pulling out data on the philippines, and comparing these against world, east asia and pacific and south asia aggregations, i came to five very engaging (and for me, quite compelling) conclusions:

Selected Variables on Annual Remittances:
By Selected Countries and Regions

Source: World Bank on Migration and Remittances, 2008
.

1. among countries with remittances that are higher than 10% of their
gdp, it’s the philippines (at us$18.6billion) that has the
overwhelmingly highest absolute amount of remittances, being more than
3 times lebanon’s (at us$6billion), its nearest rival.  while
tajikistan may have the highest remittances-to-gdp ratio (at 45.5%)
its actual remittances of us$1.7b is just 10% of that of the
philippines’ and its number of immigrant workers is just over 20% of
those from the philippines.

2. again among countries with remittances that are higher than 10% of
their gdp, the typical filipino migrant is among those who send the
most back home to support dependents, with a per capita remittance of
just over us$5,000K per annum.  lebanon, honduras, guatemala and
jordan may have higher per capita remittances but the philippines
still is about 10% higher than their total combined remittances (only
us$16.7b) and approximately 44% more than their total combined number
of emigrants (only 2.3million).

3. in the whole of east asia and the pacific, it’s the philippines
that has the highest remittance-to-gdp ratio (at 11.6%) and the most
number of emigrants (at 3.6million).

4.  in south asia, nepal may beat us with its 15.5% remittance-to-gdp
ratio, but their remittances (us$2.2b) amount to just a little more
than 10% of ours and we have 4 more emigrants for every 1 from nepal
(.7m).

5.  only 3 countries in the world beat the philippines when it comes
to absolute amount of remittances and number of emigrants — india
(us$30billion, 9.9million emigrants), china (us$27b, 7.2m), mexico
(us$24b, 11.5m) but per capita wise, the filipino emigrant still
remits roughly 2 dollars (38%) more than do the indian, chinese and
mexican emigrants.

reflecting on these 5 trends i find myself asking:

1.  what are the reasons why filipino emigrants send much more money
back home compared to most other emigrants around the world?

could it higher-paying jobs, or frugal living, or both that propels
higher remittances?  or is it cultural propensity or sense of
responsibility, or family values?

understanding why could help us promote policies and programs that
would encourage higher remittances.  with global remittances now
valued at approximately us$375billion a year, just a 10% increase in
remittances through effective marketing initiatives would be worth a
staggering us$37billion, suprassing even the us$30billion remittances
of india, the highest in the world.

2.  what are the financial mechanisms that enable these filipino
remittances to arrive in the Philippines safely?

is it a lack of similar financial mechanism that is preventing more
remittances from emigrants of other nationalities?

will it help if we institutionalize a regional, asia-wide financial
mechanism specifically targetted at remittances to lower the overall
transaction cost of sending money back home?

in summary, i always knew that the philippines had a lot of overseas
workers, but this is my first time to ever see hard numbers.  at the
very least, the philippines makes quite a unique case in the study of
migration and remittances given these 5 trends above.

BABA 1 - “Reconciliation Reconsidered” - September 3-10, 2006

BABA 2 - “Building the Common Good in Asia” - Sept. 9-16, 2007

BABA 3 - "Building the Common Good in Asia" - Feb. 16-24, 2008

BABA 4 - "Building the Common Good in Asia" - Oct. 26-Nov. 2, 2008

In Beijing, last November 2, these dialogues were brought to the next level – CONCRETE ACTION – with the establishment of the BABA Volunteer Community (BABAvC), a group with the avowed purpose of working to secure the common good of all and of building a better Asia thru volunteerism.

BABA Volunteer Community Logo

Already, a proposal to field volunteers to work within the ASEAN framework has been submitted. In that proposal, the BABAvC logo, shown on the left, is first revealed. Inspired by Giki, the government wiki, started by Anupam, one of BABA4′s resource persons, two BABA fellows started a Volunteers Wiki, as a resource mobilization strategy, to rally all available volunteerism information in Asia and around the world into one site, the first of its kind on the internet. Two songs for BABAvC have been written and are to be recorded soon. By the mid of January 2009, a core group of BABA fellows will be reconvening in Jakarta to iron out the BABAvC charter and its 12-month action plan. Indeed, a great BABA threshold has been crossed and history will refer to this event as the “Beijing Crossroads.”

