Jasmine Sawers: Peace Corps Enables My Wanderlust

Belated Farewell

2010-02-11T21:09:00.006+08:00

It is no secret that I am no longer serving in Peace Corps Philippines. I returned home to Buffalo in May, my emotions raw, bitter and frayed by what I termed "Peace Corps warfare" - a steaming conglomeration of unreasonable rules enforced with arbitrary levels of harshness, the failure of the medical unit to provide adequate and timely care, and a constipated, sometimes unnavigable bureaucracy. For my own mental and physical health, I made my life's hardest decision and terminated my service. The decision to join the Peace Corps and to serve in the Philippines was far easier than the one that ended that service.

That decision, torturous though it was, was the correct one. I spent the summer recovering my health, both physical and mental - the throat-closing cough would persist for several months, but the haunting spectre of my service on my psyche passed within two months. I got a job at Toys R Us, I moved into my own apartment, I applied to MFA programs in creative writing, and I got on with my life, a post-service purgatory.

Of course I have regrets. By the light of nostalgia, to paraphrase Kundera, I remember the esctatic exuberance of life in the Philippines, life with my friends and my co-teacher and my host family and my students on their good days. I prefer not to dwell on those things that made my departure so necessary. I regret that circumstances were not such that I could finish service and be well at the same time. I regret not following the path I'd lain out for myself, the path other PCVs and I were supposed to follow together. I regret prematurely leaving my co-teacher and my students. I regret the loss of the experience I had so badly wanted.

What I do not regret is going in the first place. The people I met, the experiences we shared, the knowledge I gained about myself and the Philippines were invaluable. Like so many Peace Corps Volunteers and Peace Corps hopefuls, my desire to serve and travel was a zealous burn. Only in going did I learn how misplaced that desire was, how ill-suited I was to weathering Peace Corps warfare and certain realities of service. But the Philippines is always with me - I eat silog on a regular basis and recently tried my hand at leche flan again, I pine for fruits and desserts I just can't have, I consider the Pinoy "third party" method of disagreement a valid option, I mix my Cebuano with my Thai and contemplate the necessity of pasalubog. I was profoundly affected by my time in the Philippines, as all PCVs are affected by their countries of service. In some ways, I am better for this - my efforts to better understand the religious life persist, as does my disdain for the American propensity toward celebrity worship in the face of far graver needs. In other ways, I wonder how long it will take me to shuffle off the Philippine shadow - whereas before service I was unfazed by, say, cinematic sensuality, I am now uncomforable with sexual content in films or even kissing on TV, a product of living in a more conservative society. I suppose we cannot pick and choose how we will integrate our experiences, and reconciling my Philippine life with my American one is my ongoing personal project, even eight months after I left.

I did not, however, storm into this blog again just to wax on about my personal changes and post-service progress. What I wanted to write is this: I am so proud of my fellow PCVs from batch 267. They have done a tremendous job in the face of their own adversity, in whatever form that adversity presents itself. Whether they are Ed volunteers, CYF or CRM, they have made personal strides as well as professional ones. I am so happy for all their small and large triumphs, I sympathize with their setbacks, and I rejoice in their strength of character. They do what I could not.

This will be the final entry in this blog. I considered resurrecting it as a more personal, non-Peace Corps related blog, but I find the subjects of my life to be not terribly blogworthy, and the internet does not need another idiot riding the waves, thinking the mundanity and minutiae of their every days are somehow compelling.

I am signing out. Good luck, Peace Corps Philippines 267. You make me so proud.

Courting Controversy

2009-05-13T19:57:00.002+08:00

I wash dishes and think about Mormons. I get a great towering pile going, sling on my headphones, grab a sponge and contemplate the Angel Moroni appearing to Joseph Smith in Western New York, in my neck of those vast American woods. At this point I wonder, “How can anything holy have happened there?” Smoke-belching industry and lake-effect snow aren’t altogether conducive to divine epiphanies, breeding instead a cellular nihilism and sense of defeat. I wonder what trick of history made Utah the territory of choice for trailblazing Latter-Day Saints rather than where the Angel Moroni first struck down on the earthly plane. Already populated by too many Catholics, I suppose, staunch, with deep set roots. Same as the Philippines.

I don’t wash dishes and think about Mormons on purpose, really. Returned Peace Corps Volunteers universally speak of how Peace Corps service changed them. What subtle shift in paradigm, in priorities, differentiates them in the present from them in the past? The Peace Corps Volunteer must expect that the foundation on which his or her character is built to crack, but must not try to anticipate the cause or the pattern. The fractures I unexpectedly find myself straddling involve an involuntary but compulsive deliberation on Mormons.

Mormons, I think, Latter-Day Saints. I think about the missionaries who live next door, who pass my apartment in their clean pressed clothes, how they sometimes wave, sometimes don’t. I think of the church beyond my school, the wide empty expanse of it, the few people who enter and exit. I think about my landlady’s smile, a permanent fixture on her face, beaming out from behind the desk in the funeral home showroom. I think about my dad saying “they were persecuted,” I think about all the long talks I’ve had with my LDS batchmate, and I think about how no matter how many talks we have, or whether or not I complete my own mission to befriend the missionaries, I will never understand the history, the culture, the context of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

This expands, as I lean into particularly stubborn food debris with the force of my various arm joints, as I squeeze more soap onto the task, into a wider contemplation of moral philosophies, personal ethics, those structures of organizing the internal that some people call religious belief. That I lack formal religious education in any faith is not a testament to a lack of personal integrity or moral code; I feel that I have those in abundance, and that they are fast and rigid. I know too the difference between belief in theory and belief in practice, whether one’s belief is religious, philosophical, political, or otherwise uncategorized.

Before Peace Corps, I would have said that I accepted all people of any religion or lack thereof. Not tolerate, but accept. I would have said that people’s beliefs are their own, and as long as they did not push them onto me, and I didn’t push mine onto them, that everyone is free, encouraged, to have diverse belief systems. My hypocrisy was that I inwardly disdained of certain religions; I’d fiercely defend the right to ascribe to them, get my hackles up if others displayed intolerance, yet I’d scoff at the reality of our differences.

