The Pharmacy(tm)

My story begins, oddly enough—one step ahead of the middle.

It is an overcast afternoon in April and I am driving down Roxas Boulevard. My destination: an obscure locality in the City of Navotas.

A Statistical Perspective

Honestly, I don’t really know anyone from Navotas—or if I did, I never realized they were “Navotan”. To me, Navotas is just another area in the expanded urban area of Metro Manila, just like Marikina (where I’m from) is.

When I started as an application encoder in HSBC, part of my training was familiarizing myself with the area codes and postal codes of various parts of the Philippines, particularly Metro Manila. This was essential to be able to accurately capture information credit card and loan applicants would put on their card or loan application forms. It was mandatory that this knowledge was second nature to us, so we could correct any misconceptions the average Juan had about their zip codes and telephone numbers, and it also helped the bank filter out signs of fraudulent activity (e.g. A guy claiming to live in Pasig City, but clearly had a Makati City telephone number or zip code was suspect).

In later years as a banker I would see the value of this early skill when I was involved in developing credit strategies and demographic studies for the bank. I studied the correlation of certain things such as a person’s residential or work address or to their propensity to borrow and repay their debts. Any statistical conclusions are only as good as the source data used to develop them—and mind you I’ve seen a great deal of crap data in my life.

On that overcast afternoon, it had been almost seven years since my first days as a “zip code sensei”, but even then I still knew that Navotas formed the northern cluster of Metro Manila known collectively as CAMANAVA (Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas, and Valenzuela). The Navotas area is relatively a small place (as Metro Manila districts go) and borders the Capital City of Manila to the north and is likewise bordered to the east by the City of Caloocan.

As an application encoder, I’ve always wondered why the CAMANAVA area was known collectively that way. Why isn’t the City of Manila or the even larger and proximate Quezon City included in this cluster? When I later got involved in credit statistics I saw part of the reason: for some odd twist of fate, applications from the CAMANAVA area seem to be of lower quality compared to other areas in Metro Manila. Not only are the average incomes from this area lower than the median, but any lending done to individuals from this area show a higher tendency to default compared to others.

Apart from these academic notions about debt and address, or my mastery of zip codes, I never really knew Navotas. Never been there personally. So with all that being said, I was just more than a little curious about going to Navotas that afternoon.

Trivia: Incidentally did you know that Navotas does not have its own set of zip codes—it shares its series (14xx) with Caloocan’s central post office. You could say from the perspective of the post office that Navotas is a missing chunk of Caloocan.

What I wasn’t totally prepared for was that Navotas (and probably most of CAMANAVA) is a totally different universe compared to the Metro Manila I knew, from more than just a statistical perspective.

A Failed Business

Before I continue to play Navotan tour-guide, maybe I should explain why I was headed there in the first place.

Those who know me from way back in college and even during my early working years first as a stockbroker, and later as a banker, know that I have a penchant for driving people home. For me the penchant is one part concern (how could you let all those delectable and dressed to kill ladies go home on their own after a midnight company party, eh) and another part curiosity: I’ve always had a wanderlust since I was a small kid, but I had to wait till my college years when I finally drove my own car to indulge it (just another one of those things I wanted to do, but couldn’t until later).

True to form, I was headed to Navotas that afternoon, to bring someone home. In the car with me was my erstwhile business partner, Maya, and behind us was Lalaine, whom we were bringing home to Navotas.

Maya was my business partner in the stillborn lending business. Since this business is pretty much the topic of this whole Bittersweet Symphony thread, I’ll skip for the time being how I met Maya and got into lending—there will be enough time for that later. For now I’ll briefly focus on the relationship between my partner, and our passenger: Lalaine.

Lalaine worked for Maya as an employee of my partner’s retail food business. Maya ran a small fast food store (i.e. burgers, fries, sandwiches, etc.) in the suburbs of Makati City. Actually I really had no actual involvement with this business, but Maya set up this store about a year ago as part of a debt recovery plan—which I was part of. One of our debtors in the now stillborn lending business had some trouble meeting their obligations, and the store was set up as part of the deal to continue servicing their interest payments.

Interesting isn’t it? So how does one set up a fast food store to function as debt repayment? I promise you that I’ll explain more about this trivial arrangement in future posts, but for the time being suffice it to say that despite my partner’s best efforts, the deal failed, and her store was forced to close.

Lalaine, whom Maya hired shortly after opening the store, was a short young woman (I’d estimate in her early twenties) with a small round face, and who rarely said anything, even when directly questioned. Totally zero impressions and hardly the material I’d select for the job of fast food sales.

Surprisingly, Lalaine was actually good at selling burgers and sandwiches during her brief stint with the store. She was so good that she was able to save enough to buy a lot of Maya’s own equipment (e.g. burner, utensils, supplies) when she offered them for liquidation after the store closed in Feb of this year. Maya was also quite happy with Lalaine’s performance, and even happier that despite the failure of the store Lalaine had offered to purchase the equipment to start her own store.

