To the Other Side of the World and Back Again

You know what I like about travel?

2011-02-01T10:49:00.002-06:00

If you guessed the beer, you would be mostly right. I like a lot of things about travel: new food, different culture, strange modes of transportation, the feeling that every day is fresh and full of unexpected awesomeness. Whether or not that awesomeness actually occurs, that's another story, but the potential for awesomeness is significantly higher, in my opinion, that in my daily life. But something I identified as liking a lot on this last trip to Belize was meeting fellow travelers. This is not an absolute statement, there are annoying travelers, pasty Americans in white tennis shoes, leathery old men who seem to drink all day and who knows what else, and dreadlocked 20 year olds from Europe. But we also met a lot of interesting people with very interesting life stories. Isn't that interesting?

We met a couple who was on a ~9 month bike trip from Mexico to Panama. Why you ask? Well, mostly for the fuck of it, but also because they were planning on opening an eco-lodge somewhere, and so were visiting about 15 eco-lodges along the way to get ideas about what works, what's feasible, and what could be done better. They were full of interesting stories, and after a few days of hanging out, tubing on the river, swimming in waterfalls, they hopped on their bikes and headed south.

We met a couple traveling, and the guy in the couple was the inventor of this thing: http://www.elliptigo.com/ It's like a bike, mixed with an elliptical machine, and he said that riding it was like running. The benefits were apparently great: you could stand up in a natural position, you could climb much better with it than with a bike, and you could go long distances very comfortably. He had been doing something else, but he dropped that to sink all of his time and energy in to this.

Met another guy, a British guy, in a little town we were staying, and it turns out he's a huge sailing enthusiast. His job is, wait for it, to sail rich people's new yachts from the place they are built to where ever they want them delivered. So he gets paid to do something he loves, namely being out at sea, sail multimillion dollar yachts, and at the end of it all, he finds himself in Thailand, or the West Indies, and takes a little vacation afterward. He also had one of the most unique and awesome business ideas I've ever heard. He was planning soon on "retiring" and living on his boat full time, sailing around the world. He was planning on running a low-key "yacht hostel" in which people would pay $30-40 a day for a room, and could sail with him for as long as they liked, to say Fiji, or Thailand. That way he would have enough money for beer and food, and then people could get where they wanted to go in a fun way. And since it would be super cheap, like a hostel, there would be no expectation of him to do shit like change the sheets, or provide any kind of guest service.

I have a lot of trips planned in my head right now: multi-week bike trip through Europe including monastery/brewery tour through Belgium, hiking a large portion of the PCT, southeast Asia since I hardly saw any of it when we were in the Philippines (except for Malaysia and Singapore)... But I'm also keen on a long trip, maybe a year or so, just going around living places for a while. And on a long trip like that, I think I would write these kinds of stories down, because sometimes people are awesome.

Alternative Break donations!

2010-11-16T10:35:00.003-06:00

I am the graduate coordinator for Alternative Breaks here at the University of Maryland. We send about 300 students every year to DC, other US cities, and a few international locations for a week or more to learn about different social issues like immigration, HIV/AIDS, environmental conservation, sustainable development, the justice system, homelessness and poverty, and a number of others. The students on these trips learn in a hands-on manner while engaging in service, with the hope that they will gain a deeper understanding of a pressing issue, and bring that new knowledge back with them to the Maryland community. We try to work in a asset-based, community directed manner in which we are partners with the communities, not simply voluntourists. The trips are also completely student led and planned; each trip has two trip leaders who spend an entire year planning the trips, and engaging in weekly trainings about service, social justice, and leadership.

I've seen first hand over the past year and a half what kind of difference these trips make. Students come back engaged, passionate, and for a number of them, completely changed. This program is basically our way to get students out of the classroom, and engaged with issues of social justice.

This year I'm the staff advisor on the the Environmental Conservation trip to the Bahamas. The trip leaders have planned a great trip, partnering with the College of the Bahamas and the Bahamas National Trust to engage in a number of conservation activities, and learn about how tourism has affected a small island community just off the tip of Florida. Because the trip is 10 days, and involves a flight, as well as 10 days of lodging, food and transportation, the trip costs $1300/person. I'm lucky enough to have my way paid for, but the students have to come up with the money themselves. Many of the families of the students don't have the means to pay for these trips, so students are actively fundraising and soliciting donations.

I would love to help out my trip in any way I can, and your donations will go to a great cause, helping shape young minds to care about and actively engage the world around them. Any amount would be not only awesome, but also tax deductible, since the AB program is 501(c)(3) organization. Please consider donating, every cent goes directly to the trip, and is disbursed equally among all the participants. Thanks!

Donate Here!

And, I'm back

2010-03-23T15:10:00.002-05:00

Ok, we'll see if I can keep up with this, or if I'll let it slide again. It's not like anything important hinges on my ability to type here, but I do kind of miss it. I got back this weekend from a week in NYC, where I was a staff advisor on an Alternative Break trip with 13 undergrads. Despite being very wary of spending an entire week in the company of thirteen 19-20 year olds, the week ended up being really fun, because I was able to regress and have some fun. I love my program and many of the people in it, but sometimes it and they are just so damn boring. I'm really sick of having discussions with people about intense issues when I'm out at a bar having a drink, so it was fun just to goof around for a week.

As for New York, I went there expecting to love it, and to my amazement I kind of hated it. For starters, the city and all its inhabitants need to chill the fuck out. Everyone I met was so tightly wound that it couldn't possibly healthy to lives one's life like that. I'm sure there are plenty of relaxed people in the city, but they certainly didn't ride the subway or walk around on city streets because all of those people were grumpy little curmudgeons. I think more than anything else, everyone and everything was just putting in too much effort. Too much effort to be cool, to be fashionable, to be making it, whatever. I know, judgemental of me to make those observations after only a week as a tourist, but that feeling was pervasive, and a huge turnoff for me. Highly superficial might be a good/better way to describe my impression of New York. I also hated the tourists. I couldn't imagine living in a city where you can't visit any of your city's attractions because they're swarmed by tourists virtually every day of the year. DC has that problem, but mostly in the summer, so if I want to go to the park, or a museum any other month, I can just stroll in. Going to MOMA on Friday, the line was three city blocks long, and at the end of the line was the most ridiculous and exasperating museum experience of my life. Great art, sucky atmosphere. That sums up my initial impression of NYC pretty well actually: great city, but sucky atmosphere.

A decision hath been made!

2009-05-27T10:41:00.002-05:00

Actually it was made a couple of weeks ago, on a day I've named "Get Me The Fuck Out of St. Louis" Tuesday. Abby got the call that they were offering her the job in DC, and so it was really a no brainer at that point. So she'll have a job doing early intervention work with the deaf in DC, and I'll be going to a great program at a great school, and hopefully will be able to network my ass off so when I graduate I can finally get a decent job. My current job sucks so hard I am trembling in anticipation at the idea of putting in my two weeks.

So with that decision, the dam has burst, and the pent-up waitlist of activities that follows is now flooding us with more decisions to be made. We have to find a place to live, Abby has to fly up there to sign the contract, I'm trying to land a graduate assistant job to help pay for school, we have to find a mover and somehow come up with the money to make this move, which is not going to be easy. The fact that hopefully this will be our last dirt poor move is putting my mind at ease though, and I'm looking forward to a new future of savings accounts and a little extra money to visit friends, family and far flung locales. More than anything I'm looking forward to testing the waters somewhere else. I've moved away from St. Louis three different times, for different reasons, and keep ending up back here. It's not that St. Louis is a bad city, or that I hate being here, because believe it or not, over the past 8-9 years, I've really come to appreciate all that it offers. I am, however, ready to explore again. I'm ready to walk out of my door and have no idea where I'm going, or what areas are like. I can form my own opinions of people and places, and escape the world of preconcived notions you live in when you've lived in the same city for 27 years (minus 5 years). So 22 years, roughly.

I'm ready to ride the metro, see the Whitehouse, visit parks and museums and experience for the first time the capitol of our country.

Life is significantly less interesting...

2009-05-11T10:59:00.002-05:00

...when one is not in Peace Corps. No, that's not true. But the sense of urgency to update this blog is no longer there. I guess when something new and interesting happens to you almost every day, be it a cultural observation, a funny story or a trip, it's a lot easier to keep up a running commentary.

Abby is almost done with her program, and in fact, this is her last week. She still has a few classes in the summer (since it's a 15 month program), but she's done with the bulk of it and they have their graduation ceremony here in May, so it kind of feels like she's finished. Amazing, one short year after getting back from the Philippines (1 year on June 1st!), she already has a Masters degree! Her job hunt is still on, but she's received a lot of interest in DC, and DC remains the only place with any kind of job opportunities in Deaf Ed (specially in early intervention). So the waiting game continues. I've been accepted to U's of Vermont, Arizona and Maryland, so we're just waiting at this point to see if she'll be offered a job in the near future. I'm hoping for DC, because even though the cost of living is high, the MPA program at U of Maryland is the best of the three, it would give me great access to DC - non-profit and international development capitol of the US - for both internships/networking during my program, and then jobs after I graduate. DC is a great area because you have a big city (5 million in the metro area), but you're close to the shore, some pretty great looking parks and outdoor activities, and you're also close to other cities on the east coast. After living in St. Louis for so long, being close to other cities is a big plus for me, because I'd love to be able to hop on the train and spend a long weekend in NYC or Philly whenever we have the time.

So we'll see, she should be hearing back this week, and if she's able to get something solid like a letter of intent from the DC program, I very well could be able to let the other schools know and make this thing official already. Considering I started studying for the GRE back in October, I'm more than ready for this whole process to be over!

10 reasons why we should switch from oil to renewable energy as soon as possible

2009-02-24T12:46:00.001-06:00

I wrote this list, please pass it on if you find it interesting or want to educate others!

1) Of the top 10 Petroleum exporters, 2 are actively hostile toward the US (Iran and Venezuela) and 3 (Russia, Nigeria and Algeria) aren’t exactly allies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Export). Oil has propped up dictatorships from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East (http://archive.peacemagazine.org/v14n3p08.htm).

2) Saudi Arabia, the world’s top exporter, has been linked to multiple terrorist attacks on the US, including 9/11, and is the source of Osama bin Laden’s wealth (http://www.iags.org/fuelingterror.html).

3) On a similar note, the US is by far the world's largest importer of petroleum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Import) and consumer of petroleum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Consumption). Wouldn't it be great if all that money we spent on oil went into the US economy instead of #1 and #2 on this list?

4) The number of jobs in the oil and gas industry is approx 400,000 (http://www.petrostrategies.org/Learning%20Center/People_Who_Work_in_the_Oil_and_Gas_Industry.htm). The number of jobs in renewables is currently in the millions, and expected to increase by anywhere from 8 to 20 million jobs in the next 20 years (http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2008/09/report-global-green-job-market-expected-to-explode-53686)

5) The burning of oil (not to mention coal, natural gas, etc) has been linked to a sharp increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere and is considered by many in the scientific community to be the leading cause of global warming (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686).

6) Oil is largely controlled by OPEC (OPEC consists of Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Venezuela), an organization that doesn’t have US interests at heart and can dictate oil prices. These radical shifts in price negatively affect the US economy (http://www.iags.org/costofoil.html).

7) Oil spills are one of the many environmental hazards of oil production, releasing millions upon millions of tons of oil into the world’s oceans, killing marine life, destroying coastline and costing billions to clean up (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills).

8) The emissions that come from cars, trucks etc burning oil (not to mention coal from power plants) are extremely bad for your health and have been linked to a range of illnesses and deaths (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/medical_notes/336738.stm).

9) Plastic, which is made of petroleum, has been linked to a variety of health problems (http://www.ecologycenter.org/factsheets/plastichealtheffects.html), is barely biodegradable (it takes thousands of years to breakdown and leaches chemicals when it does) and accounts for a growing percentage of total landfill volume. It also has other unintended environmental consequences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Trash_Vortex

10) Petroleum is a finite resource, and at current rates of consumption, is expected to run out by the end of the century (http://www.geotimes.org/nov02/feature_oil.html). Even if it doesn’t, as oil supplies get lower, prices will skyrocket and oil-related conflicts could increase dramatically.

A call to action

2008-11-07T15:48:00.003-06:00

It was a great day on Tuesday, the right man was picked for the job in my opinion, and I feel fairly confident that he'll be able to get us moving in the right direction again. And, Obama has finally broken our pattern of only white males in office. About time. But as great as the election was, it overshadowed (and rightly so) an insidious plague in our country. The plague is religious fundamentalism.

We hear news all the time about the religious extremists over there! Watch out, those other people are trying to take away your freedoms! And it's true, Muslim extremists are assholes. But we have been duped into not noticing that our very own country is slowly becoming a theocracy. We mock Iran for their government and policy that's led by religion. We say, "look at us, we're so free!" We pride ourselves on the fact that people can say whatever they'd like, and believe in whatever they'd like to believe in. But like it or not, we are becoming a Christian country. Not that everyone in the country is becoming Christian, but we are increasingly letting Christians fundamentalists dictate policy and laws for us. The entire Republican party depends on capturing their vote, and Obama had to repeat over and over that he was a Christian, that he attended church and believed in god. In a nation made up of dozens of religions, as well as agnostics and atheists, that believes in the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state, why did both candidates have to prove that they were good Christians?

This is from the World Factbook, regarding the makeup of the US population: Protestant 51.3%, Roman Catholic 23.9%, Mormon 1.7%, other Christian 1.6%, Jewish 1.7%, Buddhist 0.7%, Muslim 0.6%, other or unspecified 2.5%, unaffiliated 12.1%, none 4% (2007 est.)

So by that estimate, a little more than %75 of the population is some kind of Christian religion, but that leaves %25 who are not (or in other terms, about 75 million people).

