Documentary : The Ups--and Downs--of the Philippines : A correspondent reminisces on 4 years covering a country of conflicting images.

MANILA — Shortly after I moved here in September, 1989, I went to cover my first real anti-American demonstration.

Dan Quayle, then vice president, was arriving at the airport, and dozens of young leftists wearing red bandannas on their faces had gathered outside to chant, wave garish posters of Uncle Sam and burn an American flag. Like most people, I’d never seen a flag burn. I moved closer, if nervously, to watch.

I learned two things that night. First, it’s not easy to burn an American flag: The cloth is flame-retardant. By the time the protesters got one lit, Quayle was long gone. The second lesson came when the wind suddenly shifted and burning fragments of the flag blew onto my shirt.

As I twisted and jumped to brush the sparks away, several demonstrators rushed to my aid. “Are you all right, sir?” one masked youth kept asking as he helped swat the embers from my back. “Can we help you, sir?”

That conflicting image--the sickly flicker of a burning U.S. flag, and perhaps the world’s politest protesters--lingers as I finish a four-year tour as a Times regional correspondent based in Manila. It’s been a roller-coaster ride of an assignment. I’ve written stories from two dozen countries, from palm-fringed atolls in the South Pacific to the grotesque Highway of Death in Kuwait.

I’ve been strafed in Sri Lanka, beaten with bamboo in India--and meandered by mistake in a minefield in Cambodia. I’ve met presidents, prime ministers, gunrunners and treasure hunters. I’ve dived on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, hiked in the Himalayas and sailed the South China Sea. I’ve seen great tragedy and been shown great kindness.

But nowhere quite compares to the Philippines. It’s been said that 400 years as a Spanish colony and 50 years as an American one produced a nation raised in a convent and educated in Hollywood. I prefer to see it as a land of great contrasts linked by two overarching themes: Catholicism and kitsch.

Where else do grown women use names such as Baby, Precious and Cherry Pie? Where else do the professional basketball playoffs feature the Swift Mighty Meaties and the Purefoods Oodles? Where else do customized passenger jeeps, a combination of public transport and folk art, come complete with flashing disco lights, blaring stereos and names such as Sexy Baby?

Every new culture takes getting used to. Shortly after I arrived, I was taken to the Hobbit House, a nightclub popular with politicians, generals and journalists. I was stunned to discover the club’s entire staff, from waiters to singers, were midgets.

But I was impressed a year later when I returned for a night of Elvis impersonators. The winner crooned mournfully, played a mean miniature guitar and was draped in tiny white fringe and scarf. He was indisputably the best miniature Elvis I’d ever seen. I was getting used to the Philippines.

I never quite got used to the guns, however. Uniformed guards with pistols, shotguns or assault rifles stand outside most hotels, restaurants, banks and offices. Shootouts are common enough that I once saw several men gunned down during an armed robbery in the middle of a busy street at rush hour. Traffic barely slowed down as cars weaved around the bodies sprawled in the road.

The Wild East atmosphere hit home--literally--the day my living room ceiling began to leak. When workmen checked, they found three incoming bullet holes in the roof. I assume they were from New Year’s Eve, when so many people shoot guns in the air that dozens are killed or wounded each year by the falling lead, and the city fills with a choking cordite haze.

Nor did I ever get used to the corruption that eats at the country like a cancer. When my house was broken into, police asked for money to fill out their forms. My overseas mail has been routinely opened and checks, a credit card and other documents stolen.

Firemen looted a friend’s apartment when called to put out a blaze. Another friend, whose car was stolen from his pregnant wife at gunpoint, was told that the military was responsible. Yet another friend, who needed phone lines for his business, was asked to pay a “special fee” of $2,000. And he was a subcontractor to the phone company.

Few institutions seem immune. The country’s Department of Foreign Affairs recently stopped issuing passports because so many were being sold. Soldiers sent to join the U.N. peacekeeping force in Cambodia came home with crates of smuggled guns. And investigators are checking for cheating after 22 graduates of an obscure medical school won the top 26 spots in the nation’s medical board exams.

Corruption isn’t unique here, of course, but it may be uniquely harmful. In Thailand or Indonesia, for example, corrupt generals may take a percentage of a road building contract, but at least roads get built.

Traveling here, however, one finds a mile of paved road followed by miles of mud and gravel, followed by another mile of pavement, and so on. The reason is local officials who siphon off so much money that roads rarely are finished. Despite billions of dollars in foreign aid, the only real highway in Luzon, the main island, extends just 50 miles north of Manila and 30 miles south.

Most Filipinos speak English, but as Churchill said about America, we are two nations divided by a common language. Sarcasm, for instance, is rare here. Consider the arrest of Juan Ponce Enrile, a former defense secretary who is one of the country’s richest and most powerful men, for allegedly backing the December, 1989, coup attempt that left more than 100 people dead.

