So I’ve been really busy lately. Moved to Northern Luzon, started learnin Ilocano and my job and living with an awesome host family. So, instead of writing on my short Internet time, here are some pictures:

These are from our day at the river for breakfast with my family and then the afternoon at t beach/on a boat in the ocean

I’ll have real posts soon, I promise!

Mangoes, Malaria Pills, and Broken English

It’s been a busy, exhausting few days. It’d take too long to really go through all that’s happened since I left Pittsburgh the morning of the 20th, so here’s a quick rundown and then a bit more detail about today:

19th – On one my last drives for the next 27 months, I got in the first car accident of my driving career. While driving Ashleigh to clinic at a hospital down a typical Pittsburgh wet, windy and steep hill, the car behind slammed into us. Her car fared okay, but the front of the other car was totaled. Had to peel the license plate off its hood.

20th – Staging. They put us in a hotel in downtown San Fran, which was nice, but no one had the time or energy to do anything about it. I ate a bad reuben for lunch, spent the afternoon with paperwork, icebreakers and boring policy speeches, and, after craving one final greasy, disgusting hamburger, settled for a delicious Meditteranean meal.

21st — The flight. It was long. Eleven hours to Tokyo, a couple hour layover and then four more to Manila. I watched a lot of movies. I still don’t have any impression of Manila. We landed around 11 p.m. and didn’t get out of the airport until close to one, so everything was dark and confusing, but the parts we drove through looked like the typical city — McDonalds, 7-11s, and bad drivers. They put us up in a compound — a nice resort really, but we’re trapped here — but we’re going back to Manila tomorrow to visit the Peace Corps office and the Mall of Asia, the biggest mall in Asia (the world?).

The place we’re staying is beautiful. Hills, a waterfall and green everywhere. Also, warm showers and running water. I’m for it.

23rd — Our first full day in the Philippines. We experienced: The first rice three-a-day; the first bit of Philippines’ rain; humidity we’ll never get used to; fantastic mangoes, even though it’s not mango season; and scary/exciting information about our upcoming lives here.

24th — We received our first malaria pills today, to be taken each Monday henceforth. These things can really mess you up. I take my first one after dinner tonight. Let  Malaria Mondays commence.

And, perhaps most interestingly, we split up into sectors to learn about our jobs for the first time. I didn’t learn much about what I’ll be doing hands-on — much of that depends on my situation, location and coworkers, not to mention I spend the next three months learning the job — but I did get some insight into the education system here in the Philippines. It’s a mess.

The public schooling system is comprised of 10 grades, six elementary and four high school. There’s no aptitude test entering  high school, so students are simply passed on up, though most of them are completely unprepared. And now you ask, just how unprepared, Dan? Let me tell you. The required score on an English aptitude used to be 75 percent. A few years ago, just .06 percent of the 1.2 million kids who took it reached that mark. That’s around just 8,100 students. When the required score was lowered to 30 percent, just around half of them passed. These kids can’t function in an English-speaking world.

That’s certainly a problem, but it wouldn’t be so bad if every other course in public high schools weren’t taught in English. If the students don’t know English, they also won’t know math or science or botany or whatever else they teach in high schools these days.

I know that the system is messed up in America too, that kids get passed along and that our science and math scores are slipping precipitously. But the problem’s here aren’t just about a poor academic education. It’s also one of the poorer countries in SE Asia, and poverty, sexual and physical abuse, and disease all follow. The goal isn’t to ensure a bunch of 15-year-olds memorize English grammar. It’s to try and help their lives improve, to help improve their living situation as a whole.

Also, eat at Rosa’s Legacy in Erie, Pa. Fantastic Dominican dining.

Peace Out

Welcome to my blog.

It’s currently a mostly empty work in progress that will hopefully someday look like a real, lived-in blog. In the meantime, readers, you’re stuck looking at a lot of empty space and way too many commas.

If you’re reading this, you probably know that I’m off to the Philippines in nine days, which seems both impossibly soon and infinitely far away. We’ll have a day-long crash-course in San Fran and then a three-month training period in the Philippines and then I work for two years. After that, who the hell knows.

But that’s really all I have to say about my imminent departure. Actual details are sparse. I’ll teach secondary English on one of the 7,107 islands. Language, Internet access, access to plumbing and all the other little details will be figured out as I go. It’s exciting stuff. Scary, headache-inducing stuff, but mostly really, really exciting.

What I can attempt to explain now is why I’m going on this crazy little adventure in the first place. So, in no particular order, here are a few of the reasons I sent in my application last July (Spoiler alert: They’re pretty much the same reasons everyone joins) :

1. I just graduated from Syracuse with majors in newspaper journalism and religion. Those aren’t exactly booming career fields at the moment.

2. I love traveling. And I’m not yet ready to sacrifice that for something as mundane as a “full-time job” or a “career.”

3. I’m fascinated by other cultures. There’s no better way to experience how other people live than to jump in and live it with them.

4. I’m a journalist. There’s gotta be a good story in this somewhere, right?

5. It’s the right thing to do. This one’s the biggee, and without it all of the other reasons don’t even come close to justifying volunteering with the Peace Corps. As true as the others are, they’re also superficial. This provides the drive, I think, that keeps most volunteers going when the work seems tedious, pointless or impossible.

The one thing I took away from all my religion classes at ‘cuse was that words and ideas, for all their power, are inherently insufficient. After reading dozens of theological books about how the world should be, about how we should and could coexist, the ideas all began to frustrate me. Because no matter how eloquent the writer, or how lucid the argument, no problems are fixed by arguing about what should be. Dealing with right and wrong in the abstract is an important debate, but for it to have weight it must take place in actuality. We have to dive in and get dirty. The slow-moving, insufferably frustrating and difficult work of actually improving lives in our increasingly misbalanced world, no matter how small the degree, is a must if we’re going to complain about how bad things are. Otherwise, what’s the point?

So, if I passionately believe in the worldview those classes helped shape — and I do — I can’t not make a major commitment and keep my integrity. Hence the Peace Corps.

There you have it. My first blog post, in all its rambling, incoherent glory. Hopefully as I go on I’ll figure out a more comfortable style for these things, but just remember that the author, like this blog, remains a work-in-progress. Feel free to comment or e-mail me with any questions.

Also, I’ll post my mailing address once I get around to finding it. Mail me things.