Peanut Butter?

The strange things you mind yourself doing in a foreign place that you would never expect… like standing in the aisle of the grocery store comparing the sugar content of your various peanut butter options. The lowest I could find was 3g of sugar in a 2 Tbs. serving which was in an American import. Most had 7.5g & the “Sweet & Creamy” variety had 11g of sugar for the same serving size!! Yuck. This culture does like its sugar and they add it to everything. I used to razz people in the States for how much sugar and cream they put into a perfectly good cup of coffee but that’s nothing compared to here where you’ll typically see two large heaping spoonfuls of sugar and one of cream into an 8 oz mug. & people think I’m crazy for drinking my coffee “black” & that’s only after I explain to them what “black” coffee means…

Finished Book: “Seven Storey Mountain” by Thomas Merton. (Thanks Mrs. Valenta!)

Mosquitoes...

In places where they issue you a mosquito net, you should really use it. I’ve had two recent reminders to that point in the past few days. 1st, two trainees from our Hub have had the joyous first hand experience with Dengue fever, a lovely tropical disease spread by our little blood sucking friends. I guess you pretty much feel like death, complete with a large itchy rash covering your lower legs. It starts our as flu-like symptoms and gets progressively worse from there. The best part is that there really isn’t much they can do once you’ve got it but let the disease run its course and make you as comfortable as possible for the next 5-7 days while you’re stuck in bed. From there you can start the slow recovery to actually feeling like remaining on the planet again. Hopefully there is some hyperbole, but that’s the gist of it as its been described. I hope to not have to report from my own viewpoint on this one. The good news is that you can only get it four times; once from each of four strains…
The 2nd reminder was from my own first hand experience. I was trying to save myself the trouble of hauling an extra bag from Hub to Lamut and back since we would were only going to be home for two nights & so left my net at Hub. Of course the last two nights just happened to coincide with the start of the rainy season and so there are also many more mosquitoes around, or at least it seemed like it. So now I’m currently covered in bites, but the worst part was the lack of sleep from them announcing my impending doom by periodically buzzing by my ears making me twitch violently & flail about my head for a few seconds before once again resigning myself to my fate of less blood & more itching. & why do they always go for the feet anyway?? Specifically my Achilles…it isn’t like I was dipped in the River or anything…
But nothing serious to worry about, the Dengue mosquitoes sleep during the night. It’s the malaria ones you have to worry about while your sleeping….

Dancing the Native Way

To further skip out on class, again for a legitimate reason, almost our entire Hub went to Nueva Vizcaya’s Founding Day festivities yesterday! There was a huge market and a parade of the various Barangays in their native costumes. They all ended up in a big open area behind the capitol building and butchered 15 pigs and 5 carabou! Unfortunately (or fortunately, I’m not really sure…) we missed the actual butchering and only saw them finishing up. I’m sure it will be something I’ll get to experience later on. Following that was some native dancing and more wandering around the market.
The highlight of the whole event though was definitely seeing Kiwi in his native attire! Kiwi is a 35 year old, current serving volunteer from New Zealand who has American citizenship and has worked their in the paper and steel Industry for quite sometime. Here he has been working in the WATSAN sector in Ambagio, Nueva Vizcaya for a year. He’s been at most of our Hub Sites to give his perspective and hangout with all of us. I’m not sure if Jackson posted any of the pictures of us in the native attire from swearing in, but it is quite the sight. The women are simply wearing a skirt woven in the pattern of the particular Barangay and a white top, but the men get to wear what is called a G-String. Its simply one strip of clothe wrapped between the legs and around the waist. Some wore a top, usual a vest of some kind. Should be an interesting experience most definitely, and is also the native attire in Ifugao, sunburning very pale, exposed areas of the body will be a concern though.
The excitement among all of us is finally beginning to build! The 2nd to last Hub Site is Monday- Wednesday and our goodbye event for our host families, called a Handog, is on the 28th. Following that we swear in the evening of the 6th, have a conference with our supervisors the 6th & 7th, and then its off to site! On top of all of that, my guitar is being transported up here as I write & will arrive with the resource volunteers coming to our next Hub on Monday! People are great.