Where am I going with this? Some people might have seen the news that Prop 8 passed in California, banning gay people from getting married. Why was this even on the books in the first place? Because of the Mormon church for one, but also because of a large group of people who's religion tells them that homosexuality is a sin. It is a sin to them, but not against the law in the US. It's also a sin to commit adultery, covet your neighbor's goods and wife, as well as a multitude of other things that are not against the law. So does the fact that adultery is a sin stop Christians from committing that sin? Some yes, but certainly not all, not even a majority. So basically they pushed legislation up for a vote, banning a right for an entire group of people, simply because some people's religion considers it a sin. Does that sound like something that happens in a free country, where people's religion is not supposed to influence legislation and law?

I read a comment about it by a guy telling gays not to sue, because it was the will of the people, the majority has spoken. Yes, all %51 of the majority. The population of Cali is about 38 million, so that means that just less than half of the people, or 18 million people give or take, did not want that prop passed. But if all it takes is a majority, what if it turned out that 51% of a certain state did not want blacks and whites to get married? What if it turned out that since 51% of people thought cheating on your wife/husband is a sin, laws would be passed making cheating punishable with jail time?

The fact of the matter is, no matter your thoughts on homosexuality, being gay isn't a crime. It doesn't matter if you think gay people are born gay, or if they choose their lifestyle, it's still not a crime. And if two people wish to get married, who they fuck are we to say they can't? If they're of legal age, and both going into the marriage willingly, then they should be allowed to marry. Don't people see, this is no different than not allowing interracial marriages? Don't they see that legislation like this eats away at the most cherished foundations of our society and country, that all people are free and have a right to happiness? Doesn't everyone see that by allowing legislation like this to stand, we are no better than any of the "unfree" countries conservatives and liberals alike love to mock?

So my view is this: There are more of us than there are of them. There are more religious and non-religious people in this country who believe in the separation of church and state, who want to be free to live and practice as we see fit. The Christian fundamentalists are louder, meaner and more cutthroat, and that's usually why they're heard so often, but it's time to put a stop to this nonsense. It's time for us to demand they keep their creationist beliefs out of school textbooks and other public places where they don't belong. It's time for us to demand they keep their beliefs about what is a sin and what is not a sin out of our public domain. This is our country, and unlike them we believe in freedoms for all people, that everyone is equal and should be treated as such, and we're not going to let them turn our country into a theocracy. It's time to start fighting back.

More information about ACORN

2008-10-20T15:23:00.002-05:00

Get the full scoop from factcheck.org, a great independent website that debunks false claims made by both sides. Read it here.

I think the reason this bothers me so much is because it's such an obvious attempt at a gay marriage issue of 2000 or a Swift Boat of 2004. It's the Republicans, again, trying to win by ignoring the issues and focusing exclusively on 3rd party issues that are usually highly exaggerated and unimportant. Just once I'd like to see an campaign run by the Republicans that anything other than mud slinging and name calling. I guess they've got nothing left, courtesy of Bush.

For the record, I'm not a Democrat specifically, I just happen to usually vote that way because their candidates care about something other than big business and wealth. As soon as a Republican candidate beats out a Democrat in their positions on renewable energy, education spending, cutting the defense budget, affordable health care and corporate responsibility, I'll be happy to vote for him/her. As long as they also believe in evolution...

Nuts About ACORN

2008-10-18T17:33:00.002-05:00

From Slate.com, learn more about the ACORN "scandal," and the farce that it really is.

Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy's health.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008, at 7:16 PM ET

Last night's presidential debate didn't rise to full-frontal bodice-ripper status until John McCain insisted, "[W]e need to know the full extent of Sen. Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." Obama probably shouldn't have guffawed. But it was hard not to. He was probably thinking, "Destroying the fabric of democracy???" Even for McCain that was a little bit of breathless chest-heaving.

As far as "gotcha" stunts go, the right-wing feeding frenzy over the vile vote-fraud treachery of ACORN has yet to yield much fruit. Investigations are indeed under way. But then, they are always under way this time of the year—and as the indefatigable Brad Friedman points out, so what? Evidence of voter-registration wrongdoing is no more a sign of widespread, Obama-sanctioned vote fraud than evidence of minorities being misled and intimidated on Election Day is a sign of official, McCain-sanctioned vote suppression. What's the real point of turning voter-registration shenanigans into "one of the greatest frauds in voter history"? The object here is not criminal indictments. It's to undermine voter confidence in the elections system as a whole. John McCain wants to build a better bogeyman, and he needs your help to do it.

ACORN stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. It's a 30-year-old nonprofit that organizes on behalf of poor urban minorities, and it has registered 1.3 million new voters this year. There's no denying that the organization's system of paying workers $8 an hour to gather voter registrations creates screwy incentives. Encyclopedia Brown could have cracked that mystery. That's why ACORN is either obligated by law or opts voluntarily to turn over all its voter-registration cards suggesting that Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys just registered to vote in Nevada. That GOP elections officials started screaming "gotcha" when those registrations were turned in is the real fraud here. Jump back, Encyclopedia Brown! There is wrongdoing afoot in low-paying voter-registrationland.

Last week, media attention focused on a "raid" on ACORN offices in Las Vegas in which voter registration documents that had mostly been voluntarily turned over Freddie Johnson of Cleveland testified that ACORN encouraged him to sign 73 voter-registration forms—all in his own name) overlooks the fact that all 73 registrations would still have allowed Freddie to vote just once. The connection between wrongful voter registration and actual polling-place vote fraud is the stuff of GOP mythology. As Rick Hasen has demonstrated, here at Slate and elsewhere, even if Mr. Mouse is registered to vote, he still needs to show up at his polling place, provide a fake ID, and risk a felony conviction to do so. were dramatically seized by force. Right-wing screeching over nefarious doings in Ohio (where

Large-scale, coordinated vote stealing doesn't happen. The incentives—unlike the incentives for registration fraud—just aren't there. In an interview this week with Salon, Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College, who has studied vote fraud systematically, noted that "between 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty others were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five were guilty of voting more than once. That's 26 criminal voters." Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that U.S. attorneys, like David Iglesias in New Mexico, were fired for searching high and low for vote-fraud cases to prosecute and coming up empty. Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that five days before the 2006 election, then-interim U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman exuberantly (and futilely) indicted four ACORN workers, even when Justice Department policy barred such prosecutions in the days before elections. RNC General Counsel Sean Cairncross has said he is unaware of a single improper vote cast because of bad cards submitted in the course of a voter-registration effort. Republican campaign consultant Royal Masset says, "[I]n-person voter fraud is nonexistent. It doesn't happen, and ... makes no sense because who's going to take the risk of going to jail on something so blatant that maybe changes one vote?"

There is no such thing as vote fraud. The think tank created to peddle the epidemic has evaporated. A handful of cases have been prosecuted. Then why is Sarah Palin shooting off e-mails contending that "we can't allow leftist groups like ACORN to steal this election?" Why is former Sen. John Danforth announcing, all statesmanlike, that the whole 2008 election "has been tainted?" Why is Ted Olson, the Republican National Lawyers Association lawyer of the year, claiming that "[ACORN] acknowledged having to get rid of a thousand people or more who were participating in voter fraud efforts." These people know the difference between registration fraud and vote fraud. Why continue to suggest they are the same thing?

Consider the fact that, as the Brennan Center reported recently, "[E]lection officials across the country are routinely striking millions of voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation." Consider the recent New York Times review of state records and Social Security records, which concluded that "[t]ens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law." Consider the case, now on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, in which 200,000 new Ohio voters stand to be bounced off the rolls because, through no fault of their own, their names don't match error-riddled state databases. Consider the indictment this week of former Republican official James Tobin for his 2002 role in jamming Democratic get-out-the-vote calls. Consider the much-ballyhooed Republican challenge to the eligibility of 6,000 Native American and student voters in Montana that backfired first in court, then with the abrupt resignation this week of the official who spearheaded the effort.

Nobody is suggesting the Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts are perfect. But the suggestion that Barack Obama, through ACORN, is systematically working to get Huey, Dewey, and Louie to steal elections, and that therefore minorities and people of color should be disenfranchised, is cynical beyond belief. Consider the fliers and robo-calls designed to spread false information and threats to Hispanic and African-American voters. (According to the Philadelphia Daily News, fliers in minority neighborhoods warned residents that undercover cops would be lurking around the polls on Election Day, arresting anyone with "outstanding arrest warrants or who have unpaid traffic tickets.") There is wholly implausible vote stealing, and then there is the vote stealing that actually happens. You want to get all crazy-paranoid? I'd worry more about the people who want to rough up their fellow citizen at the polls than people who want to risk jail time for voting twice.

In the end, all roads lead back to John Paul Stevens. He wrote the plurality opinion in last term's Crawford v. Marion County, which upheld Indiana's restrictive voter-ID law. Stevens understood that there is no such thing as polling-place vote fraud, conceding that "[t]he record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history." But, continued Stevens, in the manner of someone rationally discussing the likelihood of UFO sightings, "flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this nation's history." Like, um, an 1868 mayoral election in New York City, he notes, and a single 2004 incident from Washington. Stevens was more worried about shaky "voter confidence" in elections than actual voting. The message that went out from on high was clear: undermine voter confidence. Even if it's irrational and hysterical and tinged with the worst kinds of racism, keep telling the voters the system is busted.

Each time they spread the word that Democrats (especially poor and minority Democrats) are poised to steal an election, John McCain and his overheated friends deliberately undermine voter confidence. That is the point. It encourages citizens to accede to ever-harsher voter-verification laws—even if they are not needed. It musters support for voter purges that are increasingly draconian. Insist often enough that the other side is cheating, and you may even encourage partisans to take matters into their own hands, leading to the worst forms of polling-place vigilantism—from a cross burning in Louisiana on the eve of a 2006 mayoral election to the hiring of intimidating partisan "poll watchers" to volunteer at inner-city polling places. When McCain goes after ACORN, he's really just asking you to join him in believing that the system is broken. And if you choose to overheat along with McCain, the Supreme Court promises to sign off on any measure that might calm you down later. John McCain might want to be a little more careful about accusing Obama, ACORN, or anyone else, of "destroying the fabric of democracy." In so doing, he's either deliberately or unconsciously encouraging his own supporters to grab a handful of the stuff and start ripping.

The Klaw

2008-09-24T23:30:00.002-05:00

Now that we're officially back from Peace Corps and they can no longer touch us with their big, ugly stick of rules, I would like to present The Klaw for public consumption. Basically, myself and a few other volunteers would write some random shit that most likely is and will be funny only to us and small handful of others. Never the less, it is 11 issues of pure genius. I would take everything we wrote and every two months or so put it into a newsletter of sorts. So have a look America (and other, smaller, insignificant non-America countries), and be prepared to laugh. Laugh, and wonder aloud, "Did these motherfuckers ever work?" To quote the Tootsie Pop commercials: The world may never know.

THE KLAW

The password for all the issues is: theklaw

Philly is for lovers. And cheese steaks.

2008-08-25T09:57:00.008-05:00

A couple weeks ago our Peace Corps friends separation anxiety got the best of us, so we went on a little road trip out to the east coast. We visited friends in Pittsburgh, Philly, and then hit up the Radiohead concert in Cleveland on our way home. It wasn't exactly on our way home, but whatever, it was still a really great show. It was sort of the culmination of the Summer of Abby and Owen. When I was in between junior and senior years of high school, I didn't work, stayed up until 5am every night, slept til 2pm every day and basically did nothing, so my Dad dubbed it "The Summer of Owen." He'd come home from work and ask, "How's the summer of Owen going?" because he was jealous of the fact that all I did that day was play video games and eat bean dip. Anyway, long story long, this summer, with the exception of a little school for Abby, has been The Summer of Abby and Owen. We've gone out with friends, taken trips, and generally enjoyed having a little money and a lot of free time. Abby's back in school now, and I'm *this* close to getting a job (PS Thanks a lot, Peace Corps, for being totally useless on the job search front), so the summer is coming to a end, but here are some pictures of us, doing nothing and loving every minute of it.

Matt taking photos around town.

View of Philly from the Rocky Steps.

One of the many beautiful old parks around town. Also, a lot of people there ride bikes.

Philly has a lot of murals.

Art museum.

Art museum / Rocky steps.

Walking around in Old Town.

Founding Fathers: Good at drafting documents, but not very original architects.

Down near the Liberty Bell.

Out drinking.

Carrie, Matt, and Honey the dog, who was wasted.

Carrie and me, walking down South Street in Philly.

Some guy created this little art park out of found items (junk).

Inside the park.

Contrary to popular opinion, these guys are not like the Buckingham Palace guards. You slap one of these guys and they'll pistol whip you with their replica muskets.

America needs to fully commit to renewable energy

2008-07-18T14:18:00.004-05:00

Watch this speech by Al Gore and visit the We Can Solve It page for more info. It's time to stop fucking talking about it and do something!

Now that you've watched that, send a letter to Bush, your governor, house representatives, senators, and state legislators. Send a letter to Obama and McCain letting them know that this is the most pressing issue of the election, that oil and energy are the roots of our economic trouble, amongst other things. Use this temple I wrote if you want:

Dear Senator/Governor, etc.,

I wonder if you've seen Al Gore's challenge at wecansolveit.org? He challenged the nation to be using %100 renewable energy within 10 years. I think it can be done. We have the technology, we have the money to fund research in new technologies like improved solar panel efficiency, cellulosic biofuel, fusion and other unexplored technologies. You want to help us fight gas prices, energy costs and boost the sagging economy? This is the way to do it!

This is not just a matter of preserving the environment. It is a matter of NATIONAL SECURITY! The best way to fight terrorism is to stop funding the governments (by buying their oil) that support and/or house the terrorists. You want to deal a blow to Venezuela, Iran, Russia and other similar countries? Well, they're all propped up by oil and gas money! Green technology will also create thousands if not millions of new jobs. It will make us energy self-sufficient so that we won't need new drilling or to have a strategic reserve. It will make us and the environment more healthy. That's the kind of world I'd like to live in.

