Be your own yaya

Last week I wandered into the Mad About Travel expo organized by The Travel Club stores. I am sometimes suspected of madness, and I like to travel, so I was the target market for this event. The expo featured booths selling special travel packages to Europe, North America, and Australia (none of them cheap enough to tempt me), sales of travel gear at discounted prices, and talks on ecotourism and ecological sustainability.

“Sustainability” is one of those buzzwords we hear all the time without knowing exactly what it means. Here’s a very basic definition: “Don’t use it all up, stupid.”

For instance, a sustainable environment is one in which resources are not depleted but conserved and replenished for future generations.

Obviously if you cut down all the trees and replace them with condominiums, that is not sustainable. Condos don’t make oxygen or hold the soil with their roots; what they do produce are traffic jams, large amounts of garbage, high water and electricity consumption, and small children who don’t know what a tree looks like.

Corporations concerned about sustainability measure their impact on the environment (How many trees die for their memos, how much power their buildings use, how much pollution their vehicles spew, etc.) and institute programs to help the community. It’s not just about being good, though it makes for great public relations; it’s in their best interest. If you just keep taking your customers’ money without giving anything back, if you don’t help the community to develop, who’s going to buy your products in the future, huh? Sustainable is practical. Say it with me: Don’t use it all up, stupid.

Another buzzword is “stakeholder.” It simply means “those who have a stake in the matter,” but it calls to mind “vampire killer,” the wooden stake or Mr. Pointy being the most reliable weapon against those immortals. Ah, for the good old days when girls slew vampires instead of pining for them. True, some girls also pined for vampires, but they had no intention of becoming bloodsuckers themselves. And they were great at hand-to-hand combat.

But I digress.

At the expo the Travel Club launched its “I Travel, I Care” campaign promoting responsible travel. I am in complete agreement with the Responsible Traveler’s Creed (“I am a socially responsible traveler. I care about the people and the culture of the places I visit,” etc., full details at www.thetravelclub.ph), but I think the message could be put in stronger terms. Like, “Just because we let you in here doesn’t mean you can be a jerk.”

It’s a well-known and distressing fact that tourism, which is supposed to help local communities make money, also produces tons of garbage.

When you factor in the cost of cleaning up after the guests and repairing the damage to the environment, the income is substantially less than expected.

The trails going up Mount Everest are covered with plastic water bottles. Mount Everest! You take a perfectly lovely stretch of white sand beach, and you know some dolts will leave their Styrofoam containers, plastic utensils, water bottles, cola cans and empty sunblock tubes on it. They’re presumably intelligent people, and they obviously have the resources to travel to that distant beach, but it does not occur to them that they have defiled it.

Because they’re guests, and we pride ourselves on our hospitality, no one goes up to them and says, “Listen. The beach was immaculate when you got here. I’m sorry that your parents did a terrible job of toilet training you, or that you had measles the week they taught common courtesy at your school, but you can’t just leave your garbage lying around. Other guests are entitled to enjoy this beach as you have, so clean up your (expletive deleted).”

“Hospitable” is not a synonym for “pushover.” Sure, those tourists — local and foreign — won’t be back, but do you want them back?!

If you’re too nice to express your true feelings, give me a call and I’ll express them for you. I’ll even bring my wooden stake.

It’s partly Yaya’s fault. In developed countries, only affluent families have nannies to pick up after the children. In the Philippines, lower middle class families can afford a yaya. This is because yayas get paid very little, and some yayas don’t get paid at all. We pride ourselves on treating our yayas like members of the family so they have “malasakit” (a sense of concern) that goes beyond the employer-employee relationship.

Well, there are advantages to the formal employer-employee relationship. A proper employer won’t expect Yaya to get up at the honk of a car horn at 3 a.m. to open the gate, and then whip up a meal out of leftovers.

All your life Yaya picks up after you, makes a fuss over you, cleans up your mess. You are the center of Yaya’s universe. And when you get out of Yaya’s sphere of influence, you still act like Yaya is around.

Consider fast food restaurants. No one even thinks of busing their own tables. How hard is it to put all your empty containers on your tray and take it to the trash bin? Apparently it’s harder than computing derivatives because we just leave our trash sitting there for the staff to clean up. If you try to throw your own trash, people look at you as if you were depriving the staff of employment. And we take this attitude to the beach, the mountains, the jungle, all the places we visit.

Socially responsible travel is simple. Be considerate. Don’t make a mess. Know something about the culture of the place you’re visiting, especially the definition of “acceptable behavior,” so you don’t inadvertently offend the locals. Say it with me: Don’t use it all up, stupid. And be your own yaya.