CE Tools to Use

The momentum is definitely building as we begin the downward slide towards the end of training! On Thursday we had our last language progress check before the final language interview, which was the last formal check that our LCF does with us. Combined that with our site visits last week and I know my cluster has basically thrown in the towel for language class. All of us are either going to switch languages and therefore get a tutor anyway, or want to continue at site with a tutor regardless of where they are now so none of us are terrible interested in attempting class with the given circumstances. We’ve shifted to “Language on Foot” and other such alternatives to actually having class.
Our Community Project also pre-empted class for two days. The Community Project is supposed to be the culmination of this phase of training where we pull all of the Community Entry (CE) tools we’ve been learning together and find a project that is helpful for our cluster community. The actual project turned out great, though the lead up was a tad suspect. We ended up working with a small elementary school on their “Brigade Eskwela,” which is a national program to spend a week fixing up the school before classes begin June 6th. The particular school is very well run and has a strong, active PTCA (Parents, Teachers & Community Association) so the organizing was already done. We attended a planning meeting and talked about where we could chip in. We ended up providing funding for some concrete and merienda for one day as well as taking and developing pictures to submit. We also, of course, chipped in with the manual labor which ended up being the most fun! The big task ended up being trying to figure out what was wrong with, and then fix their well which was not producing water anymore. Picture 15 Filipinos and two Americans (Jackson & I, both WATSAN) all standing around scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do with this well. We ended up hauling the entire 24M pipe out of the ground, in 6M section, and taking it apart. Not an easy task at all. We found a few foot long sticks stuck inside. I guess the first lesson at school this year will be how not to put stuff down the well. All in all it was a great two days of work and quite helpful for the school. We also did some basic yard work and used the cement to fix some steps and put a gutter along the front of one of the buildings to catch and channel the rain water from the roof on down the hill. Still, the lead left a lot to be desired. We had been charged at our last Hub Site to come up with a Community Project and then begin to implement it. The four of us in Lamut happen to be spread across 3 different Barangays (something like a town, though more Barangays equals more government funding so, for instance, the town center of Lamut has been split into two). This has made it difficult to make a lot of contacts on the government level and all of us had mostly been focusing our attention on our various families and, at least at the beginning, language. Because of that, we did not really have any ready made ideas of what could be useful to the community and about a week to figure all of this out. So, we sat down and had a 2 hour meeting to hash out a couple ideas and decided to try and host a Bingo event with some community education about the Peace Corps and some health issues thrown in. It was about the best we thought we could do on such short notice. The next day the Hub Site staff rolled out in the PC Land Rover and tactfully informed us that we would be helping out the school at Bliss with their Brigade Eskwela. No questions about what we might have been thinking, no questions about how we liked the idea, it was pretty much this is a great project so you will do this and we’ve made a few calls in that direction. It was definitely a much better idea than what we had, but I also think they ended up undermining a lot of what the CE tools and training was for and fell into the trap that we are continually warned against as PCVs, mainly not to force through our own ideas and to work within the community to empower them with their own. They missed a great chance to model the way they want us to approach our communities with suggestions of ideas and instead, ironically, fed the PC issue of diving headlong into projects. As it goes, I realize this is everyone’s first time with this training set up and they did have a wonderful idea, they could have just used some work in the presentation. Anyway, the work days were a blast!

