My Filipina

This is the last and still unfinished chapter of my emotional journey through life

The Prequel:

It had been three years since the final decree was issued divorcing me from my second wife, a Moslem girl I met and married in Egypt.  Life with that woman was the worst nightmare of my life.  The divorce, initiated by her almost as soon as she obtained her US citizenship, was prolonged and painful - both emotionally and financially.  But that's another story.  This story begins a few years after that one ended.

The setting:

I hadn't dated since the last divorce proceedings began five years earlier, and I thought perhaps my love life was over for good.  But somehow I managed to continue on, and was beginning to come out of the deep depression that had followed that divorce.  I had retired from federal service, moved to Texas, enrolled in graduate school, and sort of settled into a lone-wolf bachelor life, taking long rides on my motorcycle when I wasn't lost in my graduate studies. My world was big - and my soul empty.

The sighting:

My brother would regularly send me his old Cherry Blossoms magazines - full of oriental girls, mostly Filipinas, which I would flip through then toss away.  I guess he was trying to help me out of my depressed state by showing me some of the "fish" in those oriental seas.  Then, one day, for some unexplained reason, I applied for my own copy direct from the publisher. 

In the very first issue sent me -- as soon as I opened the cover page, there she was. She was 27 years old, living in  a small jungle village by the sea on the big island of Mindanao in the Philippines.  That's her picture in the upper left-hand panel.

Letters:

I decided to write her a letter.  I sent Cherry Blossoms the fee for her address. I was 56 at the time, but I wrote in my letter that I was only 50.  Now, you have to understand that pretty girls like the one I was going to write might be getting hundreds, even thousands of letters from other lonely guys. She later told me she received so many letters that she barely had time to even read them all, much less afford the postage to answer them all.  She only kept the few that interested her most, and gave the rest to her friends or they were discarded unanswered.  That she wrote me back at all was a minor miracle, given my stated age. Her letter was a very pleasant surprise, and perhaps an intended karma from a greater power above us. 

I wrote other girls also, but she was the one that interested me most.  We wrote each other about a year.  And with each letter I found myself waiting with ever greater anticipation for her next letter, which usually took about a month.

Then one day, not having heard from her for several weeks, while surfing the internet, I found the newly created Cherry Blossoms web site, and looked to see if she was on it.  There she was, in full-length pose.  My eyes almost popped out of my head.  She was gorgeous from head to toe.

<<< On the left is the picture I saw on the internet.

She later told me she was in Cherry Blossoms magazine before, and had a younger pen pal or two that interested her, and the only ones she was writing to.  Their correspondence went on for some time, but came to an end when one wanted her to take a nude picture of herself, and so she not only refused, but terminated further correspondence.  And another wanted her to escort him around the Philippines alone.  But she told him that her family would not allow her to go with him anywhere without a chaperone.  So he never showed up in person to see her, and that also ended their correspondence.

Karma? - - my good fortune was that she was still single, available, and accepting new pen pals.

The visit:

Back home I was going nuts over that picture, so I arranged for a visit to see her in person - to see if she was real.  A roundtrip from the US to Manila was about $800 then. Just in case it might turn out that she didn't like me in person, or I didn't like her, I arranged to meet about 50 other Filipina girls.  I reasoned, "No sense in wasting the travel expense if things didn't work out - there were plenty of fish in that sea."

I arrived in Manila and planned to stay a few days to check out a few girls I had put on as backup. But the first girl I visited turned to be so disappointing that I changed my mind about Manila, and booked a flight for the next day to the southernmost island of Mindanao where she was.

She had written me to meet her Butuan City, where her grandmother and some of her aunties lived, because, she advised, "I would never find her village by myself."  Despite its "city" status, Butuan City was just a small logging town along the Surigao river that had seen better days. 

I arrived a few days earlier than I originally planned, so she wouldn't have known I was there yet.  I telephoned her auntie that I had arrived.  Her aunt relayed back that it might be a few days before I would be able to see her niece. The next morning I began interviewing some of my backup girls.  None of them proved even interesting - nothing like their pictures in Cherry Blossoms magazine. 

So I was becoming more than a little apprehensive that she might not look like her picture either.  In fact, if you look at the picture above, one eye seems higher than the other, which made me wonder if she might be deformed.  Of course it could also just be a defect in the camera lens.  I had read that Filipinos "talk" with their eyebrows expressing emotion, so her picture might have been taken during one of those "eyebrow expressive" moments, coupled with a camera lens defect. Or so I hoped.

