Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Are we done? Yes. Yes we are.

We are finally done with training. It's hard to believe, but it's true. Today is actually our last day at the hub site, and tomorrow we travel about 5-7 hours south to the swearing-in venue. Why is it 5-7 hours? Because we have to pass through Manila, and its traffic is that bad. So we're just been doing wrap up activities here, filling out about 8000 evaluations and surveys, listening to people blabber at us about this and that. We had our community project last week, but we weren't able to participate because Abby decided to faint and hurt her neck, so we had to go to the hospital in Manila. According to my host father, it's the hospital movie stars go to. Thanks, Peace Corps. Anyway, after some tests it was determined that Abby just fainted, it wasn't a serious problem, or a seizure and her neck got better after a few days, so it wasn't too bad at all. Plus I found a little cafe around the corner that had turkey sandwiches on wheat bread with freakin' gruyere cheese on it. That is huge, believe me. So we did all the work for the project, had all of the meetings, bought all the stuff, and all we missed out on was the actual trash collection, which I don't mind at all. That trash was nasty.

We also had our LPI (Language Proficiency Interview), which is the official test to see where you are in the language. You're supposed to achieve a certain level or proficiency, otherwise you have to write up a language action plan for the next 6 months, etc. Basically they just hassle you. Anyway, I did really well, I got intermediate-high, which is the highest anyone got. There were 5 others who were in the bracket with me, so I felt pretty proud of myself. Abby did really well too, she got intermediate-mid, so neither of us will be hassled! Yay! It was funny though, people were getting really stressed about the test, which I couldn't understand. Nothing really happens to you if you don't meet the requirement, and all the test was was a 30 minute conversation with the tester in Tagalog about basic stuff like your job, your family... Anyway.

We also had our supervisor's conference, which was great because we all sat down with our supervisors and got on the same page about work schedules, what we'll actually be doing, what we expect of them and what they expect of us. My supervisor is a great guy, and I have so many potential projects to choose from it was more of a matter of figuring out what one project I'll start with initially. So, I will be working with a community (chosen by myself with my counterparts) on setting up and implementing a mangrove restoration project. I bet you didn't know I knew how to do that. Hell, I didn't even know I could do that, but I'm going to be doing it anyway. I've actually been doing a fair amount of research, so I think I'll be ready to get started once I get to site.

We also had to say goodbye to our host family on Saturday, which was very sad. They were great people and incredibly nice, but we have a friend who will be in this area, so we'll stop by and visit them again when we come to visit her. The news we got to soften the blow was that we'll be living with one of my counterparts, which is great news because she's only 29 and awesome. So to summarize, our co-workers are awesome, our jobs are awesome, where we're living is awesome and life is well, awesome.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

More pics

I'm not sure I have much to say at this point, not too much has happened. After we got back from our site visit it's been a lot more paperwork and general laying around. Actually right now we're in the middle of our end of training community project, so that's taking up most of our time. Half of our barangay doesn't get trash service since the road there is supposed to be too small, so we're working with the local women's and youth groups to get trash barrels placed around that part of town, and we'll be doing a sanitation "seminar" and a coastal clean up. We have a meeting with the mayor on Sunday to try and get him to bring the truck down there, otherwise we have the funds to buy a little peddle tricycle with a side basket to be used to collect the trash on a weekly basis. I wish I had pictures so you could see the trash, but it's a huge and very unsanitary problem, and we've been lucky to get a lot of community support.

Also, Abby and I were recently in a parade. It was in the barangay of our host sister's mother-in-law, and it was the Santacruzan parade, which might have something to do with saints. In the case of the parade it was just a bunch of girls in ball gowns with lots of makeup walking all over town (in a typhoon). Did I mention we were hit by a typhoon? It was only signal 1 (the weakest) so all we had were 60 kmh winds and lot of rain, and an angry sea. It still flooded the low lying part of town, and apparently trashed our future host site. They had flooding, trees knocked down, etc. Nothing terribly severe, but it still caused a lot of damage. Abby and I are thinking we might geta 2nd story apartment. Haha. Anyway, the parade was really interesting, Abby was taken to a beauty parlor where they poofed and sprayed her hair mercilessly and covered her in makeup. They wanted to put makeup on me too, but I was able to avoid that. "Just a little lip shine!" they would say. No thanks.

So other than our project, we also have our barangay fiesta coming up, which involves a lot of videoke and eating, from what I understand. Everyone in town just makes a ton of food and then you walk to all of the houses of the people you know, and you eat and socialize. It sounds gut-bustalicious.


This is a picture of our island from the outrigger ferry boat. As you can see, it is an awesome island.


This is a picture of Puerto Galera.


This is Abby with my counterparts. Ate Lyn is to her left and Ate May is to her right.


The girls in Santacruzan were anywhere from 6 to 18 or so. Here's Abby being peppered with questions.


Aw, isn't she cute? Just like a little doll. Hahaha


Here's Abby in front of Tamaraw Falls on the way to Puerto Galera. It falls in a series of 7 different steps.


Here's Abby in the river, eating papaya and beans from the can. This was an outting with our host family.