When the time came for them to part ways, Maya persuaded me to assist her in bringing Lalaine (who had no other way home—and didn’t know how to commute) back to Navotas. Like Maya, I was inspired to see people making their own efforts to be productive in life, and I was only too happy to bring her home.

Sights and Sounds

Our destination specifically was the town of Tangos in Navotas.

A late afternoon drive through Roxas Boulevard across the City of Manila is full of great sights: from the Manila Bay sunset (which we were sadly deprived of in the overcast weather), to the glittering rows of classy and not-so classy hotels and clubs leading up to the stately avenues surrounding the original walled city of Intramuros.

Past Intramuros and going through the seedy district of Tondo, the sights change dramatically. Paved avenues give way to potholed streets, and clear sidewalks metamorphose into rubbish piles. Hotel skylines dissolve quickly into squatter shanties, and the pungent sea breeze turns ripens into the foul stench of trash and human waste.

Everyone is familiar with the Manila squatter phenomenon. What people are probably not familiar with is just exactly how large it really is.

Driving past the Bay Area and Tondo into the Manila-Navotas border, one can easily miss the fact that that you’ve entered Navotas. You leave Manila with squatters filling your car window’s field of vision and you enter Navotas with pretty much of the same. And just when you thought that you’ve seen enough squatters and have finally entered the city fringes, you clear a hill and there’s even more of them.

Kilometers of squatter shanties. Shanties on sidewalks, old warehouses, condemned condominiums of a bygone era. Shanties on the water, under bridges, above buildings. More and more squatters. And here I was, driving into the heart of it. Lalaine, why on earth did you have to live in Navotas?

Although we arrived at Tangos just after sunset, the sun was already gone from our sights well into the heart of Navotas. The streets kept shrinking as we ventured further, from the wide avenue leaving Roxas, into the two lane city road, then a one lane road. Lalaine, who was quiet for most of our trip, finally spoke and said that we need not go further, and that she would negotiate the rest of the trip on foot. Not that we could—the street we were on had shrank to a width that only pedicabs can cross.

In this obscure area, way north of Metro Manila, there was no electricity. Although there were some houses amongst the shanties, the streets were really not paved. Puddles of murky water were everywhere—and as we helped Lalaine disembark from my car we learned why the area was mostly wet: there was a single solitary free-flowing water pipe nearby. The pipe belonged to one house, and all other residents in that area bought their water from that house. Ten Pesos per bucketful.

No power and water. Where was Maslow’s Hierarchy in this? Is this 21st century Philippines?

Lalaine sought help from her siblings to carry the loads of equipment she had bought from Maya. She still remained quiet throughout all this, perhaps due to embarrassment at having finally revealed her home—which was way past humble—to us. Even Maya would later remark that she had no inkling how poor Lalaine’s living conditions were until she finally saw Navotas up front. And thus we left Lalaine in that dark, decrepit corner of Metro Manila, to seek her own fortune with Maya’s fastfood equipment.

And that was that. With a little difficulty I was able to turn my car around in that tight street and in an hour we were headed back to glittering Makati, with our expanded notions of Navotas still ringing in our senses.

A Great Divide

You might ask at this point: why did I bother bringing up what was relatively a trivial episode? Nothing crazy happened during the trip—I just brought someone home—which happens often enough in my life. So what’s up with that? Well let’s just say I deliberately took this time to bring you to Navotas as yet another setup.

I want to illustrate a disparity.

Unfortunately, since Lalaine is only one case, you will have to wait till later posts to fully appreciate the comparisons. Just humor me when I say that for the remainder of this story Lalaine will thus serve as our moral benchmark.

Without trying to be poetic about it, Lalaine was obviously not a well-to-do person. I didn’t really have to ask, but having seen her home surroundings it wasn’t hard to underestimate Lalaine’s chances of success. But then again here was a spunky, albeit quiet girl, who was trying her best to change the cards that she had been dealt. To rise above the life she had been born into. To reject the fate that awaited her.

This is almost too much of a cliché I admit. And I won’t even go as far as remotely suggest that all “poor” people are like Lalaine. It’s likely that the sad truth in many cases, is that many are not. But these are actually just my sentiments, only knowing Lalaine for as short a time as I did, and from those last telling moments as she quietly disembarked from my car to return to the shadows of Navotas from where she came. I had no way of knowing if these were indeed the things that brewed in her young mind as we left her, nor will I probably ever know as I will likely never see Lalaine again.

But if my sentiments about Lalaine are even remotely true, this would already put her at great odds with the rest of the sordid list of characters I would meet in 2007.

<to be continued>