Prostitutes, football and scuba
spent the last three weeks in the Manila and Cavite areas for a series of Peace Corps plannings, workshops and seminars. They were mostly boring to do and would be even more boring to write about. The interesting stuff, as usual, danced around the fringes.
Who invited Steve?
My first night in Manila a few of us were sitting outside at the Pension, having a few beers and relaxing. Pretty much what we normally do there. A friend ran out of cigarettes, and the older guy sitting alone tossed his pack over. Naturally, we invited him to join us.
Steve looked like the type of guy I’d normally avoid in the Philippines. Old, gruff, lonely, white. Pretty much the archetype for guys – I’m not beyond judging, they’re assholes – coming over here in search of a loving young Filipina.
And Steve, who’s had his heart broken several times and was stationed in the Philippines when he was in the army, was in fact here looking for young Filipinas. He comes whenever he has enough money saved up. But he doesn’t want to have sex with them, or have them take care of him, or whatever else Standard Creepy White Guys come here for.
He used to want to save them. Now he just wants to give a day, just one day, where they can feel like women. Or girls, often enough. He’ll go to a bar and talk to a girl. Just talk. Let her see he’s not after anything, give her a chance to vent and feel safe around a man. Then he’ll take her shopping, out to dinner, whatever she wants to do. He originally wanted to ‘save,’ and gave a girl enough money to support herself until she found a new job. When he came back to check up, she was back at it. The money’s pretty damn good. So now he’s content with offering a good memory to look back on and an example of what could be.
It’s a selfishly noble endeavor. It has, I think, two main flaws: So the girl now thinks she can trust men. And, shit, she should be able to. But most of the men she comes across are not trustworthy. At all. Or the girl may never trust Steve, may play him for as much money as she can get. He acknowledged the first problem, but had no alternative. He is perfectly content with the second.
I don’t know if what Steve does is right. I know it makes him feel better about himself, and I hope it made a positive difference for a few girls, but it’s a damn dangerous game.
Football
The morning after staying up until 4:15 a.m. Talking to Steve was Superbowl Monday Morning. By the time I was up for venturing into the city it was halftime. I decided to pick a direction, start walking, and assume I’d run into a bar playing the game. After a couple blocks I saw American football on TVs in a bar across the street. I didn’t bother checking the name or anything else about where I was walking into. Kept my eyes on the TV, grabbed a stool and ordered a beer. Then, when my waitress said she was cheap and showed me the price on her name tag, I realized something wasn’t kosher.
8:30 in the morning. About 30 guys in the place. Ages from late-20s to mid-60s. All white. All surrounded by women/girls. One Peace Corps Volunteer desperately trying to watch a football game. That was difficult, what with all the girls complimenting my hemp bracelets and the guys trying to act cool and befriend me. Yup, I was in a GRO bar. Where prostitution happens.
The girls came in two types: The waitresses, wearing fishnet stockings, ass-short skirts and tight shirts. They wore the price tags. Then there were the ‘classy’ girls, who were dressed in kinda slutty regular clothes. The customers wore anything from wife beaters to suits.
I’m not a violent person, but during commercial breaks I’d look around and visualize myself going Ninja Assassin in the place. We’re talking serious mutilation. Instead I nursed my drink, avoided eye contact, and told people I was married. I left as angry and depressed as I’ve been in the Philippines.
Shortly thereafter I had Vietnamese and Hagen Daz for lunch and things started looking up again. Hey, it was a damn good game.
You are for scuba?
Being in the Peace Corps isn’t all about prostitution. Sometimes it’s about pretending like you’re not in the Peace Corps. Which is why during a free weekend amidst our training three friends and I went to a resort in the Batangas and got scuba certified.
The whole weekend actually fit into my PC budget, so it wasn’t that outrageous, but it sure seemed like it. We stayed right on the ocean. There was a swimming pool. The food was great, the drinks were strong, and a couple girls related to the owners taught us mahjong. And then, of course, there was the scuba.
It was fucking awesome.
The coolest part wasn’t being 45 feet underwater, surrounded by schools of colorful fish and jellyfish. It wasn’t seeing a large clam that looked like a certain female genitalia. It wasn’t watching the light filter through the water as we slowly ascended. No, the coolest part was breathing. Breathing underwater is pretty bad-ass. But focusing on your breathe to control your boyancy, to bring you up, down or completely still – that is completely bad-ass. There’s something peaceful about floating, water on all sides, and just focusing on breathing in and out. And eventually going on autopilot and, with a jolt, remembering where the hell you are.
At least, that’s how I imagine it being. I spent most of the time shooting to the surface, dropping to the bottom and landing on people’s heads.
Yeah, I’m hooked on scuba. Unfortunately, there aren’t many scuba sites in the mountains.
Odds and ends:
Going to Wendy’s and eating a double cheeseburger, large fries, large coke and spicy chicken sandwich may sound like a good idea. It is not.
I don’t like thrash metal. I really don’t like bad Filipino thrash metal.
Bananagrams is almost as addicting as Monopoly, only people don’t cry during Bananagrams. Ditto for Monopoly Deal.