I’m not sure it’s possible to live long-term in the Philippines and not spend a great deal of time deeply contemplating religion. The Spanish were wildly successful in their conversion of Filipinos to Catholicism; those who are not Catholic are still largely Christian, with a good percentage of them Mormon. The Muslim minority is marginalized and almost invisible, only mentioned with a sneer, pushed into spaces of poverty and disenfranchisement. The story of religion in this country is one fraught with colonization and resentment, but the conclusion I have come to in my long hours in solitude, scrubbing pans, surfing Mormon websites, is not a condemnation, or a manifestation of my previous religious superiority complex.

My personal revelation is this: I respect religions.

It may seem simple, or simplistic, but it’s a deep fissure in my foundation. Maybe that’s the wrong metaphor. Maybe there was a divisive fracture in my character before, broken, uneven ground, and the Philippines, with its Catholic baby saints and one of forty-seven worldwide official LDS temples, healed that fracture, made me whole. Made me see that religion is not a collective delusion but a set of beliefs as valid as my own to live one’s life by. I may not believe it, I may not agree with it or the political presences of individual factions, I may still be struck dumb by some outwardly religious individuals’ personal corruption, but I can see now the strength of community, of faith, that religious beliefs cultivate. And I think faith is a beautiful thing.

I am still trying to become better at accepting. I am still repulsed by some of the atrocities done in God’s name, or the policies and practices that some religious leaders espouse. I don’t think I have to accept those things to accept the basic fact that all religions, at their core, encourage their followers to treat each other and themselves with love. I think my becoming better is an ongoing personal struggle that will never be completely won, but now I am not fighting my words like I was before, when I spoke only what I knew I should believe. Now my gut is aligned with my mind.

The saturation of my Philippine life with various permutations of Christianity has also made me contemplate more seriously my own religious and philosophical orientation, which I was rather unwilling to do in the beginning but have, obviously, become more comfortable with. I don’t feel the need for an organized institution to give credibility to my own personal moral compass, but one of the powers of religion that I had hitherto been blind to was a sense of community. I would not be averse to finding affirmation with like-minded people in the distant future when I return, beaten, bruised, but triumphant, to the land where the Angel Moroni first lit the night.

So, for your enjoyment, the Belief-o-Matic, which, I assure you, is much more comprehensive and genuine than any quiz currently inundating Facebook with its inanity.

How April's Been Treating Me

2009-04-27T06:30:00.015+08:00

I just got back from three weeks away from site. The first week, holy week, Cassie and I took for vacation on Pangalo, an island just off of Bohol. Bohol has a great deal to recommend it, not the least of which are my favorite things ever, tarsiers. They are the smallest…monkey-like animals in the world. After Bohol, we did more Peace Corps training on Mactan, a small island just off of Cebu. It was good to see the volunteers I’m very far from, but otherwise, the extra training isn’t worth a blog entry.

Because I can’t possibly ruminate now on the past three weeks concisely, or even clearly now that time has passed with so much packed into each single day, I will just post what everyone really wants: picspam.

Me on a rock on Alona Beach, Panglao, a place almost exclusively populated by Germans.

Cassie and I holding on to these European honey bees at Bohol Bee Farm, an organic farming complex. I especially like how my camera couldn't regulate its own exposure.

Bohol Bee Farm's livelihood project. Local women weave goods like curtains, bags, placements and many other things.

Tarsier - what I really am in my private life. Also: seriously, they're the size of a hamster. More camera dissatisfaction: This is the best of 22 shots, only 3 decent, and none in focus. Others got pictures easily. Arg!

The Chocolate Hills. There are over 1200 of them, and they're way cooler than you'd think they would be.

Cassie at the hanging bridge on Bohol.

Mactan Shrine, which commemorates Magellan's death at Lapu Lapu's hands

Julie at Cebu's Toaist Temple

One of the Philippines' most beloved saints, Santo Nino. Viva pit senor!

More pictures at Facebook, if you're savvy.

My dad arrived in Cebu on Friday night. We came back to my site last night, Sunday, and we'll be having visitors like Syd and Connie over the next few days, then going down to Padre Burgos until next Saturday, when he'll be off back to Cebu in time for his flight back to the States the next day.

School begins again in June. I'm taking May to prepare a remedial reading program to implement at my school. Cautiously hopeful for a more positive upcoming school year.

Class of 2009

2009-03-30T13:58:00.004+08:00

Today was Hilongos National Vocational School's 2009 commencement ceremony. About 270 students graduated today.

That Cultural Exchange Thing

2009-03-25T17:25:00.014+08:00

I mentioned briefly in my last post that I'm a participant in Coverdell World Wise Schools. Through this program, I'm matched with a classroom in the States and we can correspond as we wish, sharing pictures and stories. Hopefully, this results in students at home learning about a new culture along with their volunteers.

When I got a packet of letters from students in my World Wise Schools match, I was really impressed to see how much thought they had put into the questions they asked me and what they wanted to know about the Philippines and Philippine culture. Their questions were more intelligent and thoughtful than some of the questions I field from adults more than twice their age and experience.

I spent the afternoon answering the questions which recurred most often throughout the letters I received, and some questions I thought were really important. I couldn't answer them all, but I got to almost 20 of them and it occurred to me that some of the questions and answers deserved to be posted here. So, here are some questions from middle school students in New Jersey, and my humble answers to them. Warning: this is gonna be a long one, folks.

How can ordinary teenagers make a difference in the world?

Making a difference starts in your own community. The world is big and there are problems at your doorstep as well as half a world away. I wish I had done more volunteering closer to home, since I believe that volunteering in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter makes a greater direct, immediate impact on those in need at home than Peace Corps does abroad. There are many volunteer opportunities available if you just look: Habitat for Humanity, SPCA, 4H, various other community volunteer organizations designed for young people like the YES program, and, when you’re no longer teenagers, Americorps or Teach for America. You can also do adopt-a-highway programs, arrange a litter clean up, or try to start composting and organic farming or gardening. If there are causes you care about like fundraising for diabetes, cancer, HIV/AIDS or autism, there are opportunities for that as well. With time, energy and care, you can contribute to the wellbeing of your community in far greater ways than you can probably imagine.

Are you a better person for joining the Peace Corps?