So please support renewable energy. Continue offering tax breaks to businesses and individuals that produce or purchase solar panels, alternatively fueled cars and the like. Set aside some of the budget to help fund research. Tax and/or fine polluters. Don't build any new coal plants. Require home builders to conform to rigorous energy standards and install solar panels on the homes they build. Help set up wind farms here in YOUR STATE and across the country. In short, do everything in your power and use the power of your office to help America reach its goal of using %100 renewable energy by 2019!

This isn't about money or the environment, it's about making this the best country it can possible be.

Thank you,
YOUR NAME HERE

Philippines slide show

2008-07-07T14:07:00.002-05:00

Abby put together a slide show of all the pictures (well, most of them) from our two years in the Peace Corps. Check it out:

Or go here to see a slightly bigger version of it.

I win!

2008-06-23T16:25:00.002-05:00

Huh huh, I never really got into YouTube, and I'm still not into it, but here's another YouTube video, cuz it's funny and stuff. Don't watch it if you're easily offended. Or made of cheese. Or on fire.

great song, awesome video

2008-06-17T23:00:00.000-05:00

We gots a place for living!

2008-06-08T12:32:00.003-05:00

Went over and checked out Abby's brother's house this past Friday to see if we wanted to live there, and it looks really nice. We'll only have to pay utilities, no rent, so that's a huge plus, meaning we'll have an extra $400-500 a month we won't be spending on rent. Booyah. It's in a pretty nice location, a couple blocks away from one of the coolest streets in St. Louis, South Grand Blvd. The area used to be pretty rough, but recently people from all over have moved into the neighborhood, plus a decent number of immigrants, so it's really diversified the neighborhood. There are Middle Eastern delis, Afghani restaurants, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants, authentic Mexican, an international grocery store... The house is within a half mile of two grocery stores, a weekly farmers market, tons of bars and restaurants, the community garden and all sorts of other cool stuff. It'll be nice to get out of the suburbs, because while it's nice out here, it's also pretty blah. Not sure exactly when we'll move in because right before he moved in someone broke in and stole all of his copper piping, but it'll probably be within the month.

Check out the hood.

Also, unrelated but still awesome, check out our group's Peace Corps slideshow. A few of our batch mates put it together and we watched it at our COS (Close of Service) conference. It's pictures and some video from everyone in the group from our two years in the Philippines. It barely scratches the surface though, because if we took about 2000 photos during our two years, that means that combined we took at least 130,000 photos, because I know a lot of people took a lot more photos than we did!

Borrrrnn in the U S A, I was borrrrnn in the U S A

2008-06-02T13:45:00.003-05:00

It's very weird to be back, I'll say that upfront. When we came back to the US in November it wasn't nearly as weird, for two reasons: the first is that Portland isn't "home" to either of us, I've only been there a few times, so even though we were visiting my parents, it was more like they joined us on vacation; and second, this time we're not going back after two weeks. It still seems hard to believe that we're back here for good, or at least in our case for 15 months until Abby finishes school. But we're done with Peace Corps and I have to admit, it kind of sucks. I was ready to leave the Philippines, but I'm really going to miss Peace Corps in terms of people. Other volunteers. Not very often do you meet 70 random people and have basically all of them be cool. Not that you're friends with all of them, but %95 of them are interesting and smart and fun and easy to talk to. You don't happen upon a group like that very often. So I'm a little bummed about that aspect of it. Luckily our friends here called up the night we got back, and we ended up going out for dinner and drinks with a bunch of people, and they're organizing a welcome back bbq this weekend, so it feels really nice to be missed, and to have people be excited that we're back. I was a little worried that maybe we'd be too different, or that other people wouldn't understand where we're coming from, but it didn't seem that way at all, which is kind of a relief.

Never the less I've kind of been in this house for two days now, slightly afraid to go out. Maybe not afraid, but a little apprehensive. We went to the grocery store today, the little international market down the street, so that was kind of fun running around looking at locally made organic bread, real tofu, baklava, deli meat, pickles, hot sauce, cheeses, meats, beers, giant jars of olives... It was pretty nice. Brought a smile to my face for sure. Abby has her first day of school this evening, but she's downstairs now taking a nap trying to fight the jet leg! I couldn't do it, but props to her that she can. I'm still in the process of looking for a job, which I don't feel like thinking about or talking about. On an unrelated note, we walked to the market and the total walking time was maybe 20 minutes, and in that span we saw a total of 3 people out walking as well. It's insane with the driving here, so much to get used to again...

Also, please check out this website: http://www.wecansolveit.org/ and consider signing up and signing their petitions.

More importantly look at this page: http://www.wecansolveit.org/content/solutions to read up a little on five ways we can combat global warming (clean energy economy, personal choice, adoption of renewables, enhanced energy efficiency and innovation leadership). This is so much more important this year because by choosing a president you'll also be choosing the course this country will take for the next four years concerning environmental policy. I think that global warming tends to hit people too much as a slogan, but I like the way this group has laid out its info. It's all very nice and well that people switch over to compact florescent bulbs or drive a Prius, but the real way things are going to chance is through the government and its relation to business in this country. It's not even just about global warming, it's about the way we live our lives, the way we let other people run our lives, and right now money and buying shit is the only thing that matters in this world, and that's pretty pathetic.

Well...

2008-05-21T23:51:00.002-05:00

So the time has come. Time for me to write about the fact that we're leaving, and make a list of things I'll miss... This is hard to write about, I've tried before, but I'll give it a shot. It's not hard because I'm so worked up I keep crying on the keyboard, but it's hard to write about because I don't think I've ever had two years of my life be filled with such strong emotions, and so many of them. On tuesday my coworkers had a lunch for me: they made a slide show with pictures of me and us, sang me songs, said nice things about how hard of a worker I am (semi true) and how handsome I am (true), and they listened to my requests for food so we had Bicol Express (my favorite pinoy dish) and sweet and sour fish, and chocolate cake, and it was really nice. It was sad, and kind of heart-warming, and I just felt happy and all over good. Two hours after that I was screaming at the top of my lungs "I hate the Philippines!" as the torrential rain that came out of nowhere filled up our front area and proceeded to flood our house (but not too badly). So in that one day I experienced sadness, nostalgia, happiness, joy, frustration, and utter disgust and anger. So now imagine that for 2 years straight, where you'll be fuming about something retarded that just happened and then someone will do something nice, and you'll be happy again.

There are a lot of great things: the smell of frying garlic coming through our window, or the gentle splish-splosh of a neighbor hand-washing all their clothes. Huge lightening displays, the moon shinning through the coconut trees at the end of our street, the cloud shrouded mountains seen from our bedroom window, the utter quietness of such a loud country at night. Watching people on boats and buses pull an endless stream of food from their bags. The fact that you can make anything happen if you just ask enough, and nicely, because there really aren't any rules that's can't be broken. The ease of getting around without a car, once you learn the system. Living in a culture where people only buy what they need. Meeting up with other volunteers and getting to use all those jokes you've saved up for 3 months because no Filipino would understand. Drinking beers at Anthology after a meal at May Lin and ripping on Carrie for requesting a song that has a 20 minute drum solo in the middle of it. Being too lazy to cook and getting fried chicken and garlic rice from Wil's. Living an hour and a half away from an amazing white sand beach, and an Italian restaurant that serves Italian style pizza made with real mozz cheese. Being able to travel to incredible places like Bohol and Sagada. Being able to walk down the street to buy a beer, or beef broth cubes, or vinegar and not having to get in the car and drive to a huge grocery store. The sheer amount of free time we have. Being able to walk to the market, and buy things from people who grew or killed that particular food (most of the time at least...). Walking to the beach, albeit a crappy, dirty one, and having a beer while watching the sunset. Bootleg dvds. The incredible, sometimes overbearing generosity of people with next to nothing. Being cut off from pop culture and all that boring shit, but being much more clued in to world events, and just having a better understand of the world period. CNN, BBC and Newsweek are all way, way better outside of the US.

I genuinely feel that this experience has made both of us better people, and I'm looking forward to getting on that plane and taking all that I learned back with me so I can lead a better, healthier, well rounded and compassionate life, one that involves friends, family, community, living local and eating well, and tons of travel. Travel, travel, travel.

A busy month: a wedding, whale sharks and COS

2008-04-23T02:29:00.003-05:00

It's been a busy month. Not with work mind you, no silly, with travel! After we got back from the farm, the next week we were invited to a friend's wedding. Actually, it was the brother of a friend whom we had never met, but that's ok. Weddings here seem to be less about family, and more about how many local celebs you can get to show up: the vice mayor, us, a barangay captain from a neighboring municipality... We didn't see the actual service, but went to the reception expecting a party. I mean, receptions in the US are usually a party, and Filipinos can turn anything into a fiesta, so I figured it would be huge. I was wrong. It was just food, and then the gifts came out. This is where it all got weird, because you never, ever open gifts at a party here. You give someone a gift at their birthday party and they hurry it out of sight as quickly as possible before they die of shame. But here at the wedding, all the money was brought out and counted, out loud, over a giant sound system. I was really surprised by the whole thing, but no one knew because I was hiding in back, trying to avoid being brought in front of everyone to give a speech or some shit. Other interesting wedding facts: people at the reception buy incredibly expensive rice snacks and shots of good booze, as a way of giving money to the couple; the night before the wedding a traveling band of bakla (men who dress/live as woman) come by the party and put on a show, get everyone dancing, and the guests pin money on the bride and groom; everyone is expected to make themselves scarce by about 4pm, when just the family goes back to the house; local officials and other rich people are listed as sponsors, which means they get a seat of honor in exchange for helping pay for the wedding.

A few days after that we headed down to Bicol, which, if you look at a map of the Philippines, is a bit like Luzon's Florida, dangling precariously off its tip. Bicol is known for their love of spicy food, and for being repeatedly decimated by every storm that blows through the area. We went for the whale sharks that hang out there in March and April. We stayed at a really nice (and by really nice I don't mean fancy, just, you know, nice) resort down there that was within walking distance of the WWF sponsored whale shark eco-tourism project. Back in the day, the locals would just kill the sharks, selling parts in the market, and the rest to the Chinese to blend into heart powder, or whatever the hell they do with all those endangered animals parts. Now they've realized that by taking tourists out to swim with them, they can make a lot more money. That's where we come in. The weather was pretty terrible when we were down there - cold and rainy - so the first day we didn't see any. We didn't even get in the water. Despite the expense, we decided that we had come all the way down there, we might was well go out the next day and try again. The weather the second day wasn't much better, in fact it was worse, but within the first 10 minutes we were Navy Sealing off the side of a bangka. The experience was pretty amazing, they did a fairly good job of keeping the groups small, so the spotter would see one in the water, yell at us to get ready, and then we'd jump off the side of the still moving boat and follow our guide. The water is full of plankton, the main reason why the sharks are there, so the water is pretty murky. The first one just burst into view from the murk, about 5 feet below us. We ended up seeing 7 really good ones, and a few we were even able to swim along with for a couple minutes before they dove back down. After 3 1/2 hours being out in the pouring rain, we called it quits and went back, still on a high.

Those are just some pictures I took, no big deal... Wow, I'm funny. No, they're from the internet, but that's what they look like. Pretty sweet when they're only 5 feet away from you in the open ocean!

After that I had PDM, Abby came back to Calapan, and a week later we met back up in Manila for our COS (Close of Service) conference. The conference itself wasn't too rigorous, just some talks on readjusting to life in the US (ironically given by two people who had left their service directly for PC jobs and hadn't, in fact, been back to the US yet themselves), paperwork and medical. If there's one thing PC loves, it's paperwork, and boy do we have a lot. So, much fun was had by all, a few alcoholic beverages were consumed (ok, fine, an entire dump truck full) and some goodbyes were said. With that we enter our last month, saying goodbye to people in town, our friends, our coworkers, our PC friends... Between that, going away parties, paperwork, last minute work around site and facing the reality of going home, I'm kind of wishing I could just close my eyes, wake up and have it be June 1st. Am I ready to leave? Yes. Am I ready to return? Not really.

Up North: Baguio, Sagada and The Farm

2008-03-25T00:22:00.006-05:00

Over holy week we decided to head north because it's nice and cool up there, and hotter than hell down here. Also, we hadn't been there yet. The area we went to is usually known as the Cordilleras, which I learned when I was looking for a wikipedia link means "range of mountains" in spanish, which is what they are. How convenient. It's actually a mountainous area in northern Luzon made up of 6 or 7 provinces, and since the whole area is at an altitude of something like 1500+ meters, it's noticeably cooler up there. During the winter it can get as cold as 4C, which is flippin' cold for the Philippines. The area is amazingly beautiful, and part of it (specifically Banaue) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We didn't go to that part, but apparently there's great hiking over there, and it also has the dubious distinction of being the place where Julia was killed.

We went to Baguio for a day, just to break up the 16 hour trip up to Sagada from our site, and it was nice, for a big city. Really hilly, with a lot of good restaurants, shopping and jeepney exhaust. After that we headed up to Sagada along a semi-paved road that offered great views down the precipitous cliffs we were teetering along on our little one-lane road. Sagada is a great little town with a decent tourist presence, but not too much. The people there seem to understand that a lot of tourists and/or big tour groups would really destroy the quiet tranquility that's such a huge part of the draw there. There's still work to be done, but hopefully they keep it like that, instead of going over to the dark side and becoming the Boracay of the north. We went caving there, which was pretty amazing, spending 2 hours poking around barefoot in a cold limestone cave. We also went on an incredible hike to a waterfall that led us down into a valley carpeted with rice terraces. Unfortunately we also had to hike back out, which was straight up.