Many Ways to Play

There is a scheduled brown out all day today, though its 7pm & we still don’t have power. The heat has also not broken yet, in fact its just getting worse. I thought the rain would have cooled things off much more than it has. I can’t wait to get to site for the weather alone! But even with the heat, here is a great place to be! Yesterday was my birthday & it turned out to be a wonderful juxtaposition of the word. I felt very much a part of the family as they proved once again how much they see me as one of their own by rolling out the typical B-Day celebration for special birthdays. There was Filipino spaghetti, some amazing graham cake, rice wine & later on in the evening they even butchered & cooked up a duck!! Mama also got me (from the family) a T-Shirt & key chain with a Christian theme which was also very touching. Quite the production indeed… The cluster also came over & Jackson, Matt & I ended up drinking some beer & singing videoke next door with a bunch of my younger cousins. That whole gig really felt like back home in the States & it surprised me with how much that made a positive impact on the evening. Matt really came through by extending the American tradition (at least where I’m from) of taking care of me for the evening via buying my two beers. Its not much but that’s just how its done back in the States with my friends & it was an awesome bit of home in a culture where the celebrant is expected to pick up the bill. On top of that Matt & I had a bit of a rough start & it feels good to have had everything settle down where we can be friends. I think it becomes easier to put aside the various annoyances from training and each other as we adjust to our surroundings and can start counting down the days till our freedom. Training has definitely gotten long. I can understand the reasoning & could also defend the whole process (except for some language shortfalls such as a lack of a Ilokono-English dictionary) but in the end it hasn’t been all that marvelous from a personal perspective. Pre-Service Training (PST) II will bring in the technical side of our training and that should be a blast. But that won’t happen until after we’ve been at site for 3 months. It gives us a chance to really learn the skills we will need at site. The current Vs think it’s a great idea, but we’re all still itching to dig into some latrines & water systems. In their defense though as well, this all would have gone much smoother is we weren’t the first batch through the new training model & on top of that we they brought on board our new Regional Manager on April 15th so she is still learning the ropes as well. Northern Luzon is a doubly confused sector! From what I hear though, come June 8th when we leave for site Peace Corps will flip 180 degrees as far as hand holding & involvement goes. A whole new barrel of challenges then I’m sure.
Another great B-Day development has been the arrival of the Economist, a weekly current events mag, that has made me incredibly happy. I had got into the habit of reading it when I could get them from work at Barnes & Noble. I’ve missed being out of touch with current events & a hard-core news source that challenges my brain and makes me think. CNN in the mornings with Dad is great, but brief & its still American style news. Just this morning it was going on & on about a horrible train accident in Japan that has just happened, but nobody really knew anything yet & there’s only so many ways one can express that before it gets old & redundant. Once. So life’s happy on the news & reading front.
& then, sort of as a present to myself, but also just because I needed a hat to contain my hair, I bought one. But not just any ordinary baseball cap, I found one that is grey (of course) with a black tribal design stitched onto the brim & on the hat itself none-other than the icon himself – Che Guevara! It’s the most ridiculous piece of pop iconography I’ve seen in awhile & I found it right here at the small market in Lamut with less than 30 hats to choice from. Its perfect.
The last bit of news for the day is that our force fed community project turned out quite well. Part of our training was supposed to be using our Community Entry tools we’ve been learning to set up & implement some kind of community project. We had not come up with many truly helpful ideas & so the Hub Site staff visited us at cluster one day and BAM, we were helping out a small local school with their Brigade Eskuela, which is a National program of cleaning and fixing up the school before the new year starts in June. We were mostly doing yard work but the highlight was fixing the well. We ended up pulling the entire 24 meter well out of the ground to remove the foot long sticks that some kids much have tossed down. It comes it 6 meter sections that we had to heave up and then unscrew from the next piece down. Not light, let me tell you. They are also putting up a small 2 course block retaining wall & creating a run-off trench for the water coming off the gutter. Not quite how I would have designed it, but it will definitely work well. It was a great start to my birthday to have some good old manual labor instead of sitting in class. It also feels great to be on a work site, as it were, once again.
& to finally cap off the day we had our last progress check with Manang Uzi today. All that’s left is the formal final interview where I need to achieve the Intermediate level with Ilokono before they will let me officially switch to Mayoyao & therefore stop testing me in Ilokono and provide funding for a new tutor at site. We’re really on the downward plunge now!! I will be very sad to leave Lamut, but I also can’t wait to truly begin.

Home!

