A Room of One's Own

I’m very pleased to announce that I have moved out of my host family’s house and into my own place. I really appreciate my host family here and everything they’ve done for me since I began service, but I felt that I was a burden to cook for and, though I will likely never know, I think my being in their home displaced someone else, whether a family member or their helper. They were the best host family I could have asked for, and last weekend, with their help and Connie’s, I moved all my stuff one street over to a brand new apartment in the funeral home complex.

When it comes to living quarters, Filipino and American cultures diverge rather sharply. Filipinos sometimes never leave the homes they grew up in until they are married, but often they stay beyond even that. Even though many young Filipinos leave home to work abroad or in Manila, wanting to live on your own is still a foreign concept. Often I am asked if I will be afraid to live alone, especially behind the funeral home because the souls don’t leave the earth for forty days. As I told my co-teacher, “If your neighbors are dead, they are not noisy.” She got a laugh out of it, but I do in fact have live neighbors, including two young Filipino Mormon men on their mission. I haven’t met them yet, but I see them pass my door every morning in their clean, pressed shirts, pants and ties, immaculate even in the rain. The funeral home owners, who are also my landlady and landlord, are also Mormons, so I feel a bit like I’ve moved into the Mormon neighborhood, especially when people find out where I live and ask if I’m also a Mormon. I think the Philippines as a whole is a country very used to missionaries, so their first assumption about most foreigners is that they are missionaries. I had actually never met a Mormon until I moved to the Philippines; now I am living among them.

My new apartment is very nice. It’s part of a row of six adjacent, connected apartments, but only mine and one other are finished; the rest are still being built. The outside is grapefruit colored: yellow with orange trim. I have a downstairs with living space and kitchen, outside laundry area and bathroom. Upstairs I have two bedrooms complete with beds (still working on a mattress for the spare room) and an open space I’ve made into my office. And, of course, my apartment coup: a balcony. It overlooks a rice field, some houses and some trees. As for furniture, I got almost all of it donated – a kitchen table from a department head at school; the bedframes, forthcoming bookshelves and a very nice area for my stove and propane tank that includes storage and counter space, all built specifically for my apartment and me by my landpeople’s employees free of charge; but my favorite, another apartment coup, has been the sala set made by students of the woodworking classes from my school. I know the items weren’t specifically made for me, but it’s really beautiful work and it’s gratifying in general that students, albeit not mine, made them. They have a real talent there, something they can use to build a life if that’s what they want. And now all I can think about is how when I had the opportunity to be in woodshop class in middle school, my classmates made bongs and such. Real charmers, going places.

I just got a real internet connection today, so I will finally post some pictures after being unable to for the past three months. For now, just the views from my balcony. Later, when I have everything set up to my liking, pictures of the inside.



This is the view when looking straight out from the balcony.



This is if you look a bit to the left. That house in the corner is where the missionaries live.



And finally, the little things that keep you smiling: that old Philippine sunset.