The guesthouse we stayed at in Sagada

The best way to carry a giant bundle of leaves

The trail to the falls

Apparently there are no roads to the villages in the valley so they carry everything in

Unbelievable, and not even the best the Philippines has to offer (apparently)

We had to make it through the terrace maze to get down

Just called "Big Falls" I think... 72 meters tall

Great swimming after a hot hike, ice cold

The next series of pictures is from the farm that's owned by the host family of our friend Sherry. A bunch of us went there for the week to hang out and work (or in our case, just hang out). It's a pretty amazing place, an hour walk from a small town, so it's totally isolated, amazingly quiet and pretty much the perfect place to go to get away from whatever it is you need to get away from (in my case: allergies, tricycles, the heat...). We ate really well, hung out a lot, went hiking and got some amazing produce from the organic garden. It's registered with WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) so if you are ever in the Philippines and would like a week or a month of work in exchange for free lodging and awesome scenery, check it out. You can hang out with Adam and Beth.

Hiking through town

Halfway down (or up) the super steep path

The farm. It's hard to tell, but there are different terraces for various kinds of crops

Adam and Beth, weeding the green onion

Weeding for their supper

A hike we didn't go on because we weren't there yet, but still a sweet picture

Sunset from the farm

Don't ask why there's a cat in the picture, it's a long story...

Malaysia - Borneo

2008-02-27T02:21:00.013-06:00

We went to Borneo kind of randomly (it happened to be the cheapest place for us to fly to), but I'm really glad we made the detour and stopped in for a few days. The big attraction in the northern state of Sabah, where we were, is Mt. Kinabalu, which is one of the tallest mountains in SE Asia and also one of the easiest to climb. It was also a little out of our price range, so we admired it as we drove by in the bus that took us to the Kinabatangan River valley. In truth, we weren't that interested in mountain climbing because we had a sweet homestay set up, and some jungle adventures planned. The homestay is a WWF project to provide livelihood for people in the area, so besides having families host tourists, they also train people to be guides, boatmen, back office people and anything else that might go into running such an operation. The family we stayed with was big and shy, but we got to chat with them a fair amount, watch some Malaysian soccer, eat some good food and have a cooking lesson that consisted of Abby dumping some chopped veggies into a pot and the mom declaring "done!" The boat tours were nice, it was just us and our guide Joel, so we got to putter around on the river for hours, looking for wildlife and dodging the occasional power boat of a bigger, much more expensive jungle operation down river. The wildlife was amazing: wild elephants, monitor lizards, a variety of macaques, proboscis monkeys, crocodiles, orangutans (which we didn't see), kingfishers, hornbills and egrets, wild boar and a few other things I'm probably forgetting. We tried to set up a jungle hike to maybe see some animals up close, but the hike was more like a 15 minute walk into the jungle to the eco-camp they're building, and not much else. Oh well...

There was another group there so we got to sit in on their cultural show. The cultural dances were almost exactly the same as Filipino dances, minus the weird Spanish colonial dances. I half expected them to come out and do tinikiling, and when I asked they said they have the same dance, it just goes by another name there.

They asked for volunteers to come up, so I got to bang on some drums in a Borneo version of the hippie drum circle.

Kingfisher

Monitor lizard - about 5 to 6 feet long

We happened to be there during the annual elephant migration, so we were extremely lucky to see a herd of elephants. In fact, we were so lucky our guide literally jumped up and down in the boat saying "we're so lucky!"

We came across them a second time, and this time they were out in plain view. Unfortunately it was getting dark, so most of our pictures were a little blurry, since we couldn't use a flash, obviously.

This is the best picture of a mom and baby. We watched them eat for about 10 minutes.

Proboscis monkeys, hanging out in the trees.

Macaques

The river at sunset. It was pretty muddy from the erosion caused by all the recent flooding.

A lake we hiked to.

This photo is actually the reflection off the incredibly still lake.

Malaysia - Penang

2008-02-23T05:45:00.007-06:00

We went to Penang because we heard it was a great place to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but when we were there, it was totally dead. Maybe the parades and dragon dances and fireworks happen some other time, or maybe they don't happen at all, we'll never know. Even though Chinatown was shut up, everywhere else was open so we spent most of our time over in Little India. The transition between neighborhoods was hilarious. You would cross a certain street and it would go from the quiet, breezy calm of Chinatown to an explosion of people, sound and smell in Little India. Tons of people out in the streets, everything was open, and every other shop was blaring Indian pop music. Instead of spending our time in a street party, like we thought, we ended up seeing a lot of sites: walking all over town checking out the different temples, going up to Penang Hill and then engaging in a ridiculously steep (from 800m to sea level over 5km) hike down to the botanical gardens and lots of eating. Luckily all the hawker stalls were open, so we had tons of satay, a tom yum soup so hot it was deliciously painful and various indian feasts. Malaysia is an amazing food country, incorporating the best of chinese, indian, malay and other southeast asian countries (notably Thailand), and it's all super cheap. We were eating good meals for MYR10 (about $3) and had an enormous indian dinner with way too much incredible food for MYR20 ($6). It seems like other SE Asian countries get more tourist love, but Malaysia was fantastic.

Abby in the archway of the Chow Yun Fat mansion. Used to belong to a rich Chinese merchant, now a hotel that you can also take tours of. Expensive tours, so we just admired the outside...

Indian temple

The outside of the Kek Lok Si temple, supposedly the biggest Buddhist temple in SE Asia. Leading up to the temple was the traditional t-shirt and other assorted junk hawker hallway.

There was a writhing pond full of turtles in the temple, for some reason.

There were Buddha statues everywhere inside the temple, of all shapes and sizes.

A view out over the city of Georgetown from about halfway up the temple.

We didn't take this picture, it's from wikipedia, but this was going on while we were there. They only light up the temple during Chinese New Year, which is 15-20 days long.

They also have great fruit in Malaysia, but unlike in the Philippines, they actually eat it! You could buy fresh fruit and packets of sliced fresh fruit everywhere, even late at night.

There were a lot of monkeys on the hike down from Penang Hill to the botanical gardens.

There were also a lot of monkeys in the gardens, but unfortunately there were also hordes of tour bus tourists feeding them. This guy just opened his brothers mouth and helped himself.

We also visited a Burmese Buddhist temple which was really beautifully done.

This reclining Buddha is the third largest in the world! Or maybe Asia! I'm not really sure, but that's one big enlightened being!

A shot inside another Buddhist temple. There were a lot of people praying in all of the temples we visited. I'm not sure if that's normal, or if it had something to do with CNY...

Malaysia - Singapore and KL

2008-02-23T04:00:00.014-06:00

Singapore might have been the highlight of the trip for me. I was wondering while I was there if everything seemed so amazing because it actually was amazing, or if my take on things is a little skewed because I've been living in a little town in the Philippines for two years, taking cold showers out of a bucket. I didn't come up with an answer, but I'm still pretty convinced Singapore is freakin' amazing. Much like Malaysia, Singapore is mostly made up of Malay, Chinese and Indian, with a pretty good sized ex-pat community and apparently millions of white babies, all being pushed around in strollers. What the hell was up with all the white babies? The city was sparklingly clean, well planned out, had amazing public transportation and green everywhere. Open spaces, parks, trees... I think I'm a little too easily impressed at this point. It was definitely a taste of the 1st world, since Singapore is a pretty rich country. Income-wise they rank in the teens worldwide, above countries like Germany and France, so there were lots of nice cars, well dressed people and the like, kind of an Southeast Asia-lite.The food was top-notch, just like Malaysia, and the beer expensive. They also have a lot of laws that they enforce, including a weird one about chewing gum. Apparently you can get fined for having it, as it is illegal, to which I say right on because if I sit on one more piece of gum, I'm going to bomb Wrigley and blame it on terrorists.

This is a hawker stall area in Singapore. There are maybe 40-50 different places to chose from here, each one with something different(ish). It's kind of like if a mall food court didn't suck, but instead was full of amazing, cheap food, and wasn't in the mall.

Why can't everywhere be full of roast duck?

Having a beer at the boat quay, waiting for the museum to be free (Fri night from 7pm-9pm).

Top of an Indian temple

There was something going on at the temple while we were there, so as the parents talked the kids roamed free...

Temple of 1000 Lights

Renovated Chinese shop houses in Chinatown, now selling really expensive clothing.

Amazing temple door art

We ended up staying in the Muslim area (called Kampong Glam), which was probably my favorite part of town, and home to great middle eastern food.

Singapore had a great botanical garden, but it was free and open from 5am - midnight, so it was more like a city park. Never the less it was huge, and beautiful, and quiet. Ah, quiet.

The best part of the park was the orchid garden. I am by no means a flower nerd, but they were pretty spectacular.

Happy 2008, the sequel

2008-01-06T20:26:00.000-06:00

Abby's out of the hospital now, no more dengue. She's still pretty weak and gets tired really easily, but most of the symptoms are gone, which is a good thing because dengue, apparently, is not fun to have. Go figure. So now we're just stuck in Manila for a week while they monitor her. We have PC Washington to thank for that. It's not that I hate Manila, I just don't really like it that much. It's fun when there are people in town, you're healthy, and you're here for short periods of time. I just hate getting stuck here when Abby's sick, there's nothing to do and there's no where to go. I guess any city would suck if that were the case though. On top of it all, they are only playing pinoy movies in all the theaters for some reason, so we can't even go see a movie!

Abby's parents came for a visit, as I mentioned, which was a lot of fun. Last Christmas was just me (sick), Abby and our friend Carrie, so it wasn't really much of an event. Plus it was our first Christmas here in the Philippines so we were still being thrown off by the lack of Christmas hoo-ha, the annoying Christmas music (luckily, this year, no Boom-Tarat-Tarat!) and the fact that it was 85 degrees outside. So this year we were used to the whole scene, plus we had family in town, and a lot of friends came over for Christmas day feasting, so the whole day had the air of something other than just another day. I could really care less now about the gift-giving aspect of Christmas, but I'm a sucker for a big celebration, so it was nice that we could have that this year.

The first two day they were here we took them around Manila a little bit, went to everyone's favorite stinky shopping area, Quiapo, went on a walking tour of part of Manila that included a lot of Imelda Marcos info, and enjoyed being ensconced in the Pan Pacific. After that we all bundled on the death rocket that passes for a bus here and hurtled off to Puerto Galera for a night, in order to show them around our favorite little spots and break up the trip a little bit. Then we went to site for 3 days, as I mentioned, which was really cool because they got to see our town, our market, and how we live our lives here. After that is was back to unreality as we travelled down to Boracay and stayed in a nice resort, ate pretty good food and lounged on the beach. I have to say, it's amazing what a difference a year makes. It's not that Boracay wasn't really nice, but I was much less blown away this year. I think a lot of that had to do with being wowed by the selection of western food last year, and this year it was a lot less impressive. Anyway, Abby got the deng, we came back to Manila, the end.

2008

2008-01-02T02:18:00.000-06:00

Happy New Years everyone, Abby's parents came for a visit, it was a lot of fun. Now she's in the hospital with dengue. But she's ok! I'm out of time at the internet cafe, more later!

Come over, we can build snowmen made of rice!

2007-12-07T22:33:00.000-06:00

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

2007-12-06T01:30:00.000-06:00

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

2007-12-06T01:25:00.001-06:00

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

Now that's a turkey!

thanksgiving photos 3

2007-12-06T01:20:00.000-06:00

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

2007-12-06T01:15:00.000-06:00

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

2007-12-06T01:10:00.000-06:00

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...

2007-11-08T21:50:00.000-06:00

...see you in three days!

halloween = no big deal

2007-10-30T23:52:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-15T21:54:00.001-05:00

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

2007-09-29T01:11:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-17T00:32:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-03T20:16:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-02T22:33:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-09T02:07:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-07-04T22:53:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-04T03:24:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-26T03:24:00.000-05:00

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.

Election time is so silly!!

2007-04-30T01:05:00.000-05:00

I think we can all agree that election time in the US is pretty damn annoying. You have to hear about it on the news, the TV is full of horrible ads accusing people of being un-patriotic baby killers, and it goes on for like 3 years. Somehow, the Philippines has found a way to ratchet up the annoying factor. All day long, up and down the streets of Calapan, trucks drive around with loud speakers attached to them, blaring music and/or talking. But it's not just any music, it's current popular music that has been redone locally in Tagalog with ELECTION THEMED LYRICS! There was a horrible, god-awful song around Christmas time called "Boom Tarat Tarat." It was created on the enormously popular daytime game show "Wowowee." I am not making this up, these are the titles of these things. Anyway, since everyone in the country watches this show, this song caught on like wildfire and for the entire month of decemeber and many months after, we've had to hear this song being sung by everyone, all the time. The refrain of the song is "Boom tarat tarat, boom tarat tarat, la dada, la da da, bom bom bom." There is also an inane dance that goes along with it. Anyway, the point is I hate that song with a passion. We all do. And now it's being broadcast from a pair of very cheap quality loudspeakers all day long, with local election lyrics added into the song. Maybe you have to be here to understand it... As bad as that one is, I think my personal favorite is the truck for another candidate. There's an old song here that's a classic videoke song called "Totoy Bibbo." This guy's truck plays the music to that song and occasionaly throughout the song a man yells "Paul Luna!" So it's music, music, music, PAUL LUNA! music, music, music.

Also, other than these boom trucks, the other tactic is the good old campaign poster. Thousands of them. Millions. All stuck to every available surface in the entire country. Trees, bus stops, power line poles, people's houses, cows... They are everywhere, and you just know after a few months they'll slowly fall off and soon we will be drowning in a sea of weather-worn campaign posters.

The other upside to this is that elections are notorious for violent altercations, so we've all been warned to stay far away from rallies, and on the actual election day they basically told us not to leave the house. Or we could go to Manila and hide out if we were worried. I haven't seen any evidence of this so far, but it does add a little spice to the campaign period.