Coming whenever I next have time: Another treatise on animal-eating and a semi-educated rant about discipline/affirmation problems in Filipino education.
Hamburgers and contradictions
I’m in a reflective mood today. So let’s reflect.
About 75 years ago Everett Ruess wrote, “I have had some terrific experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last – overpowering, overwhelming. But then I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.” Everett Ruess was kind of crazy and he disappeared into the Utah wilderness when he was only 20, but I think he was on to something with those words.
I’ve had hamburgers on the mind lately. Those big, obscene bastards topped with egg and french fries and barbecue sauce and pineapple and 10 lbs of beef and everything just overflowing and running down the sides. I’m looking at pictures of them and salivating right now, it’s that bad.
Life in the Peace Corps – or, probably more accurately, life in a developing country – is an endless series of contradictions. Sometimes we shovel bacteria-infected mud out of schools, sometimes we get a picture with the U.S. Secretary of State. Sometimes we sleep on wooden boards, surrounded by ants, cockroaches and mosquito netting. Sometimes we stay at resorts.
The result is endless disorientation and a near-inability to keep your bearings. I’ve found that the only way I can keep functioning without getting overwhelmed is to keep moving, to embrace the weird spontaneity of it all. Otherwise a lot of this shit just seems scary and out of my league. Besides, as a friend recently told me, the only events worth attending in the Philippines are the ones that aren’t planned.
Consider some of my experiences from the first six months in the PI:
–In October, as Typhoon Pepeng stormed back through the Philippines, people and animals from nearby barangays were being swept into the ocean, and coffins were popping out of the hill-side cemetery down the road, a goat slowly died in my foot. It’d been stuck in the mud for hours, was exhausted and in shock, and was soon to feed a group of hungry evacuees. But in the meantime it rested where it was tossed, in the back of a jeep, with its head on my bare foot and with two dead goats tossed on top of it. Hours later, after the mud had been beaten off it, after a hole had been cut in its throat, after a fire was lit beneath it and its nose had melted off, it finally died. And it was delicious.
Bringing that food to the evacuees was one of the most rewarding things I’ve done. Seeing their faces lite up, playing with the incredible happy kids. . It was, and please pardon this lazy writer, priceless
–Flash forward to mid-January and my most recent trip to Manila. I went to meet and brainstorm with some people I’m planning a week-long English institute in Sagada with and to see some other education projects happening in the country right now.
The first night, we ate at a Japanese buffet. All-you-can-eat sushi! It was delicious and I ate way too much. The next morning I attended the inauguration of St. Luke’s Hospital, now the most advanced hospital in the Philippines. Also in attendance were numerous doctors from around the world; the crème of Manila’s social crop; Gloria, the president of the Philippines (yes, we are on a first name basis, Glory and I); and one mildly uncomfortable Peace Corps Volunteer in sneakers. St. Luke’s has a stem cell clinic. Crazy.
The next day was more my element. We visited a module elementary school, which has gone from one of the worst public schools in Quezon City to one of the best. That school is an education PCV’s wet dream. The students were enthusiastic, the teachers seemed like they cared, classes were interactive and integrated as hell and the environment was overwhelmingly positive. I wish everyone here could visit Belmonte and see that, yes, the techniques we want to try actually can work in the Philippines. I don’t know if I left more uplifted by their success or frustrated by the unwillingness of so many educators I’ve come across to actually believe in different teaching techniques. Not new, mind you. Just not rote memorization. The big, as yet unanswered question: What happens to these kids when they reach high school and the teachers don’t want outspoken, critically-thinking students?
That day I had delicious Indian and Italian meals and a visit to an ice cream parlor in between.
The next day was the weirdest of all. I shared a vehicle with: The principal of the private school in Sagada and one of the top educators in the country (he’s the guy I went to Manila with), an interior designer, a member of one of the wealthiest families in the Philippines, and the head of the Kaballah Institute. Naturally, we took a break at Starbucks, where I was treated to a Chai and fresh bagel. Oh yeah, and did I mention we had a police escort?
Gina Lopez’s family owns ABS-CBN, the biggest multimedia company in the country. She’s in charge of their social work branch, whose current main project is building an entire city. The flooding in Manila during Typhoon Ondoy a few months ago was due in large part to hundreds of thousands of squatters living on mounts of trash clogging the tributaries and flood plains that cross through Manila. So the Pasig River overflowed, with devastating results. If the river is going to be cleaned and future floods mitigated, the squatters can’t all live there. So the government donated some land and buildings, Gina raised a shitload of money, and around 100,000 people are going to be relocated to a city that didn’t exist a couple months ago. Around 2,000 families live there now, 5,000 by March, and the city still barely exists. New residents are constructing the houses, job opportunities are fairly nonexistent, and the school is a mess. Around 100 students per class, two shifts a day, seven teachers in all. And no high school yet.
