wouldn’t interrupt construction but after two days all bets were off, including the health of my buddy councilman Jimmy. As I was getting ready to leave, I asked for his phone number so I could get in contact with him. He had one of those phones that shows multiple contacts at a time so I tried to get all James Bond on his ass and write down all the numbers I could see like someone was going to send them to some central database with all their DNA and give me a run-down on their criminal history and any medical conditions they are predisposed to…
I let the workers off early from trenching for the day, got back in a bus back to the city. When I got back to the office, my coworkers already knew everything that had happened. Someone’s brother’s wife’s mother’s friend knew someone in the platoon of NPA and had made the necessary text messages and calls to let everyone know how they just shook down a big white guy. Of course, they all thought it was funny as hell that I had gotten to meet some nice people and had already been planning for how to pay them off since day one of the project (without telling me about it of course). We eventually settled on paying them 10,000 pesos, a goat, a sack of rice and a big box of instant coffee. My counterpart took the goods to them and once we paid I never saw them again. The pipeline and pumps were installed without a hitch and the village still has easier access to water.
Besides learning to keep my mouth shut, what I took away from this whole experience was that even principled revolutionaries turn to extortion if they can’t get their morning rice and coffee.