No happy endings

2007-04-25T20:05:00.000-05:00

It's been in the news, so I'm sure most of you have heard, but last week about this time they found the body of our friend, the missing PCV Julia Campbell. There was a really great, very emotional memorial service for her on Saturday and on Sunday we officially got the autopsy report: she died of blunt force trauma to the head. They have some leads and a prime suspect, so hopefully they do a good job and don't just jump the gun and pin it on someone because of all the pressure to make an arrest. As hard as the news of her death was to hear, the idea of her being beaten to death, all alone, was even harder for me to deal with. We're ok now, safe, not in any danger or anything as this was an isolated incident. I hope her family is doing ok. That's about it for now, hopefully next time I update there will be something good to share.

Missing volunteer

2007-04-15T00:59:00.000-05:00

A fellow volunteer went hiking last sunday and hasn't been seen since. There's a huge PC/Embassy search party looking for her, but it's already been a week, that can't be good. We're getting occasional updates but everyone is super freaked out, mainly because of the uncertainty of it all. I hope she's ok...

A photo tour around Calapan

2007-03-19T05:05:00.000-05:00

I thought some people might like to know what our town looks like and what our daily lives look like, so this past week I went and took some pictures of the various places we frequent and spend our time. This isn't everything because that would just be boring. You can click on any picture to see the larger version (as is true of every photo on the blog).

This is the downstairs part of our apartment. Abby just finished tiling the bathroom because she wants to be on the Filipino version of "This Old House."

Here is the front of our apartment. It used to be just a boring slab of concrete until we turned it into a kick ass outdoor seating area.

This is Block 1, our street. It's generally nice and quiet, lots of families and kids and whatnot. What I left out of the picture was the vacant lot/garbage burning area.

Now to the untrained eye, this may look like a vacant marshy field. But no! It's so much more than that. It's a playground, a kite-flying area, a tricycle driver urinal, a grazing place for your goat/cow/water buffalo, a place to get firewood or look for edible leaves...

Signs like these are in every town in the Philippines. They may be encouraging you to avoid drugs, keep an eye out for crime, to recycle, or in this case, to keep the barangay clean. It roughly says "Let's band together! My dedication! My clean!" The sign next to it says "Don't throw your trash here." Good luck with that one buddy!

This is just a little welcome sign to our barangay. It listed who the captain and council are. They have these for every barangay, who knows how old this one is.

My favorite Filipino invention, the sari-sari ("everything") store. Your average block with have anywhere from one to twenty of these things, and you buy all sorts of stuff from them. Chips, vinegar, cigs, beer and booze, soy sauce, shampoo in single use packets, a single hard candy, candy, text load for your cell phone, sometimes veggies and eggs... I love 'em!

I know what I'm doing for my next birthday!

Tricycle drivers all lined up and waiting to yell at me. I mean, pick up passengers. These dudes will just sit around and wait forever for a fare. Behind them are awesome home-made kites for sale. It's summer, so it's also kite-flying season.

This is the gate that leads into the Capitolio complex, where I work. My office is down the left side, way in back.

Jose Leido National Memorial High School, where Abby works. Also known as "JJ" and "Lemnahis." Abby said this photo sucks, but tough, I'm using it anyway.

This is the main street through Calapan, Jose Rizal St. It's where most of the shops are, and traffic.

You think this looks bad, it's three times more crowded after school and work let out. I avoid this street like the plague from about 3pm-7pm.

A Filipino once asked me if Calapan was a big city. I said I didn't know. He then said, "Let me ask you this, is there a Jollibee in your town?" It's a fast food place, but in addition to burgers you can also get fried chicken and rice, taco hotdogs, spaghetti, something called a "tuna pie" and ice milk topped with purple yam and cheese. Awesome!

Citimart is kind of like a department store. We never go to that part of it, but they do have a sweet grocery store.

The market is a big complex, part inside, part outside. The fruit vendors are all outside and you can get some killer oranges and mangoes in this country. On the other side are the bootleg dvd vendors.

This is the main street by the market. It may look busy, but it's not. This was taken at about 2pm, and the market is really bumpin' around 7am.

This is the indoor wet-market. You can get fish and seafood, meat and veggies in here. Behind it is the dry market where you can get a ton of crap that was made in China.

An average veggie stand: japanese eggplant, tomatoes, bitter gourd (ampalaya) and a ton of stuff I only know the tagalog word for.

This meat sits out all day, so if we buy it, we make sure to get here early. In the heat of the day at 3pm, this place is enough to make you a vegetarian for life.

Random pictures

2007-03-19T03:17:00.000-05:00

Here are a few pictures from the past month or so, just to give you an idea of what we've been up to. My work is winding up, in starts and lurches, as Abby's work winds down for the summer break. She's actually going to be pretty busy over the summer, as she's doing a two week long workshop in Cebu City for about 300 teachers from the island of Mindinao on how to teach english. She and 7 other volunteers will be working with them to improve their english, and also to introduce new teaching techniques and teaching philosophies, games, visuals, etc.

We also have some travel plans coming up, both work related and for fun. We're going up to Puerto Galera on Thursday to help facilitate a three day youth camp for gifted kids from Laguna. It's going to be all about ecology and the environment, so Abby and I are helping with the games, and we'll also be helping work with the groups. Over Holy Week we're going to the island next to us, Marinduque, for the Moriones Festival. There are some volunteers who live there, and it's maybe 4-5 hours away, so it'll be a super cheap and fun weekend. We already saw the crazy people whipping themselves last year, so this time around we thought we'd opt for a less insane Holy Week celebration. Also, after Abby's workshop we're going to spend about a week of official vacation time down on the island of Bohol, which is home to the famous Chocolate Hills, the insane little Tarsier, dolphins and whales, hiking, waterfalls, camping, beaches, diving and snorkeling and is, according to our friend who lives there, pretty freakin' sweet. So here's hoping because it's gonna be expensive!

This is another awesome ray of light picture from Puerto Galera. I guess it's because of all the humidity in the air?

Abby visited two friends in other provinces for a week to work with their deaf programs. They hiked out into the hills around Limay, Bataan to visit with the tribe there and check in on their school.

This is the front of the school. A friend said "now that's a Peace Corps picture!"

Here's Abby with our neighbor Jaan. She was one of the "muses" at her school, which is who knows what. An excuse for little girls to get all dressed up!

Steady as she goes

2007-02-24T21:17:00.000-06:00

Well, it's been a pretty quiet month for us, just life as usual here. We went to Manila a week ago, both of us, because Abby had to get her final ear check (all healed, she's good to go), and I had to see someone about the allergies I've been having. I've never had allergies before, so it was strange that they would be so severe here, but there are all kinds of reasons. It's getting into summer now, which means dry season, but the last few months have been really wet, with a lot of mold growing. We also have no real way to close our windows, so dust and crap from outside can pretty much come in at will. Also, they're clearing out an empty lot across the street from us to build apartments, which involves burning everything they clear out of the space. They do love setting small brush fires here. So all of that together I guess, led to my allergies.

Also while we were in Manila I bought a bike. We we got here, Peace Corps would reimburse us up to P5000 for a bike, which is about $100, and not really enough for a bike of any quality. Then, in August they randomly upped the amount to P12000, or $240, which is a decent sum, and totally un-Peace Corps. They never up the money for anything! So I went to this bike shop in Manila and looked at all their crap bikes and ended up spending about 2 hrs there with the owner just going through a bike part by part, picking out exactly what I wanted, and then they built it for me there that day. Sweet service! So I now have a nice bike for riding to work, and riding around town, which is awesome because I was really missing my bike from back home.

That's kind of what it came down to here, finding different things to help occupy our time. Of course we have each other, and friends and work, but I was feeling a little bored on and off, and it's not that there's a lack of things to do around here, there are just different options. So we've started going to a gym that's down the street from us, and we're going to start doing some stuff to the apartment where we live to make it a little nicer. But that's mostly Abby's idea, I'm fine with it. The one area I do want to set up is our front area, which would be a nice place to sit, especially now that it's getting hotter.

Something I do miss from back home that I didn't realize until recently are green spaces. When we lived in the city I'd always ride my bike around Forest Park, and go sit with friends, play cards or frisbee, and just enjoy being outside. By and large, I don't particularly enjoy being outside here. There is no quiet space to just be, there's always people or traffic, and it's just not the same. We went to the Calapan Nature Park recently, and it was pretty much what we were expecting. Our best guess was some politician a while back was trying to get reelected so he built this park out in the middle of freakin' nowhere so he could say he built it, but there wasn't really any funding for it so now it's totally unused and uncared for, and not very nice. That's a fairly common story here, unfortunately, that things are just built, thrown up, so the person building it can say "Hey, look what I did," but then there's no funding for it afterwards and not much planning even goes into the actual construction. And then of course afterwards they have a dedication ceremony, they write their name on it or put their picture on it, or both, and that's the end of that. You would think in a country with a very limited budget they would guard every cent to make sure it's spent as wisely as possible, but the opposite is true. So anyway, all bitching aside, I miss (maintained) parks.

It's a lake inside a volcano in a lake that's inside a volcano!

2007-02-01T01:58:00.000-06:00

We went to a workshop last week on project planning and design, and it was... not as boring as it sounds. It was actually pretty cool and got my counterpart and me started on the right path. That path would be the one where I actually do something, and we complete a really awesome project. There will be more on that later. For now here are pictures from our hike at Lake Taal, which, as the title says, is a lake inside a volcano in a lake that's inside a volcano. It's like the Russian doll of lakes. Or volcanoes. The hike itself was ok, but we couldn't help imaging what it would be like in the US. It would be a calm, breezy hike up the side of the volcano, inside a beautiful and well maintained national park. Instead it was a shit-ton of lazy Korean tourists riding midget horses along a dusty path, overwhelming us, the only hikers, with dust and horse poop. I guess it's hard to appreciate open space when you live in a country that has the highest population density anywhere in the world (Metro Manila, 40,000+ per sq/km.).

We stayed at the Taal Lake Yacht Club. This is a view from our little covered hut.

Of course the term "yacht" is used very loosely here.

A fisherman out on the lake.

Rays of light coming through the clouds.

Here is an example of the average tourist. Work clothes, leather shoes, shoulder bag and of course, the same goofy straw hat every other businessman in his party was wearing.

The inner lake is supposed to have medicinal benefits. The shores are crusted with mineral deposits.

Our friend Carrie, me and Abby escaping the tourist hoards.

The little girl in the foreground said "Give me coins." Aren't kids cute?

Pagod na ako

2007-01-20T03:25:00.000-06:00

Oh, Philippines, you're so silly! So after 3 months of waiting for the rest of the info I needed for the Puerto Galera guidebook, they gave it to me last week, along with "We're having our [the organization's] one year anniversary on the 21st. Do you think you could have it done by then?" I mean, yeah, I can, but what the hell have you all been doing the last three months? It's really best not to try and answer that question.

So anyway, after a somewhat whirlwind tour of 12 resorts in the Puerto area, I came home and pounded it all out in a day. I'm a genius. It actually turned out really well, like, I'm not ashamed to have my name attached to it. Yet. There's still the possibility of horrible layout, terrible graphics and fuzzy, poorly shot photos, but for a brief moment it exists in that wonderful space where I'm the only one who's done anything to it, so I know it has to be good.

Unfortunately, my other ideas were not meant to be, such as a comprehensive website, and including a broader array of lodging choices (everything in the current guide is over $40 a night, which is really, really expensive for lodging in the Philippines). Anyway, I'm burnt out but feeling really good, so I thought I'd let you all know that.

New Camera

2007-01-04T23:26:00.000-06:00

We got a new camera for Christmas courtesy of my parents, so now we have no excuse not to post more pictures. There are a couple old ones in there too. Just click the pic to see a bigger version.

Our Thanksgiving spread: roast chicken, mashed sweet potatoes, stuffing, green beans, fruit salad, bread platter and apple pie. Pinakasarap!

I don't know why this photo is now tinged pink, it didn't used to be. Anyway, sweetest basketball court ever in Puerto Galera.

Beth and Adam, our island mates. Adam was in the Peace Corps in Guinea '98-'00 and is usually much hairier than that.

Despite my facial expression, I'm not that passionate about videoke. That's Noah, Patrick and Eprihim with me.

Beth's birthday apple pie, courtesy of Abby. Goes great with super cheap beer.

This is Kuya Iman, one of Adam and Beth's friends from Gloria, tearin' up the mic.

Celebrating NYE by ruining the inside of my mouth.

Abby's self-portrait during the NYE fireworks display.

Happy New Year

2007-01-03T02:39:00.000-06:00

After a tiring few days we're back at site, somewhat ready to actually work. Christmas was good, but at about 7pm Christmas Eve I started vomiting violently, every 10 minutes for about 3 hours, followed by a night of repeated bathroom trips. I'm still not sure what the cause of it was. At first I thought it was food poisoning from some leftovers I ate, but then it seems like I passed it along to two other people, so it must have been a virus. Needless to say I was in hell on Christmas Eve and so drained Christmas day all I did was sleep and lie down. Abby had a good time, our friend Carrie came down, so they just listened to music, made jewelry, ate and drank all day, followed up with National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, which was on tv and made us all feel a little closer to home.

Still a little under the weather but feeling better, we all went up to Puerto Galera to meet another friend and spend a few days on the beach. It had been raining here for weeks, but we got lucky with a few days of sun on the beach, so it was a really nice time. Unfortunately my bug got Carrie the day after we got there so she spent most of the time in bed feeling like crap and then went back home instead of coming with us on the rest of the trip. We went on a hike to a waterfall, ate a lot of awesome Italian Corner pizza and just generally relaxed, which was exactly what I needed.

