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.