Here's another parade pic. I'm wearing a Baraong Tagalog, the traditional dress shirt here.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Mindoro, the sequel

I came up with a little test to determine your nationality. I'll present you with a scenario, you tell me what you'd do. You're driving a rickety, piece of crap, chromed out LED light explosion of a jeep from WWII. You're driving down a 1 1/2 lane road in the mountains and there's a tricycle, a dump truck and another jeepney in front of you, all going different speeds and in different lane(s). You're going around a blind curve. Do you a) wait to pass or b) gun it wildly around the curve?

Now the results. If you selected choice A, you're probably American. No matter how aggressive of a driver you think you are, you are a passive, defense driver here. If you selected choice B, I don't know what you are. Maybe Indian. I hear they're crazy drivers. If you're Filipino, you would have selected secret choice C, which is that you'd stop on the blind curve to pack 4 more people into a vehicle that already has people on the roof and hanging on the sides.

Ok, enough fun and games, I have a serious job to do here. I must recap for everyone. Actually, I won't do that, but here's what's been going on. Life with the host fam is good. We've been working on these stupid (if anyone from PC office is reading, I mean great) "tools," which involves a lot of talking to people and then writing about the experience. It's by and large a waste of time, but there are some good things too. We all had to shadow someone in our field, so I went out for the day with Kuya Jun (Kuya means big brother, a term of respect), who lives in our town and works for the municipal government in CRM, much like I'll be doing. So he took me around on his normal day, which in this case involved drinking beer and eating chicken at the Bantay Dagat (local water patrol) and going to a chicken farm for much fruit eating and snake handling. In actuality, his job is to coordinate with all the different environmental organizations in the municipality, but in a country that's all about interpersonal relationships, that translates to a lot of hanging out and chatting.

Last Tuesday we took the ferry, the bus and then the ferry again to get to Calapan. We were supposed to have a host family, but since we didn't, we stayed at the guest house at Abby's school, which was probably better anyway. Abby really didn't have a whole lot to do because it's summer vacation here from April until June, but she went out to visit other schools and various youth organizations in town. I, on the other hand, was taken on a courtesy call extravaganza which resulted in us doing a shitload of driving and meeting with the mayors and environmental people of 9 of the 12 municipalities here. It was cool though, I got to hang out with my counterparts a lot, see a lot of the island and meet most of the people I'll be working with. Mindoro Oriental is really beautiful, we have the country's 4th highest peak (Mt Halcon ~9000ft), a huge freshwater lake named Naujan Lake, and a big national park right next to the lake. Most of the country-side consists of rice fields, banana and coconut trees and coastline. In the upland areas are the indigenous peoples of Mindoro, the Mangyans. There are 7 different tribes, and from what I've seen they're shy and wear g-strings.

My counterparts are awesome. They're both very nice, one is 46 and the other is turning 29 soon (both women as you might remember). It looks like it's going to be great working with them, and they're really excited to have me here, which makes me even more excited to be here. There are a lot of projects going on, but initially I'm going to be working on about 3 to 4 things. They want to set up a demo farm that will showcase different techniques of planting and raising crops, as well as how to do it organically without fertilizer, how to compost, etc. They also have a reforestation/mangrove rehabilitation project, and a few municipalities are setting up marine sanctuaries. Also, the WWF in Puerto Galera is starting the second phase of their project here, which is developing the upland areas into a tourist destination by creating trails, working with the Mangyans to showcase their cultural heritage, and educating the community about proper waste disposal and segregation, the need for environmental responsibility and all that good stuff. They invited me to work with them, so I think I will since it'll be nice to work with one project that's already doing well, it'll be a good learning experience for me. One way or the other, I'm going to be doing a lot of research because in case you didn't know, I don't know much about a lot of that stuff.

Right now we're in Puerto Galera. We went to White Beach last night, which is a small resort area with a lot of beach front bars/restaurants and drunk teenagers drinking brandy from the bottle. It was cool though, they had a concert and it was a very relaxed atmosphere. The weird thing about the resort areas here is that they're nothing like you'd expect. The roads are still dirt, it's mostly Filipino tourists from Manila and it's not the nicely manicured mega resorts with swimming pools like in the south of France or Jamaica. Today the guys from the Bantay Dagat took us over to Sabang Beach which is where all the dive shops are to talk to this guy we heard of about getting PADI certified. He gave us a little discount for being PC, so we get the course, the book, all the gear (rental) and one extra dive for $300 each, which I think is a pretty good deal? I dunno, but he's been doing this for 20 years, so at least we'll get a good lesson. They also took us to a few other beaches in their boat and then brought us back. Tomorrow we head back, and then we have about 3 more weeks of training before swearing in at the beginning of June. Whoo, the paperwork will be over with (for the time being)!

Friday, May 05, 2006

Mindoro Oriental

We're in Puerto Galera right now, which is a beach town and kind of a tourist destination. We came here with 6 of my co-workers, all women. Actually, I pretty much only work with women. Single women. It's hilarious. My job seems very cool, I'll be working with the provincial government, and more or less I get to pick the projects I would like to work on. Calapan is a really nice city, very clean and still really rural. You drive 5 minutes out of the city center and you're in rice fields. I will type more later, maybe in a few days and tell you more about what's been going on, but right now I'm in the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) office and they told me to use the internet. I also have very important things to do today, like go to the beach, drink beer and right now, eat bbq'd something. Mmmm, bbq'd something...