After we parted ways with Carrie the three of us went down south to Gloria where our friends Adam and Beth live to celebrate Beth's birthday. We walked up to the house at about 5pm to the blaring sounds of videoke and some drunk Filipinos, which pretty much set the tone for the rest of the night. Their pinoy friends all came over, and so did some of our Peace Corps friends for a big dinner, with lots of spaghetti and Beer na Beer. The next morning as people left Abby and I were lazy and decided to hang out for another day so we just laid around playing dominoes and doing nothing. That night a friend from the batch previous to our's sent us a text that said "where the hell are you guys I thought you were coming to Boracay?!" We had cancelled because everyone had dropped out and we couldn't afford to pay for the hotel room by ourselves, but they had a house that a bunch of people were sharing, so with one change of clothing a piece, we set off the next day for a few days on Boracay.

Boracay is the main tourist destination in the Philippines, where most foreign visitors go. It's also a huge New Years Eve hotspot, and we thought it would be the most fun place to celebrate. It's an interesting island because it's still very rural, except for the tourist area and a sprinkling of huge houses throughout the countryside. The beach is everything you could possibly ask for from a tropical beach: pure white powdery sand, turquoise waters, palm trees lining the beach... And of course tons of great bars and restaurants. New Years Eve was really great, spent drinking on the beach with a huge fireworks display. We spent most of our time there, again, doing nothing, just swimming, eating, snorkeling. It was strange to be there though, because the beach part of it felt so un-Filipino. There were filipinos there, but they were well dressed, light skinned rich Filipinos from Manila, and then of course so many white people. I haven't heard that much English spoken by strangers in months.

On the incredibly over-crowded boat ride back to Mindoro I just stared into space and thought about work, since I officially can't read on boat, even with motion sickness medicine. I'm really excited about this new year, we have a budget again, my counterpart is excited to get going, the department has some decent and obtainable goals and I came up with some really killer ideas while I was sitting there. I think even if things don't pan out perfectly, people are interested in the work and that's all that really matters.

No birds, plenty of dogs

2006-12-16T00:32:00.000-06:00

Here's something weird: there are hardly any birds where we live. Or, from what I understand, in the Philippines in general. It has a lot to do with habitat loss, pollution, the endless supply of stray dogs and cats and of course, the fact that people ate them. I was told it's mostly due to the fact that they've all been eaten. It's weird though, here we are in this lush tropical country and I rarely hear a bird. I didn't really notice it though until fairly recently when we were at language camp. It was up in the hills a little ways from Manila, and off the road, so for the first time in almost nine months, it was quiet. You could still here that distant highway rumble, but for the most part it was almost deafeningly quiet. Then I noticed there were no birds signing, and I thought back and realized that I never heard or saw birds at site, or anywhere else for that matter. A little discussion with other volunteers and I was able to piece together that information. Weird, huh?

The interesting part about it for me though was not that there weren't any birds, but more the fact that there's such a constant barrage of noise here I didn't even notice for close to a year. Tricycles going by (even the smallest little 150cc bike sounds like a Harley because they don't have mufflers), jeepneys and cars honking, neighbors talking, kids yelling, people outside cooking, dogs barking, cats in heat yowling, roosters crowing, music (ours or the neighbors), chainsaws going, street vendors calling out "Taho!" (silken tofu with syrup) or "Toasted Siopao!" (toasted, steamed bun filled with pork), the ice cream man ringing his bell, the Nestle ice cream man playing that damn song over and over, the cigarette guy snapping his rubber band, sirens going off, loudspeakers blaring the national anthem over at the elementary school, the non-stop whir of the electric fan, rain pounding on corrugated metal roofing... It's crazy how much noise there is here, and you get used to it so fast. I don't notice most of that during the day, but I'm still able to list it off. I guess that's why I never noticed the lack of a few song birds.

It's official: Manila stinks

2006-11-27T02:31:00.000-06:00

Well, the big surgery adventure is over, and it was not as bad as I thought it would be. For those of you who don't know, Abby has had an ear infection on and off since May and due to various factors, it ate a hole in her eardrum. After about two months of travelling to Manila every week to see the doctor, PC Philippines consulted with PC Washington, who decided she could reasonably get the surgery done here. We were skeptical to say the least because provincial hospitals leave a lot to be desired, like doctors, or equipment. But hospitals in Manila are a lot nicer, and we actually ended up going to the newest and nicest hospital in Manila. It was even nicer than Makati Medical Center, which is, as my host father explained, "Where movie stars go." I would say it was even as nice as an American hospital. So anyway she got top notch care, terrible hospital food and I slept on some kind of fold out chair that was really uncomfortable and of course, way too short. The doctor decided she needed to stay in Manila for a week, so after a little dicking around with Peace Corps, they put us up in what was to us a luxury hotel. All that meant was a private room with a tv and minifridge, but it was a lot better than getting stuck in a room at the pension we normally get sent to. She was in some pain, and rested the first day or two, but we did some Christmas shopping and saw the new Bond movie, so it wasn't a total loss. Other than that we stayed in bed until 2pm every day and ate some cheese.

Manila is kind of fun in small bursts, but it quickly gets old. The pollution gets you coughing after a few days, the poverty becomes depressing, the puddles of piss and street grime blacken the soles of your feet and you can't stand to see one more hooker. The area we stay in Manila is called Malate, which is actually a pretty nice area. There are a lot of hotels and tourists, some pretty good restaurants and even a few good bars. But with tourists come beggers and GROs (Guest Relations Officers [prostitutes]). Every fifth bar you pass is a GRO bar with a gaggle of little Filipino girls in small dresses standing outside (by little I mean in size, not in age), trying to get people to come in. In and of itself its nothing new, but seeing it over and over for an extended period of time, it starts to become depressing. And seeing these beautiful Filipino girls in their early 20s/late teens with fat, ugly white guys gets depressing too. The poverty there is also weird because Manila is way richer than the rest of the Philippines, so the poor stand out way more. Out here in the provinces everyone is poor, with the exception of a few people, so it's just a way of life. People are poor, but still generally happy, they have a home and a family, they still participate in daily life, going to the market, farming, whatever their thing is. In Manila it's by and large dirty shoeless kids, a good portion of which sniff something called "rugby," which is just industrial strength glue, to kill their hunger. Seeing a brand new car drive by a woman in rags putting her two kids to sleep in a pile of trash is fucking brutal. Top all of that off with the fact that Manila is drenched in piss and is full of terrible smells, and we were more than ready to come back to site after our week there.

Thanksgiving was really nice, we went down south on our island to hang out with some friends in their nipa hut. They built it themselves; its the traditional Filipino home, made of bamboo and nipa leaves. It's really nice though, they're out in the country a little bit, so it's quieter and more relaxed out where they live. Not that where we live is that crazy, but it's still a city. Since they're vegetarians we roasted a chicken at our place and brought it down, as well as a homemade apple pie and some Stovetop stuffing from home, and they made mashed sweet potatoes, fruit salad and green bean casserole. Top that off with a little wine and brandy and we had a feast. It was really nice and relaxing, and it was great to be able to pull off a semi-traditional Thanksgiving, since that is my favorite holiday and all.

Po troubles

2006-11-01T01:50:00.000-06:00

Something that's interesting and a little frustrating for me in trying to use Tagalog is the word "po." It's not even really a word. In english it would be a tone of voice, or maybe a manner of speaking to someone. Basically, by adding "po" at various points during a sentence you are showing the person you're speaking to respect. You really only use it when speaking to older people, especially older people of some importance (mayor, your boss, etc). Some places use it more than others, some places use "ho" more often, which is slightly less formal. They use "po" a lot in Manila, apparently, and I'd say they use it a lot on Mindoro too. At least I do. Actually I probably over use it simply because I'm still not %100 on the terms and conditions of using it. I think the main problem for an english speaker is that we don't really have a direct equivalent to it. I think "sir" or "ma'am" is about as close as we get, and even then you probably have to think of 1950s US when that was much more common. Basically to give a quick example I'll give you a few very common ways it's used. The word for "yes" in Tagalog is "Oo" (pronounced 'o' and then 'o'). If you want to say yes in a respectful way, you say "Opo." "Good morning" is "Magandang umaga" but if you want to make it respectful, you just add a "po" (magandang umaga po). When you get into sentences it gets a little more complicated as the po does not always get attached to the end, for example "Magcano po ang pamasaje?" is a respectful way of asking how much fare is (for the bus, etc).

Now people say the english language, and American english in particular, is very informal, which is somewhat true, I suppose. We have less formality built directly into our language, but although there are many informal workplaces, I think it's safe to say most business still maintain some sense of formality. There's the tone and manner you use with your boss, and then there's the one you use with your coworkers. I mean, it's not like people here don't kid and joke with their superiors at work, but when it comes down to it there's still a hierarchy that people stick to. And out on the street, I'm not "sir-ing" and "ma'am-ing" every older person I see, and even if I do start out respectful with certain people, that usually breaks down after a while into a more informal tone. My problem here is I still am not sure about those kinds of things. Don't get me wrong, it's not that big of a deal. If I "po" someone I'm not supposed to, or I forget to "po" someone I am supposed to, it doesn't make that much of a difference, especially since I'm a foreigner. They're amazed I know anything at all (and rightly so). But I'm always wondering if I should "opo" the older tricycle driver or waiter. I mean, they're older than me, but they're also serving me. Is there a point at which you stop "po-ing" someone and speak more informally? I've discovered there is, but I still feel uncomfortable sometimes.

It basically just comes down to me wanting to learn the language a little quicker, because as true as this in most countries, it's doubly true here: you are automatically labeled "sucker tourist" from the get go, and knowing language is the only way to counteract that. The funny side effect to that though is that if you do know even the smallest bit of language, they automatically assume you are a missionary. I thought that was really weird that there are missionaries here since it's a roman-catholic country, but I forgot about the Mormons. Those little fresh faced kids in their white short-sleeved shirts and black ties are everywhere. There are also some born again types here too. I always get a laugh out of it though because they always ask me when I'm sitting shirtless on a beach drinking a beer or something, and I just want to ask them "do I look like a Mormon?"

The whole tourist image is an impossible and very annoying image to shake however, and it can really annoy you sometimes. Basically the only white people who come here or live here are rich by provincial standards, even if they're just dirty backpackers. Some guy asks them for p100 ($2) for a 15 minute tricycle ride and they think that's cheap, or normal price because they don't know any better, so they go along with it, even though it's double, triple the price. We were in a cab once in Manila, and the cabbie told us that an American had once paid him p3000 ($60) for a ride down to Batangas, which is about 2 hrs away from Manila. That's a great price by American standards, but the bus ride down there is p150 ($3). So it's no wonder people try and rip us off. And for us we know the prices, we know how to bargain, so it's much less of a problem. Unfortunately (I forgot to mention this in the last post), but the downside of living near a tourist destination is being labeled a tourist in your own town. More than a few times I've had this conversation, in Tagalog, with a tricycle driver:

"Where are you going?"
"Sta Maria Village" (the name of our barangay)
"Ok"
Two minutes later he sticks his head in an says:
"Jeepney terminal?"
"No, Santa maria village"
"Puerto Galera?"
"NO! Sta maria village!"
"Ok"
3 minutes later:
"Jeepney terminal?"

Pretty much except for the people we know and the places we frequent, we are assumed to be a) from Puerto Galera or b) traveling through to Boracay. Or secret choice c) Mormom missionaries. Ahhh! But by and large, it's not that much of a problem. Mostly people take us where we want, for the right price without having to quibble with them, and only occasionally do they try and rip us off, so it's not as bad as maybe I just made it sound, but sometimes, when you're having a rough day and you're tired, it's the last thing you want to deal with.

Keepin' it real

2006-10-23T04:16:00.000-05:00

We've really grown to like our site, the city we live in, but recently we found a reason to like it even more. We found a campground up in Puerto Galera that's right on the beach and only p100 ($2) a night person, so we can take a long weekend up there on the beach that includes eating out, going out at night and a few extras (like p200 [$4] hour long massages on the beach) for about p2000 ($40). We recently went up there for a few days (which turned into five) to hang out, and also so I could do a little research for the guidebook I'm writing. I was recently contacted by the guy I know at the World Wildlife Foundation up in Puerto because he had heard I was an English major, and he asked if I would like to help them write their guidebook. Basically they are trying to develop a small guidebook they can sell cheaply to tourists to help generate some income. They actually hired someone to do this for them, but she did such a lame job they scrapped the whole thing, and that's where my will-work-for-free ass comes into the picture. It's actually really exciting to be working on this, because even though it's a small guidebook (passport sized, about 30 pages), it will be completely written by me, and I'm going to assist with the layout and overall design too. On top of that I'm in charge of developing the official Puerto Galera website and I'll be working with them to create a project proposal to increase upland tourism!

They will be giving me a list of the hotels and restaurants they want to include, so in the meantime I walked around the three tourist hotspots and wrote down where basic services were, like internet cafes, banks, grocery stores, public transportation, etc. We also went to some of the tourist attractions they want me to include, one of which was a very nice hike up to a waterfall. In my opinion their problem could be easily fixed with little to no money by simply labeling where the hell stuff is. To actually get to the "trail" that led to the waterfall, we had to ask at least 10 people where it was. Basically we'd walk 50 or 100 meters until we were lost again, stop, ask someone, be told we would never find it and that we needed a guide, and then eventually be pointed in some vague direction. That's the thing about Filipinos: they can't give directions for shit. You ask someone where something is, and the usual response is a lip point in some random direction (they don't point with their fingers, it's rude. They point by making a "kissy face" and nodding their head in the direction they want you to go) and the word "Doon" which means "over there." It was fine for us because we're used to it, but I'm guessing your average tourist isn't going to want to bumble around some little village stopping to ask for directions every 5 minutes. That's where I come in, making simple suggestions like "why don't you put a sign out on the road?" and "tie some colored tape around a tree every now and then so people know they're on the right trail and not some goat path."

