Come over, we can build snowmen made of rice!

It's cold, so cold! Of course it's not cold, we're 12 degrees north of the equator. But it's December, which means it's a cold month to Filipinos. Everyone is talking about how cold it is. I've seen people wearing sweaters, jackets, knit caps, even gloves. I saw an old woman bundled up at the market, wearing a knit cap, with a plastic bag over it, and then a baseball cap on top of that. She must have been freezing. I, on the other hand, continue to sweat, but it really is nice. It's been cloudy, breezy and overall very reasonable here, I even slept with a blanket the other night! It was kind of a shock going to Portland, where it was only 45 or so, but it felt so cold.

Also, to give you an idea of the temp in Calapan, here is the 5-day forecast from Weather Underground. See, I'm not joking, it's crazy cold here.

5-Day Forecast for Calapan

Saturday	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday
84° F | 69° F 29° C | 21° C	82° F | 71° F 28° C | 22° C	86° F | 71° F 30° C | 22° C	87° F | 71° F 31° C | 22° C	87° F | 75° F 31° C | 24° C
Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation	Scattered Clouds	Scattered Clouds	Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation	Scattered Clouds

We spent thanksgiving knee deep in cheese

So we went back to the US for two weeks, which was interesting. I kind of spent the first two days or so just walking around looking at everything and going "wow" like some sort of 19th-century immigrant fresh off the boat. Abby on the other hand had more severe culture shock which led to a breakdown after visiting the grocery store with her saying "There's just so much shit!" Indeed, there was a lot of shit in the grocery store, like something called a Slim Jim Bacon n Cheese Log, and 12lb packages of pork, which must be sweet if you work and live in a firehouse. All that aside it was a great trip, with lots of family time, plenty of walking around in the park and the city, a visit to the Portland Art Museum and more feedings than I care to remember. Let's just say we ate a lot, and often. Also, for the record, I did get my chicken wings, so thanks for asking. Here are a few pictures. Unfortunately blogger is messed up right now and can't post pictures properly, so the photos will be spread over a few posts...

This is how we started off the trip, by seeing this odd display on an otherwise normal looking desk near our gate in the Manila airport.

We had a lot of time to kill in the Hong Kong airport...

Abby's brother Nate and his daughter Payden.

Abby with her niece Elsa. I guess I shoudl say our niece.

thanksgiving photos 2

Abby's sister-in-law Michelle and Payden.

Now that's a turkey!

thanksgiving photos 3

Since I took a shot of pinoy thanksgiving last year, I thought I'd take a shot of American thanksgiving this year. Looks remarkably similar, but this year's feast was a lot better. Sorry Philippines!

A pint of Smithwick's in a pub. This alone would have been worth the trip home.

My sister, hopped up on goof-balls.

Sorry dad, but you just can't take a good picture.

thanksgiving photos 4

I don't know what they're looking at, but I like shots where people aren't looking at the camera.

Abby and me, looking cute, and scruffy, respectively.

thanksgiving photos 5

We went to the tree lighting in downtown Portland. It was as exciting as a tree covered in lights can be.

A shot of the full(-ish) moon over downtown Portland.

We had a 13 hour layover in the Hong Kong airport on the way back (we could not get enough of that place!) so we found a little spot and camped out.

Hello America...

...see you in three days!

halloween = no big deal

So, they don't really celebrate Halloween here, for whatever reason. I don't even care. However, two interesting things.

This morning at 5am, a loudspeaker was going off around our house, with what sounded like chanting. It was later identified as a prayer. I saw the following from my window: a small candle procession, a lit up float of the virgin mary, and a car following the procession with the aforementioned loudspeaker. Abby asked about it at work and it turns out it's a superstition, they are warding off evil spirits on Halloween by praying to the virgin mary. How did I miss this last year, did I sleep through it?

Also, I got the following text from Abby: "Some of da kids r dressd up 4 halloween. I think theyre supposd 2 b da white witch, but they look like klansmen."

The White Witch is a local legend about an evil white witch. If white is evil, why is everyone always bleaching their faces here? Something to think about...

interesting note

Other than the homepage, the page that gets the most hits in this blog is this page.

Why? Because it mentions GROs (prostitutes), and more specifically, how depressing they are. So people searching for information about/pictures of hookers in Manila routinely stumble across that page. You guys are gross.

