In a world full of monumental problems, I believe, what celebrities think or do is not of monumental importance. Which is why I had to ask my wife who Andi Eigenmann is. “Oh,” she said without hesitation, “she’s a famous actress who fell in love with a surfer and moved to Siargao.”
Which you probably already knew, given how much news she’s garnered lately. It seems the surfer in question, Philmar Alipayo, recently showed the poor judgement of publicly sharing identical “love couple” tattoos with Swedish influencer Pernilla Sjoo, a female friend living on the same island. Eigenmann, something of a social media tiger herself, responded with a loud and jealous snarl and the fight was on.
All of which interested me not in the least.
What did interest me, however, was the ensuing debate over the increasing influence of foreigners on Siargao Island. Because, well, I’m sometimes one of them. “Alipayo and his AFAMS are giving Siargao a bad name,” Wilfredo Garrido, an attorney, complained bitterly on Facebook.
For those who share my ignorance, AFAM, I learned, originally stood for “a foreigner around Manila,” but now applies to foreigners in general, especially Westerners.
“The flamboyant surfers of Siargao,” Garrido continued, “hustle for cash with foreign girlfriends, displaying them like trophies…Which brings us to those AFAMS…” Drawing a distinction between “transient tourists” who bring in money and those who take up residence, the good lawyer wonders whether the latter are “really a blessing to the island or…a curse like backpackers begging in the streets for fare money.”
While the “sun and the surf, the mangroves and the coconuts, the rustic charm of the place” attract tourists, he says, resident foreigners are “spoiling this image of pastoral bliss” by “making out with local boys, breaking up families, and promoting the wrong lifestyles. Perhaps, Siargao needs cleaning up like Boracay. Not only of pollution, but of this foreign trash.”
Ouch!
The overwhelming response to his post—more than100 comments, 7,100 reactions, and 2,400 shares—was equally shocking. “The narrative [describes] what is actually happening on the ground,” declared one reader, who I know personally.
Chimed another: “I totally agree.”
To be honest, to some extent I agree too. My Filipino wife, who grew up in Siargao, often laments on how much it’s changed. “They’re bringing bad things to the island,” she says of the foreign influx, referring, among other things, to tattoo parlors, vape shops, alleged drug use, and bustling bars. “It’s very different from when I was growing up.”
And an American friend who lived there from 1995 to 2004, says he feels partly responsible. “I was one of the original people who started ruining it,” Mark Slade confesses. “We didn’t go to Siargao for the nightlife, though, but the surf and the culture. Not to exploit it, but to preserve it. I don’t want to live there anymore because it’s too depressing.”
I share some of his ambivalence. The first time I experienced Siargao in 2006, it was a tropical island paradise featuring untouched white-sand beaches, clear-water tidepools crawling with crabs, and virgin jungles oozing fresh coconuts. Later during the pandemic, when foreigners disappeared for a while, I wrote about what seemed like a rebirth.
“The water,” I penned, “was as crystal clear as I’d ever seen it. Just beneath the surface a swarm of green fish scurried about, while scads of purple crabs crawled past each other on the rocks overhead. But the telltale sign was the smell; instead of sunscreen, the tidepools exuded the natural odor of, yes, the teeming reef that God had intended.”
The irony, of course, is that I too am a foreign Johnny-come-lately on whom Siargao grew rather than the other way around. The invasion from afar, I now realize, is a double-edged sword cutting both ways by enriching the economy while altering the environment and culture. And yet there may be hope. Eigenmann and Alipayo recently announced that they had kissed and made up.
My fondest dream is that one day Siargao and its foreigners will do the same.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies, is now available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