Started in 2006 by the Nippon Foundation Group (including the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and the Tokyo Foundation) and implemented by the Asian Dialogue Society through the Information and Resource Center (IRC), the four BABA retreats, thus far, have assembled a veritable pool of next-generation leaders of Asia (download summary profile here). BABA fellows are nominated by the Academic Committee of the IRC through a competitive selection process where applicants are asked to write personal and leadership statements.

Peng of China - Pondering on rich insights from the resource persons

Danaa of Mongolia - Pouring thru reading materials.

THE BABA SPIRIT. The essence of the BABA retreats is to gather promising, young Asians in an environment of quite and critical reflection on the toughest social development challenges of today, guided with the insightful stories, disciplined knowledge, and personal sharing of both painful failures and joyful successes from no less than the front-line practitioners themselves.

Combined with a lot of personal interaction and both one-on-one and group bonding among fellow Asians, BABA believes that when, in the future, these young leaders are thrust into positions of greater responsibility and encounter complex dilemmas that try dearly their values and principles, that they will remember to reach out to a fellow BABA warrior and find solace and a quite sanctum where memories of a BABA retreat shared together will soothe their tired souls.

Wonderful stories and rich laughter during meals - 3x a day for 8 days!

Group bonding sessions helped a lot in getting to know the more personal side of the BABA4 participants.

South and Central Asia fellows warming up to each other.

BABA thus is all about planting good seeds of principled and courageous leadership for the Asia of the future — an Asia where the common good is available to all, an Asia that is, simply, a BETTER one for everyone.

Raja of IRC - Sharing his vision of a vibrant Asia

Dr. Surin of ASEAN - Sharing his joy in the ratification of the new ASEAN charter

BABA IN MY EYES. The last time I was with such a culturally diverse group was 2 decades earlier when I was part of the Asian Student Seminars held in Taipei and Jakarta. Research papers prepared beforehand were sent to other participating countries via postal mail. Even prior to the seminars, friendships were jump-started via long-distance calls to collaborate and share our data, in preparation for the presentations to be made — and all without powerpoint!

This time around the internet enabled my BABA friends and I to actually begin our personal and country introductions and thematic discussions on the chosen batch themes even before the face-to-face retreat proper. This was done thru various online social media tools such as, among others, the BABA community blog and the BABA mailing list. This helped immensely in “breaking the ice,” so to speak, so that when we all finally met each other in person, lively stories continued where the online discussions left off.

I appreciated very much that Raja and Mary of IRC took great care in ensuring that the final retreat programme had a good sequence and mix of topics, not just on the chosen theme, but also on core leadership skills and real-world case studies of tough, development challenges. Enough socialization time and trips to tourist attractions were built into the busy schedule as way of unwinding after a particularly heavy and serious input session.

At the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium. Underneath the smiles are chills.

The Dynamic Duo - not Raja and Dr. Surin but Margaret and Alicia, their gorgeous spouses, for putting up with them! Dr. Surin celebrated his birthday with BABA4 and he got a surprise cake and song from us!

Supergirl 2 - Ying of Yingjie

Supergirl 1 - Mary of IRC

Dr. Chen, Wang Ying and Betty of the Yingjie International Centre were extremely efficient, rolling out the scheduled activities like clock work and whisking us off to various activity venues and restaurants with such perfect timing. Wang Ying and Mary must be crowned as the official BABA supergirls – they were the group’s de-facto mothers, tourist guides, hotel room directory, Kamrul’s surprise door opener, picture model for Beijing fashion and 24×7 friends.

What inspired the white lines in the BABAvC logo created by Maky and the title “Interconnectedness” of the BABAvC song composed by Novri were the wonderfully creative and deeply meaningful group calisthenics and integration activities brilliantly executed by Sherilyn and Manisha, the BABA4 facilitators. The white lines represent the string held together by the BABA4 fellows during the closing activity and the title “Interconnectedness” represents the contorted holding hands of the fellows that mysteriously unraveled all by itself in the first attempt.

The BABA4 Facilitators - Sherilyn (top) and Manisha

Sumana - BABA5 here he comes!

Observing closely the rudiments of running a BABA retreat was Sumana, who is tasked to run BABA5 and the future BABA retreats.  Sumana is also active in the Asian Dialogue Society and is responsible for crafting the overarching digital strategy of www.asiandialogue.com, its anchor internet identity.

