Interview with my Neighbor - Dario

At the age 58, Dario lives in Glendale California. He was born 1948, and came from the Philippines in the year 1980. Dario was in a room interviewed about his life and his childhood in the Philippines. He was informative about talking about how the schools were like, and also of how the streets were like, and his living conditions. He said that the Philippines were a great place to live, especially since there were not many crimes going on.

Philippines are also democratic like the United States the form of government. It’s the same because the government is patterned after the United States because the Philippines were under the U.S. from 1900 and gave us the independence in 1945. There was freedom of press and they declared martial law in 1972, but prior to 1972, before the declaration of the martial law, everything was normal. There was no noise pollutions because radios, there’s no such thing.

Local police I guess are ordinary guys, they’re just there. they don’t make a lot of money and so I think that brings some sort of corruption because when lets say people violate people get speeding ticket, there’s a tendency where they let them go a little kind of upsetting things like some money, other than like that, its not like you’re talking about brutality, no there’s no such thing, the local police are just there for peace and order. Hardly the police will come, because they are hardly ever needed. If there was a teacher, they would stop. They wouldn’t be even fighting because the teacher is the authority. There was a police prison, but sometimes there is nobody in the jail. I really can’t think of any reason why anybody would be in jail. Over there, stealing is like you murdered someone. Maybe the national jail is like the county jail here. All those people who have properties will have a gun, like if you have cattle’s, or animals, you want to protect them.

It’s a pretty enterprise place over there, like the United States. People are selling everything, at very sustain, is maybe cigarettes. Before we called it the blue sealed, they sealed with blue, that’s why it’s called blue. The food over there is expensive. Well again during the time, expensive is relative. There were property taxes, but there were no sales tax. I think the ID thing here was recent. Before anybody could buy cigarettes here. When I was a kid, I could go to the store and buy liquor, or beer. I say my dad, or somebody, if we have a visitor, because you don’t stuff things in your house because we didn’t have refrigerators.

There is excellent education, it’s very good. Again it’s patterned after the U.S. educational system. We have private colleges; private universities and also we have public universities, which were very good. Very educated teachers, very good teachers you know if you’re teaching English, they’re supposed to be teaching English, if they’re teaching mathematics, they know what there subject matter, education is very important to us. , I started to read in English, even before I started to learn Filipino. Yeah, all the books I was reading are American books during school, we’re reading about American politics, American history. So it’s all about America, I guess the text books that we used came from America, so we were reading those things. We studied history of the Philippines. I enjoyed being in school, its fun being in school. Nothing is free. You buy your pencil, you buy your notebook, you buy your paper, and nothing is prohibited free.

The graffiti’s here are worse, I’m not seeing things like that over there, and there was no, very few graffiti’s there. Now talk about dirt, people there is not trained like here. Over there they just throw away things on the streets or river, and it’s bad in that aspect, because they not being trained, putting the things in the trash. There are policies and regulations and rules. You’re not even supposed to raise your voice, or make noise in the hallway.

There are gangs here, they’re just localized gangs. It’s not really violent gangs that are shooting each others, just group of boys you know being grouped together and if there’s any rivalry, just a small stuff thing just a fist fight or something, not really shooting. Other than the petty rival group we called “gang”, it was peaceful. The worst gang activity over there was fist fights.

I like living the Philippines, but materially there is more opportunity over here, over there it’s less opportunity. People are all educated but it’s very hard to get a job. Very limited opportunity that’s why people come to America. There are a lot of educated people who have no job, so if you have a job, you have to love your job. Because it’s so hard to replace a job not like here. There were people, who would hang out around and not go to school, but they just hung around the school and they’re there, but no malls or loud music.

 Interviewed by Kazu Mizuguchi