Filipino Bus Holdup

Sometimes I wonder how universal certain aspects of our methods of communication and expressions of emotion are. For example, why does the whole world seem to understand smiling as meaning, more or less, the same thing? Does everyone use kisses and hugs to show affection? I am almost certain the answer to that one is a no. Handshakes as a form of greeting? That is far from a standard greeting around the world. Our world is filled with a variety of cheek kissing and praying hands used to say hello.

But what about things that are only relevant in more contemporary scenarios? How universally understood is gun etiquette? Is it only because of movies that I know to put my hands up when the gun is in my face? Do the Filipinos know why my hands are up? Have they been watching the same movies? Am I confusing them? Nobody else has their hands up. Except of course for Lise, who apparently has watched the same movies. Now the trigger has been pulled, and someone is shot. Is this because their hands were not up? I am not privy to the meaning of the language going on around me, so I can’t know. I leave my hands up.

***

8/10/2011

The bus ride started like any other. We left Tacloban on the island of Leyte in the early evening, crossed the bridge to the island of Samar and we were on our way to the city of Catbalogan. The bus was quite full, but plugging along as usual on the windy roads, stopping to drop folks off, picking others up. As usual, Lise and I had snagged the bench seat in the very back with a few others. I struggled to get the window closed. It was jerry rigged with a puzzle of random wires and clips. It took me several tries to finally get it down to keep out the cold, dusty air.

When seats opened up in front of us, the men sitting next to us moved into them. I took this opportunity to pull out my laptop. I have the Philippines guide book on my computer, so I was using it to look at the map of Catbalogan and get an idea of where the cheapest hotels would be. Pulling out this kind of flashy device isn’t my typical style on a cheap bus in a poor country, but I didn’t want to be completely lost when we arrived.

I heard Lise whispering my name. It had a sense of urgency to it, but it seemed odd to hear her whisper. I looked over at her and she was staring in front of her, nodding for me to look. It took a moment for my brain to believe what my eyes were telling it. I switched into a dream like state, as my mind seemed to race and freeze up at the same time. The man who had been sitting next to me, and had moved to the seat in front of me was now standing up in the aisle. He had a gun in his hand. It was pointed at the head of a man sitting two seats in front of Lise. He clutched his young boy close to him as he scrambled to produce his wallet. I slowly shut my laptop. Part of my mind starts to try to remember the kinds of things I had always imagined myself doing in this situation. Hero stuff, escape stuff, whatever. All of this, however, was thrown out the window when I noticed he was not the only gunmen. There was another man with a handgun trying to take a woman’s purse. In the front of the bus there was a man with a shotgun. The woman with the purse was struggling with the man, refusing to hand over her purse. Suddenly it flew in the air, coins and contents fluttering about and crashing on the floor.

The bus stopped.

Halfway up the bus one of the men had a gun pointed at two women. I could only see their motionless silhouettes as the orange flash bursted from the gun. Everything went completely silent and the women remained motionless. Before I could figure out what was going on, one of the gunmen had approached us. Lise had placed her hand bag in an easily accessible place. The gunmen kept the gun pointed at her as he nervously edged towards her. He stretched out his arm slowly towards the bag, plucking it up quickly and pulling back in the same manner that one would pick up a wedding ring out of a snake cage. For a man with a gun, his hesitancy surprised me. Then the he came to me, the gun pointed at my forehead. My hands, of course, were in the air. He spoke to me in a language that I am not even sure was Tagalog, but instead a local dialect. He reached for the Macbook still sitting in my lap. He looked at me as if to ask permission to pick it up. The look in my eyes told him that the gun was permission enough. He lifted the laptop off my lap, held it up high, examined it each side of it with a perplexed look, then handed it back to me. I left my hands up so he set it in my lap. He said something in his language, which I did not understand. He repeated it then turned back around.

