'Makuwenta'

LAST week I wrote about French smokers groaning over the new prices of cigarettes: 5.50 euros a pack, which I converted to 440 pesos each, using a rate of 80 pesos to the euro. As Murphy's Law goes, almost as soon as the Inquirer went to press, I happened to spot the latest currency exchange rates in a newspaper and realized I was thinking of Britain, where the rate used to be 80 pesos to the pound sterling. The correct exchange rate then is about 65 pesos to the euro, which still means a deadly 357.50 pesos per pack.

Oh well, I thought, it was just as well. During my last visit to Europe I kept multiplying by 80, instead of 65, which meant I kept my spending even more tightly reined.

Mainly for work, Filipinos travel a lot, which means we do end up being "makuwenta," a word derived from the Spanish "cuenta," meaning, to count. Usually, makuwenta has derogatory connotations: to be called makuwenta means you're always counting pesos and centavos, dollars and cents, figuring out who owes whom and when you can collect. In an extended sense, it's used to refer even to social relationships: Someone who is makuwenta is always calculating what he can get back whenever he or she helps out a friend.

I wanted to use makuwenta in a more literal, but less negative, sense. When I was in grade school, our arithmetic teachers used to give us all kinds of conversion exercises to sharpen our multiplication and division skills. To name a few of the exercises, we had to go from gallons to liters, Fahrenheit to Centigrade, acres to hectares.

There was more to these exercises to numeracy. Our teachers knew that we live in a world where different cultures have different ways of measuring weights, volumes, lengths, even temperature.

Who was to know then that so many Filipinos would end up globetrotting, not as tourists but to make a living and that to survive, we had to learn to be walking calculators, quick at converting from one system to another? For example, application forms in Europe will ask for heights and weights in the metric system, which baffles many of us because we still think in feet and inches and in pounds. Once I put my height in a form as one meter 45 centimeters, which turned out to be only four feet and nine inches -- a few inches, oops, I mean centimeters, short of reality.

I grew up with the Fahrenheit system, and still have difficulty when the pilot announces we're about to land in a European city and that it's a wonderful spring day with a temperature of 15 degrees Centigrade. All I know is that 15 degrees, for this Fahrenheit-oriented person, doesn't sound like a wonderful day. (For Filipinos my age, and Americans, here's a quick conversion: 15 degrees Centigrade is 59 degrees Fahrenheit, still a bit too cold for tropical creatures like us, but psychologically more tolerable.)

Let's get back to the matter of currencies. I've learned that it isn't always too healthy to keep converting, especially when you're in the United States or Europe because you end up not eating anything. If you're in Britain for example, the exchange rate now is one pound to, hold your breath, 93 pesos.

But even without being makuwenta, you start to get a gut feel of what the costs are. You learn to pack your lunch when you take a train trip because buying a sandwich and a pack of fruit juice on the train will set you back by six euros, converted into 390 pesos. You walk a hundred blocks or so to avoid paying one pound in bus fare (goodness, I think it's sinful paying 93 pesos for a short bus ride). You learn to take airport trains into the city, feeling very good because it costs only six dollars, or 330 pesos, the taxi fare of 50 dollars being almost unthinkable at 2,750 pesos, and promising yourself you can buy three or four more books with the saving.

As a Filipino who's been makuwenta through several years (okay, okay, decades) of travel, these currency conversions can sometimes be depressing, because you realize how the peso's value has shrunk in relation to other currencies. There was a time, and this will tell you how old I really am, when we joked about "Made in Japan" products being inferior, and how one peso was equivalent to 100 yen, which we looked at almost as Mickey Mouse money. Today, the Japanese yen is worshipped next to the US dollar, with 100 yen now equivalent to 50 pesos.

Then, too, there was a time when you went to Taiwan with an exchange rate of one peso to 10 New Taiwan dollars (NT$). We went to Taiwan packing our own toilet paper because theirs was, well, too abrasive, and we went around merrily dividing prices by 10, snapping up pirated books and records. If I remember right, a record cost the equivalent of 10 pesos. Hardcover textbooks went for 30-100 pesos each, while their originals cost up to 10 times more.

Today, Filipinos going to Taiwan pack their instant coffee and instant noodles to take as lunch in their hotel rooms because Taiwan's prices are as high as those in Tokyo. There aren't pirated books anymore; several generations of Taiwanese students gained from those cheap books, learning medicine and engineering and now producing high-quality, high-tech goods to sell to those "mayabang" [haughty] Filipinos who used to smirk at their toilet paper.

Meanwhile, Filipinos queue up to apply for jobs in Taiwan, the NT$ is now as coveted as the greenback and the Japanese yen. While we used to divide New Taiwan dollars by 10 to get pesos, we now have to multiply NT$ by 1.7 to get the equivalent in pesos.

What's most depressing is that these days, you don't have to wait years to see how our peso is depreciating. In the last year, I've had to visit Thailand almost every other month to coordinate a Southeast Asian project for the University of the Philippines. Each time I visit, the Thai baht, whose collapse in 1997 set off the Asian financial crisis, seems to be getting stronger, even while our peso continues to slide. Two years ago it was about one baht to one peso, but over the last few months I've had to multiply Thai prices first by 1.1, then 1.2, then 1.3, to get the peso equivalent. When I go this week, it will be 1.4.

Oh well, we can still find consolation joking about being a millionaire in Indonesia, where one US dollar is equivalent to 10,000 rupiah, or Vietnam, where it's 12,000 dong. Let's not get too smug though. The way those countries are racing ahead, I wouldn't be surprised if some day we end up multiplying, rather than dividing, when we visit.

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