Quiapo church and its famous outside stalls
Quiapo church is an old Spanish Catholic one, right in the center of Manila, on a busy road surrounded by side streets full of stalls and little markets. It provides a landmark, within strictly Catholic Philippine society, of hope for women with unwanted pregnancies. It is here that they head for drugs that may enable them to terminate the pregnancy.
This of course does not happen in the church itself, although inside there is supposedly a life-size statue of Jesus, said to perform miracles (say solving the problem of an unwanted pregnancy) if you pray to it. Rather, just outside the church are dozens of stalls selling concoctions made of herbs and roots that are supposed to induce menstruation, or the shedding of the womb walls, which leads to abortion. And then there are stalls selling commercial drugs, such as one really intended for ulcers, which was so effective that the local anti-abortion group had it banned from official sale in the country. (As a result it now sells only on stalls like these at the much higher black-market rates.)
It might seem odd that Catholic churches in the Philippines should have this role, but it is also appropriate. After all, it is only because of the political power of the Catholic church in countries like the Philippines that the governments provide no official methods of help with unwanted pregnancies. And in the Philippines, there are a lot of them. The World Health Organization estimates that there are three quarters of a million unsafe abortions there each year, and the country's own Department of Health records 100,000 hospital admissions as by-products of abortifacient drugs or back-street abortion clinics.
The street markets of the Philippines are quite friendly and safe, although the same evidently cannot be said for even excellently alternative herbal remedies if they are designed to cause abortions.
Cultural side tripThe Museum of Mrs. Marcos' Shoes
While you're in the Philippines' capital, browsing the wares of the Quiapo church markets and so on, “just looking” of course, there is a small and relatively safe political tour available in Marikina, of the Shoe Museum and its selection of a few of Mrs. Marcos' 1,600 pairs.
The museum contains shoes from famous people, but the selection that is of most political interest is that of Imelda Marcos, sometime beauty queen, Minister of Human Settlements, and of course, devoted wife of the former dictator. Mrs. Marcos opened the museum herself, with these words:
This museum is making a subject of notoriety into an object of beauty... They went into my closets looking for skeletons, but thank God, all they found were shoes, beautiful shoes. More than anything, this museum will symbolize the sprit and culture of the Filipino people. Filipinos don't wallow in what is miserable and ugly. They recycle the bad into things of beauty!
Anyway, Madam Marcos' shoes include some by Givenchy, Chanel and Christian Dior, all size 81/2, and most of them worn only once. Many, never at all. Alas the most famous pair, plastic disco sandals with three inch high flashing battery-operated heels, are mysteriously missing, along with an estimated $700 million dollars from the national treasury.
After Ferdinand and Imelda were toppled from their lofty perch (in 1985), they fled to Hawaii, reluctantly handing in several million dollars worth of jewelry on the way. Back home, in the ever-impoverished Philippines, (the majority of the population lives on less than $2 a day) the new President, Corazon Aquino, ordered Mrs. Marcos's shoes to be put on display to, as she put it, show everyone their “extravagance.” As President Aquino, of course, is a woman, we must consider this to be a little bit of cattiness. In any case, it scarcely seems to have worked. People like the Shoe Museum. And since the death of her husband in exile, Mrs. Marcos has returned to the Philippines, stood for the Presidency a few times, and even been elected to the Philippines House of Representatives.
Gems the size of golf balls were impounded by US and Philippines customs offices when the Marcoses fled. At first the officials apparently left the gems lying around casually on their desks, as they were so comically large that they assumed they were all glass or plastic fakes.
Small risk of becoming “Imeldific”—the term coined by Mrs. Marcos herself for gross extravagance.