Instead of languishing in a Third World dungeon, I found Enrile in a cozy three-room police office he’d taken as a cell. He’d brought his bed, exercise machine, a maid, several phones and, of course, his aides.

Later, at his daily press conference, Enrile--a man blamed for widespread human rights violations when he was martial-law administrator in the 1970s--complained that his human rights were being violated.

“I am being cut off from the world’s press!” he told scores of TV cameras, microphones and tape-recorders thrust in his face. I was the only person who found that funny.

Enrile was released several days later, and all charges were dropped because all the witnesses had disappeared. Still, Enrile was inconvenienced. Accountability otherwise is largely absent.

Enrile’s mentor, Ferdinand E. Marcos, fled the country in 1986 after a regime so corrupt that it spawned the term “kleptocracy.” Today, seven years later, not a single official from the Marcos period--not one--has been convicted of graft or corruption.

Perhaps it is compassion. But nowhere else, I think, would Marcos’ widow, Imelda, be allowed to return in such regal splendor. She complains that she is “penniless” but throws lavish parties, lives in one of the country’s most expensive apartments and is again surrounded by a collection of Impressionist art. The government has accused her of stealing billions of dollars but the charges are more a nuisance than a threat; after seven years, not one case has been resolved.

Or perhaps it is a lack of a sense of outrage. I’m constantly amazed that Manila residents do not rise up in fury at the daily blackouts that leave the city in steamy darkness. Thanks to monumental government incompetence, the capital now suffers the worst electric outages this side of Kabul. At least there is a sense of humor: The former head of the scandal-plagued national power corporation was known as the Prince of Darkness.

Yet most people endure such indignities in silence, a passivity that defies and then dulls the spirit. Few seem shocked, for example, that the government in what is statistically the world’s most disaster-prone country is routinely unprepared for the annual onslaught of natural calamities.

In the last four years, the Philippines has suffered one of the century’s worst volcanic eruptions, a devastating earthquake, plus assorted mudflows, typhoons, floods and more. I count the damage in 11 office cars, all leased, that were variously damaged, destroyed or washed away.

Filipinos, of course, count the damage in far grimmer fashion. After the earthquake of July, 1990, rocked central Luzon and left more than 1,500 people dead, emergency experts and special rescue equipment arrived from around the world. Horror stories resulted.

Several teams were held up for days trying to clear critically needed rescue gear through customs. A British team had all its electronic equipment, used to detect people trapped in collapsed buildings, stolen. So was much of the food and medical supplies sent to Baguio, center of the quake. Only a handful of the hundreds of portable lavatories and emergency generators given by foreign donors reached the victims. Even coffins were stolen.

During the crisis, I spent a day aboard a Philippine air force helicopter that was supposed to deliver relief supplies. We did--but only to military camps, not to the people who needed them. We had a lavish three-hour lunch break, then spent the afternoon shuttling the wives of Cabinet secretaries around the disaster area.

When the pilot politely invited them back the next day, one woman, who had worn pearls and high-heels for her day visiting ravaged villages and mangled bodies, turned in horror. “Surely you don’t work on Sundays too?” she asked.

Still, I leave many friends and a few heroes here.

Haydee Yorac, a brilliant lawyer with an acid wit, was largely responsible for ensuring that last year’s presidential elections were the most free and fair the country has ever known. She is now trying to solve a far thornier problem: bringing warring factions--from the Communist rebels, to Muslim separatists, to right-wing military mutineers--to the negotiating table.

Richard Gordon, the dynamic former mayor of Olongapo, has inspired thousands of local volunteers to help protect the former U.S. Navy base at Subic Bay. He has courted investors, wheedled deals and managed to keep at bay the legions of looters, largely led by the military, who stole everything from light bulbs to hospital equipment from America’s former Clark Air Base.

And Dr. Juan Flavier, the irrepressible health secretary, has taken on the supposedly impregnable Roman Catholic Church by promoting family planning and AIDS prevention. He has dared new doctors to work with the nation’s poor, rather than emigrate abroad. He has used everyone from Communist insurgents to the military to help immunize millions of children. To my delight, polls show that he is now one of the country’s most popular figures.

If the Philippines, the so-called “sick man of Asia,” ever catches up to its booming neighbors--and I hope it does--leaders like these will be key. The current president, Fidel V. Ramos, is clearly trying. But another image, a warning really, also comes to mind.

The morning after the 1990 earthquake, then-President Corazon Aquino flew into Cabanatuan, where a high-rise school had collapsed and crushed scores of students. Although cries could still be heard from children trapped in the rubble, soldiers stood mutely, disaster workers sipped soft-drinks and crowds milled about.

“Who’s in charge here? Isn’t anybody in charge?” the president angrily demanded.

In four years, I never found the answer.