Absolutely not! I am trying to become a more patient person, a more compassionate person, more understanding and more empathetic. Living in a different culture provides me opportunities to become better in those ways, but I have to work on it myself. However, I think the root of this question does not lie in what we are trying to develop within ourselves, but in buying into the essential nobility of joining the Peace Corps, which is a grave fallacy. We who join Peace Corps do have altruistic reasons for joining, but our reasons are not all selfless either. Of course there will be the people who say “I just want to help people!” Frankly, they're lying. As you can see from my answer about making a difference, you don’t have to go far to help people. Some volunteers want professional experience, some want to travel no matter where, some want high adventure, some want a totally different experience than most of their peers. My foremost reason for joining the Peace Corps was to be involved in something positive for the world, to put good karma into the ether in any way that I could help. I wanted to do HIV/AIDS education work, which I haven’t had a chance to do yet, and I wanted to provide individual attention to students who may struggle in English class. But I also wanted the teaching experience, I wanted to learn about a new culture, I wanted to experience completely new things, I wanted to travel, and I’m not ashamed of that. No Peace Corps Volunteer is any better a person than the volunteers and community organizers who devote their time to making the world a better place from home.

Did you want to be placed in the Philippines?

The Peace Corps has an extremely long, tedious and difficult application process which is too boring to explain. To put it simply: you don’t get to request where you will go. You may put in geographical preferences, like Eastern Europe or Latin America, and you can put where you don’t want to go, but because of your skills set, which determines what job sector you’re qualified for, and your medical needs, which determines which countries you can or cannot be sent to, you are never guaranteed anything as far as your geographical preference. They may even put you exactly where you didn’t want to go, but this shouldn’t be a deterrent. My father served in the Peace Corps during the Vietnam war, and he wanted to go to French-speaking Africa, and he didn’t want to go anywhere near the war. Well, they sent him to Thailand, right next to Vietnam, and he had the time of his life.

Personally, I wanted to go to Thailand because it’s part of my heritage and I speak Thai. Turns out, this is exactly why I was barred from ever going to Thailand with the Peace Corps. They want their volunteers to experience a totally new culture. Once I knew this, I put as my preference, like my father before me, Francophone West Africa. The Peace Corps was recruiting for French speakers, they were excited about my desire to serve in Africa, which is where the fewest people want to go, and I was nominated for a program in Francophone West Africa. However, during my long medical screening process, I found out that I’m unable to eat gluten (a protein found in wheat, barley and rye), and I could not go to West Africa as a result. Peace Corps decided to send me to Southeast Asia, reminding me that it wouldn’t be Thailand, and in the end I was extremely happy to come to the Philippines.

What do you miss about America?

Of course I miss my friends and family. 27 months is a long time to be apart from them. I’m missing out on weddings, funerals, births, many crucial moments in the lives of my loved ones because I made the decision to be here. I knew that at the outset, of course, but faced with the reality of missing these moments, these people, it’s much harder to shrug off the time factor.

The other big thing I miss is food. Since I’m gluten intolerant, it’s not always easy for me to eat here, though of course not as difficult as it would be in other parts of the world. Filipinos have been very much influenced by 400 years of Spanish rule and 50 years of US occupation. That means that they use many Western ingredients that I can’t have, and because of the threat of contamination, it’s even harder for me. If something I am able to eat, like a fried fish, is touching a breaded piece of pork, or was fried in oil that previously fried something battered by flour, then I can’t eat it. I have been able to remain healthy here, but only through vigilance and discipline and culinary abstinence. So I miss the food I can get easily at home: gluten-free breads, cereals and desserts; peanut butter; Thai food; sushi; candy, chips and junk food.

Do you speak a foreign language? Do you speak Filipino?

Any foreign language? I grew up speaking both English and Thai in my house, and I spent about five years studying French in middle and high school.

There are hundreds of languages and dialects in the Philippines. English and Filipino, which is actually Tagalog, are listed as official languages. When my group of volunteers, Philippines batch 267, got here, we were split into three geographical and linguistic groups which would determine where our permanent sites would ultimately be. My group was sent to Dumaguete on Negros Oriental, part of the Visayas (Vi-SY-ahs). For three months, we spent intensive classtime learning Cebuano, or Visaya, or Bisaya. Cebuano has 20 million native speakers throughout the Visayan islands and greater Philippines, whereas Tagalog has 11 million.

Because the Philippines has such a high rate of moderate English proficiency, it is possible to get by without learning a Filipino language very well. Some volunteers never speak it at all. As a teacher, I am obligated to speak English all day at work, so learning is especially difficult for English Education volunteers because they aren’t as immersed in the language as volunteers in other sectors in the Philippines, coastal resource management (CRM) and children, youth and families (CYF).

What do you do in your spare time?

I read a lot of books. I have been here for almost eight months now, and I am currently reading my 23rd book since arriving in country. This is more than I’ve read for pleasure since I was in middle school myself. It’s very satisfying to have the time to read what you want, for whatever reason you want. I also use the internet a lot, and I try to spend time writing. Some weekends, I visit other volunteers relatively close to me.

Do the Philippines have seasons?

The Philippines have basically two seasons: ting-uwan (rainy season) and ting-init (hot season). It is both rainy and hot during both seasons, but the intensity of the rain during ting-uwan is shocking, as is the intensity of the heat during ting-init.

Over the course of the year, there are other mga ting (seasons), like ting-ani (harvest season), ting-prutas (fruit season), ting-bagyo (typhoon season), ting-mangga (mango season), and so on and so forth. Anyting goes. We have a joke among the Peace Corps volunteers: we’ll add the word ting before anything. It’s always ting-uncomfortable, we’ll say of the weather. It’s ting-ako na (season of me, now).

What kinds of sports and music are popular in the Philippines?

Basketball is a big, big past time here. If there isn’t a decent basketball court in every neighborhood, there’s at least a makeshift one. There are informal games all the time, and plenty of people from the neighborhood or community will come to watch. My host brother would turn the TV to a sports channel and watch basketball, past games and present, all day, and then watch shows about basketball players. Philippines national obsession. With the emergence of Manny Pacquiao, Filipino boxing legend and recent defeater of Oscar De La Hoya, boxing has gained popularity.

Filipinos love all kinds of music, without irony. Celine Dion, Queen, Mariah Carey, the Star Wars theme, Christmas music no matter the ting, the Carpenters, stadium evangelical gospel, anything. Videoke (karaoke with moving pictures of anything you can think of on the screen) is another national obsession, and you can hear it all the time. My students particularly enjoy current American hip-hop, and it can be heard at all times, and they frequently prepare dance numbers to it.

What is Filipino food like? Do you like it?

