Show Me the Money

About the Book

Graham Michael Barton is an Englishman retired on a tiny island of less than three thousand souls in the Philippines. Emponet Barton Beach Resort and 60 per cent of the homes on Higatangan Island, Biliran, were destroyed by Yolanda. Two weeks after the super typhoon passed through, Graham returned with a modest amount of supplies and food, distributed throughout the island by his partner, Emily Poyos, who had been born there. The devastation was so severe that Graham returned to Cebu to organize helicopter air lifts and do whatever he could to get aid to his adopted island and its people. During this time, the international community responded magnificently, and Graham had the opportunity to visit the airbase at which most of the aid supplies arrived. This book contains his account of those days and the subsequent hunt for where the aid and billions of pesos went. None of it arrived on his small island. His queries about where the money went were rebuffed. Graham freely admits that he is only one person, and he fervently hopes many more are demanding, “Show me the money!” His first book, The very Small (Obviously) Book of the Philippines, is a series of snapshots of his experiences as a foreigner in the Philippines. I hope that some found it amusing and entertaining. Show Me the Money, dear readers, is not very funny at all. This book is dedicated to the PHILIPPINE AIRFORCE. Without whom aid would have sat on the tarmac...... risking their lives for their own people was ,in their words, absolutely the right thing to do.

About the Author

Graham Michael Barton, the Englishman in question, stayed in school to about the age of fifteen. He was expelled and considered a bad boy, with no qualifications and a learning curve that had gone steeply downhill from the age of ten. His patient-but-mystified father sent him to an Army Apprentices College location, where his older brother had excelled. Unsurprisingly, in less than six months, Graham was again discharged as a bad boy. Graham’s dad refused to tolerate his son’s singular lack of enthusiasm for education and insisted he find work. As jobs were plentiful back then, the uneducated, unqualified, slightly angry, and frustrated young man started working in a frozen-food factory. He moved swiftly to a rope factory, became a furniture salesman, worked in a supermarket, and had a spell as an ice-cream salesman. All this was before the age of twenty. Graham soon realized that to make serious money, he had to work for himself, and he chose his hobby of martial arts, where fighting and winning gave cash prices. But winning wasn’t a given. Losing fights in spectacular fashion gave him the time and opportunity to sell specialized products to his fellow martial artists. Many asked him to find particular weapons, and he sourced these from manufacturers in Spain and Europe. From his one-room flat above his family’s taxi office, Graham sold Japanese swords, martial arts equipment, replica guns and knives, and militaria. Then film companies producing movies such as Shogun, Enter the Dragon, and the James Bond series recognized Graham as the supplier of all things weapon-related. As the years passed, orders from many other film productions including Gladiator and the Lord of the Rings movies took his business, Battle Orders Ltd., to number one in this admittedly limited field. During this time, Graham travelled to the Philippines to have products manufactured to his design. Emily Poyos, Graham’s business partner and a naturalized Filipino, advised him on one such trip to buy land there. Over the years, they developed Emponet Barton Beach Resort, where Graham retired a few short months before Typhoon Yolanda interrupted his plans. His book The Very Small (Obviously) Book of the Philippines reflects his unique experiences in the Philippines. This book, his second, contains his observations on what happen after the super typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) visited the Philippines. Graham promises that this is his last book about the Philippines, but if enough people buy copies of the first two books, he may be able to write something else equally entertaining. Those of you who have been to the Philippines will recognize the phrase, “It’s up to you!”