That’s where Dennis and I come in. He’s Gina’s unofficial education adviser. I’m lucky. So the current plan is go spend two weeks there in June, training the overwhelmed teachers and, if all goes as planned, organizing a three-day youth camp to help build some sense of community and allow these kids, and their parents, a much needed opportunity to be kids. Plans are very tentative right now – I’m mainly focused on my upcoming trainings/meetings in Manila and the English Institute we’re hosting in Sagada in April – but it’s the audacity of the project that really gets me. Constructing a city, infrastructure, livelihood opportunities, sense of community, and all, is an almost impossibly large task. I was extremely skeptical before visiting the site, but now I’m nervous. If it doesn’t work, or funding dries up down the road, these people are fucked. Against all expectations they’ve been given the opportunity to mark, on the calendars, when their lives turned around, when they owned a real house and real property. Betraying that faith would be devastating. Anyway, I’ll hopefully have the opportunity to play a very small role in this creation, and that’s pretty kick-ass.
That night was more good Italian. And a late-night McDonalds run.
Since getting back from Manila two weeks ago, I’ve: Drank good Australian red wine and cheap Filipino gin. Eaten delicious vegetarian sandwiches, fresh fruit-covered homemade yogurt, and dog (twice). Discussed the failures of Filipino education, problems Christianity is facing in the 21st century, and why Sagada can’t technically sell itself to Japan, as nice as that may be. Almost every day I get online to e-mail people in the States and check up on the latest American sports (Go Pens, go ‘Cuse!).
It’s like living in three different worlds simultaneously, with about a dozen different roles within each one — teacher, American, Jew, Journalist, man, young man, tourist, adopted local, random expert on visa policies, etc. — all switched around with extreme rapidity. And it’s challenging and sometimes completely fucking exhausting, and the dog tasted good but my body rejected it very quickly, and damn, sometimes the weird beauty of it all is breathtaking.
The Funeral
I apologize if this is disjointed. It’s been a crazy week. I’m tired.
First off, New Year’s in Banaue was amazing. Great hikes, breathtaking places, and kick-ass people. The trip couldn’t have gone much better. I then went to Manila for some PC business. I don’t like Manila. But we had a damn good Indian restaurant, and that makes up for a lot. Life is still spectacularly awesome. Maybe I’ll write a longer post about those trips sometime. That’s not what’s on my mind right now.
By my count, I’ve been to death-related ceremonies for about 10 different people since arriving in the Philippines. This past weekend, however, marked the first time it’d been for someone I knew.
Gary Joven Makellay was a teacher at my school, Sagada National High School, before becoming too sick to work. He was dying long before I met him a little more than one month ago, and he and everyone around him knew it. So the end, when it came on January 6 after a long stay in the hospital, was not a surprise. But, goddamn.
The custom here is to hold the funeral three days after the person dies. In the meantime, the body is kept at home and a vigil is held 24/7. People usually come in at night for the wake, which in Sagada consists of food and Christian hymn-singing. I didn’t get back from Manila until the 7th, but that night I went with my fellow teachers at around 7:30. We were there for around three hours.
On Friday we went at 4 p.m. We stayed until 4:15 a.m.
Like I said, wakes here consist of singing, eating and drinking. And so I did. Groups of teachers from different schools came in at different times, took turns taking the musical lead, but Gary was an SNHS teacher, and so SNHS stayed.
As a Christian brotherhood group to which he belonged began their ceremony I, along with most of the other men, quietly went out back to drink, eat and tell stories. It was after being out there for an hour or two, maybe at around midnight, that it happened. I think – hope – that anyone who has spent time in the Philippines recognizes the moment, that instant where everything clicks and everyone’s family and nothing has really changed from five minutes ago, except that now you see the connection, to you, the people beside you, and everyone else sharing that experience. I could hug everyone around me in that brilliance, and I honestly don’t think anyone would have minded.
Anyway, while sitting on a piece of plywood and talking with my host dad and fellow teacher, Joseph, about some of my favorite snacks in the States and simultaneously talking to the man on me left about how important these ceremonies are, I realized we were amidst one of those transcendent communal moments that seem to happen most frequently within a context of pain and loss, like the exuberance after Typhoon Pepeng in Bauang during PST.
As the night wore, and occasionally dragged on, the feeling became untenable at times, but something always brought it back.
Like how, starting at around 1, the 40 or so people took turns standing and telling a story about Gary. Each person’s telling was followed by a brief chant in Kankanaey.
Here’s what I said, more or less – I think recollection makes me more eloquent than I actually was :
I only had the privilege of meeting Gary a handful of times. He was already very sick by the time I got to Sagada. But every time I talked to him, he seemed. . . happy. Our few conversations were mostly about either teaching or hiking. The time I remember the most was when, after a long trek, Sixto and I came here for some noodle soup (Gary’s house, where the wake was held, also has a videoke bar/restaurant.). Gary came out and we all chatted for a while, then he went with us to Bukong, the small falls. Sixto, the idiot, stripped to his underwear and jumped into the frigid water. I helplessly did the same. And Gary just took a seat on a rock, laughing at our misery and enjoying the moment. Afterward, on the uphill walk back up to the road, he had to stop often for rest. But as he rested, he talked about how we’d all have to go to the Big Falls together sometime for a picnic. And then we’d go to Lake Danum for a picnic some other time.
