Mang Pandoy the Informal Settler

A common problem in the Philippines is the existence of squatters or informal settlers. Let’s look deeply into the squatters and try to find out who and what they are, honestly as a kid going from manila informal settlers are a common sight, if you talk to them one will notice that they can’t even speak straight tagalog, most speak with different dialects. To them life in the city seems much easier than in the province. Why do this people try and go to a place where they have no known relatives and have no sure mode of income move toward to a place where the cost of living is costlier than the place where they came from? Is it stupidity? Let’s look closer…

Life in the province is boring considering if it’s influenced by too much hype. Even people with money who grew up in the city make the province their haven to earn more money. Most of these informal settlers try to sustain themselves by squatting and begging for money.

If these people realize that if in the province where they have families strive and stay in the province, live a normal life as a “syano”, informal settlers would not grow as it is now in the cities of the Philippines. Sad to say when living a life stopping or hopping is not an option, strength and perseverance are its good traits. Land reform and ownership in the Philippines is doomed to fail because people here are fighting within the lines of ancestral or birthright within a land. If these people managed to stay and fight for their land, its reform would have been created a long time ago but since there are no people to stand within their land, the fight for who owns what began and is still a war within its confines to this date.

Since the volume of informal settlers in the Philippines are growing fast and with its government welcoming the swarm, in form of food, shelter, clothing, even lands and jobs, I ask what is the economic impact of these for a community? Let’s look at Sir John Conway’s Game of Life, See more at math.com and wikipedia, where any live cell with fewer than two neighbors dies, as if by loneliness. Any live cell with more than three neighbors dies, as if by overcrowding. Any live cell with two or three neighbors lives, unchanged, to the next generation. Any dead cell with exactly three neighbors comes to life. Just an analogy with these too much or too little cells makes a system dead, a dead Game of Life happens when its lonely or overcrowded… just like a swarm attacking a healthy system, a game dies a lonely gilder. Any system that grows fast fades as fast and relies on its remaining entities for its future, sad to say a system which is stable remains stable no matter if it’s weak or strong. Pandoy’s participation in a system is needed where they can live and relive themselves without harboring another system, because with that another system dies. And with that an ending statement for this is to ‘live and let live…’ and a great year ahead.