Davao City Runs Better Than My Mental Health

NOTE: THIS POST? YEAH, IT GOT LEGS.

This one went a bit viral too: 273,000+ views, 918 shares, and most of it came from non-followers. Which is wild. Apparently, all it takes to get traction these days is a love letter to public buses, free stitches, and the kind of functional governance that feels like emotional whiplash.

Archiving it here so I don’t lose it to the Facebook void. Also because hope, weirdly, still deserves to be documented. Even when it comes wearing crocs and a city ID.

There are days I wake up and feel like I’m held together by coffee, sarcasm, and pure delusion. And then there are days like this (when I read on City Government of Davao's FB page that Mayor Baste bought 10 buses to ease public transport) and I feel something soft and dangerous bloom in my chest: hope.

Now don’t get me wrong. I know we’re in hell. This country is spiraling faster than the tsimosas of this country with a load. PRRD is still detained somewhere in The Hague, treated like a villain. And yet, here I am, in my late-forties, with eye bags shaped like the Philippine archipelago, feeling proud. What a time to be unhinged and hopeful!

Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up here. Born, raised, broken, rebuilt, glitched again—diri nga side of the earth. This city is my ex that never left. I’ve known Davao when it smelled like fish guts and unresolved trauma, and I know it now, paved and strangely polite.

I was a kid when the first Duterte ran the show. Became a single mom under Inday Sara. Now I’m a half-feral Lola clinging to sanity while Baste takes the wheel. Call it a dynasty. I won’t argue. But, admit it or not: it works. It runs. It breathes. That's damn near miraculous in this country nowadays.

If you think I’m being dramatic, that's fair enough. I haven’t seen the inside of a jeepney in months! I barely leave the house. My cardio routine is mostly doomscrolling while horizontal. In fact, my first born recently went into one of his usual “ka-hirap mo palakihin na magulang, mama uy!” tirades (“you're such a difficult parent to raise, Ma!") like I was the child and he was the exhausted single dad. Honestly? He’s not wrong.

He’s worried, poor boy. Keeps begging me to leave my crypt (I mean, my room) and touch some grass like I’m one existential crisis away from fossilization. “Ma, naga tanda ka na ba! You’re aging in high definition! Walk around again before your knees resign!” he says. Because honestly, the only time I go out is when someone’s bleeding. Which is how we ended up at SPMC a few months ago.

My daughter had an ectopic pregnancy.Code red. We rushed her to a private hospital all panicked breath and false hope, until I imagined the bill and saw the Grim Reaper holding her partner's and my wallets hostage. I was tempted to tell her partner to sell his kidney, tbh. Then I remembered: SPMC.

If you didn’t grow up in Davao, allow me to take you on a quick tour of a memory lodged somewhere between my pelvic floor and my cPTSD.

Back when it was still called DMC (this was the ‘90s) the place reeked of rust, despair, and postpartum betrayal. I was giving birth to my second child. First time doing it there. I had a plastic bag of meds with me...a sad little “starter pack." You had to buy your own anesthesia, oxytocin, sutures then hand them over to a nurse when you're already in the delivery room. I, of course, heroically forgot mine in the labor room. I was too busy wrestling with contractions, convinced I was seconds from rupture. So I waddled to the delivery room door and announced to the doctor that I was about to pop. She didn’t even look up. Just asked, “Ilang cm ka na nong huli ka gi-IE?”

“Eight, doc,” I muttered, teeth clenched, legs crossed like I could hold the baby in by sheer will and pelvic denial.

"Ay, hali ka na.Hali ka na. Bilis! Manganganak ka na!"

A nurse helped me through the stirrups and asked where my meds were. When I said I left it in the labor room, the doctor snapped at the nurse to fetch it, but she returned with a shrug and a “Wala gud doon ang gamot mo.”

So, yeah, they stitched up my freshly split body with no anesthesia, just the holy spirit and the laws of gravity. And that pain?Oh, I swear it made all my heartbreaks look like emotional mosquito bites...

Meanwhile, outside, the father (who was well on his way to becoming a full-time methhead) was getting suspiciously cozy with his new sugar mommy. He even brought her that night, for reasons known only to meth logic. She was a former SK Chairwoman, because of course she was. I labored alone while they flirted over the wreckage of my uterus. (Shoutout to my lola, who saw them, for intel.May you, RIP. Labyu!)

I left DMC vowing never to return. Life, of course, said “ROFL." And then it rolled its sleeves, and got me pregnant a third time less than two years later. So yes, I was back. This time I clutched my starter pack like a talisman as they wheeled me into the delivery room. The birth went fine, but the OB-Gyne Ward was packed tighter than a Jollibee drive-thru during pay day. They stuck us in the hospital’s basketball gym to recover. I had to share a bed with another mom and both our newborns. No aircon. That part I could live with. But the CR? That toilet made me want to exit the planet. I stood by its door and felt like a bacteria was sizing me up for a body snatch. I had fresh stitches and had to hover over the bowl, praying not to touch anything that would turn me into a Kafka-level cockroach. The walls looked like they had secrets. Violent ones.

Fast forward to now: my daughter got admitted to the new SPMC, and I swear it felt like we wandered into a K-drama hospital by mistake. Elevator that worked. Aircon that hummed. Nurses who didn’t act like your mere existence was a personal inconvenience. And the CR? It sparkled. I could’ve eaten sinigang off that toilet lid! Promise! Then came the bill... except there wasn’t one. Free laparoscopy. Covered mostly by the city's Social Welfare and a portion by PhilHealth. I almost cried. Not from fear this time, but from sheer relief.

And yes, I remember. Even during my own trauma-riddled births in the ‘90s,the city never charged me a single cent. Of course, the pain came deluxe and unfiltered, but at least the suffering was free. A tiny mercy, but mercy just the same.

You don’t have to like the Dutertes. Hell, I don’t like most humans myself. But facts don’t care about your moral lens: this city looks after its own. Cancer patients. Car crash survivors. Broke mothers with nowhere else to bleed. Even scatterbrained women who forgot their meds mid-labor... Oh,we were never left behind!

Healthcare shouldn’t feel like flipping a coin where one side says funeral and the other says lifelong debt. But here? In Davao? There’s a fighting chance.A working system. An infrastructure built not just on taxes but (brace yourself) something dangerously called actual governance.

So yeah. Mayor Baste buying buses? That’s not just public transport. That’s infrastructure in motion. That’s the city whispering, “We still see you.” Pair that with 13 billion pesos in collected taxes and a brand-new intervention center for kids with special needs, and suddenly, suddenly I’m wondering if this political dynasty (next to the relationship I have now with my guy) might just be the healthiest long-term relationship I’ve managed to keep.

No one's perfect. But these people—these Dutertes—they made it possible for my daughter to walk out of a hospital with her body intact and her pride untouched. I never got that. But I’m glad she did.

Progress doesn’t always come with fireworks. Sometimes it comes in the form of a quiet elevator ride, the hum of an aircon in a ward, and the absence of a bill that would’ve broken us.

Maybe someday the whole country will catch up. For now, I’ll take the win. One air-conditioned, fully funded hospital bed at a time.

May the Dutertes remain political. May they stay functional. May they continue to care and give a flying fvck for strangers of this city, in a country that often doesn’t.

Save. Save. No erase. Invisible forcefield. Forever and ever. Eymuhn.

—Kooks dL., Open Journal,04.22.2025 | Current Mood: Oddly hopeful, slightly feral