Each morning the sun rises over the beautiful blue sea

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Dumanjug Sunset

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Each morning the sun rises over the beautiful blue sea that laps this beautiful tropical island of Negros, that I now call home.

The traffic builds up past my home as the lucky Filipinos that are employed journey to work. My neighbors all have fairly well paid jobs that is indicated in the area where we live and the cost of housing and rent.

As I write my partner is cooking breakfast, will defiantly not the breakfast one would expect in UK or America but more a Filipino in its nature. My partner is a very good cook and that factor can be seen in my girth.

Now I live a very good life my military pension allowed me to retire early and seek an economy where I could live in luxury of the lifestyle I wish to pursuit. However the downfall is that I am surrounded by poverty.

Poverty is very apparent when I travel around the city of Dumaguete, where there are beggars on the street and one can see how many citizens live and how many forage all avenues to earn a daily wage or money to put just one meal on their table each day. Even if I sit and drink coffee outside the local McDonalds there are streams of street tradesmen that try to sell me their wares and the street beggars will hone in on the man with white skin. Most of the beggars ship in from the Muslim areas of the Philippines and treat begging as a business. The parents send their children out to beg on the streets.

As a foreigner here most Filipino’s think that I am a very rich man and some wish to take advantage especially in the local market. Price’s rises to three times the rate than what they would give to a local Filipino.  But if your face is known like mine is and you speak the local tongue the prices level down to a more acceptable rate. In fact where I lived in Cebu for seven years the local traders would give me a better price than my partner could get, because they had become friends. However I never worried about paying that little bit more as I knew that it would put more food on the table for someone less unfortunate than me.

The one good thing is that by being here I am helping boost the economy by spending my British pounds, each year I spend 1 Million peso’s on my own lifestyle and my partners, I sponsor children going to school and many other things.

One thing else I love to do is promote tourism as the more people visit third world countries the more money flows into the third world economy. So please if you go on holiday abroad consider the Philippines or even my small neck of the woods on the beautiful Island of Negro’s. I would be pleased to see you,  we could have a cold drink on Rizal Boulevard and share the view of the sun going down over a beautiful clear blue sea.