In most holdup situations the obvious rule is that you give them what they want and you won’t get hurt. I thought back to all the stories of banditry I had heard about in Central America. Awful stories where they will randomly kill people on the bus to scare everyone, or even execute rival gang members in sight of everyone. And there is no doubt they will take every bit of everyone’s belongings. I didn’t know how it worked in the Philippines, but they had already fired one round at a woman. I didn’t want to be a random victim.

I looked over at Lise. Like me, she still had her hands up. She looked nervous but still. I got her eye contact and nodded toward the window, asking if she would follow me out. She nodded in agreement.

I move my hands toward the window. That puzzle of a window that wouldn’t come down. Now I was hoping to discreetly get it back up, and get it to stay. I pushed out a piece of wire, and slowly slid the window up. Just as I heard it click into place, a miracle in itself, I saw the man with the shotgun notice me, and swing his cannon around at me. My hands went back up.

A passenger in the front of the bus shouted.

The man with the shotgun turned back around. The three gunmen descended on the man who had shouted, reigning blows on him with the butts of their gun. Then the guns started firing. We jumped behind the seats. I looked over at Lise, but a man from somewhere in the back of the bus was now squeezed between us, hiding behind the seats with us. Lise climbed behind him towards me. As the shots continued, I pointed at the window, and she agreed.

I thought it would be more complicated, but I just put my body to the window and somehow landed on my feet. I couldn’t tell you now if I went head or feet first.

I turned around to look for Lise coming out of the window. Before I saw her in the window, I heard more gunshots, only now they were outside of the bus. I got the feeling that more people were fleeing the bus, and now they were punishing us for our mistake.

I turned and ran as a couple more shots fired. I ran about ten meters into the 4 foot tall grass and dove inside of it.

Just as I landed, I saw the bus speed off suddenly. Everything got quiet. Lise! Lise must not have made it off the bus. I assumed that all the robbers were out of the bus, but at this point I did not even know how many there were. Perhaps some of them had been waiting for the robbers here and this is why there seemed to be people shooting people inside and outside of the bus.

Either way, I assumed that at least Lise might be safer on the bus. At least there was a chance there were no thieves where she was. I was certain they were around where I was, and almost sure that if they saw me they would shoot me.

I felt that they might not have seen me, so I just had to breathe calmly and stay quiet. As my breathing got heavier, either from being nervous or my short sprint, I noticed something flat and hard against my chest. My Macbook. Although I don’t remember this, it seems that it was easier for me to escape the bus with my laptop rather than take it off my lap. I think of it as one of the more bizarre things I have done under pressure.

I had never thought about death on this level before. For a few moments, I was forced to ponder those last minute details regarding your life and your afterlife. These thoughts flashed in my mind between my contemplation of what I needed to do now. Surely I should stay put. At least an hour, perhaps all night if I hear any other action. The thieves had, for whatever reason, abandoned the bus here. Perhaps they were wandering the road to the next place they could flag another bus and escape. Or maybe they too would wait until morning to make their way home. Should I try to flag down the next vehicle? Go to a village? No, not yet. Definitely stay put for a while.

“Joey?!”

As soon as I heard her voice, all my previous decisions went out the window. I poked my head out of the grass.

“Lise!?”

I didn’t hear an immediate response. I stood up and looked around. Everything was quiet and still. The road, the trees, the night, had completely forgotten our gun battle and panic.

“Lise!?”

I ran out into the street, and finally heard her respond with my name again. I ran after it, and followed it over the guardrail and into a deep ditch on the other side. She was standing in a gravel turn out that was hidden from the view of the road. We hugged and made sure we were each ok. I didn’t feel that our situation had improved, but it was so much easier to deal with it with her right there. We started to explain to each other what happened. As we started, though, I saw the glint of an approaching vehicle. I knew that if the robbers were still around, and did in fact mean us any harm, that we had just revealed ourselves, so we had to go after this vehicle and hope they stop for us.

