We are starting to get pissed

Ok, I'll keep this brief so the entire post isn't just me bitching. But you see, we belong to this organization that is drowning us in arbitrary and ridiculous rules. We like our host family a lot, the kids are fun to hang out with, but it's just them. The mom works in another town all week, so grandma next door and the housekeeper take care of the kids. We also cook our own food, seeing as how we're 24 and fairly capable of taking care of ourselves. We have also found a really nice house, 2 bedrooms, tiny kitchen, bright airy upstairs that we would really like to move into because living with other people is, quite frankly, starting to drive us fucking nuts. However, we are not allowed to move because you have to spend 3 months with this host family as well (for a total of 6 months living with families). Now, the reasoning behind this is that living with a host family helps your language, it helps your adjustment and it helps to integrate you into the community. As I've mentioned before, we don't really live with a family. It's more like we rent a (tiny) bedroom from them. We also live in a city of 100,000 people and plan on living in a different barangay anyway, so the community integration issue is a moot point. We also have friends and co-workers who we see everyday, and so far have been about %98 of our social contact. Not the "family." So why then are we not allowed to move? BECAUSE THEY HAVE A RULE! And if you have a rule, it can't be broken.

So anyway, we almost literally can't stand it anymore, not having our own space, our own things, so we're telling our regional manager that we are moving. We're not going to stay in a situation that's making us unhappy (and apathetic might I add), and the house we found is really awesome. It's going to make a huge difference.

Everything else is going really well, saw some friends this past weekend, which was a little breath of fresh air. Two weeks ago I went out to a rural barangay to help commemorate the launching of a fish sanctuary, and it was a real trip. The only way to get to this place is an hour boat ride, or a half day hike through the mountains, which means for people who can only justify using their boats to fish, every time they need something from town, it's a day long journey. We went out with maybe 12 coworkers of mine and we also inexplicably brought along 5 thoroughly bored looking, heavily armed guys. 4 with M-16s and one guy with an uzi. Now, I'm not sure why we had to bring along 5 guys with guns, but we did. The event itself was pretty fun. They had a table set up on the beach, loaded with two giant smoked, rainbow colored fish, and about 6 cases of beer and a dozen bottles of gin (we arrived at 9am). The ceremony was brief, consisting mostly of people acknowledging the other people who were there, and then we were able to get down to some serious business. After the speeches the women all made themselves scarce and we broke out the booze. The fish was delicious and the beer, well, it was warm and flat. That's ok though, you can't blame them, they only get electricity from 6pm until 9pm when they turn on the town's rickety diesel generator. Being the celebrity that I am, I was given both my own fish and my own bottle of beer, instead of sharing communally, which actually just made me feel like a leper, so I kind of worked my way into a circle. Since the beer is warm, and people want to drink, you fill your glass up, pound it, shake it out and pass it on.

Meanwhile the gun toting dudes are hanging out, leaning on their guns, and then the guy with the uzi sends his loaded gun clattering across the rocks on the beach and I took that as my cue to get up and move far away. I sat down next to one of the M-16 guys who had taken his clip out and was performing a delicate operation on the safety of his gun by bashing it with a rock. I won't say I was afraid of getting shot, but these guys didn't make me feel any safer from the invisible threat.

So as we said goodbye to the increasingly drunk fisherman and set out on our dangerously overcrowded boat, a school of flying fish sailed ahead the bow of our ship. The sun was beating down and the frothy waves reflected millions of points of light. It had been a good day.

Soccer and housing

The title more or less sums up what we've been doing with our free time. Not really, but it's a good visual image to start with. The World Cup has been awesome, I don't know if anyone back home is watching, but it's going to be a really good final. We're getting together with a few friends to watch the final two games, and also to see some other Americans so we can bitch non-stop about all the goofy shit that bothers us. Actually, today is the 4th of July and we were invited down to Romblon, but it takes two days to get there, and two days to get back, so that would have been a lot of work for just one day. Plus, we can't really take time off work just yet. It has only been a month, after all. So instead we're going to cook hamburgers I think, and hopefully shoot off some cheap fireworks, if we can find them. They don't really do much to celebrate their independence day here, it costs too much to buy fireworks.

Which brings me to house hunting. As you might imagine there are no listings here for rentals, so you either have to walk around and occasionally write down phone numbers off of signs, or you have to know someone (who knows someone who knows someone). So far we haven't been very lucky, but Abby looked at a house today with her coworker, so maybe it'll be great and we can stop looking. I'm not holding out much hope though after the two places we've looked at so far. One was a store front. Yes, not a house or apartment, but the room where a little store used to be. So, seeing as how it was a store, it had no kitchen and no real bathroom to speak of. Oh, and it also floods and smells like cat pee and she wanted about 3x what is was worth. So, we politely declined that gem. We looked at another house that was nice, with a little patio, but it would have been really small for two people, and since the Peace Corps gives us a decent amount for rent between the two of us, we felt we could do better. I'm not too concerned about the place, I just want a nice outdoor space and as little traffic as possible.

Speaking of money, at work we have these people called "casual employees." They come to work everyday, do field work, write reports, file paper work but the catch is they only get paid if there's money to pay them. One of the guys who works as a casual employee at the municipality where our friend Beth works has not been paid in months because there's no money in the budget for him. But the office needs him, and he can't leave a job where at some point he might get paid, because someone else will take it and then he definitely won't get any money. That's the problem with a country that has a high population but is still mostly agricultural out in the provinces. There are a lot of skilled people but very few jobs for them. As of 2004 there were 87 million people living in a country that's slightly bigger than Arizona.