SOCIOTECHNOPRENEUR. The collective wisdom and insights of the BABA4 speakers and resource persons crystallized the three things I love to do — entrepreneurship, information technology and social development – into a clear personal goal.  This inspired me to start a new blog called sociotechnopreneur which will chronicle my journey toward that goal — technology-enabled, social innovation. Here below are some excerpts of the wisdom shared by 5 of the 11 resource persons/ speakers of BABA4.

Harsha Navaratne

Harsha, Chairperson of the Sewalanka Foundation, shared his life as a grassroots development worker in Sri Lanka with such burning passion.  His mother exiled him to the Philippines to shield him against growing radicalism and fundamentalism in their hometown.  Harsha challenged the BABA fellows to be proud of their cultural/ ethnic identities, citing that he himself has never worn an American suit.  Narrating his own personal experiences of long-time friends of his who became politicians and were eventually eaten up by the system, and becoming corrupt themselves, he instead offered the alternative of working directly with local communities as that is where the greatest need is, saying: “Our generation has made a lot of mistakes. Our generation has a responsibility to look after those suffering from our mistakes.”

Tay Kheng Soon

Kheng Soon, who founded Akitek Tengara and is a well-known Architect and culture/social critic, passionately explained “Rubanisation” as a way of moving forward on the deadlock on sustainable development.  He explained that “Rubanisation is neither the Urban nor the Rural, it is both.  New architecture cannot come out of old planning! Rubanisation is the re-conceptualisation of human settlements in harmony with the environment.”  I find Kheng Soon’s ideas quite moving because he is, in fact, practicing what he is preaching in actual local communities, as he showed us in the case of Lamplaimat in the northeast of Thailand.

Anupam Saraph

Anupam showed us what learning by doing really meant.  With small, multi-colored balls and very active facilitation of the group activity, Anupam demonstrated the seven habits of effective leaders, that is: initiative, visioning, clarity, focus, inclusivity, persistence and openness.  Anupam also demonstrated how a wiki can remove the subjectivity and biases in various forms of communication,  enabling instead content objectivity on the topic or dialogue.  When, during a plenary session, the discussions were bottlenecking and not getting anywhere, Anupam stepped in and showed us Pangea Day as an example of the power of action being done by just 1 person.

Takeju Ogata

Takeju-san, President of the Nippon Foundation, when asked by his wife which was more important to him, his family or his work, said this to her: “The two are incomparable. I love both equally.”  Such is the rare dedication of this man who has been with the Nippon Foundation for now more than 30 years.  Remembering when he worked directly under Ryoichi Sasakawa, Nippon Foundation founder, he shared with us his simple work ethic: “I vowed to myself that I would never lie to him.  When asked, I would always tell him truthfully what he could and couldn’t/ mustn’t do.”  When asked what he can advise to become successful in one’s field, he shared with us another priceless insight: “If you do your job very well, and concentrate on solving problems analytically, then success will come.”

Dr. Surin Pitsuwan

Save the best for the last, they say.  Truly, it was Dr. Surin’s talk that was the hallmark of my BABA4 experience.  Hearing the story of ASEAN, and the behind-the-scenes struggles they courageously fought just to stay relevant to their constituents, constituted a “Tipping Point” [of Malcolm Gladwell] that crystallized sociotechnopreneur very clearly in my mind and heart.  I’m not sure if Dr. Surin’s talk was placed at the early part of the retreat by accident (due to the exigencies of the Secretary-General’s toxic schedule) or by design, Raja probably knowing from experience that Dr. Surin’s words have a mysterious yet wonderful way of reverberating off the ideas of all the other speakers after him.

ASEAN

First and foremost, Dr. Surin’s vision of the ASEAN and the relevant force it can become in building a better Asia was so clear to him that probably, I would’t doubt for a second, he can actually see and visualize it in his head.  As the old adage goes, probably Dr. Surin’s heart and soul are already one with his vision of ASEAN, and it’s just his physical dimension that’s still patiently struggling at the present to get to his future vision which, for him, is already happening.  He is living the future in the present.

14th ASEAN Summit

With the new ASEAN charter now signed and going into effect, hopefully, before the 14th ASEAN Summit this December, Dr. Surin will now be armed with the institutional authority to do what he stresses is “flexible engagement, open-minded engagement, candid engagement,” replacing ASEAN’s current non-intervention policy – soon to be a thing of the past.

