lokal

Despite a lot of common perceptions, living in the Philippines as a foreigner is not completely easy or carefree. In a world of fake social media and clickbait, a reputation has formed that as an American — especially a male American — you can waltz over here, live like a king, everyone is friendly to you, everything is cheap, and done. You're set for life.

Small parts of that are kinda true. A salary or a retirement in dollars can go further here than it would in many other countries. It's nice to be close to beaches that people fly ten thousand miles to reach. But day to day it really isn't all that different from being in the US, or Europe, or anywhere else. And in a lot of ways it's harder. For a start, without speaking Tagalog or Bisaya, it can be quite lonely.

It's a common story for anyone who has lived somewhere they're not from, so no sympathy needed here. In the Philippines, I look different, and from a hundred metres away someone can see me and know it. I can't go for a run without teenagers shouting hey bro at least five times an hour — or, if it's someone from an older generation, the classic Hey Joe.

In other cases it's the kids who run up to you and say only give me money. My work is entirely focused on poverty alleviation, so I meet these circumstances with great empathy. But there's also a part of my brain thinking: man, I am so much more than an ATM.

I've made videos joking about the Hey Joe thing, because it is funny, and also endearing in a very warm kind of way. But it's also a steady, gentle reminder: you are not from here. The longer I stay, the more I'd like to change that perception.

Here in the Philippines I'm instantly an AFAM — a complicated word with a long history and a slippery meaning. Nobody is quite sure where it started. The explanation you'll hear most often is a foreigner assigned in Manila, pointing back to the era when large numbers of foreign servicemen were stationed here. From there it spread to cover more or less any foreigner, picking up alternative expansions on the way: a foreigner around Manila, a foreigner arriving with money. It is embedded enough now to have produced essays, academic papers and a great deal of commentary. AFAM arrives with a whole heap of assumptions attached to the word, many of them surface level and economic, and I hope to slowly unravel some of those over time with the people I meet and interact with.

But slang words and social media perceptions aside, my biggest source of inspiration for learning the language is Filipino friends and people my own age. Building a friend group here, outside of work or an institution like church, is genuinely hard. Many people are shy about speaking English, or shy around a foreigner they don't know. There's just a little bit of friction in everything. You miss the informal dinners after the gym and the invitations to weekend trail runs — not because anyone dislikes you, but because somewhere in the back of everyone's minds is the thought we'll have to speak English the whole time. Filipinos are super hospitable like that, which is incredible. But I'd also just love to go trail running and be totally confused the whole time, and pick up some more Tagalog and Bisaya words I didn't know, and get to know the culture more, and get to know more people.

A year or so ago a run group in Davao made a video of me talking to one of the club leaders, then cut to a fake nosebleed on him afterwards. It's a common Filipino joke: too much English and your nose starts bleeding. I love that video, because it is hilarious and also, in a small way, a bit of acceptance. But it lands exactly on the core problem. All of this would be a hell of a lot easier and more seamless if I just spoke the language.

I can't change how I look and I can't change where I'm from. But how people read me shifts a lot when we're speaking the same language. When someone yells Hey Joe expecting a tourist and you answer in Tagalog, the whole exchange changes. It stops being hey you and becomes how are you?

For the kids on the run who see me and have been influenced to only see money, a simple Walang pera, pero anong name mo? Ilang taon ka na? Ako si Matt, Amerikano ako changes it from look at that foreigner, I bet he has money to whoa, that foreigner speaks Tagalog. It doesn't solve anything. But it is definitely better.

I've lived mostly overseas for close to fifteen years, across Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. So in some ways, maybe all of this isn't a problem. I'm a professional outsider. But there comes a point where you want more than that, and I've concluded you can only really connect with the culture, and build something here — or with Filipino communities abroad — if you know the language.

I was reminded of all of this again over the last 24 hours or so, in my day-to-day interactions. I eat balut most nights after the gym, and this morning I ordered breakfast: egg, rice, longganisa, and tuyo — the very salty, dried, Filipino-style fish. For the record, none of that was an exotic excursion. It was just exactly what I wanted. Someone told me, wow, you're super Filipino now, like a local. True, and also not quite. You can live here, you can eat the food, you can learn the culture — but you won't truly be lokal until you're speaking and thinking in Tagalog.

Alongside the nosebleed jokes, people will often say ah, my English is running out now. Which I understand completely. It's their country, and I'm the one in it. I'm just grateful that one day soon nobody will have to say it to me, because we won't need the English at all.

You don't need much to signal that you live here rather than visit. A handful of sentences will do it, and you'll pick up a bit of grammar along the way. Every tourist knows Kumusta ka. The examples below will get you a level or two deeper, and they're useful day to day.

Start with two questions that are not the same question. Taga-saan ka? asks where you're from. Saan ka nakatira? asks where you live. A tourist only ever has an answer to the first one. Having an answer to the second is most of what separates you from them.

• Taga-saan ka?Where are you from?
• Taga-Amerika ako.I'm from America.
• Saan ka nakatira?Where do you live?
• Nakatira ako sa Davao.I live in Davao.

Taga- is super useful when learning Tagalog. Put it on a place and you get a person who belongs to it: taga-Davao, taga-Maynila, tagabundok for someone from the mountains. The hyphen turns up before a proper name and disappears before an ordinary root — the same pattern behind nag-jogging.

It has a second job too, and it's the same idea wearing different clothes: attached to an action, taga- gives you the person whose role that is. Tagaluto, the one who cooks. Tagalinis, the one who cleans. Tagapayo, the one who advises. In both senses it answers the same question — which one are you here?

Then the everyday phrases you should know that tourists don't. None of these are advanced, and you will use all of them in a normal week.

• Ano ang trabaho mo?What's your job?
• Guro ako.I'm a teacher.
• Ilang taon ka na?How old are you?
• Ako si Matt. Amerikano ako.I'm Matt. I'm American.
• Matagal na ako dito.I've been here a long time.

Guro is teacher — if that's not you, look up the Tagalog for your own job or field and swap it in. For age, the answer is just the number, and English numbers are fine. Nobody builds a sentence around it. Don't be afraid to drop in some English if you lose the words. The key thing is that you're speaking, and trying.

Filipinos are incredibly hospitable and empathetic. They will do almost anything to make sure you are comfortable and feel welcome.

You've probably been in the room for this. A conversation is running in Tagalog, you don't follow it, and within about four seconds someone has noticed and switched to English — or started translating for you, or quietly restarted the story. Nobody was asked. It simply happened.

That behaviour has a name. Pakikisama is getting along with others, going along, making the person in front of you feel included and looked after. This all goes back to the concept of kapwa that we covered a few days back: if the person across from you isn't separate from you, their confusion isn't separate either.

As incredible as this is, there are downsides. Read through a slightly different lens, the same culture of pakikisama can end up as a culture of people who only ever accommodate. That has deep, colonialism-level roots which are too complicated and too challenging to get into here, so let's stay in the present day.

But recognising this reframes things a bit when the room switches to English and the nosebleed jokes come later. It's a small nod to the fact that English is, for most people in the Philippines, their second or third — or in many cases fourth or fifth — language.

So the reason to learn the language isn't only that it opens the culture to you. It's that it stops quietly handing the effort to everybody else, to translate or to bring you along. You probably can't stop looking like a foreigner. But you can stop being the reason the whole table changes language. And in the process, push back a little on years and years of expectation that Filipinos make the accommodations for the rest of the world instead of the other way around.