The prostitution here is nothing new for a lot of countries, but I still find it really weird. Weird because Filipinos are fairly devout Catholics, or at least that's what they'll tell you. High school aged girls can't even look at me, let alone talk to me, because they're so shy. Dating doesn't really happen in the sense we're all familiar with, and usually around 18-20, out here at least (not in Manila), it's time to make babies and get married. There's very little birth control (I guess we have the Pope to thank for that one), and the vast majority of people are church going, Jesus-lovin' Catholics. And yet a common expression here is "when two are apart, four are happy."

I'm in a relationship where I wouldn't consider cheating, but I don't find it morally objectionable or anything. I'm not going to slap a scarlet A on anyone, but it blows my mind sometimes that not only is it acceptable in a certain sense to cheat, but if you're going to cheat, then if it's with a prostitute that's something people can live with. The problem is, of course, that these are desperate people being sometimes literally forced into these roles. This isn't "single mom who starts stripping to pay the bills" desperate, this is truly desperate. A lot of the girls who end up in these situations, especially in Manila and Angeles, are lured there with promises of jobs, etc and then are stuck there because they have no way to get back.

But hands down the worst part of the whole thing are the guys who come here as sex-tourists. They contribute nothing, exploit people, and then return to whatever they came from, all because they're too fucking pathetic to get a girl they don't have to pay for in their own country. It makes me mad, and then it makes me sad.

The mythologization of the United States of America

As I previously stated in my last paper on the subject....

Here in the Philippines, there are a lot of things that annoy us Americans. People say yes when they mean no, people don't show up for things when they're supposed to (or don't show up at all), the pollution is out of control, people burn trash and the smoke fills our house, they yell at you in the street (in a friendly way at least), etc etc. The food sucks! There, I said it. It's easy to pick out these annoying things in your everyday life because they're different than what you're used to. It's always easier to pick out things based on differences than it is to pick out things based on similarities. This of course leads to a lot of bitching on all of our parts, and sometimes a little fun is poked. I think this is pretty much normal, because I remember being in Europe and thinking "who the hell charges for condiments at a fast food restaurant?" Answer: the Belgians, and maybe more! It was a constant battle in France to not have your meat served bloody, or your pizza un-burnt. The French were always out burning piles of crap in their yards, and there are strikes approximately every 3 days.

The problem with this is that sometimes you get so caught up in being pissed off about things that soon everything is annoying and everything is the US is awesome! What a glorious land of traffic laws and ethnic food! Sure, the US is a great place to live, I'm pretty happy I'm from there, but those of us living abroad sometimes fail to remember all the things we hate about the US. Here is a short list of things that I don't miss even a little bit about the US:

o Everyone having to be on time
o People getting mad because they had to wait in line for 4 minutes
o The Bush White House
o Republicans
o Fast food (except for maybe Jack-in-the-Box tacos late night)
o Celebrity worship
o Celebrity magazines
o America-centric news
o Having to hear about the latest "miners stuck in a well" story for 3 weeks straight without any regard to what's going on in the rest of the world
o The war in Iraq
o Drinks larger than 20oz
o SUVs
o Giant homes
o Teenagers driving luxury cars
o 6 freezer aisles in the grocery store
o An entire aisles devoted to soda
o Having to drive everywhere
o Walmart
o Obsession with gadgets
o Luxury goods of any sort, or even worse, having to hear about them
o Car commercials
o The cost of insurance/health care
o Having to hear about goddamn gas prices
o People saying they care about global warming, then doing absolutely nothing about it

You get the point, nowhere is perfect, even a country with baseball, good beer and great food.

random pics of people and places

American contests promise millions of dollars, hovercrafts, personalized helicopters, luxury mansions and free burgers. We've got generators and goats. Now who's laughing?

This is the mountain at the end of the street. I think it's Mt. Halcon but I'm not really sure. It's usually shrouded in clouds, and coming from the Midwest, I love seeing mountains in the morning.

At MST, we had a bowling alley. It was duckpin bowling though, so a couple brave people had to volunteer to be pin monkey and risk being nailed by flying balls.

Traffic in Manila sucks. Especially when it's 98 degrees outside, and you're stuck in a taxi without aircon, there are four people crammed into a seat that only comfortable accommodates three, and it takes an hour to go about a mile.

Kate and Reyna eating pakwan (watermelon/squash) seeds. Kate is directly responsible for about half of all PCVs becoming addicts, which leads to Pakwan Seed Zombieism (as seen above).

Went to Puerto Galera for my birthday. There are always amazing sunsets there, and a point-n-shoot digital camera can never do them justice.