The afternoon of the second day of my stay there, she showed up with her aunties.  She peeked through the window of the Caraga hotel lobby, and I recognized her right away.  She was even more than I hoped for - almost perfect in my eyes, and even better looking than her photos.  Her eyes turned out to be equally level, and she had the most dazzling smile - to see her smile in person looking at me just blew me away.  That's an earlier picture of that smile to the right. >>>

All my other appointments were cancelled, and I only had eyes for her.  Of course, even with a year's worth of letters between us, we really didn't know each other very well, though we both might hope that the other would be that one true love and the life partner the other was looking for.

She was escorted by her aunts, and ask me to travel to her village to meet her mother and father.  So the next day I rented a driver and a van, and she and I and her aunties set off for her village.  We drove down a paved road that claimed to be a national highway, but at times was just a dirt road.  Hours later we turned off the "main road" onto a logging trail, that soon turned into no trail at all. Another hour bumping over rocks through the jungle and over a small mountain, we arrived at her village by the sea.  She was right - even though I had found it on a map, I never would have known the trails and paths we drove over.

In a jungle village by the sea:

It was like the Garden of Eden in a way, no amenities to speak of.  Gravity-fed, very low-pressure piped water ran to the outside of her house.  There were many small bamboo huts around, with no water service at all. There was no telephone service anywhere in the village, except for the local government agent's radio phone.  Her house had electricity to it, but most of the other huts had none.  The bathroom for most of the village was the nearby bushes.  At least in her house there was a bathroom and a modern toilet.  When the toilet was flushed, you could see the ground below, and a small ditch to carry away the waste. Still, it was better than a pit privy or the nearby bushes. 

Most of the inhabitants appeared to be subsistence farmers or fisherman, growing or catching just enough to feed themselves, with little currency to buy anything remotely modern.  But her family seemed relatively affluent, with a refrigerator, stove, TV set, and VCR. 

I was probably the first Anglo many of the locals natives had seen in years, if ever. I instantly became quite a curiosity, especially among the children.  In remote villages like this one, many, perhaps most, of the inhabitants did not speak English.  They spoke to each other in a local dialect peculiar to their area.  But she and her family also spoke Tagalog, Visayan, and some other Filipino dialects (none of which I understood), and also English.  They were obviously fairly well educated. 

Her mother's house was made of wood, rather than bamboo, raised off the ground on stilts - as was the custom in coastal area prone to tidal surges from storms at sea or tsunamis.  A thatched roof graced the house, which was quite a bit larger than the surrounding bamboo huts.  Obviously her family had some status in the village.  Behind the village was the big hill we had come over, which served as a refuge for when those tidal surges were too strong.

They received me graciously, and put me up in their home, as there was no hotel in the village - nor even a restaurant.  They also fed me some local delicacies, including a bowl of fresh calamari boiled in its own ink.  Unfortunately, I wasn't sufficiently acclimatized to appreciate that particular dish, though the other local cuisine was quite good. 

Her mother was teacher at the local elementary school, and she worked as a daycare teacher in a government sponsored pre-kindergarten school nearby.  They asked if I wanted to go to the nearby beach while she was working, but I asked if I could just follow her around - which they allowed would be okay.  She took me on a winding path through the village to her school and introduced me to her students.

The fall:

All that day I just could not take my eyes off her. If their was any flaw in her, I wasn't seeing it.  And she was mighty pleasing to my eyes.  I'm sure we made small talk, but I can't remember a single word.  In the evening they put me up in her room (without her, of course), while the van driver was assigned a spot on the floor next to the main door to sleep.  Her bed was a thick foam mattress on a frame well off the floor, with a mosquito net for a canopy.  An electric fan in the room made it fairly comfortable to sleep, despite being in the tropics. 

That night as I lay in her bed, looking up through the mosquito netting at a a small opening in the thatch roof, a rooster crowed in the night, as if heralding some portentous event. I felt a tear slide out my right eye and roll down my cheek.  Then a tear rolled out my left eye and I knew I was a goner - I would be marrying this girl!  Even if I wanted to, I could not turn away from her.  If I was making another mistake, it was now too late.  I had fallen off a high cliff for her.

In the morning I proposed marriage to her.  She ask me to discuss it with her mother first.  Her mother advised me that the final word was her daughter's, but that I must also agree to send her younger sister to college, and to support a four year old abandoned relative they had taken in.  I agreed to her terms.

The marriage:

As we began to discuss the marriage details, it became clear that we might have some obstacles to overcome.  The first obstacle was that I did not originally travel there to get married, just to check her out.  So I did not bring any paperwork with me that I might need to marry, such as US Embassy certification, and proof of termination of my prior marriages.  The second obstacle was that she did not have a passport.