Second, it moved me to see the courageous decision-making process of Dr. Surin when faced with complex dilemmas.  His unwavering commitment to the ASEAN legal framework and its inherent challenges, but innovating within it to ultimately have impact on the lives of individual people in its member countries, was truly, I think, patriotism of the highest level.  Indeed, Dr. Surin has been called the first true, regional leader.

Cyclone Nargis

He narrated how, when cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar, and the regime in power refused to allow international aid to come in despite “2 weeks already of death, hunger and illness and no one knew what to do,” they reached out to the Myanmar leaders on a more personal, one-on-one basis, rather than the threatening, condescending stance that Myanmar had gotten so much of in the past, and gently but firmly explained the ASEAN’s responsibility to protect principle, that is, if a government cannot protect/ help its own people, then the whole world has an even greater, more encompassing responsibility to do so.  And that’s what got the international relief agencies into Myanmar.

UNFORGETTABLE.  Endings are also beginnings.  So as I begin my BABA-endeared future and my BABAvC-concretized contribution to the building of a better Asia, my heartfelt thanks goes out to, first of all, Raja and the whole IRC team for a job well done in staging the BABA retreats; second, to all the inspiring resource persons and speakers that moved me beyond my comfort zone of ideas, sociotechnopreneur is for you; third, to Mr. Ogata and the Nippon Foundation and Tokyo Foundation teams for believing in and supporting the BABA process (special mention to Vicky who stayed for the entire duration of BABA4); fourth, to Dr. Chen, Wang Ying and the whole Yingjie team for showing us a Beijing, a China that will stay in our hearts; and last, but not the least, I want to thank my BABA4 friends for what I can say was simply an UNFORGETTABLE Beijing Crossroads.

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Some reflections during the 18 hours I spent to get tickets:

I promised my son we’d watch the Thursday game live

Part 1: 9 Hours at Araneta. Eating, texting, reading a newspaper, doing crosswords, standing, sitting, sleeping, stretching, exercising, playing games, thinking, drinking, looking around, laughing, smoking, talking, listening, calling on a cellphone, shouting, snoring, praying, studying, memorizing a lesson. And me, writing this story by texting on my cellphone.

These are the things people around me are doing. We are in a line; a very, very long line which began 10 hours earlier. I estimate this line to be about 1,000++ people. It’s Monday, 5am here in the Araneta Coliseum, which means these people started lining up right after the game yesterday. I promised my son that I’d get tickets for the game this Thursday. You can do this, I tell myself.

Go back 20 years to 1988. I was a senior in college. Jun Reyes, Alex Araneta, Nonoy Chuatico, Jet Nieto, Jayvee Gayoso are the players whose names I still remember. It was at the Rizal Coliseum, the one at the back of La Salle at Taft. The shorts were really short back then, compared to today at least. Ateneo won the championship that year of 1988 (and the previous year, 1987). It was the perfect cap to my years at the Ateneo.

From 1988, go forward 14 years to year 2002. I had just brought my family back to Manila after living and working in the province. I hadn’t watched any of the games since 1988, not even on TV. But there I was at Araneta watching the 3rd game of the 2002 championship series versus DLSU, and score is tied, 1-1. I see for the first time the great players of that season: Enrico Villanueva, Rich Alvarez, Wesley Gonzales, Larry Fonacier, LA Tenorio, Paolo Bugia, Quimpo. Intal and Kramer were still benchwarmers back then.

Ateneo won that game, needless to say. And I remember I immediately realized that in the only two games I watched live in a span 14 years, Ateneo won two UAAP championships. I was the lucky charm, I said to myself proudly! Ateneo was waiting for me to be at a game live for it to end the championship drought of 14 years.

It’s 2pm and my spirit just got decimated. No more tickets, the Araneta official shouts. I am so close already to the yellow gate. Nine hours down the drain. Hungry and dehydrated, I go home worrying how I’d tell my son.

Part 2: Blue Eagle Gym, 9 Hours. It’s 5am, Tuesday, and here I am at the Blue Eagle Gym. I knew it, the moment I read the website announcement that tickets for the Alumni, the high school and the grade school would be given out starting at 2pm today, I should have come here immediately. I am maybe the 500th or 600th in line. I asked my son to pass by the gym yesterday on his way home to see if there was already a line starting. That was at around 5pm, and he said he didn’t see any line. Now I know why. The line was inside the gym.