Filipinos eat white rice at every meal, even breakfast. For some volunteers, this is a big adjustment and sometimes one which they will never get used to or come to enjoy. Personally, because I am used to eating rice regularly and because I can’t eat common items like bread or flour, I really prefer to eat rice anyway, so it’s not a problem for me. Filipino main dishes are usually fried or boiled, they often contain a lot of fish and pork, and their main seasonings are salt and soy sauce. Because soy sauce contains gluten, sometimes my host families had trouble finding things to make for me. However, with a little imagination, they were able to remove the soy sauce or substitute it with something safe for me. I like many Filipino foods, but because of my dietary restrictions I am often limited in what I can have and how it can be flavored, resulting in the same kinds of bland dishes over and over. Now that I live on my own, I can make my own food, and generally I wouldn’t describe it as Filipino. I am, however, very much into eating and making Filipino desserts.

23

2009-03-22T13:08:00.010+08:00

This weekend, Connie arranged a birthday party for me at her house in Inopacan. She prepared an unbelievable epic of a meal, worthy of the Philippines, including a killer buko salad and a make-your-own halo halo buffet. Sean and Cassie came up from the depths of Southern Leyte, and Syd was there, whom I haven’t seen since we were both in Manila for different reasons in January. She brought Matt, a volunteer from batch 266 who also lives on Leyte. It was amazing to reconnect with everyone together. In classic Pinoy fashion, we ate our meal and snacks and desserts over a six hour period and went home clutching our bellies, satisfied.

Connie cooking up some bean sprouts

Me, Sean, Connie, Cassie, Connie's feast and a kind of inverted tapestry of the Last Supper

Me and some key halo halo ingredients before this gorgeous group of PCVs sang Happy Birthday to me. Who needs cake when you have halo halo?

Syd, Sean, Matt and Cassie building their ultimate halo halos

Syd digging mightily on her halo halo

On my actual birthday, it was like the universe had decided to take it easy on me. At school, which is finished for the summer at this point, I only collected tests, and the Ruby students were joking with me and making me laugh. I got an order of one of my favorite Pinoy snacks, puto cheese, which is like a cupcake except made of rice flour so I can actually eat it. It’s not always there, so when I saw the little stacked mountain of them at the bakeshop I inwardly rejoiced. I got three packages I’d been waiting for, and a series of letters from my World Wise Schools students in New Jersey, which were very pleasing to receive and read. I'm preparing a response to almost 20 common questions the students have about service and the Philippines. I’ve been introspective about service lately, and I’ve also been having to write about it in various forms, and having to do that makes me articulate my challenges and successes and helps me to navigate them. That evening after work, I ate as many puto cheeses as I wanted, had pad Thai for dinner, and waited to feel 23. I’m still waiting.

Insects, Amphibians, and Fowl, Oh My

2009-03-12T06:38:00.005+08:00

Last night seemed particularly dedicated to animals of the unexciting variety. Since moving into my own place, I have noticed at night the appearance of a certain kind of insect whose continued existence beyond its prehistoric origins can only be credited to the fact that it appears to be made of armor. This insect, I have no idea what it is, possibly some ancestor of the modern beetle, is about a centimeter big and inspires no fear whatsoever. It can be startling when it flies around without warning, but it is not gross, slimy, or covered in millions of legs, nor do thousands swarm when there is food around. Prior to last night, there had only ever been one, I’m assuming the same single, mentally challenged, armor plated creature careening comically into walls, the computer screen, my person, and landing with a surprisingly clear and heavy thud on the floor. Last night, as I went to bed, I noticed about five had gathered to convene on my office wall. I paid no mind other than to be briefly concerned that this may turn into an infestation, and as I moved to turn off the office light, I heard, even though the din whose description is forthcoming, the dull smack of a little armored body losing purchase on the wall and falling, not to its death, only to the ground. For some, there is just no evolution.

Being in the Philippines has come with lessons, shifting priorities, surprising new skills. I now know there is no added authenticity in suffering or going without as a Peace Corps Volunteer, but I also know how to open a tin can with only a knife and some gumption. Another thing I now know: roosters crow any damn time they please. As far as I can tell, this means regularly, as in every few seconds, throughout the daylight hours, and at least hourly in the moonlight ones. There may be nothing more infuriating to me than the spluttering, cackling, 60-year-old smokers’ hack crows of the cocks at all hours of the night, particularly when trying to fall asleep and stay asleep. The hours between 4 am and 6 am are particularly brutal, and usually I’m out of bed around 5 simply because the cocks have destroyed anything resembling sleep at that point. I don’t think those people in the States who haven’t grown up on a farm can truly appreciate how piercing, how penetrating the shriek of a rooster, nay, many, many roosters in one’s immediate vicinity, can be. There are many in a sort of courtyard just behind my apartment, which my bedroom window conveniently faces, and the result is that it often sounds as if these roosters are sitting like the devil on my shoulder, issuing forth with gusto their shrill, grating screeches into my weary, abused ears.

So, that’s the routine of my life – go to bed trying to ignore these devils, stay asleep through their crusades against night silence, wake with resigned displeasure to their calls when the sun’s not yet spilling over the horizon.

Last night, all that changed. Around 9 pm, when I usually start my slow move toward that lofty ambition of going to bed and sleeping, something new happened in that courtyard behind my apartment, where any sounds issued are amplified in my acoustic theatre of a bedroom. That something new was a veritable army of toads engaging in the first night of what I can only project is their mating season. The sound of them, not unpleasant, is constant and uniform enough not to cause irritation, but it is loud enough to ring in my ears, echo in my bedroom, and block out any campaigns the crowing cocks and barking dogs may have had against the sleep of the Hilongos citizenry. So, despite the reprieve from the cocks, despite the deafening white noise toad sex apparently offers, I couldn’t sleep. At 11 pm their ardor abruptly – very abruptly, as if their cessation was timed, rehearsed and flawlessly executed in perfect unison - cooled, causing the vicinity’s proud cocks to attempt to catch up on that whole two hours of crowing the dull roar of the mating toads had thwarted. From this point onwards the toads began stopping and starting in even intervals, each hard-won silence soon shattered by the penetrating, phlegmatic shrieks of half a dozen posturing cocks. I woke before five this morning to that pattern still in effect – the ebb and flow of the sweet sex sessions of libidinous toads, the piercing crows of all local roosters. By 5:30 am the toads, no doubt exhausted and sore, stopped their amphibian lovemaking, one assumes for the day, and the cocks had their stage back.

I wonder how long toad mating season lasts?