I feel so comfortable & at home here in Lamut. I cannot even begin to describe how important that has been or how thankful I am to this family for that. I am allowed to participate as much as I would like as they go about their lives. I’m also give time & space to do my own things & follow my own thoughts & through it all I know that I am loved & included. A quick wry smile from Dad as he heads to the porch for some drinks with his KC friends after their meeting, or the fretting & worrying of my mother when I returned from Mayoyao. “You’re Skinny.” Which is definitely not the case… I’ve thickened up a little bit around the middle. Nothing more running & less fried everything won’t take care of but I need to be more careful what I eat or I’ll regret it J… fried food and all though, it feels good to be home.

Unlucky?

I cannot think of any better way to spend a day than hiking up to a series of swimming holes & water falls, butchering & cooking two chickens & drinking a little brandy with a bunch of my new cousins. And I can put it down as work, checking out a proposed eco-tourism site! The National government is piloting a 4 day work week right now though, so nobody was in the office anyway J. Follow that up with visiting a wake and than an evening chatting with Erik & Alexander, 23 & 26 year old locals, fending off numerous suggestions that I get married and offers of escorts in case I want to start courting anyway… Not a bad way to spend my last day in Mayoyao! I’ll be catching the morning bus back to Lamut. It will be nice to have a day off to do whatever I please!

Mental Wanderings

Its amazing how things work out in the Peace Corps community! Not only have I managed to have a left handed guitar hand made by a local on the island of Bohol whom I’ve never met, but it will also now be at my next Hub Site!!! It took awhile and the texting back and forth with no less that 5 different people, 3 of whom I’ve never met, but it looks like its going to work out!!! I just need to pick up the extra boat fare so they can hop over to the island and they’ll fly out from there. Life is good.

I’ve noticed people here have a very refined idea of what their fruits should taste like. I wonder how long it will take for mine to develop, or if it will. For now I’m just happy that all these new fruits exist in the first place & they all taste good to me. Hopefully it will stay that way. Just another reason its going to be hard to go back to the temperate climate…

Today was the 1st time in awhile all 5 meals were not readily prevalent or greatly encouraged to be eaten. I ended up subsisting for the afternoon on just a few mangos & a pack of chips more out of surprise than anything. Its nice to be responsible for my intake again, hopefully we can keep that trend up. It would definitely be more healthy.

The classic stereotype I got in Lamut about Mayoyao was that everyone, even the children, chews Mo-ma, or beetle nut. They are not too far off the case either. Moma is a nut that grows on trees in a husk that is chewed with some kind of leaf and “lime,” which is a white powder made of a shell that is smoked and pounded. It produces bright red salvia and is chewed much the same as tobacco is in the states. Its an interesting substance and I’ve tried it once now. Managed to get little bits of grit all throughout my mouth. If I can keep that factor to a minimum it might not be a bad Community entry habit. Its very similar to cigarette culture in the states where you can bum a chew and start a conversation. And they say that it hardens to teeth… not that I necessary believe that one, but the old Ifugao’s do still have their teeth. Maybe that’s cause they don’t eat a couple pounds of sugar a day like your average Filipino does today. I mean come on, spaghetti isn’t supposed to be sweetened…

The strange contradictory feeling of living & seeing rural poverty much like Appalachia & then to sit down in the office on a nice new laptop running Windows XP to check my email… not that I’m complaining!

You really know your body has adjusted to a new climate when you wake up, its 75 degrees and your cold enough to go for your sweatshirt…

There are signs on the walls in various public spaces telling you not to chew Buyo here. Buyo is Tagalog for Moma. Ahhh, the politics of language at work and they expect people to actually obey the signs? On top of that people tend to draw an interesting and very purposeful distinction between “language” and “dialect”. Tagalog, also called Filipino, is a language. Everything else is a dialect. Not quite the definitions I learned in school…