I just came back from talking to the man who is the first in the line. He started lining up 4am of Monday. Golly, that was about the time I left our house to go to Araneta. I should have gone straight here. Maybe I’d be number two on the line.

Interesting man beside me. We’ve been talking for about 3 hours already. Two daughters: one, a Junior here in Ateneo and currently in Japan on an exchange program; the other daughter, currently a high school senior but planning to enter the Ateneo also. Proud parent he is. Very kind guy.

Just woke up. My back hurts from sleeping on the wooden chairs. My neck is stiff. Have no pillow.

Am walking at the side of the gym facing the Ateneo grade school. On both corners of the gym I see this great dumping site of old chairs, tables, signages and other wooden and metal trash. And it’s open to rain and the elements. Mosquito heaven. Snake hiding place. Dust gatherers. I’d be interested in the old sofa chairs there. Scrap wood/metal garage sale?

Finally, it’s 2:30pm and I have my 2 tickets. They are gold to me. General admission. Fifty pesos each. I am a proud Father.

I know what you’re thinking, dear readers. “Eighteen hours for 2 general admission tickets: is he insane?” You know what, I completely agree with you! HAHAHAHAH! But it wasn’t about the tickets. It was about keeping the promise I made to my son. Got you, didn’t I?

Some Thoughts on the System of Releasing UAAP Tickets: It was very nice and really commendable for Ateneo to spend valuable resources to keep the line at the Blue Eagle Gym orderly and fair. There were multiple guards and they were very courteous and systematic. People’s arms were stamped and numbers were given out, making it harder for the line to be penetrated unjustly.

However, when the ticketing booth opened and the line started to move, a full-blown riot nearly broke out. We were lined up around the gym but the line didn’t form orderly circles, like the circles of a coil. To complicate matters, not all people were stamped in the arm, and the numbers being distributed run out so that only about half of the approximately 800-900 people were given numbers. When two lines — with people in each line moving in the same direction — went too close to each other, some people deviously jumped lines! This of course didn’t go unnoticed. Tempers flared easily, caused in no small part due to the very long hours of doing nothing. People had so much stored energy and the frustration at having to go thru such a sacrifice just to get tickets was like a volcano waiting to erupt.

After the guards had quelled the commotion, the lines were all mixed up! Suffice it to say, people’s faces looked defeated, and being in the line for 9 hours I can understand completely their sentiments. The segment of the line where I was in also got broken and mixed up with people from the parallel line but we were able to sort things out peacefully, thank God. At that point, it was my turn at the ticket booth and I left immediately after. I didn’t see anymore how the hundreds of people behind me were pacified.

Why do we have lines at all? People who want tickets sign-up on a website. Needless to say, a separate and independent process is instituted to verify if the person who signed up is a student, alumni, faculty member, staff, or any valued friend of Ateneo. Existing verified lists of the Ateneo Alumni Association or the College Registrar can be good starting points. A serial reference number is then assigned to each verified member of the website. For each game that verified members want tickets for, they must enroll. Tickets are then randomly raffled away to the enrolled ones, and the names of the lucky ones who got tickets are posted on the website. If tickets are not claimed within a specified time, they are raffled away again, randomly again, that is. Statistics on the number and type of tickets to be randomly raffled away and those who successfully claimed tickets are posted online, building people’s confidence in the lines-free system. A committee of respectable stakeholders to the fair distribution of tickets is formed and they oversee the whole activity.

Why is it that none of the Patron tickets are ever available to the “regular” Ateneo people like my son? While I understand why these choice tickets go to major sponsors and to various important personalities, isn’t the school spirit of my son, who will be in the bleachers this Thursday, as authentic as those of the VIPs? Why not just declare outright that the Patron tickets are NOT FOR SALE and are distributed following certain “internal procedures.” This way the “regular” Ateneo crowd are informed accordingly, and people don’t wish for the impossible.

See you on Thursday — live from the Araneta Coliseum.

[Update on this story:  Ateneo won.

[Note: This story was also published in the Ateneo Website:http://www.ateneo.edu/index.php?p=120&type=2&sec=27&aid=5829].

