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My Excellent Philippine Adventure |
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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. 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 the Philippine Sea. Then, one day, for some unexplained
reason, I applied for my own copy direct from the
Letters: I decided to write her a letter. I sent Cherry Blossoms the fee for her address. I was 57 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 couldn't even read them all, much less afford the postage to answer them all. She had to give many of them to her friends, and many letters to her went unopened and unanswered. That she wrote me back at all was a not only a very pleasant surprise, but 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.
The visit: I arranged for a visit to see her in person - to see if she was real. A roundtrip from the US to Manila was only $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 I would never find her village by myself. Despite its "city" status, Butuan City was just a small town along the Surigao river. I had arrived a few days earlier than I originally planned, so she wouldn't have known I had arrived. 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 more than a little apprehensive that she might not look like her picture. In fact, if you look at her picture, one eye is 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. Later I learned that Filipinos "talk" with their eyebrows expressing emotion, so her picture was probably just taken during one of those "eyebrow expressive" moments. 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, 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. All my other appointments were cancelled, and I only had eyes for her. Of course, we really didn't know each other very well, but we both had hopes that we might be able to be the true, 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 - I never would have found it on my own. The village: 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 toilet, although it just led to a hole in the floor and a small ditch to carry away the waste. Most of the inhabitants were 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, 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. They spoke to each other in a local dialect peculiar to their area, but she and her family also spoke English and were 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 flood-prone areas. 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. They received me graciously, and put me up in her room (without her, of course), as there was no hotel in the village - nor even a restaurant. 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 I did, just like a puppy dog at her feet. She took me to her school and introduced me to her students. The fall: That night as a lay in her bed, looking up through 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 marry 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 little 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 true.) 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. But the priest there told her she would have to get permission from the parish where she was born and 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. I also confessed that I couldn't live in her little village, as it didn't have telephone service, and I would need internet access to manage my finances. So we set off for Butuan City and Manila, chaperoned by her younger sister, to accomplish all the preliminaries. In Manila we got the US Embassy to issue the affidavit, despite not bringing a copy of all our letters for the past year. And back in Butuan City, it was decided that her cousin, who was a priest, would 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. But we celebrate our wedding anniversary on the date the church wedding ceremony took place, not the 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. 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. She is still a beauty, with the body of a teen-aged girl. 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 arouses me to passion. Karma: I entered this journey with two bad marriages and painful divorces haunting me, and some great trepidations about the marriage lasting. But it has endured some ten years 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 a great gift from some power far beyond my comprehension, which I treasure, and for which I am grateful to the karma that joined our paths.
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publisher. 
Then one day, not having
heard from her for several weeks, while surfing the internet, I found the 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.