The beach itself was really nice. After 3 days there we wanted to leave because in typical American fashion, we were done with what we needed to do and couldn't think of anything else to do. God forbid we spend even an idle minute on vacation! We must be doing something! We eventually loosened up and relaxed and spend the next two days getting up and going for a swim, eating breakfast, going for another swim, reading, eating lunch, swimming, reading, dinner, beer, sleep. I think after 7 months in country we've finally chilled the hell out and are able to enjoy doing nothing at all. It was hard to do, there's 24 years of American upbringing that wouldn't let us sit still, but now a morning where all you accomplish is drinking some coffee and watching the news is quite possibly the greatest thing ever.

Sheet metal flies well

2006-09-28T21:50:00.000-05:00

So stuff happened this month, mostly went down to Iloilo City on the island of Panay for PST2, the technical portion of our training. It was pretty good, lots of hands on training, most of which should at least be a little useful.

I'm at the Peace Corps office right now, the building is running on generator power because the entire city is still without electricity. We came up on Tuesday for a brief doctor's visit for Abby, and ended up getting stuck here because Manila was hit by a signal 3 typhoon. I'm not sure what that is in American terms, but we heard on the radio before the power died that it had sustained winds of 220 kph and gusts of 260. We were up on the 4th floor of the pension we were at, which luckily for us was on the leeward side of the building, so we were able to stand out on the balcony and see the storm kick Manila's ass. Its interesting watching something like that in a city of poorly constructed buildings because huge sheets of roofing were flying by, plexiglass, etc. It was really pretty cool actually because I've never been in a hurricane before, just some big thunder storms in St. Louis

Money, that's what I want

2006-08-31T21:35:00.000-05:00

Thank the lord, we have money again. We were down to some wanton wrappers, spices and half a package of noodles. We just went to the market yesterday and stocked up, so now we're back in business. You think moving is hard back home, try starting from scratch on a volunteer's "salary." Salary is in quotes because we've been told by the Peace Corps a million times, we are not employees of the Peace Corps. It's like we're covert ops over here. If we are caught they will disavow any knowledge of us. Yet, they still tax our non-earnings. How can you tax it if it doesn't exist? Somehow the government has found a way.

We have a few last things to buy for the house, the two biggest being wood for shelves, and a bbq. We've had books and other random junk sitting in boxes on our floor for a month because we had nowhere else to put it and no money to buy anything, but we're going to buy some planks today to build some quality cinder block and plank shelves. They're going to be beautiful. I'm really excited about the grill though. It's good grilling weather here all year round, and it's a nice change of pace, having grilled meat or veggies. Plus then we don't have to heat up the kitchen to near sauna-like levels. I have to cook with my shirt off because I'm dripping with sweat by the time I'm done with a meal. Of course my shirt is always off because I'm always dripping with sweat, so that's nothing new. It was pretty funny, speaking of meat, the other day we were watching a cooking show on cable, and the lady was making steak. She was talking about the different types of steak you can buy, and both of us thought of our options here. We have beef short ribs and a giant leg hanging off a hook. If you don't want ribs, you tell the guy how much beef you want and he whacks it off the leg. It's good for kabobs though, and tonight we're making beef bourguignon. For all the bitching we do to each other about the food we miss, we eat really well here. I think it was mostly last month though because we had no money to buy meat, or anything other than veggies, noodles and rice.

In other news, we got a kitty! We were totally against getting a pet, but the stars aligned perfectly, so we couldn't help ourselves. Our next door neighbor's pseudo-pet cat had kittens, and they offered one to us. So we looked around, and you can buy cat food at this one "pet" store (mostly pig and chicken feed), we can get sand for the litter box, they have free vet service here so we got her de-wormed and can get her a rabies shot (and fixed), and one of Abby's coworkers already has a cat, and he volunteered to take her when we leave. So we just couldn't help ourselves. She's a little orange and white cat we've named Beatrix. She's really playful, learned her catbox on the first day and sleeps with us under the sheet every night. It's nice having a cat again.

We have cable

2006-08-18T04:24:00.000-05:00

I had to join the Peace Corps and come to the Philippines to get cable. How weird is that? Our host brothers were in here playing some online video game that every kid here loves, and I didn't see them. They just came up to me and said hi, and that they missed us. Awww!

Everything here is cool. We moved into our place two weeks ago, and it is awesome. We have it pretty well set up, painted the floor and it's become really comfortable. It's pretty nice to be able to just do our own thing without being in someone's way, or vise versa. We still have a few small things to get next month when we get paid, because the cost of moving in has left us with no more money. I'll try to put some pictures up, but that's a lot harder than it sounds when you don't have an internet connection in your house.

We have a bunch of stuff coming up soon. We're going up to White Beach in Puerto Galera at the beginning of September with some friends to celebrate our birthdays, and just to get away from site. I'm definitely getting a little stir crazy here. White Beach is one of the more popular beaches around the Philippines, lots of bars and restaurants, and of course, a big, long white beach. We've been there before during our summer (march-may), and it was packed. The tourism there is mostly Filipino though, so it totally dies off after summer and every place reduces their rates anywhere from %50-%75, so it's a great deal.

Right after that we are going to PST2, which is mistitled because it's not preservice training, it's just more training. For some reason they don't do any technical training before you come to site, they save that for three months in. Word on the street is that they're going to change that though. We just got a new country director and he's really shaking up the program, in a fairly positive way from what I've heard. My training is down in Iloilo City on the island of Panay, which is supposed to be really beautiful, and a fun town. Abby and the other education people have to go to Cavite, which I consider Manila's butthole. We were there for our first week and it's just ugly and boring. I actually have a fair amount of travel because I'll be going to Cebu City in October with work for a conference on marine sanctuaries. Abby is going to try and come too, we might turn it into a little vacation afterwards and take the chance to visit other islands in the Visayas.

That's pretty much it for now. Work is chugging along. I just got involved with a project that's part mangrove reserve, part crab farming, so I get to help raise crabs with a crazy old guy who really wants me to take a second wife. It's too bad the crabs are mudcrabs, and they harvest them too early so they're these little useless things with hardly any meat. For a country that gets most of its protein from fish, they don't seem to understand much about it. You know, I'm all like "can a get a tuna steak up in this piece?!" But no, I have to eat tiny, bone filled fish, or worse yet, dried, fried fish, for breakfast. Actually they have some pretty good seafood, we've been buying live prawns, then shelling them and fryin 'em up. Masarap!

we are no longer pissed

2006-08-03T01:34:00.000-05:00

So everything ended up working out because we are awesome. Actually it's our RM who's awesome, we're just pretty cool. We filled out all the paperwork and then wrote a letter to him explaining the situation, so he gave us the green light and now my hands smell like bleach from scrubbing our new place. It's in surprisingly good shape, just a little dirty from sitting empty for a while. I personally think we got a sweet deal, because after seeing the other crap for rent around here, we're actually living somewhere that doesn't smell like piss or have huge leaking problems. It's two stories, the bottom floor is just an open room, with a bathroom and a kitchen at the end of it. The bathroom is pretty scary, we're going to have to do some work on it so we don't feel like we're showering in a killer's basement. We have a little space out back for doing laundry and we were thinking about making a place to sit, but the communal river of funk flows (or rather stagnates) back there, so I don't think we'll be doing much relaxing there. The river of funk is basically the runoff water from people's kitchens and bathrooms. Here in the city the toilet drains somewhere (septic tank, central system, I don't know), but all other drains lead outside. You can see light through the kitchen sink because it's just a pipe that pops out of the back of the house, and the bathroom drain (for shower water) is literally just a hole at the bottom of the wall. So this water drains out of everyone's house on the block and collects in a ditch that runs along the back of everyone's property. It's not really angled from what I can tell, so the water just tends to sit there and look horrible.

Upstairs is really the selling point of the house. It's two big, open rooms with actual closets and tons of windows. The entire wall is all windows, more or less. So it's very breezy and light up there, which really helps accent the hard wood floors. That's right, hard wood floors. How cool is that? The house also happens to be in a very nice part of town that has cute little streets with lots of families and people out in the street at night, hanging out. It's also a 10 minute walk to my work and a 5 minute walk to abby's work, so we won't have to spend a bunch of money taking the tricycles back and forth. And, there's a sweet bar right down the street. So all in all we're very excited. We've been shopping for things for the house, but had to go to Batangas across the bay to get some things for cheaper. We have all the basics now, plates and cups, a pot and a pan, buckets for showering, tubs for washing clothes, a double burner... We also bought a sofa set that's a sofa, two armchairs and two tables. It's not really a sofa though, maybe calling it a futon that doesn't fold down would be a better description. The tables will come in handy because now we have somewhere to eat. We're also getting a fridge because we can afford one here. The funny thing about the Peace Corps is that we make a decent amount by filipino standards. A while ago I was reading our provincial profile at work and they had the households divided up into tiers based on their annual income. The top bracket was P500,000+ a year ($10,000), the second bracket was P250,000-500,000, which is where we fall. So even as volunteers we make more than about %85 of the population on our island. An interesting side note to that is that the average annual income of a family of 8 here on Oriental Mindoro is p88,000 ($1,690). Things are cheap here, but not THAT cheap.

This week I went with 8 of my coworkers (all in the same car) down to Bulalacao, which is our southern-most municipality. It's not too far distance-wise, but it takes forever to get there, partly because the last 30km takes 2 hours to travel. We have a pretty nice main 2 lane highway here, because a while ago the national government decided to make Oriental Mindoro an alternate route down to the Visayas. However, once you pass the town of Roxas, where the port is, they didn't feel like putting any more money into the project, so it peeters out into a rocky mud pit. It's beautiful country down there though, kind of like a tropical Scottish highlands with mist covered green hills and a lush carpeting of rice fields. It is also home to a lot of the indigenous Mangyans and the worst poverty on the island. It's where you get down to ramshackle bamboo huts and no electricity or water. Bulalacao is a fairly nondescript, sleepy little town with great fish. If you're into eating endangered fish you can get some yellow fin tuna down there for about $1.50 a kilo. We went down there to have a meeting with some fisherman, but it was mostly an excuse for all of us to go somewhere and hang out, which was fine with me. I'm slowly accepting the pace of work here, which is good for me because I feel less bored and annoyed. My job continues to be my one sticking point, but things are happening and I guess that why we're here for 2 years: because it takes 6 months to even begin to start to think about doing something!

We are starting to get pissed

2006-07-16T00:59:00.000-05:00

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

2006-07-04T00:34:00.000-05:00

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.

Singing

2006-06-18T02:25:00.000-05:00

I think one of the things I like most about living abroad is that you become an amateur anthropologist. You study people and you try to make guesses and assumptions so you can try to figure out what the hell is going on. So, in my studies here, I have figured out two key facts: Filipinos love cell phones and videoke. Now, I didn't say I was I was a good anthropologist, but that's what I've figured out. Everyone here has a cell phone, even if they're dirt poor (because you can buy time in 30 cent units, if you want to) and they use them all the time. On the jeepneys, during meetings, while talking to one another. It's neither uncommon nor rude to whip out your cell phone in the middle of a conversation and reply to a text while still talking. It's funny, people back home bitch about cell phone etiquette, but it seems like the solution is just for everyone to get a cell phone, then no one cares. Also, the videoke thing. There is a machine in every restaurant or bar, and most people have a microphone at home. In fact, singing in general is just huge here. People sing along to songs in public, anytime there's a public event or competition singing is usually involved. Most commercials and tv shows have singing. It's hilarious. It's actually so prevalent that not only do I now sing videoke, but I actually like it.

Reality sets in

2006-06-13T20:26:00.000-05:00

So after a fairly boring 3 days in Los Banos, we are officially sworn in. We had to swear our allegiance to the constitution, and there was also something in there about defending America against our enemies? I don't know, it was a very odd thing to have to repeat back. So yay, replace our T's with V's, for we be official, yo. We took a few days in getting to our actual site by way of Manila, where we found probably the best hostel I have ever stayed in. For an aircon dorm room with its own bathroom, it was a whopping P200 ($4). This included a sweet balcony overlooking the city, free wifi, free coffee, a kitchen and communal fridge, and on Saturdays the owner has wine night. Needless to say, we're going back in July to watch the last game of the World Cup. Is anyone following the World Cup? Our family has cable, so we've been watching the games on the bad reception Japanese channel. Manila was a really nice 3 day break full of eating good food, drinking bad beer (actually, it's not so bad) and just checking out the city. Manila is huge (I think 12 million people), but not too difficult to get around. We went to Quiapo, or more specifically to Chinatown, and Abby discovered a whole street devoted to beads. She was in heaven. Actually, she got our friend Carrie into it, so now bead madness is sweeping the PC ladies. Well, three of them at least.

After Manila we got to site to, dun dun dun, start working. After 2 1/2 months of goofing off, it was a little nerve racking showing up to work. Not to mention both of us were taken everywhere possible and introduced to everyone and their mother (sometimes literally). Abby's boss got up at a conference and introduced her as the Peace Corps volunteer with a different last name than her husband, and no babies. For a country that is supposed to be very indirect, pinoys can say some startlingly upfront things. For example, our old host father said to us, in front of his 16 year old daughter, "she's not feeling well, she's on her period." Ha! I think an American girl would die of mortification is her father said that to guests. The work situation is good, but frustrating for both of us. We can both see that these will be good jobs and that we'll get along well with our co-workers but for the time being it's a lot of showing up and wandering around trying to figure out what's going on. It's much more self-directed than a normal job, and by that I mean it's totally self-directed. You have to find out what's going on, and then invite yourself to it. I think part of the problem is that I now have 2 desks, 2 (maybe 3) counterparts, 3 (maybe 4) offices and 1-3 "bosses." So basically I'm going to have to narrow my focus here at the beginning if only so I know which office I'm supposed to go to every morning. Unfortunately everyone is out of town this week, so that will have to wait until next week.