Duende

2009-03-11T19:01:00.005+08:00

From her nonfiction book On Bullfighting, author A.L. Kennedy on the Spanish concept of duende, loosely defined as a malign spirit in the bullfight which also implies transcendent contact with a higher form of self:

"It can be a reminder that destruction does have an intimate relationship with creativity, even if it is simply the destruction of the empty space which precedes it, or the necessary removal of the earlier, poorer forms that lead to a finished piece of work. It can also act as a description of the 'soul' which offers itself beautifully, and cruelly, to specific human beings at specific moments - but try to trap it, guarantee it, take it for granted and it melts away."

Nicole

2009-03-04T20:21:00.001+08:00

Yesterday morning, I was concerned enough about dehydration, pain and my vomiting to check into the hospital. Soon after I got a room, I learned I would get a roommate – a woman about to give birth. She and her husband, a man from Switzerland who speaks excellent Bisaya, unlike most other foreigners, myself included, gave me the impression that they’d been waiting for this for a long time. The husband kept repeating “Today I’m going to be a father.”

While I lay in bed working around the splint a nurse had taped onto my left hand and tangled in my IV tubes, alternately rereading The Cider House Rules and watching some of the worst movies ever made on HBO, the couple had their baby in another room. The dad came in to get something and said it was all finished, they did a C-section.

“Boy or girl?” I asked.

“Yes!” he said. “Oh, girl.”

“Good,” I said, “congratulations.”

The rest of the evening came with visitors and well-wishers and calls from German speakers. I had no overnight kasama, though Connie offered, and my counterpart offered her daughter Nor-vith, but I knew there was room for only one kasama: the new mother’s, and rightly so. And I was self-sufficient, able to get me and my fluids to the bathroom and back with one working hand. So, after my counterpart left, I was the new family’s observer, the silence from the other side of the room.

Nicole, 7.5 lbs, possessor of a future long, coveted white person nose like mine, spent the evening being rocked and cooed at and, it seemed to me, generally hassled. She is a calm baby, not given to crying, and I couldn’t help but wonder from my place against the far wall if this harassment was altogether what she would have wanted from her first few hours of life. When I looked at her, I couldn’t fathom how new she was, how small and open. How serene and unafraid. I imagined that at just a few hours old she knew everything; that we all did, once, and by living lost our knowledge, gained ignorance and anxiety. When voices rang in my ears, when noise scraped them raw, I winced for the newness of Nicole’s.

The world is loud. And so sharp and bright, beautiful and painful.

The Rain in Spain's Former Colony the Philippines

2009-02-26T14:45:00.005+08:00

It started raining like it was the end of the world today, and I thought I could capture it on video. Turns out the intensity of neither the visual nor the audio translate well, but I thought I'd post anyway. I apologize for the DSL line running through the image; such is the price of internet.

I would like to remind the Philippines: it's ting-init now, not ting-uwan. Get it right. Anyway, I think neither ting is the accurate ting. I think it's always ting-uncomfortable. I hear ting-prutas is on its way though, and I approve.

Adventures in Pinoy Cuisine III

2009-02-25T16:19:00.010+08:00

The Philippines is a country that takes eating very seriously. This means taking snack, or merienda, between each meal. Often snack is something sweet and full of gluten, sometimes it’s just fruit, and other times it’s a full on meal. Champorado is a popular snack item here, and unlike some recurring snacks, I never got sick of it. When I first had champorado made by my host family’s house helper in Dumaguete, I fell in love.

Champorado is basically chocolate rice pudding. How could anyone resist? However, I soon learned that not all champorado are created equal, and despite the ease of preparation and varied recipe options, it is easy to mess up champorado. For example, burning the chocolate is never advised and will result in an entirely ruined batch. I also prefer a thick champorado, not a runny one, and too little sugar or too much tablea, cocoa tablets, can also ruin your champorado. Some of my batchmates were also familiar with it as a breakfast food, but were not thrilled about it, even saying that it didn't taste like chocolate. I concluded that they had not had good champorado.

In Dumaguete I’d seen tablea for sale all over, but since coming to live in Hilongos, I hadn’t seen any. Today I resolved to find some and buy it so I could try my hand at my own champorado. I bought oversized tablea because I asked the tindera, the saleswoman, which made the best champorado and she indicated a set of them made in Hindang, the next town north.

I chose this recipe because it’s simple, straightforward and looked easy and delicious. This is another recipe that I think looks as clear, possibly easier for those in the states. The following is the recipe I chose and my modifications.

4-5 pieces of tablea (blocks of pure cocoa the circumference of nickels – I think bakers’ chocolate or plain unsweetened cocoa as in the alternate recipe could substitute) melted in ½ cup of water
1 cup of rice (many recipes call for sweet rice but I don’t know which kind is sweet and I have 5 kilos of rice right here, why buy more?)
2 ½ cups of water
½ cup of brown sugar
¼ can of evaporated milk

As I mentioned, I bought oversized tablea, about double the size of regular ones. I broke up two and melted these with the ½ cup of water in my makeshift double boiler because I’ve burned chocolate in the past and have no low heat with this stove. When I make this in the future, I might use a fraction less tablea, maybe 1 ½ or 1 ¾.

Cook the rice with the 2 ½ cups of water in a saucepan, stirring constantly. I didn’t stir constantly, but frequently. When the rice is translucent, add sugar and melted tablea. It looked like it was still swimming in water when I added the sugar and tablea, but this seems to have had no ill effects.

Cook until rice is tender. Add sugar and water to taste. I added two more spoonfuls of sugar and no water. The recipe says to add evaporated milk to individual portions, but I’d been instructed by the house helper in Dumaguete to add either evaporated or condensed milk (I can’t remember) during the cooking. I added about a quarter can of evaporated milk (can was 410ml) and am pleased with the results. Someday, I may forgo the sugar and evaporated milk and add only condensed milk. Anyway, during this stage, stir frequently and be careful about burning the chocolate. I used my lowest un-low heat and it still bubbled, threatened to boil, but it ended up fine and unburnt.

When finished, take it off heat, cover it, and set it aside to cool, to expand and to thicken. Not the prettiest dessert you've ever seen, but well worth it, and should be eaten while still hot. This recipe makes 3 or 4 servings.

EDIT: This is possibly even better in the morning, after a night in the fridge. I added more evaporated milk and water, broke up the gelatinous mass it had become, and reheated. The result was a lighter, fluffier champorado than it had been the night before.