Our first thought was to apply for a fiancée visa for her to come to America to get married.  But her not having a passport, and her birth certificate indicating her father was Chinese, meant she might have difficulty even obtaining a passport (which turned out to be all to true, and a story unto itself.)  And we couldn't apply for a US visa without a passport.  

The thought then occurred to me that perhaps that was a blessing in disguise, and it would be much safer for me to marry her there and for me to move to the Philippines.  Then if the marriage didn't work out, at least she wouldn't be able to attack any of my assets in the US. Two prior divorces had made me somewhat leery of marrying again, at least in the US. 

When I suggested to her that we marry and live there, she seemed quite pleased with that, and relieved that she wouldn't have to leave her family for a far away place.  So that became our plan. 

She wanted to be married in her little village, in the small "open air" Catholic Church there.  The local priest there told her she would have to get permission to marry in the church parish where she was christened, which was in Butuan City.  To complicate that picture, I was not a Catholic.  In addition, I had to go to Manila to the US Embassy and obtain a notarized US Embassy affidavit that served as a certificate of legal capacity to contract marriage. 

She also wanted us to live in her little village, close to her friends and family.  But I came to realize that this Garden of Eden wasn't for me, as it didn't have telephone service, and I would need internet access to manage my finances.  So we settled on Butuan City, where she had attended high school and college, and where her grandmother and some of her aunties lived.     

We set off for Butuan City and Manila, chaperoned by her younger sister, to accomplish all the preliminaries.  In Manila I had my sister in the States fax a copy of my prior divorce documents, but we forgot to bring any of our letters to each other proving we had been corresponding for a least a year.  Despite that, the US Consul took pity on us and issued the affidavit

Arriving back in Butuan City, arrangements for the marriage ceremony was in progress.  The parish priest refused to officiate at the wedding because I wasn't Catholic, but with a generous "donation" to the church, he allowed her cousin, who was also a priest, to be the one to marry us.  We attended a Catholic pre-marriage counseling the church required, and the date was set. 

Finally everything was set, and we had our wedding in the Catholic Church in Butuan, with her cousin the priest officiating.  That's us getting married in the picture to the left.  And below is the two of us at the reception afterwards.   

Some days later, she took our church wedding  certificate to the city registrar, but they refused to process it until we attended a government-required seminar on family planning.  That never actually happened, but she got one of her relatives in her home province to issue a certificate that we had, and with that the church reissued the marriage certificate a month later, which was accepted by the civil registrar, and we were then "officially" married. 

We celebrate our wedding anniversary on the date the church wedding ceremony took place, not the later date on the marriage certificate.  However, on all official documents, the marriage certificate date is what we have to use.

The courtship:

You can't really develop a realistic relationship with someone just writing letters.  So when we got married we hadn't had a real courtship.  For us, that came after the marriage.  As in all courtships, adjusting to the other's personal traits and idiosyncrasies takes some time, some negotiation, and, frankly, some quarrels and fights.  So it took us about six months of living together before we finally worked that all out and settled down to a routine we both could live with.  One of the good aspects of the Philippines is that there is no divorce, so couples are encouraged by the system and by families, to stay together and work things out.  That doesn't always happen, of course, but in our case, it served to help us reach the smoother waters beyond that initial adjustment period, which for us was pretty rocky - with lots of quarrels. 

The duration:

The relationship really started to smooth out after she got pregnant with our first child, and we moved to Davao City, where we lived for the next six years, and where our two children were born.  In the Philippines it was a good life with a good woman, who became my best friend, and whom I eventually came to trust enough to bring her back to the US, where we live now. 

Aging with an angel:

She ages slowly, if she ages at all.  At forty, she is still a beauty, with the body of a teen-aged girl and the face of a twenty year old.  Men half her age ogle her as she walks by.  I am always proud to be her companion.  I think no matter how old I live to, I will never need Viagra, as just to see her stroll around in her underwear or less still arouses me to passion. 

Karma:

I entered this adventure with two bad marriages and painful divorces haunting me, and some great trepidations about the marriage lasting.  But it has endured some decades now, and we still hold hands and plan our future together.  She is more than a wife - - she is my partner, my passion, my comfort, and my soul.  I have received in her a very great gift from some higher power far beyond my comprehension.  It is a gift I do not deserve, but for which I am grateful -- for the grace bestowed upon me, and to the karma that joined our paths.  She is truly a gift that I treasure beyond all things earthly.