Beads are super cheap here, so Abby usually makes a bead pilgrimage to the Quiapo district any time we're in Manila.

back in the o-r-min-do

Back at work now after being gone for two weeks at various Peace Corps events. We had to go to Manila for MST (mid-service training), which is now known as IST (in-service training). Why they felt they had to change the acronym, I'll never know, but apparently it makes a big difference... Anyway, we had some medical check-ups, got shots, submitted poo samples to be analyzed and had a dental cleaning. We're both ok for now, no cavities, no butt worms, so that's about all you can hope for. Living here has turned me (and I think most of us) into a hypochondriac though, because most of the illnesses you get have such vague symptoms, and it seems to me like you're always a little off here, health-wise. Not that I'm always sick, because I never really am, but you might have 3 straight days of diarrhea for no reason. Sorry to talk to much about poop, but welcome to our world. So you'll have issues like that, and then you'll consult the trusty PC-issued health manual, only to find out you could have 1 of about 17 different things. There are 6 kinds of parasitic worms that are common, along with amoebas and giardia, and they all basically have the same symptoms. LBM, but not necessarily! Trouble sleeping, fatigue... They only way to ever really tell is when a worm come out of you. Even something like typhoid is vague. Another PCV on our island has typhoid. He was having fevers for a week, went to the hospital in Manila, and after running tests, they still couldn't say %100 that he has typhoid. I mean, typhoid?! Seems like that would be pretty obvious.

The trainings were pretty bad. We were supposed to have our MST back in June, but they delayed it for 2 months so they could plan and have some quality training sessions for us. The problem is, it's september. We have 9 months left of service, and teachers only have 7. Except the month of december is pretty much a wash because of Christmas, and March is all tests, slacking off and preparation for graduation. So at this point, training isn't particularly useful. They had it anyway though, and it was not very useful, surprise surprise. Most of it was for teachers, which I didn't like, and the only session that seemed mildly interesting was organic farming, which was a really great, inspiring session, and now I think Abby and I actually have a side-project doing that with a guy we met last weekend. My favorite was a session I didn't attend, but heard plenty about. They invited a woman to come talk, but it turned out she was selling a computer program that you could buy for only $6,000 a year. So every year, you would have to come up with $6,000 (P300,000). Needless to say, if every school here had an extra 300,000 pesos just laying around every year, Peace Corps might not even need to be here. One of our friends got up and left in disgust halfway through the lady's presentation.

After that was over Abby headed home, back to school. She's moved from the high school to a local elementary school with a deaf ed program, and she's much happier, and much busier. She works with three teachers who are seemingly very pro-active, and 27 deaf students of all ages. Right now she's working with the pre-school kids, teaching them the very basics, since some of them don't have any sign language at all, not even their names. It's a lot more work, but she's actually making progress there, and will be working with the other teachers on turning their empty fourth classroom into a resource center for the SPED program. I stuck around after MST because I was one of the facilitators for a PC PDM (Project Design and Management) workshop. It was with 13 PCVs and their counterparts, and then 40 PTA members from the southern island of Mindanao. I love these trainings because I actually feel that they, unlike so much of the work I do here, make an immediate and lasting difference. You can see people slowly grasp the concepts - things like how to write a goal, or how to monitor a project - and by the end they have a well developed project that might actually succeed. I think I've said it here before, but I've decided that virtually every problem or issue here has its root in the fact that so many people in positions of power and change have virtually no planning skills. A project will just be done without any forethought, other than how much it will cost, and monitoring and evaluation is non-existent. An example would be going out and planting 2000 mangroves, without doing an assessment of the area first to decide which area is in most need of new mangroves. Then the mangroves are planted, and no one ever goes back to check on them, to make sure they're still there, to evaluate the effect they're having, whether the planting is accomplishing what you hoped it would... So there are 4 more coming up in the next 6 months, and I plan on facilitating as many of them as I can!

up the mountain

Yesterday I went to a Mangyan village at the base of Mt. Halcon that I've been to a few times. It's actually up the mountain, but since the mountain is about 3 or 4000 meters, we were pretty much still at the base. We were invited to attend their nutrition month celebration since we've had projects in their community before. The celebration was typically long, and of course we were the guest judges, so we judged three competitions. The first was a performance competition where four different groups of kids dressed in leaf costumes got up and sang and danced the exact same song. The song was put out by the government I think, and is sponsored by Knorr. It's about eating more vegetables, specifically eating more vegetables in soup form, all flavored by delicious Knorr-brand soup stocks! Anyway, these kids all danced the same song, doing the same moves, and then we were supposed to judge them. I picked the group with the cutest kids. The second competition was a cook-off, specifically a veggie cook-off, which was ok, although in all honesty, except for the first one, the dishes were all pretty much just unidentifiable piles of mush. Come to think of it, so was the first dish, but at least it was tasty. The funny, and by funny I mean tragically sad, thing is that what these people really needed was some meat. Or at least education on protein-rich veggies and legumes. A lot of the kids had the red hair that is a sign of pretty severe protein deficiency, so it was nice they were doing this push to eat veggies, but those they've got. Unfortunately you can't sing a government approved jingle and make chickens appear.