Adventures in Pinoy Cuisine II

2009-02-23T20:14:00.009+08:00

Apparently, this was the weekend of cooking. And Monday counted as an extension of the weekend because it was declared a holiday and we got it off. Anyway, earlier Monday, I used this recipe to make kettle corn. I had heard it could be a messy process, but with this recipe there was no sugar or oil left over. I took a few flying popped kernels to the eye before closing the pot with its lid, but I remain whole and generally uninjured. I heartily recommend this method, and if I were to modify the recipe at all, I’d add a little bit more sugar. Of course, lacking things like measuring spoons, who knows how much I actually put in?

In my halo halo chronicle, I mentioned that I would make leche flan fairly soon. I didn’t anticipate it being quite so soon, two days later, but the opportunity presented itself with my day off and failure to write anything other than this blog entry. I’d had leche flan in halo halos and at Sugarland Hotel in Bacolod. It was delicious, naturally gluten-free, and pretty addictive. And, I saw, not too difficult to make, so why not?

After dinner came the moment I would try out my leche flan recipe. I found several recipes, here, here, and here, but all made unreasonably huge portions in the tradition of Filipino fiesta-sized eating habits. I saw from these, however, that I could steam cook leche flan, and I had just discovered that my rice cooker came with a steaming apparatus to add on. Lacking an oven and not really trusting a “water bath,” that I could steam my way into leche flan was very important. I decided on this recipe, due to its simplicity and portion size, but I had no llanera (Filipino leche flan mould), and even if I did, it wouldn’t fit into the modest rice cooker add-on. So, I made some modifications to this last recipe to accommodate my available materials, including steaming rather than bathing it in water. I bought aluminum muffin tins, which I cut into individual cups so they could be arranged to fit into my steamer. The recipe used makes a good amount of carmelized sugar to line the bottom of each tin. However, as for the custard, it made a little too much, but not outrageously so. Also, I used a 300ml can of condensed milk, largely because it was what is available and because the recipe doesn’t specify, even implying that any size is appropriate. In the future, I believe I will use less so as to minimize waste and because the mixture was quite runny, though I don’t know its proper consistency, and it far surpassed its 30 minute steam time, possibly due to its consistency, possibly due to my steamer.

So, here’s the recipe:

Carmelized Sugar:
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/6 cup water
Dash of salt

On a low heat (my low heat is still pretty high), dissolve the sugar and salt in water. The recipe says not to stir, but it wasn’t dissolving, so I swirled the pan a bit to dissolve it. Pour it into your mould or moulds; it should cover the bottom.

Custard:
4 egg yolks
1 can of condensed milk (I used 300ml)
1/3 water or milk measured by empty can of condensed milk (I used water)

Break and gently mix egg yolks to avoid bubbly custard. Empty the can of condensed milk into yolks, then put water or milk measured by the same can into the liquid. Mix gently. I went ahead and forgot the vanilla because apparently so did the recipe writer, but still came out with a delicious product. Here I noted that the mixture separates slightly; the condensed milk goes to the bottom, the egg and water stay on top. It never quite converges, and the urge to mix or whip it vigorously is fairly intense. Patience, grasshopper.

Strain the mixture as you fill the tins/your mould. This direction seemed odd to me, and I wanted to skip it for expediency’s sake, but I remembered the flourless chocolate cake debacle of 2008 with Ken, where the recipe called for, but didn’t explain, like this one, a technical aspect of the baking process. The results were dire that time, so, holding with faith, I strained the mixture into the tins, using a spoon to pour rather than dumping from my giant bowl into tiny tins. Turns out, the straining is done so that unintegratable egg bits are strained out rather than left to cook in. Another recipe says not to bother to strain, but I feel good about it. So, always follow directions, and if you’re writing recipes, always explain the rather opaque reasonings behind the processes so fools like me don’t skip it.

Cover tins with tin foil so the flan doesn’t get soaked in the steaming process. The recipe says to steam for 30 minutes, but only around the hour mark was it finally thickening up. I don’t know if that was the runniness of the custard mixture or a failure of my steamer to heat up quickly. Anyway, the time it took in comparison to the time it was supposed to take was a tad ridiculous. My final steam time: 1 hour, 30 minutes. Even after all that time, it never firmed up, and the results were unattractive in the extreme. Zeus. I refrigerated my tins overnight, and only then did they stay together when inverted onto a plate.

In case you try this in an oven and get positive results, I'll continue. In my opinion, it should be refrigerated for a long time, though the recipe does not call for this. Then, to remove your leche flan, gently run a knife along the edge of your mould and invert it onto a plate. Here is where many leche flans get destroyed. Mostly I don’t care what it looks like, but maybe next time it’ll be marginally more attractive. This recipe made six small muffin tins worth, with some custard mix left over. So, this is my truly hideous and out of focus individual portion of leche flan.

On the whole, I’m satisfied with the ease of preparation, flavor and portion size of this recipe, but not the cooking time or appearance/consistency of the final product. Next time, I will try not to forget the vanilla. Ultimately, the cook time and final product are cause to pause, but since I’m aware of this for next time, I won’t be dashing off every fifteen minutes to see if it’s ready yet, and I'll modify it to be less runny by adjusting the amount of condensed milk and water/milk added. In the future, I may also forgo the carmelized sugar. While delicious, it's a tad cloying and the custard needs no help to be sweet. I’ll also try to find something to do with the four leftover egg whites. In a past life, maybe I would think nothing of pouring them down the drain in the absence of something to do with them, but here that is more difficult.

Please note that I’ve added to the side of my blog a list of links to recipes I’ve been using, including this one, and recipes I intend to use when the opportunities arise. Some are Filipino recipes, others are not, but do check them out and enjoy. The recipes listed were chosen among the many available for ease of preparation, fewest or most reasonable/logical ingredients (one of the leche flan recipes called for the most expensive [eyeroll] organic eggs, carabao milk and something I’ve never heard of – no thanks), and clarity of direction. As I experiment with these recipes, I will post with results and modifications.

Next: Champorado

Because the Public Demanded...

2009-02-22T18:14:00.018+08:00

Certain fathers who shall remain anonymous won't stop pestering me for a complete pictorial guide to my new apartment. So, in an effort to appease the rabble, I present: My Apartment.

The outside of my apartment, before it was finished. Now it has plants in the little plant area underneath that window, and the area that's all dirt out front is concrete. I call it grapefruit chic.

