Sidewalk Notary Office

Having been born in Cebu, and living here for most of my lifetime. I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't been to a lot of places here. And when I say places, I'm not even talking about the beaches, the tourist spots, the malls, the restaurants. No. not those kind of places, I'm talking about the heart of urban Cebu which is downtown. If you really want to experience the reality of living in one of Philippines' fastest developing cities, you really need to check out Downtown / Colon.

A few days ago, my friend and I decided to go to City Hall to look for a "lawyer" in the hope of securing a notarized affidavit of loss. It was a Saturday, so it wasn't as crowded and you can hardly find the annoying people who will ambush you and ask you for "notaryo bai?". In fact we had to go to the side of the City hall to find them there beneath an arcaded sidewalk. This is where I met Manang, a lady I think in her 60's or 70's. She was the encoder. The way their business works goes something like this; There are people who I call "pimps", these are the ones who look for clients in the street. And as soon as the "pimps" know what the client wants, they ask you to write the necessary information on a tiny piece of paper and pass it to Manang for the encoding. Manang did all the encoding in her almost antique typewriter. Just by the way she uses the knobs on her typewriter to adjust the alignment, you can already tell that she's been using it for a very long long time.

As for the Affidavit of loss, she already had a "fill in the blanks" form where all she needed to do was type the needed information and Presto, you have yourself an affidavit. At that time, Manang have used up all her affidavit forms, so she needed to to reproduce another set of copies. The problem was, she barely had any money to pay for the photocopy. She looked for her wallet on her small drawer and was fortunate to find a few folded worn out "bente" pesos and asked one of their errand boys to photocopy the forms. Our affidavit cost us 150 pesos.

It's been said that the measure of a society is how well they treat its weakest members. And these images speak for themselves how this city, with all its glory and economic growth has yet to trickle down to the most common of people.