Thinking there would be no more policemen as it was nearly midnight, I abruptly made an illegal turn into a main Makati thoroughfare, wanting to bring my tired and hungry passengers, who had just flown in via a very much delayed PAL flight from Laoag, to a restaurant as quickly as possible.  As I had committed our car to the prohibited act, a traffic policeman suddenly appeared from behind a parked car and, while walking fast to the middle of the street to flag me down, was brandishing the infamous and dreaded MMDA pointed finger.

Fear gripped me as I calmly brought down the car window to face the industrious traffic cop.  It wasn’t that it was my first time to be guilty of a traffic violation but rather it was because my three passengers were foreigners, and respected, senior professors at a major Japanese government school at that.  I remember clearly a number of frantic thoughts racing through my head as I waited for the cop to reach my now opened car window.

Was I going to feign ignorance and appeal to the policeman’s sense of Filipino hospitality to foreigners in the hope that he would let us go?  Might work.  But, I said to myself, I’ll have to speak in pure Filipino so my Japanese friends wouldn’t understand that I was in fact bribing the policeman.  But no, I thought, it won’t work because one of the passengers was my friend of 20 years who studied and lived in the Philippines for years.  Surely he’ll understand that I’ll have to bribe the cop to let us go so his co-professors would not suffer the hassle of the delay.

But wait, I thought again, two of my passengers were first-time visitors of the Philippines.  Widely-respected lady academics, and very prominent writers in Japan, how could I show them a live example of Filipino corruption?  More specifically, MY corruption.

“Boss, that turn you made was a traffic violation,” said the policeman in Filipino, as he finally reached my window.  I took one final look at my three worried Japanese guests.  “Sir, please forgive me for making that illegal turn as I was in a hurry to get my foreign guests to a restaurant so they can eat and rest after a long trip and delayed flight from Laoag,” I told the policeman in Filipino.  I looked at the professors and saw that they were all bending down, straining to show their faces to the policeman.  I wasn’t sure if they had guessed what I said in Filipino, or they were just eager to look up and see the face of the policeman.

Instantly I noticed a change in the body language of the policeman. “Sir, please give me your driver’s license and I will call my superior and tell him to come here to you,” the policeman said.  Seeing both police officers talk at the back of the car, I sensed that they were at a loss as to how to handle the situation.  I then decided to come clean and, at that point, I asked my friend of 20-years to please tell the two lady professors that I am very sorry and that I will have to bribe the cop so they will let us go, and we won’t be put thru the great hassle of the arrest.  Not waiting for their responses I got P1,000 from my wallet, got out of the car and walked towards the policemen.

I was taken aback by what the more senior policeman said to me.  After I snuck in the P1,000 in the notebook of the policeman, before I could say anything, he said: “Boss, please apologize to your foreigner guests but we will have to accept this gift kasi we have a daily collection requirement mandated by our Big Boss. I was ashamed to accept this in front of them so I waited for you to go down from your car,” the senior policeman awkwardly confessed in Filipino.  Not wanting to prolong the situation, I quickly went back to the car and drove off.

As my punishment, all throughout our late dinner, our topics always returned to the bribe.  And, indeed, it was the first time for the two lady professors to witness one.  Analyzing the cultural roots of the practice, I learned that in Japan traffic policemen can never be bribed and that fines for traffic violation are very stiff.  Driving Under the Influence (DUI) of alcohol, for example, has a fine of P150,000 pesos and your license will be revoked for a very long time.

As I said goodbye to them the following day at the airport, I once again apologized for my bad judgement and for their inconvenience of going through that bribing experience.  Maybe that’s why the Philippines can’t take off economically, I blamed myself mentally, though silently I knew I was just rationalizing what was clearly my sole accountability into a learning experience.

While what we value is clear — hospitality, saving face, abiding by the law — we are (I was) unable to set a clear hierarchy to these values, defining which one takes precedence over the rest, especially when we are put in a tight situation and forced to choose only one.  How can one turn down a family member who is asking for a government favor, using your power as a government official?  Family (personal) well-being is chosen over the country’s (common) interests.  By choosing to bribe the cop, I chose what I perceived to be “personal benefit” over the greater community benefit of having respected cops, and safe streets with cars following traffic laws, making all pedestrians safe in the long term.  Even the policeman was torn between, what was for him, conflicting values:  wanting to receive the cash in order to comply with his Boss’s quota (obedience), but not wanting to lose face with the foreigners (hiya).

Tell me what you think.  What would you have done?