It was a minivan bus. They go on the same routes as vans, but they don’t stop to pick people up, thus making a faster trip. We stood in the middle of their lane, flailed our arms around and shouted. They did not make an exception for us, but simply swerved around us frantically. I turned around to see in their headlights, about 50 meters in front of us, two men also flailing about trying to get a ride. I knew those had to be either the robbers, or perhaps other passengers that had jumped off. We didn’t want to take a risk, so we ran the opposite direction, where we had noticed a street light.

Just around the bend we could see the few dim lamps at the entrance of a tiny village. We also saw a light pointed straight at us in the middle of the road. As we got closer, we saw that it was a flashlight. At this point we were both in the mindset not to trust anyone. I saw the glint of a machete in the man’s right hand. It alarmed me at first, but then I felt relieved that it wasn’t a gun. It didn’t ease me, though, when he came towards me with the mammoth knife, raising it up.

He rattled off angry sentences in his local dialect as he waved the machete around. When we heard the word “holdup”, we put up our hands up and displayed that we were the victims, and that we didn’t have any guns.

The man was just an old guy on the edge of town, taking care to protect his family and home from whoever had been responsible for the gunshots he had just heard. A few people were hanging around us now. We didn’t know where they had come from and the old man didn’t seem to certain of anyone as he waved the machete around. Lise noticed one of the men reach deep into his shorts pocket. She waited for the gun to come out, but it never did.

Eventually a large crowd formed. They all seemed to be talking at once, though we couldn’t understand them. Eventually we could understand that some of them were asking if we spoke Tagalog, the national language. Apparently only some of them could. We told them English is all we spoke, so someone went running for the town English speaker. They told us that we would meet them in the Captain’s House. We were led there by dozens of children, a gaggle of teenagers and a sprinkling of adults.

As we walked I started to find out about what had happened to Lise. She had indeed followed me out of the bus, but hadn’t made it out by the time I started running from the shots. She basically landed as they were shooting, and had not seen where I had gone. She turned around, and saw, what she thought was me, under the bus, behind the wheel. She moved towards the figure, but then the bus started driving away, revealing that it was not me, and the man ran away. She continued to run and jump over the guardrail. She thought maybe I had somehow jumped back on the bus.

As we waited for the English speakers, we realized, probably because someone pointed it out, that we were barefoot. We usually take our sandals off while on the bus, and this time was no different. We had been running around this whole time barefoot and hadn’t even noticed.

The people in the village surrounded us in the community building/Captain’s house (whatever it was), just staring and giggling. They brought us some water. Lise got worried because had hit her head on the way out the window and also felt pain in her back. They asked us to sign the guestbook. I wasn’t sure if this was to record our incident, or if they were excited to have us as guests in their village.

Two women arrived, and told us they could speak English. We were so surprised that it was this hard to find an English speaker, since so far, the Philippines had had the best English speakers I have encountered in any foreign country in the world (including Canada). The women spoke passable English, but communication was still a little slow. We explained everything to us, but they seemed equally interested in the irrelevant questions like countries of origin, whether we are married, professions, where we have been in the Philippines, why we are there, etc. The standard questions upon introduction in plenty of places. Usually the island of Mindanao is considered the most dangerous area, especially for banditry, so we asked if this happened often in Samar, particularly in this area. The girl said it is more common around August, as it is the season where food shortages become a problem. That bit of insight really changed my perspective of what we had been through. Of course, I don’t condone violence, but it was really significant to know that these men could have simply been going to extremes to feed their family, even if it meant stealing or killing.

Most people seemed exceptionally calm, even in good spirits, considering there had just been a hold up at the edge of their village. Lise was nervous, though, and we asked if we could go to a doctor to get her checked out. They said a police car was on its way to pick us up. It took quite a while, so we were subjected to quite a bit of little-kid-staring in the meant time.

When the police truck came, we were instructed to get in the back seats. One of the seats had a big streak of blood across it. We avoided that one. We asked the driver when that had happened. “Just now. A police officer was shot”.

At this point, we still knew very little about what had happened on that bus.