I didn’t go to those places with Gary. There wasn’t time, or strength. But I don’t think he expected to. He wanted to talk about those places, maybe recall his own memories of them. And maybe he wanted to dream. There’s an indomitable spirit there, that. . . blows me away.
And I’ll be damned if I didn’t cry a little after I sat down.
Then I dozed off for a while, every now and then dozing off to stare blankly in the distance or at Gary’s poorly-embalmed face, sagging like a marshmallow that’s sat too long in the sun. Such a contrast to the strong, karate-practicing man in the picture hanging above his body.
Every hour or so, his family members would come around with pots of tea and snacks. I’d been in Bontoc all day and went straight to the wake without going home, so didn’t have a sweater with me. It got cold as hell last night. One of the other teachers kept offering me her baby blue woman’s shawl. Which, eventually, I got cold enough to accept. I probably looked damn good.
I got my last wind at around 3, when someone passed around books of heartbroken country songs and someone else busted the guitar back out. One of the last songs I was a part of, appropriately, was Auld Lang Syne. Everyone found the energy for that one.
And so we stumbled off to our beds, to catch a few hours of sleep before waking up at 8:30 this morning for the funeral.
I sat a row back from Gary’s widow and young son. I spent a large portion of the service making faces at the boy until he smiled. Eventually, he did.
Gary Joven Makellay 1971-2010
A month’s worth of random, unconnected musings
This is what happens when I go a month without blogging. A long, rambling, and disjointed post with a 47 percent chance of being 83 percent nonsensical.
It’s setup like this: First, a couple pictures. Then description of my Christmas Eve and teaching. Then long pseudo-intellectual discourses on ethical animal slaughtering and religious/cultural pluralism. Good luck.
Sixto, my teaching counterpart and trekking companion, at Kiltepan, my favorite place in Sagada.
Me, during a trek up a random mountain
Christmas Eve
Here’s how I didn’t expect to spend my first Christmas Eve in the ‘pines: A little bit drunk (ok, we all could’ve guessed that), watching The Polar Express, eating homemade pizza and Korean food, and not going to church at all. Spent most of the day napping and reading, then went out to meet a friend for coffee. Afterward we went to the house of a retired American friend and had a couple drinks. Then I came home for dinner, more drinks, and kids running in circles and laughing uncontrollably.
In the morning I went out to check the mail and ran into a guide I’m friends with who was taking some Canadian tourists down through Echo Valley, an easy hike I’ve done about five times. He invited me along and, since I had no plans, I went. Along the way I told him about my next trekking goal — to follow the underground river through the mountain and out the other side. His group thought they were walking to the base of the river and then back up to the road. Instead he asked if they had headlamps, told them to put them on, and through the mountain we went. Poor, silly Canadians. A short walk, maybe 20 minutes, but it was fun. A couple giant caverns and some slippery rocks to clamber over. And I hadn’t yet been up the mountain we came out to on the other side. It’s the little things like that — weird, unexpected surprises — that make life so kick-ass.
Unfortunately, in the middle of the night I was hit by a rather violent case of food poisoning and I spent the next 12 hours cursing life and, um, purging my system every which way. That wasn’t the best experience. But it did get me out of a long Christmas morning mass.
Teaching
Work is pretty awesome, in and out of school. I’m lucky enough to have progressive thinkers in my school and community, luckier to have befriended many of them, and luckiest that I arrived in Sagada during a time when many things, including things I’m uniquely to help with, are changing. People have already put into motion projects I dreamed of doing here, teachers have already taken some casually mentioned ideas and made them their own.
Right now in my English classes it seems like we focus more on positive reinforcement than actual English education. So many of these kids, for cultural and institutionalized reasons, have no self-confidence and little self-worth. They’re too shy to read a one syllable word I’ve written on the board and an certain they know. So Sixto and I, as much as possible, are focusing on interactive techniques, projects and assignments. We say “there is no wrong answer” about five times each class. We lecture as little as possible. For example, we started an introduction to literature with our 2nd year class last week. We had the class shout out words they thought of when hearing “literature.” Then, as a class, we came up with our own definition. Sixto and I then gave a couple other definitions and, as we progress through the unit, we continue to return to and amend our class definition. I’ve never taught before, I don’t know if this shit is gonna work, or when we’ll see results, but it’s the best way I can conceive of doing it.
Beating the Meat
Recipe for Pinikpikan, a.k.a “Killing Me Softly”:
Ingredients: One chicken, live, preferably old. One fire, blowtorch or natural. One stick, sturdy, wooden, roughly one foot long.
You also need etag — salted pork — and maybe some garlic and onion, and lots of boiling to tenderize it all, but that comes later. What we care about – what everyone cares about when it comes to Killing Me Softly – is the killing part.
Procedure: Hold chicken down on one side, wing raised up and pressed back. Starting at the top and working your way down, beat the shit out of the wing for 5 – 10 seconds. Flip, repeat. Place on stomach, aim at the head-neck region, and bam bam bam!. Repeat any step at your discretion, or until chicken is dead. Ignore repeated cries for mercy.
