Bahala na

My friend Paul, an American professor who  recently moved to Cebu with his Swiss wife and two little kids to teach film in my university, is so worried about dengue, which he heard has killed a number of people here, mostly kids.

They live in a townhouse unit where every door and window is screened. But mosquitoes, he said, still manage to find their way through a small hole in the screen of one window. So he sprays his kids every day with insect repellent.

“The toxic spray must be equally dangerous,” I warned him. But he has no choice, he said, as the kids have to play outdoors and attend school, where there are only electric fans to drive away the mosquitoes. He can’t take any chances now that he is in the Third World (they used to live in Paris).

“So what do you do to protect your own kid?” he asked. “We just close the windows and doors as much as possible,” I said. “When my daughter was small we let her wear very long socks like  Japanese school girls to go with her long sleeved uniform.”

“They only wear shorts in school,” he said.

“You can make them wear spandex arm warmers,” I told him pointing to my own spandex bike shirt.

“Yeah, like those with fake tattoos,” he said.

Nowadays, we don’t worry so much, I told him, because we’re usually out during the day and most dengue mosquitoes, those low flyers with striped legs that love to lay their eggs in clean water, are said to come out only during the day.

However, health authorities  also report that a recent study has found out that another type of dengue mosquito loves to go out in the dark to compete with the less deadly vampire mosquitoes. It’s still a study though and only applies to a rare species. Still, I can’t help but think of the small hole in the screen of Paul’s house.

“As for me,” I told him, “I grew up with  mosquito bites living amidst the swamps and a river in Mindanao back. We didn’t hear about dengue back then and malaria had been mostly eradicated.”

“Dengue is a recent thing here in the Philippines,” I told him. “We started hearing about it  less than 10 years ago. But yes, that’s long enough to make people aware of its dangers and how to prevent it.”

And government has done every effort to educate people  with village health workers going house-to-house to fumigate infested areas and asking  residents to cover their water containers, sweep out puddles, declog canals, plant vegetables in empty cans, and punch holes into used tires that are  placed on  rooftops  to protect GI sheets from flying during a typhoon.

Yet, such clean-up drives never got to be a communal or personal routine. Prevention never got to be a lifestyle or a state of mind. People still throw plastic cups and empty bottles everywhere. “We don’t have to go far,” I told Paul as we talked about dengue in the mosquito-free air-conditioned faculty office. “Just look at the litter around this building.”

It got to my attention two years ago that many of our students have got the disease, which made me suspect that it must have come from mosquitoes living in our surroundings in the college. So, I asked them to plan their own community-based guerrilla campaign, using their skills in cartoon illustration, animation, graphic design and advertising.

Using street art tactics of “sticker-bombing”, stenciling, and public art installation, the students launched their own mini-campaign which they documented and reported online through a website, Facebook page, or blog. Although it’s just a small effort, it easily went “viral” at least until the end of the semester.

But after they got their grade for their project, most also abandoned their campaign and ironically went back to their old mosquito-friendly habit of littering. We never really learned to get scared enough to the point of paranoia like Paul. Amid the clear and present danger, our indifference perplexes my foreigner friend.

“We have lived with danger all our lives, we couldn’t care less anymore,” I told him. Indeed, we take even worse risks every day, like walking in narrow dark alleys, riding an overloaded, overspeeding jeepney, or biking against  vehicles on our way to work like what I just did before we had the conversation.

I forgot to tell him it must be our “bahala na” mentality, or our tendency just leave things to chance. Or as the old song goes: “Que sera, sera. What will be, will be.”