Creatures of Habit

"Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give its solidity & continuity; but the settlers give it passion."   - E(lwyn) B(rooks) White

They wake up at the right time, they take the same car, sit in the same seat, elbow the same creatures, isolations, eye contacts, relationships form, intimacy creeps in and everything breaks at the last station. As dawn breaks, the creatures roam all over again. treading the tracks, the streets, the city for that uncontrolled rush that the engine brings.

For almost four decades, the Philippine National Railways has served the people in the urban jungle and countryside as a means of efficient everyday transportation. It has been a landmark project by the government to link neighboring towns in pursuit of improvements in the country's progressive economic state then.

But aside from the continued passage of people in the metro, it was also considered a vehicle towards greener pastures. Sadly, the barrage of hopefuls was caught in unfamiliar territory and was instead trapped down in the poverty line.

It was a one-way ticket to their dreams. As the train left, they were wedged along the tracks trying to catch the next train back to their simpler lives.

As the ambitious and expensive rehabilitation of the 1060km railway is underway, part of the condition by the Chinese and the Koreans before funding the project was for the government to relocate the thousands of families living in the tracks.

Now the people has been given another ticket to unfamiliar grounds, a ticket to the same train that led them to the land of broken dreams.