Needless to say, PETA isn’t much of a force in the Philippines.
Pinikpikan is a traditional Igorot dish. The Igorot dish, really. It’s made for every ceremony and important event. Birthday? Get a chicken. A teaching seminar at school? Blood splashes on the faculty room walls. A housewarming party? Shit, get two. And use the fireplace to cook it.
I’ve had it three times in the past week and, while I haven’t done the beating yet myself, I’m going to. We’ve saving that for when I get my own place, and an Igorot name, in about one month. The offering will have more power if I do it myself. So, in the meantime, I watch, and sometimes I help burn or pull off the feathers. And I attempt to moralize it, mostly because everyone from home immediately condemns it as unnecessarily cruel and barbaric. I’ve started doing some basic research, talking to a few people, reading a few essays, and currently two books, about ethical vegetarianism and industrial farming, and I’ve reached a preliminary conclusion: Sometimes you just have to beat the shit out of a chicken with a stick.
I’m not ready to tackle the vegetarian argument yet. I’m a life-long meat lover and I don’t see that changing any time soon. But I’ve only recently given any actual thought to it, been forced to watch, hear, and occasionally assist in slaughtering on a day-to-day basis, so that angle has a ways to go before I’m ready to offer an argument either way.
No, this is solely between the industrial slaughtering of the West and the small-scale, manual and “uncivilized” methods of the small population I deal with here, the Sagadan Igorots of Mountain Province, Philippines.
In the States, most animals spend their entire lives without movement, in a pool of their own shit, force-fed and pumped full of so much artificial . .stuff that they’re more SuperAnimals than animals. Then, when the end-time comes, it is often less peaceful than we’d blissfully like to think. Sometimes they’re pressed so closely together they suffocate. Sometimes it’s disease. Sometimes the No Country For Old Men pump doesn’t really do the job, and they’re skinned and chopped hearts still beating. We don’t see it ourselves, we don’t need to think about it. Everything sounds so humane on paper. After all, we have agencies in place making sure they’re treated ethically, right? How one ethically treats an animal biologically engineered solely to be slaughtered I’m not sure, but there you are.
So let’s return to Killing Me Softly. Yeah, it’s inhumane. Sure, it’s unethical. But it’s killed that way for spiritual, religious reasons, and spirits of ancestors are often invoked. I think that counts for something. No one here is under any illusion about the nicety of the thing. That’s just the way it must be done, and guys who are good at it work quickly. It’s done on a personal level. I realize this isn’t a possible comparison to the way things are usually done, but for whatever reason I think it’s immensely important. It removes the self-deception, the easy cruelty of pretending dinner has always just been a packaged hunk of meat and, combined with the prayers, does create a sort of bond between animal and Igorot. Although, of course, the animal is always viewed as mostly just food.
So, if we’re dealing with absolutes, they’re both pretty damn unethical. But, since I enjoy meat so damn much – and Pinkikpikan, especially the broth, is delicious – we’re on my sliding, relative, omnivorous ethical scale. They’re both fucked up, but the stick isn’t any more barbaric than the processing plant. So I’ll continue to enjoy my bloody food, you enjoy yours, and when I’ve given the vegetarian angle some more thought we can reconvene. Over pinikpikan and veal.
Pluralism?
I had a weird day a couple weeks ago.
In the morning my school hosted a ceremony for retiring teachers in the Sagada school district. This, of course, began with an hour-long Catholic mass, transubstantiation and all. The rest of the morning consisted of speeches and dances by the teachers from each school. The dances ranged from traditional Igorot to Spanish to country western swing.
In the afternoon I went to the Korean volunteer’s house for a traditional Igorot house-warming ceremony to bless the house and keep evil spirits away. This, of course, involved beating a chicken to death with a stick, burning the feathers off with a blowtorch, and then boiling and eating it. Pinikpikan. Like I said earlier, delic.
In the evening my host father and I lit the Hanukkah candles in my makeshift menorah – an ashtray.
Like I said, a weird day. A weird religious day.
Let’s throw out the Hanukkah, because that’s more personal curiosity than anything else. We’re still left with two seemingly diametrically opposed worldviews being practiced by the same people at basically the same time. And it isn’t just a matter of paying lip-service to one. Most genuinely believe that a Godly life is the only one worth living, and that Christian morals and ethics should be the guiding light. But the same people believe that if they don’t pour an offering from a just-opened bottle of liquor, if they don’t perform the right ceremonies at harvest time, bad spirits will harm them.
The easiest way to quantify it might be Christian ethics and Igorot superstition, but those two worlds mix freely. I don’t know. The Igorots fought off the Spanish for hundreds of years and have, at least more than most of the Philippines, managed to maintain their culture in the face of modernity. Though that’s changing rapidly. Most people I’ve talked to seem to function with dual worldviews – Christian and traditional, Igorot and Filipino. Sometimes they perceive differences where there are none, sometimes they overlook the obvious ones.
I don’t know what it means, and I don’t know whether it will be strong enough to survive the Internet and cell phones and satellite TV, but whatever’s going on here is pretty damn fascinating.