A before shot of my refrigerator and me, courtesy of Connie, before my refrigerator was turned on and made to work for its place in my swank apartment.

The sala set built by students at my school. Exceptional craftsmanship, as Cassie and Sean noted today, truly beautiful work. Donated by the woodworking department.

My kitchen space with donated furniture. The area where my stove and propane live is particularly pleasing on the eye and makes a lot more space available for preparation. My landpeople's carpenter made it in a matter of days. Also, note the pan with handle as showcased on my stove.

Let's head upstairs.

My still unorganized spare room. The bedframe is there, wa'y mattress, but I'm working on it. Anticipating much welcome guest traffic in that room.

My spacious bedroom, complete with king sized bed and exceptionally pleasing mattress.

My pride, my most used space, the office. My bookshelf, another creation whipped up by the carpenter in mere days, gives me a lot of satisfaction. This is an open area that leads, as you can see, to the balcony.

And that's my apartment. I ordered some fine art prints, laminated as fine art is meant to be in its natural state, and when I get them I plan on enspiffening the office, my bedroom and the living room with them. I also want Filipino art, but am finding it difficult to find.

In technical news, I'm dissatisfied with the performance of this camera. It's a point and shoot Nikon CoolpixL18 with 8 megapixels. I had previously been very happy with its predecessor, also Nikon Coolpix but with 5 megapixels bought in 2005, but this one has less depth, poorer color perception and seems fundamentally incapable of focusing. When I get an electricity converter and can charge it, I will start using my digital SLR, provided I'm not somewhere like a beach where it will get destroyed. Lesson: like a 5th wife, newer, thinner and flashier does not equal better.

Adventures in Pinoy Cuisine

2009-02-21T16:12:00.011+08:00

Halo halo: my favorite Filipino food item. Most of my comrades have already posted their obligatory halo halo-themed entries, but I have been waiting for today. From the first time I had a halo halo, at the deeply buried hole-in-the-wall Tablespoon fairly late in training, I knew I was destined to make one - the best one, the ultimate halo-halo; I was going to be the one who made it. The perfection of the halo halo would be my secondary project. This single truth occupied my mind, biding its time through training, through my second homestay, through until today when I had the desired ingredients, the time and the space.

First, let’s look at the anatomy of a halo halo: on a bed of shaved ice, halo halogists across the nation pile any combination of the following ingredients and many, many more: pandan, big tapioca balls, gelatin, corn, garbanzo beans, mungo beans, some other kind of big white bean, pieces of leche flan, coconut strips, jackfruit, banana, mango, ube either in cube or jam form, ube or mango ice cream, cornflakes or puffed rice, condensed milk and sugar. Essentially, whatever’s lying around and convenient goes into the halo halo. While many of these ingredients may seem antithetical to dessert (beans?), I assure you, even the pickiest of palates is pleased by the product. Nonetheless, I have my favorite ingredients, and since moving into my own apartment, I have slowly been amassing these items for my future in halo halo production. Today, as I considered my languishing jar of ube jam, my soaked but purposeless tapioca balls and my fresh batch of strawberry Jell-o, courtesy of Marlene, I knew with certainty that my day had come.

I looked up the recipe for leche flan, and, upon discovering that my rice cooker is also a steamer, I desperately wanted to include it. However, I would have had to go out and find a mould or moulds small enough to fit inside the steaming add-on, so some other day will be the reckoning of the leche flan.

First, and perhaps most stupidly, I decided to crush my ice in the blender I had bought for that express purpose. Any halo halo enthusiast will tell you that the consistency of the ice is key; an ice miscalculation can destroy the entire experience. Well, my blender certainly does not crush ice. What I got was water and some humbled cubes, so I put it in a bowl and put it back in the freezer to see if more time would improve it in its current state. Then I set to work on the other ingredients.

I boiled my tapioca balls, small ones, and that was a success except I have no strainer. So I had hundreds of caviar looking tapioca balls in a puddle of their own juices, drained to the best of my ability with my finger against the lip of a tipping bowl.

I opened a can of condensed milk with my can opener. Or, if we’re being honest, I half opened it before the can opener’s parts sprung apart like teenaged lovers caught by Dad. That was fine, since it was condensed milk and would come out even in its half opened state. But. But, I had a can of whole kernal corn to open. And I had to do it Pinoy style: with a knife and my own brawn. So I gathered my nerve and went at the top of the can with a large, sharp chopping knife for about ten minutes before getting a large enough opening to fit a spoon in. I thought I would die or lose some fingers, but I am in tact and proud of it. Note to self: get a quality can-opener held together by more than the will of its maker.

Then I had three jars to open – ube jam, mungo beans and coconut strips. Twenty minutes later, I had none open and was trying desperately not to succumb to the urge to find a kindly Mormon man to open them. When I gave in and peaked outside, I saw only a man mixing concrete to continue the construction of my building and decided I was on my own. Eventually, I got the (essential) ube jam and the coconut strips open, but not the mungo beans, and considered it a success.

I cut a mango, cut some Jell-o into cubes, and brought out my bowl of water ice to begin the creation: sugar, Jell-o cubes, mango cubes, condensed milk, tapioca caviar, coconut, ube jam, ube ice cream, corn, and I was ready.

With great anticpation and exuberance I tucked in, only to find that my base ingredient, that most essential of items, my ice, was a travesty, an insult to halo halos everywhere. I ate it nonetheless, as the water turned a light opaque ube purple and the remaining ice cubes floated on top like little rounded mocking eyes. It was my first try, and marginally successful despite myriad pitfalls, and I now know that a blender will not suffice in the absence of an ice shaver. Until next time, ultimate halo halo.

A Room of One's Own

2009-02-13T15:38:00.006+08:00

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.

Precious Gems

2009-02-11T12:31:00.004+08:00

Being an American trying to work in the Philippine education system offers many frustrations and difficulties, not necessarily because of the individuals one works with or teaches, but because of the circumstances of the country, which are myriad and complicated. Often, students reach high school having an unbalanced knowledge of English. Sometimes more advanced concepts in grammar pose no difficulties for them, yet they lack some basic skills. I'm still trying to determine where they are, but what they already know and what they don't seem very arbitrary to me. Plus, as a new teacher, I am unsure in general about where 12 year old ESL students who have been learning English their entire lives "should" be. One of my issues with this last one is that I feel in myself a disparity between being 12 and being in high school. In the States, we have 7th and 8th grade, but here those were eradicated in the first half of the 20th century to cut costs. So, I get to thinking, "well in high school, they should know this certain thing." But it's very different when I think, "at 12, they should know this thing." And that's a hard gap to bridge for me, but I'm working on it.

