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!
Friday, August 18, 2006
Thursday, August 03, 2006
we are no longer pissed
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!
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!
Sunday, July 16, 2006
We are starting to get pissed
Ok, I'll keep this brief so the entire post isn't just me bitching. But you see, we belong to this organization that is drowning us in arbitrary and ridiculous rules. We like our host family a lot, the kids are fun to hang out with, but it's just them. The mom works in another town all week, so grandma next door and the housekeeper take care of the kids. We also cook our own food, seeing as how we're 24 and fairly capable of taking care of ourselves. We have also found a really nice house, 2 bedrooms, tiny kitchen, bright airy upstairs that we would really like to move into because living with other people is, quite frankly, starting to drive us fucking nuts. However, we are not allowed to move because you have to spend 3 months with this host family as well (for a total of 6 months living with families). Now, the reasoning behind this is that living with a host family helps your language, it helps your adjustment and it helps to integrate you into the community. As I've mentioned before, we don't really live with a family. It's more like we rent a (tiny) bedroom from them. We also live in a city of 100,000 people and plan on living in a different barangay anyway, so the community integration issue is a moot point. We also have friends and co-workers who we see everyday, and so far have been about %98 of our social contact. Not the "family." So why then are we not allowed to move? BECAUSE THEY HAVE A RULE! And if you have a rule, it can't be broken.
So anyway, we almost literally can't stand it anymore, not having our own space, our own things, so we're telling our regional manager that we are moving. We're not going to stay in a situation that's making us unhappy (and apathetic might I add), and the house we found is really awesome. It's going to make a huge difference.
Everything else is going really well, saw some friends this past weekend, which was a little breath of fresh air. Two weeks ago I went out to a rural barangay to help commemorate the launching of a fish sanctuary, and it was a real trip. The only way to get to this place is an hour boat ride, or a half day hike through the mountains, which means for people who can only justify using their boats to fish, every time they need something from town, it's a day long journey. We went out with maybe 12 coworkers of mine and we also inexplicably brought along 5 thoroughly bored looking, heavily armed guys. 4 with M-16s and one guy with an uzi. Now, I'm not sure why we had to bring along 5 guys with guns, but we did. The event itself was pretty fun. They had a table set up on the beach, loaded with two giant smoked, rainbow colored fish, and about 6 cases of beer and a dozen bottles of gin (we arrived at 9am). The ceremony was brief, consisting mostly of people acknowledging the other people who were there, and then we were able to get down to some serious business. After the speeches the women all made themselves scarce and we broke out the booze. The fish was delicious and the beer, well, it was warm and flat. That's ok though, you can't blame them, they only get electricity from 6pm until 9pm when they turn on the town's rickety diesel generator. Being the celebrity that I am, I was given both my own fish and my own bottle of beer, instead of sharing communally, which actually just made me feel like a leper, so I kind of worked my way into a circle. Since the beer is warm, and people want to drink, you fill your glass up, pound it, shake it out and pass it on.
Meanwhile the gun toting dudes are hanging out, leaning on their guns, and then the guy with the uzi sends his loaded gun clattering across the rocks on the beach and I took that as my cue to get up and move far away. I sat down next to one of the M-16 guys who had taken his clip out and was performing a delicate operation on the safety of his gun by bashing it with a rock. I won't say I was afraid of getting shot, but these guys didn't make me feel any safer from the invisible threat.
So as we said goodbye to the increasingly drunk fisherman and set out on our dangerously overcrowded boat, a school of flying fish sailed ahead the bow of our ship. The sun was beating down and the frothy waves reflected millions of points of light. It had been a good day.
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.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Soccer and housing
The title more or less sums up what we've been doing with our free time. Not really, but it's a good visual image to start with. The World Cup has been awesome, I don't know if anyone back home is watching, but it's going to be a really good final. We're getting together with a few friends to watch the final two games, and also to see some other Americans so we can bitch non-stop about all the goofy shit that bothers us. Actually, today is the 4th of July and we were invited down to Romblon, but it takes two days to get there, and two days to get back, so that would have been a lot of work for just one day. Plus, we can't really take time off work just yet. It has only been a month, after all. So instead we're going to cook hamburgers I think, and hopefully shoot off some cheap fireworks, if we can find them. They don't really do much to celebrate their independence day here, it costs too much to buy fireworks.
Which brings me to house hunting. As you might imagine there are no listings here for rentals, so you either have to walk around and occasionally write down phone numbers off of signs, or you have to know someone (who knows someone who knows someone). So far we haven't been very lucky, but Abby looked at a house today with her coworker, so maybe it'll be great and we can stop looking. I'm not holding out much hope though after the two places we've looked at so far. One was a store front. Yes, not a house or apartment, but the room where a little store used to be. So, seeing as how it was a store, it had no kitchen and no real bathroom to speak of. Oh, and it also floods and smells like cat pee and she wanted about 3x what is was worth. So, we politely declined that gem. We looked at another house that was nice, with a little patio, but it would have been really small for two people, and since the Peace Corps gives us a decent amount for rent between the two of us, we felt we could do better. I'm not too concerned about the place, I just want a nice outdoor space and as little traffic as possible.
Speaking of money, at work we have these people called "casual employees." They come to work everyday, do field work, write reports, file paper work but the catch is they only get paid if there's money to pay them. One of the guys who works as a casual employee at the municipality where our friend Beth works has not been paid in months because there's no money in the budget for him. But the office needs him, and he can't leave a job where at some point he might get paid, because someone else will take it and then he definitely won't get any money. That's the problem with a country that has a high population but is still mostly agricultural out in the provinces. There are a lot of skilled people but very few jobs for them. As of 2004 there were 87 million people living in a country that's slightly bigger than Arizona.
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.
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