Off to work I go. .
Since, we last spoke, I’ve officially become a PCV and made it to Sagada, my home for the next two years.
Swearing-in on Friday was a tedious, boring and repetitive day. Except for about 10 minutes.Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the Philippines for about 15 hours, and she took out 15 minutes to swear our batch in. So the Secretary of State, the top diplomat, made me a PCV. I’m kind of a big deal.
Her speech was stock, uninspiring and occasionally innacurate (‘the jungles of the Visayas), but that’s fine. I wasn’t expecting much else.
Saturday morning, I left with Sixto –one of my counterparts — to come to Sagada. We broke it up over two days and, other than a heavily smoking flat tire, the trip was remarkably uneventful. That was nice.
So, impressions from the first day ‘at work’:
It’s really nice not sweating profusely everywhere I go. Definitely never thought I’d come to the Philippines and live in the cool mountains surrounded by pine trees.
I sat in on the two 2nd year classes and the 4th year class. Fourth year has around 50 students, the 2nd years are about 30 each. They weren’t as shy as I’d feared. Of course, they are shy and their English definitely needs to improve, but the kids had opinions and showed creativity, and that’s a great start. I think they’ll be fun to work with.
In the afternoon I walked around town and introduced myself to some people. I also stopped at the renowned Yoghurt House. Expensive, so I definitely won’t be frequenting it, but damn good yogurt.
Today I’m going to sit on on the 1st and 3rd year English classes and go to St. Mary’s, the private school in Sagada, to meet some of the faculty there and chat with the principal. I met him last night, and he had some ideas I’d like to press further. He’s apparently working on self-sustainable tourism projects, which is something I was hoping to focus on. So, yeah, more details on that to come. Probably lots of time before I actually attempt to implement anything.
That’s the fun and frustrating part about this process. I like meeting and talking with people and sharing ideas, but I need to be careful and keep myself in check. Just because a few people seem enthusiastic doesn’t mean they actually are, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean my idea’s a good one. And on the opposite end I’m expected to do a lot at school — more than I can or want to do — so I have to politely turn down a lot of ideas and jobs as well. That no, in Filipino culture, usually comes out as a ‘maybe.’
So, yeah, I’m excited as hell. I love the feel of this place and thing, by and large, that I’ll get along fine. Hopefully I even do one or two good things while I’m here.
Let’s hope I’m still saying that in a couple months, when the frustration period usually settles in.
I have reliable Internet at my house here, so no excuse not to post more often now. Maybe I’ll even get up a picture or two.
Training winds down
At long last, a blog post!
First off, my address at site:
Dan Thalkar
Sagada National High School
Poblacion, Sagada, Mountain Province
Last week was pretty uneventful and routine, so I didn’t have all that much to say. The last few days, however, have been stellar.
Friday – A bunch of PCTs and I went to San Juan for the opening night of a local surfing competition. The actual contest didn’t start until Saturday, but there was live music, a lot of vendors and a nice crowd. Plus, many of the competitors were out surfing until sundown anyway. There was a one-legged surfer who was absolutely sick. He could do tricks and catch waves seemingly at will. Badass. One of the other volunteers got a henna tattoo of a wolf on his arm — his entire arm –, dripping fangs and all. Also badass.
Saturday – The final part of training is a community project, sort of as a way to demo the community projects we’ll be doing on site. Due to some beaurocrat complications, the Bauang group had to come up with and propose our project idea with pretty much no supervision or guidance. So, unsurprisingly, it took us three proposals until we found one PC would approve.
It couldn’t have gone better.
A lot of the barungays in the area are still suffering from the blood a few weeks ago. Roads are still covered in mud or collapsed, farmers can’t use their fields and homes are still full of mud. So, after talking to some of the faculty at our school, we learned of an elementary school nearby that hadn’t had classes for three weeks. At the height of the flood, water in the school was waste high. The roads in the barungay were just finally cleaned last week, which means the school went mostly neglected in that time. The teachers were taking turns cleaning and teaching small classes outside. And the cleaning was back-breaking work. Classrooms were caked with mud and decayed text books up past your ankles. Parts of the pathways were destroyed and the rest had layers of mud. Desks, tables and chairs all needed wiped off.
So, for our project, we spent out 2,000 peso budget on shovels, buckets and brooms, recruited a few other volunteers and students from our school, and spent the morning shoveling like mad and getting all kinds of gross and sweaty. I think I had mud everywhere by the end of the morning.
But, by the end, we’d cleaned mud from the final two buildings, cleared off the sidewalks and cleaned most of the chairs. There’s still a lot to do, since dirt mounds and broken materials are still everywhere, but we left the supplies we bought with them, so at least they have more to work with now.
The amazing part — and this shouldn’t be a surprise by now — was the attitude of the teachers and parents working with us. They’ve been doing this for weeks with little or no thanks, and not a one complained. They laughed, made games out of it, and didn’t seem like the devastation had affected their spirits at all. The flood happened, their school was a mess, and it needed cleaned. So they work. There’s no other option.