The microphone system was a bullhorn loudspeaker like you'd see at a county fair that they got from somewhere, rigged somehow to a microphone. They also blasted bad dance music most of the time, which the kids all loved. They had a demonstration on how to start a fire using the traditional method, which was freakin' awesome and would put some boy scouts and their two sticks to shame. They had a short play about traditional healers that weirded me out because the girls in the play were freaking out, crying, and it all looked very weird and real. It was an odd moment.

The experience is hard to describe because the Mangyans are not only poor beyond belief, but it's like entering some alternate universe where life as we know it took some sort of radically different path a few thousand years ago. It's hard to believe that so many radically different lifestyles can all co-exist at the same time. For some reason they've adopted western style clothing despite not being able to afford it, so rather than wear the traditional g-string and women's attire, everyone is dressed in super old over-sized shirts and shorts that are so full of holes they're barely holding together. I don't feel uncomfortable there because everyone is super nice (although super shy), but it always feels really weird to just pop into their world from mine of enough food, limitless possibilities, education, health care, etc, and then to be served a shit ton of food, like pork, iced tea, veggies, and cookies while a gaggle of dirty kids in huge t-shirts with rotten teeth and distended bellies looked on. That was fucked up and made me so incredibly uncomfortable I took just enough to not be rude and hoped they would give out the leftovers, and gave the rest of my food away to the kids. Not that they need cookies, but sitting there eating cookies in front of a kid who only eats rice is just something I couldn't do...

pictures

Here are some pictures from the weekend I mentioned in the last post. These are actually just taken from their blogs since a) everyone has a blog, I think and b) I can never remember to bring the thumb drive with me to the internet cafe and c) these computers have some many freakin' viruses on them it would probably kill the thumb drive anyway. So enjoy!

Kate, Reyna, Carrie and Pat hanging out at the river.

What to do when it's hot as hell and there's no fridge? Drink in the ice cold river.

We had lunch at the river too. I think this is me trying to open that bottle of soda. It took about 10 minutes.

Carrie, Kate, Reyna and Abby, eating Gay Pasta, which is just noodles, raw tomatoes, garlic and whatever kind of cheese you can get your hands on.

Happy, shiny people...

Me going to town on some beef.

Abby and me riding in the jeepney on the way back.

These little "bahay cubo" or covered house things are pretty common at any kind of public place. Usually a rough little structure to protect you from the sun and/or rain, and a table and chairs, because when you do anything in the Philippines, you eat.

Happy 4th!

Well, let's see, it's noon here on the 5th, so it's still technically the 4th of July everywhere in the US except the east coast. We didn't do anything on the actual 4th; no fireworks from China, no barbecue, no flag waving. All we did we each quiche and watch Sopranos. This past weekend, however, we headed north on the island of Luzon to a friend's house, where we celebrated in full American style by drinking cheap beer, eating huge grilled bacon cheese burgers, swimming in a river and eating watermelon seeds. Not actual watermelon, just their hugely addictive seeds. It was a great time, we just went up for a few days, but some friends from nearby came as well, and it was nice to see friends again and revel in the fact that people understood you the first time to said something, and that they not only understand sarcasm, but actively used it themselves! The river was awesome, mostly because it was clean, and the drive there was through lush, rolling green hills, the likes of which I haven't seen yet in the Philippines. The place we went on the river was a local swimming area, which meant a few things: nipa huts, videoke, brandy drinking and oddly enough, motorcycle washing and laundry doing. Bringing a giant load of laundry to a fun weekend outing at the river doesn't appeal to me, but you do have to applaud their multi-tasking. Some people rented innertubes which you could use to float a short section of the river, but mostly we just sat in the water, ate a lot and had a few beers.