The officer brought us to a small 24-hour clinic. It wasn’t even in a town, but probably in a place that was accessible to several other towns. We were told we could stay there for the night. The doctor checked out Lise’s wounds and gave her some painkillers. It didn’t seem that anything was too serious. They took care to set up an inflatable mattress in a small common area with a TV and dining table. They asked us if we were hungry, but we said no. A little while later, though, another doctor stopped by to drop off a couple of McDonald’s hamburgers. Apparently he had come from the nearest city and had picked up extra for us. Finally, after being curious about McDonald’s for weeks, we got our burgers. Cold, but now we didn’t have to go to McDonald’s again.

Eventually the doctor on duty and a nurse were the only people there and they closed the front doors. A few minutes later the nurse had disappeared into a room, I am guessing to sleep. The doctor was in the bathroom, when somebody started knocking on the front doors. Lise was still spooked and considering the fact that the thieves were still in our vicinity. She didn’t want to open the door, so we just sat quietly as they banged away on the door. Finally the doctor emerged, and opened the doors. It revealed a family with a young girl, maybe 16 or 17, about to go into labor. It felt natural that all of a sudden, as part of our crazy night we would be present for the birth of a child. The family stared at us as they were escorted into a separate room. We noticed a chart on the wall showing all the due dates of all the pregnant women in the area.

Within minutes, a police officer entered and spoke with the doctor. He said we had to go with them to get our bags from the bus. We weren’t sure what had happened with all our stuff. People had said that we would get our bags back, but we were not convinced. We were both prepared to finish our travel with the clothes on our back, and of course my laptop. I had my money belt with my cards, passport, and a healthy stash of cash. Lise’s passport, and money was all in her backpack, so we were already ready to spend some days in Manila at the French Embassy sorting out these issues. Now we were learning that we would almost certainly recover our backpacks.

We walked out with the police officer to find about five different police vehicles, most of which were pickup trucks with about eight armed soldiers in the back. I had never seen guns this large, and part of me wanted to assume that, consistent the DIY culture of the Philippines, they were locally made. They appeared much larger than AK’s and M-16s. We were put into the back seat of a truck and moved onto the road with the rest of our convoy.

We finally got a few answers about what had happened. He confirmed that a police officer had been shot. Apparenltly there was an officer on the bus. He was off-duty, but when one of the gunmen fired a shot at the woman, he spoke up, saying to just take what they want and not to hurt anyone. Somehow the gunmen realized he was a cop and started beating him up. I don’t know who shot first, but he ended up taking three bullets; one in the shoulder, one in the cheek and one in the side of his head. Apparently he had also gotten a shot off on one of the robbers and managed to chase them from the bus. The cop, was recovering, and we were told he would be fine. Apparently their guns were pretty obsolete. The woman that was shot had taken a bullet in the stomach, but would also be fine. We asked if other people had gotten off the bus, as it had appeared to both of us. He thought that was a silly question. Only the thieves had left the bus. Apparently the Filipinos don’t scare as easily as us westerners, even when there is a gun battle going on in an enclosed space. In fact, one thing that seemed so surreal to us was the level of silence that seemed to envelope us throughout the incident, only to be occasionally punctured by the gun blasts. In a movie (or maybe in a different cultural setting) there would have been a lot more screaming. The officer also told us that he did not know how many gunmen there were, but thought there could have been up to six. They had already identified a few of them and officers were out looking for them. Although we had only seen three gunmen, it explained why it seemed there were so many people outside the bus when we jumped out. It did not explain, though, what they were shooting at outside the bus. Some things we would never know for sure. We also learned that they had chosen that spot as the place to hold up the bus because they lived in the area, making for a quick getaway. Yes, we definitely made…no, I definitely made a bad decision to jump out of the bus at that moment. Part of me feels silly and ashamed for that decision, while part of me feels good that I was at least trying to be proactive and didn’t simply freeze. People were being shot, and I wasn’t about to fight. I guess I chose flight. Either way, we both agreed that since we had survived, we could feel good about making the night a little more interesting.