At one point one of the other volunteers told me, “This is every volunteer’s secret dream, manual labor.” And he’s right. So much of what we are expected to do is long-term and intangible — from the basics of English education to starting up a parenting seminar, we may never see how effective we actually are. But on Saturday we saw their faces, we saw the results. That’s a damn good feeling. Plus, my blisters are just about healed.
Sunday — All Saints Day. It’s a big deal here. Everyone goes to the cemetery to visit and light candles on the graves of loved ones. And, since we are in the Philippines, to eat. My family spent the morning making beautiful flower arrangements and cooking. Then in the afternoon about 12 extended family members loaded into a jeepney and we headed to the cemetery. Vendors stood outside the gates, selling snacks, candles and drinks. Inside, pretty much everywhere you looked people were sitting on graves, eating and laughing. We did the same. Cleared the stones off, made sure the candles stayed lit, and held vigil for two hours. It’s a cool tradition, a homage and celebration at the same time.
Afterward — again, since this is the Philippines — we went back to the main house and celebrated with great food, drinks, and some atrocious darts games on my part.
We leave for Manila on Sunday for a conference and then — finally! — swearing in. Then, — finally! — off to site two begin my two years as a Peace Corps volunteer.
I’ll put up reflections on the last two months sometime by the end of the week. Stay tuned.
A brief recap of typhoons and travels
Hey guys, sorry I haven’t posted anything in a while. The past week has been crazy. Last Thursday Bauang experienced its worst flooding in almost 20 years, then on Sunday we travelled to Manila for Supervisor’s Conference and site placement, and I’m currently visiting my site, Sagada in the Mountain Province. It’s a seriously amazingly beautiful place. Think Forest County only with bigger mountains, wider rivers and more caves, hikes, hanging coffins and indigenous culture.
I have pictures from all of this stuff that I’ll put up when I get back to Bauang and have some time — I’ll also finally make some actual posts about what’s been going on — but in the meantime, here’s something I started writing the day after the typhoon:
Yesterday was one of the most memorable days of my life. It started with an early-morning scene of a dismembered cow getting loaded up into several blood-filled trykes and ended with a drunken feast of goat meat 15 hours later.
I recently wrote about how it doesn’t really flood here. I stand corrected. We had a dorrential downpour for several days as Peping was pushed back over the Philippines by an even more powerful storm. Water rushed down from the mountains and a new giant river was formed where only a stream had existed before. All throughout La Union, things were swept away. Goats, cows, houses, people.
The water reached its peak at about 1 a.m. Friday morning. Twelve hours later much of had receded, but the mud in many houses was still waist-high.
A quick disclaimer: My house and host family are fine. We’re in a small, sturdy structure on high ground.
One of the really frustrating thigns about volunteering as an English teacher is that it seems useless when shit like this happens. All around us people were losing their homes and livelehoods, and there was really nothing that we, as Americans supposedly here to help, could do.
But we tried.
Melissa’s host dad is our Barungay captain and, since most of the other captains in the area were vacationing elsewhere, he was a busy dude. At around 6:30 a.m. Melissa adn I went with him and his crew on a tour of the area, visiting houses, neighborhoods and seeing what needed done. We also visited an evacuation center, where non one had given the evacuees much water or any dinner, breakfast and lunch wasn’t on the way.
To make a long story short: We spent the afternoon cooking lunch and then dinner for the evacuees, delivering it to them, playing with the kids for a long time, and then drinking heavily.
All across the Barunguy people were slaughtering animals that died in the floods and having a sort of impromptu, “we are alive and well” celebration. So hair, blood, meat and alcohol were everywhere. I’ll embellish later, but it was an amazing thing to witness.
A few key moments:
The slowly dying goat casually dropped on my feet in the back of a jeep, casually tossed into a stream to clean off, and then casually slowly bled/burned to death as the people were in a great hurry to get cooking.
I smelled of burnt goat hair all day.
The little ball of fur huddled in the corner of a house that I eventually realized used to be a kitten.
Being told that our bridge was in danger of collapsing . . . as we drove over it.
Walking/getting stuck in mud and wondering, “Am I getting worms right now?” As far as I know, I did not.
Carrying around and tossing in the air about 30 small children for several hours in intense heat is fun, but one hell of a workout. “You’re wet!” one of my host sisters exclaimed when I got home. I was seriously wetter than after I showered.
People who lost everything, yet still smiled and laughed while helping their neighbors salvage what was left.
The realization that people weren’t drinking out of desperation or depression. They were genuinly happy that they were alive and immediately accepted the fact that tomorrow, it was back to hard work.
Raindrops falling on my head
It seems like I’ve just been writing about the weather lately, but that’s kind of unavoidable.
About 30 villages in the Manila area are still flooded and the newspapers here all think the it’ll be in a state of calamity for the rest of the year.