Stairway to Heaven

Today I went hiking again with Jerry and it was a good follow up to the last trip. We were going to hike up to Nagachara (sp), the mountain where the Japanese made their last stand during WWII (& hence the previously mentioned artillery shell), but we got caught about halfway up the “stairway to heaven,” as he referred to it during one of our breaks, by the afternoon rain which came a touch early today. (Like most Filipino’s he isn’t in the greatest shape, so I appreciate these hikes all the more!) We ended up just chilling under someone’s native hut for an hour or so chatting & then went down for coffee at his house. He speaks English well, but has a hard time understanding me, which I have found to be the norm with most people. I’ve picked up the habit of speaking fairly slowly (really slowly for me) and saying everything in two different ways to cover more vocabulary. Through our chatting I got a much better idea of how things have been going & learned a lot more about how he sees the world. He is very interested to learn but there is so much new technology since he was in school and so many things have been just handed to the community with, at best, a cursory explanation of how they work. I think we will be able to work well together. Even better once I start learning his language and am not the only one struggling with that issue. I hope I can balance his desire for knowledge that I am able to teach with bringing out the knowledge he already has while still combating that entrenched idea that the foreigners have all the answers. I sincerely hope for more chances to just sit and chat like this though. It tells me a lot about how they think and how they see the world and I think we came a long way along the road to a good working relationship.

488

I have been at site for three full days now & every day it has rained, every day there has been a short brown out & every day I’ve climbed the 488 steps from my house up the hill to the Municipal hall & my office! I guess I shouldn’t be too worried about shedding the extra pounds my current host Mom has managed to get on me with all the fried food. Quite the hike indeed and quite the welcome to the rural mountains or Ifugao! My 1st impressions have been overall very good. No one was prepared for my arrival, but that has been handled well & has also given me some time to explore on my own. My counterparts have been taking me to various lookouts to get a bird’s eye view of Mayoyao which has helped a lot to orient me to the area and the various Barangays. I look forward to being able to dive in and see all those places up close. Mayoyao is definitely a bit of a development graveyard though, for both PC projects and other international agencies. There are plenty of examples of how $$ and supplies only fix the immediate problem (if that). The 6 previous PCVs have left a semi-functional fish hatchery, a currently broken water pump & a library that has no funds for an attendant so has been closed for some time. And those are only the PC projects I’ve heard about so far. The GTC (some German group) has left a Global Positioning System (GPS) that no one here claims to be able to operate & a computer program for water systems that they can sort of work. There is definitely plenty of work to do & before I get to any of that there is the colossal talk of overcoming the view that I am just another cash source here to fix all their problems for them instead of with them.
My Super, Madame Florence Ponchilan, should be an interesting character, I met her for the 1st time today. She’s a single 40 year old which is unusual in itself. She’s also working on a Nursing degree that she’ll finish in October with which she hopes to go abroad and work. That’s what she was doing in Manila the last two weeks. I get the feeling she’s going to be a little distracted. I get the feeling their office is a little swamped with work too, especially with all the planning that they do… not enough hands to produce all the long range plans and work on implementing them all as well. Still the water system they are currently working on (being funded by the GTC) is coming along and will service 4 Barangays and they have managed to procure a grant from National for a Dump Truck that will hopefully be coming along soon. They didn’t know who will be in charge of operating or maintaining it though when I asked. All n all I think we will all get along quite well after I convince them that a 23 year old with no engineering degree still has a lot to offer. I also think Florence will be helpful when I need her to be, will sign the appropriate paperwork & not micro-manage, so we should get along fine too! We’ll negotiate more of that relationship at the Supervisor’s Conference in Bayombong after we swear in.

Host Family - Round II

I have been truly blest with another wonderful host family. My host mother works with the DSWD and will also be working on the Wat/San team with me. Not sure exactly what the “Team” is, but it should work out well. She’s a great person and has been very kind so far. She gives me space to exist in and also lends a hand here and there. She’s also been a great teacher and was quick enough to pick up on a reference to my Ilokono test & suggested we only work on Ilokono for now. I’ll switch to Mayoyao when I officially move up here. Speaking of that, rumor has it that the New Testament has been translated into Mayoyao and the translator is still here working on the Old Test!! An American linguist just might be handy in learning a new language quickly, especially since I’m so visually oriented with my language learning. Learning the language missionary style!
My host father is also awesome. He was elected to a term as a Kagawad in ’01-‘04 (municipal council person, the legislative arm of the LGU called the SB) & before that he spent 21 years in the Intelligence branch of the military. Very laid back character & he appears to do quite a bit of gardening in the back “yard” (it’s a 60 degree slope) as well as raise pigs. Plenty to learn from him. He also took me on a hike back up to the Hostel on which I learned quite a bit more than when I did the trek alone. The advantages to a good tour guide! It also looks like Dad will put in a bolo order for me so I have one for my own hiking trips (basically a machete that is also worn for ceremonial occasions). He says the Blacksmith’s anvil is an old WWII bomb that did not explode, with the gunpowder taken out of course. There are definitely plenty of opportunities here! We’ll see how many of them I can capitalize on when I return.