We arrived at a military checkpoint within ten minutes, and saw our bus parked there with all the passengers of our bus standing around outside. They seemed a bit bewildered, but it almost seemed like that came from confusion over us, rather than the night’s violent episode. We imagined the kinds of things they were thinking about us. “Are those the crazy foreigners that jumped out of the bus?! Where have they been? Where are their shoes?” Perhaps they were also annoyed that they had had to wait for us to come get our bags before they could continue the bus ride.

We went onto the bus to retrieve our things. Our sandals were still there and so was my small shoulder bag. Unfortunately, Lise’s small bag was never recovered. Our backpacks were still there. It seemed that the thieves were only interested in cash, jewelry and cell phones. As we walked out of the bus I noticed blood splattered on a few of the seats. Seeing the blood moved me, but at the same time I was a little surprised that there were only splatters and no large pools of blood. I saw a holster laying on the ground and picked it up. I considered shoving it in my bag as a bizarre, but unique souvenir. Then I came to my senses and dropped it, regretting putting my fingerprints on what might have held an attempted murder weapon.

When we got out of the bus, the Sergeant in charge of the military base next to the checkpoint approached us. He told us that we were welcome to stay at the base for the night if we didn’t want to get back on the bus. Lise and I discussed it. It was about midnight and if we got back on the bus, we would arrive in our destination at about 2:00 AM. If we stayed at the base, not only would we get to go to sleep soon, we would score a free night! And in all honesty, getting back on a bus at this point did not seem like an attractive idea, especially heading to a new city in the middle of the night without a place to stay.

As we left the crowd of our former travel companions, it felt a little weird to be getting the special treatment, but we didn’t mind too much. The sergeant, who introduced himself as Jovie, showed us into the base. He sat down with us, had someone bring us biscuits, and we had a long chat. He told us all about his job, and how they have been having increasing problems with holdups recently. He was new to the area and seemed to be taking the increasing crime very seriously. At the same time, though, he seemed so casual about it. We asked him if this would make the newspapers. He thought for a moment and said, no, probably not. “But an officer and a woman were shot!” “Yes, well, maybe it could be in the local newspaper, but probably not.” There had been two holdups in the previous two months in his jurisdiction. I didn’t know if it was a lot for the Philippines, but perhaps violent crime is just so common that the newspapers don’t bother with relatively small incidents.

He brought out one of the female soldiers, who brought us towels and showed Lise to the shower. He seemed proud to have a few women at his base. He had encouraged her to speak with us, but she was very shy. I made small talk with a few of the soldiers as we watched professional wrestling on the fuzzy TV. I showered next. It was a wooden outhouse next to a river. We chatted a little more with sarge, and then we were shown to our room. It was obvious that two of the soldiers were instructed to sleep in hammocks outside and give us their room. We would have been fine sleeping in hammocks as well, but challenging their hospitality would have been foolish.

When we finally got to our room at 1 AM, we finally had some time alone to talk about all that we had just been through. So much had been going on that we didn’t have the luxury to discuss every minute detail of what had happened. We were tired, but wired. We stayed up for a while, just laughing in disbelief of it all. Especially the fact that at the end of it all, we were staying in the barracks of a military base! Then we remembered that it was just the night before that we had been welcomed into the home of the Captain of the village in Santa Rosa. The night before that we were sleeping on the beach on Tulang Island with our friend Martin. Along with our various hitchhiking rides lately, our days of late had been completely unpredictable. The Philippines had proved that it could surprise, welcome, terrify, amaze, and confuse, while at the end of it all, no matter what had happened, leave you wanting more.

Since this incident, whenever we told any westerner about the incident, their mouth would predictably drop open and their eyes would get wide in disbelief. On the other hand, whenever we told Filipinos about our first experience under fire, they would casually nod their head, responding with something to the effect of, “yeah, that’ll happen.” We would respond to make sure they understood. “Well, you know, they shot a cop and another woman.”

“Yeah, welcome to the Philippines.”