The typhoons haven’t been bad here so far, nothing bigger than class 2 and, since we‘re surrounded by mountains and on a slope it rarely floods here, but it’s hurting the neighborhood in its own way. This is rice harvest season and the heavy rain + winds have completely destroyed a lot of families crop for the year. Other than farming, the other major jobs here are manual labor and fishing. But, since it’s been storming to hard for people to work outside and the water is too rough for fishing, a ton of people are loafing around, sleeping and drinking and not being able to make any money. My dad, a construction worker, stares out the window a lot. It also means that there is almost no seafood at the market. Plus, elementary schools are automatically cancelled for level one typhoons, high school for level two. So there’s been no school the last couple days.
Today there’s no typhoon, but we had the windiest and wettest night since I’ve been here, with no signs of letting up. Needless to say, everything, my language classes included, have been cancelled. Looks like I’ll be playing a lot of Uno and watching way too many bad dance movies (Are there good dance movies, you ask? Yes, “Take the Lead” with Antonio Banderas. He’s a badass rogue dance teacher, instilling in his Dangerous Mind-like pupils the important lesson that dance is life. Stellar, stellar stuff. Also, true story.) with my family.
The weather’s exciting, sort of, in an uncomfortably privileged way. The temperature feels good, the rain is fun to watch, and loafing around is relaxing right up until it becomes boring. But this is very, very bad news for people who actually work and live here. They struggle in the best of times. We’re just transients playing house.
On a more uplifting note, I’ve gotten a few more recipes together. I’m not sure why, but I really enjoy doing this. It’s entertaining. Maybe it’s the closest I’ve gotten to researching/reporting in a while? Hell, I just like food. I don’t have a better theory, so we’ll stick with that.
Anyway, chicken adobo (adobo nga manok). It’s another Filipino staple and one of my favorites.
Ingredients: chicken, potatoes, vinegar, soy sauce, black pepper and garlic.
Chop the meat and potatoes up and stick them in a pot. Add a largish amount of vinegar and soy, crush the garlic and add and toss in the pepper. Mix it all around. Cook for about 20 minutes.
Simpler and much tastier-sounding than chocolate meat, right? It’s a cheap, fast meal. That’s partly why adobo is made a lot here, though with pork more often than chicken. It’s good with pretty much every meat, actually.
I think that’s enough Rachel Ray for me today. Peace.
Storms and cooking
Hello world!
Sorry I haven’t written anything long or exciting lately, but this is just another storm update post.
Our Supervisor’s conference in Cavite was postponed until next Sunday because of a couple typhoons in the area, so we must wait another week to find where we’ll go. It kinda sucks, but I guess is better than being stranded in a flooded city somewhere.
Typhoon Pepeng has come and almost left, and wasn’t too powerful here. We got (are getting) a ton of rain and some loud-ass wind, but there was no major damage or anything.
Let’s see. .
Teaching is still going well. I taught news writing in my English classes last week, which was a lot of fun. I had the kids match headlines and leads from stories I’ve written, then broke down the structure or a typical lead and news story organization. After that, they wrote their own short story.
The kids seemed to enjoy it, and I had a lot of fun teaching it.
Ilocano classes are progressing decently. Definitely not well, but decently.
Ohh, and I’m finally learning how to cook some Filipino food!
Here’s a recipe of Dara aka chocolate meat, a pretty popular dish:
Saute some garlic and onions. Then add diced meat. Toss it around and add salt, vinegar and sugar. After the meat is basically cooked, add the sauce and cook for a little bit longer.
Congrats, we’ve just made quite possibly the most un-Kosher dish possible. Meat = pork and sauce = pig’s blood.
After it’s cooked the blood looks like chocolate, hence the name. It’s sweet and kind of tangy, depending on the amount of vinegar. Naimas (delicious)!
Next I think I’m going to learn adobo, a meat and vinegar dish that’s a staple here and one of my favorites, and some types of palutan, finger foods.
I’ll try and write up a more coherent and entertaining post later today if I have a chance. Until then, I’m off to try and stay dry!
Funerals and floods
I’m sure most of you have seen the flooding in Manila on the news, so I just wanted to drop a quick line letting you know I’m dry and well. If you didn’t know: The city got a month’s worth of rainfall in about 10 hours, its worst flood in more than 40 years. The storm blew out before it got north to us, but the scenes from Manila are terrible. Parts of the area are still flooded, more than 400,000are homeless or displaced and they think the body count, currently around 140, will keep rising. Tough stuff.
Continuing this depressing post, I’ve been to a funeral literally every week I’ve been here. More like a wake, actually. The body is laid out for viewing before it’s buried, and a vigil is required over it at all times. So at night a weird sort of party develops. People come in, pay their respects to the deceased and family, and then head to the gambling tables.
Most of the ones I’ve been to so far have tables set out in the driveway our courtyards outside the building proper. And that’s where dozens of mourning Filipinos gather to loudly play Lucky 9s — like blackjack only with different numbers — bingo or some other games. I’m in a hurry so am not describing this well, but hopefully you get the picture. Wake = social event and cause to gamble. There’s a lot to be said for the power of community showing up in force, and a pseudo-celebration makes a lot more sense to me than the expensive, unnecessarilly-somber funerals most people in the States have.
And so as to not end on a sour note: I’ve started bathing outsid occasionally (don’t worry, I wear shorts) and it’s pretty damn refreshing.