Litany of A Day

Conducting electricity with my hands is only one of the challenges I have faced today. To get the fluorescent bulb in my room to turn on requires me to touch the far end & slide my fingers across to complete the connection. Don’t ask me how that works, but it does. I’m sure I could get a new bulb, and I will once the amusement factor wears off.
So still no supervisor today. I did go to the flag raising though and somehow still managed to be surprised when they asked me to introduce myself in front of everyone & so of course I completely forgot the short intro I had prepared in Ilokono. Such is life, we all managed fine in English. (& here comes the downpour I narrowly avoided being drenched in on my hike home. The storms move in fast here). After that, my host mother was gracious enough to take me around and introduce me in person to all the different offices at the LGU. She works at the DSWD (Dept. of Social Work & Development) so she was at flag raising as well. I hit it off quite well with the Vice Mayor and the chief of police seems like a great guy as well. He has only been here for 2 months so maybe we can go exploring the different barangays together. I ended up at the MPDO (Municipal Planning & Development Office) which is where I am officially attached and got to meet my counterparts. I have a desk which is a nice touch & I also got handed the 400 page MPDO 10 yr plan for the Municipality, 97-06. Glancing through it looks rather interesting, but reinforces the stereotype that Filipinos are long on the planning part and less so on the actual implementation. After that Linda, who is a secretary of sorts in the office, showed me around town so more and took me to some of the more outlying offices. Not a bad morning considering no one was expecting me to be here. After a slightly awkward lunch with Lillian at her sisters house Jerry, an Engineer who will be one of my counterparts in the office, walked me up the steep hill to the hospital so I could meet them and fill out some PC paperwork (always more paperwork…) and…
And I’m writing by candlelight now. CRASH, BOOM, & no more power. There’s a great storm going on. Soft rain, rolling thunder, lightning. It was an interesting walk though. We looked at the huge, poorly maintained & run Tilapia (fish) farm built by the 1st PCV here back in the 70s & then essentially I got hit with a huge litany of projects funded by outside sources, including many by the past 6 PCVs, that have both failed or partially succeeded & a large list of major problems facing Mayoyao. Water is drying up so they can only harvest rice once a year (though his numbers of the area affecting by this are way higher than others I’ve heard), some kind of large earth worm is destroying the terraces (which I read about in the 10 yr plan written in ’96) & the irrigation project done with the Japanese equivalent of the PC that cost 4-5 million pesos (54 to the $) that could be extended. On the way back down he asked me if I had any project proposals that we could submit to foreign governments for $$… Informative, but not the happiest of trips. I’m not excited to be seen as the foreign cash cow here to fix all their problems by sitting at a desk and writing grants for outside funds. So much for capacity building and all that jazz…
After I finished the rest of my PC paperwork at the office I decided to take my own hike around the community. People might as well start getting used to seeing an American wandering around without a companion. I hiked the long way around (via the road) to my house getting turned around a few times but was saved by a talking with the locals with my small Ilokono vocab. I then kept on going past my house and ended up on the next hill over at the Hostel they are currently building (which also currently doesn’t have any running water). There’s a great view up there & I hiked out along the ridge and got a wonderful chance to just sit and look at the spectacular view of the terraces and process some of the day. Quite the task ahead. This is the loneliest I’ve felt so far, but that is also to be expected with my first look at the immensity of the work ahead. Integrating into a new community, building solid relationships and trying to find a niche where I can actually be of some service. And then I hiked home, barely missing the rain & here I am dripping sweat, writing my candle light. The day finishes in high spirits & to cap it off, nothing like a dozen or so texts from your fellow Vs to brighten the evening. As I’ve been texting: No Staff. No Sked (schedule). No Problem.

