Agencee France, picked up by MSN reports

Filipinos fly flag in South China Sea

For the few dozen Filipinos living on a remote speck of land in the South China Sea, each day is a battle against loneliness but also a love affair with nature.

 

Contact with the outside world is limited and comforts are few for the residents of “Freedom” town, which exists mainly to raise the Philippine flag and fend off the other claimants to the Spratly islands.

“People here just play billiards, ping-pong. We have no markets and no malls. You need a special mindset to stay here,” said Eugenio Bito-onon, 55, mayor of the town of Kalayaan, the Filipino word for freedom.

Bito-onon, who initially went to Kalayaan in 1997 to work as a town planner, said he learned to cope by playing guitar, watching videos and simply walking around the small islands surrounded by the purest blue ocean waters.

“I love the beauty of the place. It is so peaceful,” said the deeply suntanned Bito-onon while on a visit recently back to Puerto Princesa, the nearest major Philippine city on Palawan island.

Kalayaan was created in 1978 mainly to assert the Philippines’ claim to the the Spratlys, a group of more than 700 islets, reefs and atolls in the South China Sea that is believed to sit above vast natural resources….(for more see the article http://news.ph.msn.com/regional/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5058784)