some background: i’m off to tacloban in the philippines with three of my classmates for a two month clerkship in global health! all of my classmates are somewhere in the developing world for these two months. this is the capstone of my medical school’s global health curriculum, and being that global health is the reason that most of my classmates chose the school we’re at, this is something that we’ve all been looking forward to with eager anticipation!
i had a quick layover in tokyo, just long enough to leave the airport, eat a bunch of sashimi off a conveyor belt, and take a dump while sitting on heated toilet seat and subsequently have my bunghole rinsed clean by a pressurized stream of hot water.
in manila, i quickly began to learn about filipino public transportation. the primary mode is the jeepney, extra-long world war II era jeeps with benches in the back. we stayed in a hostel in malate, which is apparently the red light district of manila. not so bad though, really. we were allotted a week in manila to complete the registration formalities with the university of the philippines. we explored intramuros, a remnant of colonial manila, which is home to a selection of centuries-old catholic churches.
we arrived in the philippines at around the same time as pope francis, and the place is going insane. 80% of the philippine’s population of 100 million is catholic, making it the third most populous catholic country in the world. add to that the rock-star status of this pope and his particular penchant for the poor and destitute, whose prevalence here is high, and you’ve got chaos of epic proportions. roads in a many-kilometer radius are closed for days in anticipation, the airports shut down for hours when he is transiting through, and the entire duration of his stay was declared a national holiday. 25 000 police officers were brought in from around the country to line the streets; only a few of them had to be fired for taking selfies as the pope passed. i set out to glimpse his motorcade in the pouring rain, and was almost crushed. its got to be tough being elderly or a child! i found myself on the second level of a mcdonalds with hundreds of screaming fans pushing against a glass wall to catch a glimpse of the pope-mobile. thankfully the glass wall remained intact. he came to tacloban, the site of our clerkship, to express solidarity with the survivors of typhoon haiyan, the worst natural disaster in modern filipino history. more about the rebuilding of tacloban in a future post, to be sure.
the pope also held a mass at what they say is the largest mall in the philippines, the “mall of asia.” in our experience we think we found much more extensive malls in manila. this country, like the rest of southeast asia, is absolutely obsessed with shopping malls, and very little could excite me more than that fact. actually, religion and malls have a unique symbiotic relationship here, as chapels are ubiquitous in the malls, with multiple daily masses which are remarkably well attended by shoppers carrying their bags of merchandise; the sound of the liturgy being poignantly broadcast throughout the mall in much the same way as the muslim call to prayer echoes through the alleyways of much of the middle east. it is special.
we spent most of our four days in manila wandering around amazing shopping malls, interspersed by a quick impromptu trip to taiwan. our flight to tacloban was cancelled and delayed repeatedly, so i spent an extra night in a hotel where i appeared to be the only customer not paying by the hour. a mouse shared the tiny room with me until i was finally about to scare it out the door. i was able to spend a night (yes, a night – I was picked up at midnight and dropped off at 6 am) with my good friend prajjwal from college – he now attends medical school in the philippines. turns out ihop pancakes at 3 am in manila are just as good as you’d expect!