An Arrival of Sorts

If the freedom & ride out here did not bring home the idea that I really am in the Peace Corps than showing up to site with no supervisor in sight definitely did. Not only that but I got taken over to her house & left with two boys who did not speak any English. This would have been fine if they happened to know any Ilokono. Nothing like truly getting thrown into a language situation only to discover your pathetic in the wrong language for even that to be helpful. I called my super on Friday and she said she would be catching the night bus back from Manila. I wonder what happened to that. Either way, I just thank the Lord that 1) I had the number of my host family & 2) My new host Mom just happened to be nearby so we managed to find each other fairly quickly. Unfortunately they also did not know I was coming, so SURPRISE to everyone!! But here I am at the home of John & Lillian Martin. They have 7 kids & 2 grandkids; 1 still in HS, 1 recent HS grad (16), 3 in college and 2 already married and living elsewhere. Only two kids will be home this week though. Great family so far, I mean they just took me in at the drop of a hat for starters…
This should definitely be an interesting ride. Life is still great though! I’d much rather be figuring all this out on my own on the fly than continue to have the PC staff holding my hand. The transition here could have gone a touch smoother but so these things go. Paul, one of the LCFs, is actually from Mayoyao & happens to be related to the mayor & went to college with both my super and the Vice-Mayor so he has already texted the latter so that I don’t surprise anyone more people than I need to at the flag raising tomorrow morning. The adventure truly begins…

Balancing on Mt. Tops

You can look at these mountains & see beauty. You can also look at these mountains & see the devastation & despair & ugliness of the deforestation. I think the trick is to be able to see both; to balance the awe & magnificence of it all with the harsh reality of a place with 60% deforestation and the destruction that it has and will continue to cause. Hopefully you can come out with the positive desire to work on the problem and look for ways to overcome the obstacles & also have the ability to appreciate the amazing beauty it still has in the moment.

Snapshots of Going

Its 8am and I’m sitting outside the store waiting for the bus to Mayoyao.

A stream of well dress people passes by as 1st mass ends at the Catholic church just down the street.

My family, getting dresses and preparing four the baptism of a cousin where my sister will be a God Mother!

Dad - sitting, chilling, calmly, stoically on the bench by the road waiting with me for the bus in his LGU Lamut jersey from a volleyball tournament in ’02 or ’03. Orange and Black. #7.

2nd service lets out. More people go by including a pink moped with a family of four on it. The little one is standing in the front between Dad’s arms as he drives proclaiming her displeasure to the world. Mom looks back & smiles as they pass.

My mother worrying about me taking too little luggage & the very full, over stuffed nature of my mosquito net bag.

Texts flying back and forth as excited and nervous Volunteers get ready for and leave on all of our trips. “Good Luck,” “Safe travels,” “you’re a wonderful monkey (I mean person)…”

A ridiculous jeep with a lift kit & Texas license plate stops and drops someone off across the street. Seeing the “Someone in Texas Loves Me” sticker as they drive away.

Mother suddenly noticing & worrying about the sun burned bit of scalp where my hair naturally parts. My fumbling through “Not Painful” in Ilokono. Her offers of Merienda… & then pop… & then coffee, & the two sandwiches and drinks she already packed for me to take.

Manang Uzi in a big covered flat bed truck full of excited kids and adults stopping to make sure I’m alright before going to the water park with her family to celebrate her birthday and Mother’s day.

The usual sporadic conversation with Dad about buses & routes & stopping for lunch. About holidays and being able to come home to visit.

And finally the bus to Mayoyao! 10:30 am. Blissfully empty with my Dad hopping on to explain (I assume since it was in Ilokono) who I am and what I’m doing & to look after his errant Americano son.

& now this bouncy breeze filled bus with the beautiful countryside rolling by the window & one excited, marvelously, incredibly free & elated & way too lightly packed volunteer riding along trying to write. (If ya’ll could only see what my hand writing looks like…)

The drivers 2nd just climbing on up to the roof of the bus for no apparent reason while its still moving.