All job bitching aside, everything else is great. Our host family is very nice, there are three kids who are hilarious and very talkative (a radical change from our last host family where the girls maybe said 8 words to me between the two of them over the course of our 2 month stay). The 9 year old likes to watch movies and then point to things and say "Kuya Owen, is that how it is in America?" My answer is yes, if you're very rich and live in New York. Also, and this is a biggie, we get to cook our own food! Maybe that needs two exclamation points. Cook our own food!! Now don't get me wrong, Filipino food is great, we still eat with the host fam sometimes, but pinoys have this habit of deep-frying fried eggs. And there's a lot of boiled meat and vegetables going on. And they have this stuff called tuna spread which is just tuna flavored mayo and definitely NOT tuna salad despite their claims that it is. So it's nice to be able to make spaghettii that doesn't have sugar and hot dogs in it, or a tuna salad sandwich, or curries. It's kind of a happy medium, I guess you could say. Also, Calapan is really nice, we keep discovering cool new places and there's a ton of exploring still ahead of us. For example, hiking on the 9000ft mountain that's a little ways away. Or taking a banka out to the three uninhabited white sand beach islets that are just off the shore. Puerto Galera is only an hour away and three hours away, 50km after the road ends, is Bulalacao, which is all white sand beaches and Mangyans (indigenous tribe), no tourists. We have a marine sanctuary project down there actually, so I'll get to visit it on the government's dime.

So all temporary job frustrations aside, everything is going really well here. Still sweating it out, but a little less so. Actually it'll start getting a little bit cooler over the next few months and during typhoon season it's supposed to be pretty nice (except for the 21 predicted typhoons of course). So, yeah...

Are we done? Yes. Yes we are.

2006-05-30T04:14:00.000-05:00

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.

More pics

2006-05-18T03:21:00.000-05:00

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.

Mindoro, the sequel

2006-05-07T04:15:00.000-05:00

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)!

Mindoro Oriental

2006-05-05T22:36:00.000-05:00

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...

Freakin' finally

2006-04-20T05:24:00.000-05:00

We know where we're going to be living finally. About 1 year 4 months into the overall process and we know what we'll be doing, who we'll be working with and where we'll be living. Abby and I will be in Calapan, Mindoro. It's a larger city, I think of about 100,000 people and it's the provincial capital. It's taken a second to get readjusted to the idea of living in a city since I think most of us assumed in the Peace Corps you live in the boonies in a hut, but I'm very happy with our placement. It supposed to be a very cool city and it's really close to a lot of good beaches and scuba spots. Actually Mindoro is known for its excellent scuba spots, and that's saying a lot since the Philippines is considered one of the best dive spots in the world. I'm going to be working with the provincial government helping with eco-tourism, reef restoration, flood control and a bunch of other semi-unrelated things. It sounds pretty cool because the government works with something like 12 municipalities around the province, so I'll be doing a lot of day travel around the island to different communities and working with them to set up programs and implement them. Abby is going to be working in a high school that has both a special ed and a deaf ed class, so she's very excited about the prospect of working with deaf kids. I can't say much more at this point since I haven't looked into it at all, and I'm kind of pressed for time, but yeah, it seems like it going to be awesome. We've been in Balanga the past two days for more training, and we're heading back now. We go to visit our site next week, so that'll be our first big travel experience since we're arrived here, and it'll be great to finally see the place. Also, we went swimming in the south china sea yesterday, and it was amazing. This country rocks. And now, look at some pictures.

This is a picture of the flagellents from behind. You can see their bloody backs.

Here they are from the front. They cover their faces to make it more of a personal sacrifice and less of a public display.

Here is where we had our water safety "lesson." Life is hard here.

Here is our host father Bhoy with his grandson Paul Lee.

They had a night time procession on Holy Thursday with lots of floats.

Here is a view across the fishponds from our town. As you can see, it's very nice. But, directly behind me is a lot of trash.

We walked over this rickety bamboo bridge to get out to the water at the mangrove nursery.

This is us in a tricycle, the best and usually cheapest way to travel short distances.

Magandang hapon

2006-04-09T03:45:00.000-05:00

It's official. Internet cafes here should be renamed internet video games rooms for boys under 16. The "cafe" part of the title is the most misleading, mostly because it's totally untrue. There is no coffee here, not even a cookie. It's just a room with computers. So maybe it should be called Internet Room on all of the signs.

We moved in with our host family a week ago, and they're awesome. The Estrella family consists of about 47 people by my estimation, most of whom come and leave throughout the day. There are 6 kids, a few grandchildren, grandparents, aunts, uncles, um, second cousins... I don't know. I can't remember half their names, but if they're female and under the age of 25, it doesn't matter anyway because they're all too shy to talk to me. Well, that's not true, they are warming up, but it's been a slow process that involved a lot of card playing. We've played uno, canasta, skip-bo and my new favorite game, tongkit. It's kind of like rummy mixed with poker, only you throw in a ridiculous, incomprehensible betting system that I have yet to make any sense of. Luckily we play with pisos (2 cents). They have a nice little house though, mainly due to the fact that he worked in Japan for the last 9 years until he was sent home for being an illegal immigrant. It's funny actually, walking around town you can pick out who has a relative abroad and who doesn't. Cement walls, tile, a complete roof and a big TV? They have a relative abroad. Wood or sheet metal walls, coconut leaf or tin roof and a small tv? They're a fisherman. I've been talking to some people around town and apparently the use of dynamite in fishing has totally wrecked their catch. People come in from other provinces, blow the shit out of the fish population and then the net fisherman here are basically left with nothing. It's a huge problem, one that hopefully I'll get to help with.

We still don't know where we're going, but there's a lot of gossip, so we're about 95% sure now. Probably a small island, hopefully one that is well stocked with beer. When I first got here I heard about the barkada, which is a drinking circle of (male) friends who have some (or many) drinks and just generally shoot the shit. Then I learned most barkada drink gin or brandy and my enthusiasm waned. Nothing like a hot shot of gin from a communal cup, followed by a chaser of warm water. That sounds like the scientific formula for puke. Actually I briefly hung out with a few guys and had a shot of brandy, which had ice in it luckily, so it wasn't too bad. Which leads me to my next point, the Filipinos are friendly to the point of embarrassment (on my part). I walked by those guys a few days back and they yelled at me "Shot! Shot!" so of course I had to stop. But everywhere you go, there's food, coconut juice, mangoes, halo-halo (ice milk with beans and stuff), cookies, crackers... If I make the mistake of asking someone what a food item is, within 3 minutes that food item will be in front of me so I can find out for myself. The first three questions you get asked are: Are you married? Do you have kids? and Do you eat Filipino food? It works out really well though because Filipino food is the shit. Did you know you can buy a kilo of caught-that-morning fresh mussels for 20 cents? Well, you can.

I like fruit

2006-03-29T21:45:00.000-06:00

They have really great fruit here as you can probably imagine, and they practically force feed it to you. They have, in my opinion, and awesome tradition here of having something called a merienda which is basically a snack between breakfast and lunch and then again between lunch and dinner. It's nothing big, usually just fruit, or a little empanada, but it's great.

So let's see. We have wireless internet here in this "resort," hence my ability to post a lot, but there are internet cafes everywhere, so I'll probably be able to keep this up. We don't have a cell phone yet, but apparently it's the thing to do, especially in this country. We went to a mall nearby to by a surge protector, and every other store was a cell phone store. When I say every other store, I mean that literally. There would be a clothing store, and then a cell phone store and then a food stand and then a cell phone store and then an electronics store and then a cell phone cover store and so on. It was insane. But anyway it's really cheap, text messages are only a peso a piece, which is about 2 cents a pop. Someone here told me that Filipinos send more text messages than any other country in the world. My point is eventually we'll have one, and then we'll send out the number and people can call us if they want.

We found out a little more info the past few days about where we'll be going and what we'll be doing, so get out your maps. Abby and I are in a really good group of people who are going to be assigned to the MiMaPa 3 region (which isn't official by the way, that's a Peace Corps term). Basically it means a few things. One is that we'll be the only group learning Tagalog, which is the national language. The other 4 groups all learn the regional dialect/language of wherever they're going. So in the respect we have a real advantage because they speak Tagalog everywhere, whereas Cebuano or Iligano are only spoken in their respective regions. I thought that was pretty cool. Geographically, we'll be spending the next three months in the region of Bataan, which is north of Manila, but on the other side of the bay, basically. It's about a 4 hour bus ride away (or more, depending on Manila traffic), and we're going to be in the town of Balanga, which is supposed to be really great. They have coffee there (whoop whoop), and they're really close to a lot of great hiking and a lot of historical sites, mostly related to WWII. That's all we know for now. Out actual site could be anywhere in the region, which consists of provinces to the north of that, as well as one region to the south called Caminares Norte, and then the islands of Mindoro, Marinduque and Palawan. Basically I think we got a great placement so far.

We leave tomorrow to go the these "hub" sites for the rest of our pre-service training, and in a little less than a week we meet our host families and go off to live with them, so that's going to be awesome. I'm already planning to blow some minds with my cooking skills, plus guys don't cook so I thought that would be a fun cultural exchange. Anyway, Abby's waiting and I'm using all the internet time, so I'll write later from the hub site.

2006-03-25T22:12:00.000-06:00

I saw a monkey last night. I was walking through the compound and I looked up and there he was, just hanging out. At first it didn’t register, I was still looking for squirrels and house cats, but it was one of those things that actually confirms for you that you are somewhere different.

Anyway, enough about the monkey. Everything has gone really well so far, and smoothly too. It’s been kind of weird, actually, traveling and not having to deal with any hang-ups or delays. Detroit was fine, if not a little boring. It had that “first day of class” feel about it, where you spend all of your time introducing yourself to everyone and talking about your only shared interest: the fact that you’re all there. It has been neat meeting everyone though, because I envisioned being surrounded by a bunch of 20-somethings who all wanted to change the world. It turns out that we have a very diverse (and large) group, with people of all ages and backgrounds. We have a surprisingly large contingent of older people, probably about 6 or 7 of them over 50. It’s been cool getting to know people better though because a lot of people have really interesting stories. One guy was recently over in Thailand teaching for 3 years. Another was raised in India. One guy was over in Melbourne waiting tables while he was going through the whole process. It’s nice to be with a group of intelligent, well rounded people. Not that there aren’t also people who are fresh out of college and have never flown on a plane, but hey, they’re here.

Right now we’re outside of Manila in this weird resort-y kind of complex with a “zoo” and giant pool complete with rickety water slides and various other strange diversions, but all in all it’s pretty nice. Never having been to a resort before I have nothing to compare it to, but I was expecting to just be in some hotel, so I really can’t complain. Actually, so far the Peace Corps has just been throwing money at us. I mean, we each got $160 for 2 days back in Detroit. Granted, we only got 585 pesos ($11) here for the whole week, but still. Yesterday about 5 of us took a jeepney into the nearest city center and walked around a little bit. There’s a huge mall here called SM (Shoe Mart), but we didn’t go in. We actually passed a lot of cool looking places though, a big market, little stalls of that sold various meats on sticks, that kind of thing. The resort is a little confining, so I imagine we’ll explore more since we’ll be here for about 4 more days. As you can tell from my incoherent thoughts, we’ve all had a fair amount of info to process so far.

We’ll have a lot more to do it sounds like, more orientation here, a visit to the embassy, training, etc. We’ll meet our host families in about a week and a half, which I’m very excited about. It’ll be nice to progress out of the confines of this initial orientation and actually sort of start our lives here. Well, I’m tired of typing and I’m not sure what the write next, so I’ll just save it until the next update.

Welp...

2006-03-20T13:52:00.000-06:00

Well, this is our last day here in St. Louis. Today has been pretty nuts because although we've actually done some pre-packing, there are still a lot of things to pack, last minute details to take care of, etc. We've been been on over-drive since about 8:30 this morning, running around the house, making trips to get boxes and taking things over to Abby's parents house. I finally took a minute to eat some left-over chinese and sit down for a second before plunging back in.

It looks like we'll be pretty much down to the wire here, but hopefully tomorrow's an easy day because I'm going to be dead tired. We have about two days of training in Detroit (well, actually at a hotel by the airport in a suburb of Detroit), and I can only imagine what a blast that will be. Filling out forms, getting inoculations! It's going to be a blast. Oh well. This is about as much time as I can spare, so backing to packing and my next post will be from the warm, polluted confines of Manila. Hooray!

Packing sucks

2006-02-28T15:22:00.000-06:00

Well, we've started packing, and even though we don't have much, we sure have a lot of crap. Despite the fact I've moved quite a few times, I can't imagine how long it must take to pack up an actual home, with kids and good china and lots of furniture you want to keep. We're keeping some of our stuff, but most of it isn't worth holding onto, so we're selling some, donating some, and throwing away a lot. For instance: the old brown chair that was found in a parking garage 4 years ago? Probably not going to move that again...

Really, other than that, everything is going swimmingly. We actually have a small amount of savings, we have our plane tickets, everything is more or less ready to go. Now we just have to pack up, enjoy our last three weeks with cheese and milk, and kiss this place goodbye!

Look at me Ma, I'm on the internets!!!!

2006-02-01T12:09:00.000-06:00

I don't really have anything important to say, I'm just creating this post to see how everything works. Basically, I'm going to try and post here with some frequency, and I think Abby will too, if she wants. I figured this would be better than sending emails to everyone, and this way people can check here whenever they want. Besides posts, you can also put up to about 300mb of pictures on here too, so I'm going to try adding photos as we take them. Take for example this one:

Wow, that's great. Anyway, I don't know why I'm bothering to explain what's going to be here. It shall all become clear in due time (fade out)...