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.
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.
posted by george at 9:44 PM
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