Rice & corn spread out to dry along the road occasionally blocking an entire lane & in Legawe covering an entire tennis court right under the sign “Do Not Dry Palay on Tennis court.”

Occasional stops for more passengers… and for people who the driver thought might possibly be more passengers.

The stopping & filling of the water jugs, along the way at a roadside source which consists of a pipe sticking out of the hillside, including the one on the roof used to cool the engine. The spitting out & rinsing of mouths from the beetle nut & off we go again.
Stopping for lunch (for 2 hours…) in Legawe and running into a Swiss tourist coming back from Banaue who has been bouncing around for about two weeks and finding myself staring just as much as the locals do because of his white skin…

Motivation & Intensity

I fell lost, wandering with no clear path. Lacking momentum in any particular direction. I think in part because training is so long & there is so much info they need to get across. The pace becomes so different. At ASP training stream lines & packs everything into 2 & a half intense crazy weeks pointing straight at our counties and the concrete, tangible work we will be doing. Here the pace plods much more. The only place the intensity could really key in would be in with our language. Which is still to me the biggest part of training & yet here I am looking at my site visit on Sunday and I can barely say a thing. My personal motivation has definitely been thrown off track by all the BS with our language class. Its hard to get up the mental edge to really work & study language in the afternoons when the 4 hours were supposed to put in in the morning leaves me feeling zombified w. info I could have easily absorbed in an hour or less. I need to gain my focus back and rise above all of this. Balancing the desire to pull out of class and study alone with knowing that being in class helps the others and that I do learn things better when they are explained to me as opposed to reading them out of a poorly written book…I still don’t know what to do but things are not going along as I had hoped.

mind, Body, soul

To begin with, a quick Happy Birthday to my brother Scott. 25 today, getting old eh?
One of the things I have really appreciated about all of the alone & self directed time has been a chance to really focus some time & energy on my body. I’ve been trying at the very least to stretch out everyday & I’ve been running on average every three. It would be nice to get that down to at least every other, closer to everyday, but you have to start somewhere. I’ve also been fairly consistent with doing small work outs of pushups, sit-ups and the occasional pull-ups and such things. I hope this will all translate into an improvement in my lower back. We’ll see how that goes, the last few days have been a little rough. VERY poor beds at la Union. Mind. Body. Soul. It takes balancing of all three & it feels good to be getting back in shape. Hopefully I can continue to incorporate it into my lifestyle here. Its been going well so far.

Going Once

In idle passing conversation on religion on the bus I realized that the whole affair, for me, has much less to do with a particular denomination or religion as it has to do with the particular faith community. It’s the people & what they are doing much more than idle beliefs and doctrines floating around in the nether regions of our brains. I think in many ways that is one thing life can be boiled down to – the communities we choose, or do not choose to exist in. Which raise the interesting question of what communities do I have now? Ya’ll are probably the closest I have now, here in training if only because you have all known me for at least some time. More tangibly are the other trainees, but we are all split up into clusters & don’t see each other that often. That & I’ve been surprised by the diversity of people I’ve found here. I keep looking for people somewhat like myself, not that I necessarily know what that would entail, but I guess people who can identify and relate to my reality. The ways in which I look at the world. I haven’t really found any here, which is a bit of a surprise. Maybe I just haven’t dug in to people enough to find out. A friend of mine who went to the Visayas and will be posted in Cebu City, Mike, might count, but he’s also a couple hundred miles away and might as well be in the States for the next four months before we can actually travel…
But life is about communities which I think Is one of the big reasons why this whole process is strange and makes me feel lost & literally floating through life at times. From an American viewpoint of individualistic freedom, even odder that at no time do I really ever choose my own community. I do get to pick which circles I run in at Mayoyao, but in a small barangay with the burdens of work and being a role model thrown in even that is fairly limited. None of this is necessarily bad, just different and will take some getting used to. I guess a taste of what life must be like for the other 95%…

“And it all seems so odd sometimes, & the odds all seem stacked…”
~Ani Difranco, Going Once