Other than that, we haven't been doing much. Abby's classroom has been flooded for the past week, despite multiple claims that it had been fixed. As the water bubbling through the floor indicated, it has obviously not been. Plus her counterpart's wife is going to the US to study, so he's been a little busy. So she's been trying to work on her grant proposal, and keeping herself busy. She's attempting to get grant money so they can hold sign language classes for the deaf student's family members, who, amazingly enough, don't speak sign language. Most of us in the US can agree that having family members involved in a student's life makes a big difference, so obviously this will be really helpful for her students, not to mention the fact that it's almost insane that some people can't really communicate with their own children.

I had two big Project Design and Management workshops here at the end of May/beginning of June, and for most of the month of June I've been alternating between doing nothing and working on a Coastal Resource Management plan for the province. I have a few things coming up in the future though, as I start working on a biodiversity camp we'll be having here on Mindoro in October. Abby and I are also going to start work on a project at her school, a book club of sorts for the English teachers, not only to get them reading, but to promote creative thinking and also to introduce new strategies for teaching/teaching literature, other than just having students memorize things. That will coincide with Abby's library project, where she's hoping to get about 500 books for mid-level readers so that the kids can have access to easy-to-read books. Because virtually NO ONE reads here. It's nuts.

A sign of the times

A fun thing to do here is taking note of all the times you see someone blatantly breaking a law or disregarding a sign. I'm not a stickler for the rules, in fact, I could care less, but it's always funny to me to see someone peeing on a sign that says "Bawal umihi dito (it is forbidden to pee here)."

Case in point, this sign:

I found this sign recently on the capitol complex grounds. The reason I noticed it is because I always see people smoking around the complex. People stand outside their office's door, smoking and talking. People light up cigarettes in the office on their way out. People sometimes smoke in the office, by the back window, especially when it's raining. So I doubt anyone is ever fined, let alone imprisoned!! Can you imagine having to go to jail for lighting up a cigarette?

The best part about this sign is the fact that right after I saw this sign, I turned around and saw, I swear I'm not making this up, 3 policemen sitting in plastic chairs, smoking. Right in front of the sign, no more than 10 feet away. Maybe this is lost on some people, but it's never going to stop being funny to me.

Vacation time

Long time no update, but we've been on vacation. Actual vacation too, in no way related to medical issues or peace corps training. Abby had her two week teacher training called Tudlo Mindanao in Cebu City, where she and 7 other volunteers taught English to 130+ teachers. The teachers already knew english, but this was to improve their english language skills and their ability to teach it. They held the workshop in Cebu because we're not allowed to go to Mindanao, because of terrorist activity I guess. It's strange because it's a big island and most of the terrorist activity is confined to the little islands that trail off the south-west end of Mindanao, known as the Sulu Islands. Anyway, the workshop went really well and Abby was happy to be busy, since summer time for teachers is a little slow. I had two workshops scheduled before the vacation as well, but as typically happens here, the dates didn't work out because some people weren't available, so we rescheduled for after the vacation. I just had one this past week, a Project Design and Management workshop for 14 CRM technicians and 5 other people involved with CRM in the province. It went really well, although it was kind of hard to get back into the swing of things after two weeks of vacation.

Originally we were going to come back from Bohol on the 15th, stay with some friends for 3 days and then go visit our host family from training. However, when we got to Manila we were told we couldn't go visit our friends due to election related violence in their province, and we weren't allowed to go home due to violence in our province. We had a mayor kidnapped by the NPA, three barangay captains in our town were killed and the governor of Oriental Mindoro was very nearly blown up by a bomb on his visit to Occidental Mindoro. The entire election period was just plain crazy, but we still visited the host family and another friend, so all was not lost. We did have to make another brief stop on the way home however, because I had some kind of GI tract infection. All better now, enjoy the photos.

The first night we stayed at a place called The Bee Farm. It was expensive, but the rooms were awesome and all the food came from their own organic garden.

What do you know, they actually have bees at the farm! Not many though, most of their bees were up north.

This is a tarsier, the world's smallest primate. They have a conservation center where you can look at them up close in their natural habitat. They are about the size of your open hand.

We stay for a couple nights on Alona Beach, a really nice white sand beach with lots of divers.

We got up at 5:30 to see the dolphins. We went out with the brother of one our pension's staff for only half the usual price, and got to snorkel in an amazing marine sanctuary!

We visited another PCV who lives on Bohol, and he's done work with a butterfly garden in his town. It's beautiful, but run by a woman from New Zealand...

The famous attraction on Bohol are the Chocolate Hills. There are hundreds of these cone shaped hills in one particular area in the middle of the island, and they are as of yet unexplained by geologists.