Anyway, this entry is not meant to be my scathing critique of the Philippine education system or a whinging post about how I toil. I want to say here that today I'm so proud of my Ruby students. Here, the students are arranged into sections in which they will stay for the duration of high school, which is a practice I'm not comfortable with. I teach two sections of mixed levels, Emerald and Garnet. In the afternoon, I teach Diamond, the advanced kids, and Ruby, the so-called slow kids (not my words.) My co-teacher has earned my admiration for her devotion to all her students equally, which was something I did not see in Dumaguete. In Dumaguete, I would hear teachers talking about how much they hated their slower students within those students' hearing range. Here, my co-teacher never loses her temper with Ruby, never leaves them though there may be a staff meeting, never insults or disrespects them. My Ruby students can be more careful and conscientious of their work than any of their peers, Diamond included, and yesterday that really showed in the group work they handed in. I have Ruby as my last class of the day, so I had already corrected the three previous classes' work and knew their scores. Out of ten groups in Ruby, nine got perfect scores on work regarding modal auxillaries. And the only group to get anything wrong only appears to have forgotten to finish a single sentence out of twelve. No other section, mixed or advanced, could near the amazing accomplishment of the Ruby students yesterday.

And they call these students slow. I absolutely disagree.

Peace Corps: Home of the Small Victory

2009-02-04T17:46:00.005+08:00

Today I stayed home from school in the afternoon owing to a crippling gluten contamination of my person sometime during lunch. It was the worst single incident I've had since arriving in-country, and I'd forgotten what a raging misery a bad gluten contamination could feel like. When I refrain from fulfilling my obligations due to illness, I always feel like I'm being unproductive and useless, even though I know what would really be unproductive and useless is going to work weak, in pain, and in need of the bathroom for embarrassingly long stretches of time. So, as I lay in my bed alternately recovering and relapsing, I felt that if I wasn't teaching, I could at least be shopping for my new apartment, which was of course ludicrous and untrue. I was equally unable to shop, but I thought all day about what I still need: curtains, pots and pans, a mattress. Mostly though, I began to covet the mirrors I'd seen a few days ago in a glass shop. As far as I can tell, many Filipino homes lack mirrors that aren't personal sized. My batchmates have also noticed a lack of mirrors, so it's not just my imagination. I was very surprised to see mirrors in a shop, mirrors of a respectable size, and as the evening drew near and I regained my strength and my gastrointestinal constitution I set out to go buy one.

Well. I didn't come home with a mirror, but I went out into the marketplace to see what else I could procure, if anything. The following uninteresting anecdote is only understandable if you know that most pans here are metal, with metal handles, so when you cook you must always use a potholder. I just can't be trusted to do that. I'm clumsy, accident-prone, and still bear the marks of various hot objects from the flat in Edinburgh. Know thyself, they say, and I knew myself when my host mom took me shopping this past Saturday and tried to get me to buy one of these disastrous pans. And I probably would have resigned myself to it if, a week or so before, I hadn't seen some with rubber handle covers while visiting Maasin with Connie and encouraged her to buy one of these elusive treasures herself. I did not know, at the time, that I too would be moving out quite imminently.

We marveled over the pans, and she eventually bought one much to my biting envy. I thought I wouldn't be moving out for about a month, but last week, some miscommunication led me to believe I had to move immediately, and, despite the miscommunication not being true, I am now nonetheless set to move out this weekend. Since confirming the move, I've thought of those pans, and how hard it would be to get one in Hilongos, but I kept hope alive when I refused to buy a burn hazard and today, in my mirror-induced jaunt, I found a stack of be-handled pans deep in the marketplace. They were 328 pesos. I wanted that pan as much as I wanted a mirror, more than I wanted a mirror. But I also wanted to leave off that cumbersome extra 28 pesos that would make my change a nightmare. So for the first time ever in country, I bargained successfully, without salivating over the merchandise, and got my pan for 300 pesos. I know, not the boldest bargain, but I'm pretty proud of myself.

Now the fact that I got my pan is a source of intense triumph. I am going to cook things and burn myself only occasionally, not constantly. I found it, by Zeus, and bargained for it too. I showed my host mom, texted Cassie, and am writing a blog entry about it. Somehow, this is very sad, but also very Peace Corps. The subject line was Cassie's reply to my inordinate excitement about pan handles, and it's too true.

Stay tuned for a weekend post about my new digs, hopefully with pictures!

Quake

2009-01-30T07:27:00.002+08:00

This morning as I sat in bed fiddling on the computer, I had the sensation that someone was on the other side of my wall, inexplicably pushing at it and thus rocking my entire bedroom. Then I realized that it was an earthquake. So, that was my first real one, a tremor in elementary school notwithstanding, and it rather felt like my bed was possessed and gearing up to take me flying across Leyte like a deformed magic carpet. Quick texts to Connie and Cassie confirmed the phenomenon.

So, Leyte, I’ve heard you were the apex of Filipino natural disasters. Typhoons and earthquakes we’ve taken in stride, if muttering complaints; will you soon present us with landslides and a sudden increase in the snake population, as promised?

Hail

2009-01-21T07:30:00.001+08:00

This is a momentous day to be an American. It’s a momentous day to be an American of color. I’m sure for most African Americans, today’s emotion is too big to contain on virtual pages or in black and white print. I can’t articulate the feeling of my heart expanding in my chest thinking about how staggering this election has been; I can’t imagine the impact this has on those who lived through and participated during Dr. King’s civil rights era, people who never thought they would live to see today. But today is not about the color of our skin, or even civil rights, which, despite the optimism of the hour, remain issues unresolved. Today is about the United States redeeming itself, rebuilding its potential to be as it should be: a country of freedom and opportunity. It’s about becoming the best it can be and encouraging its citizens to do the same.

Before I began my Peace Corps application, I struggled with the moral dilemma of going abroad and representing a country whose recent governmental policies betrayed my personal ethics. Atrocities like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as well as the slow but sure chipping away of the various rights of women, immigrants, people of color, the LGBT community and every other private citizen were too troubling to ignore in the decision to serve a country and government which had implemented such violations of human rights, even if that country was my country. In the end, I decided that the spirit of the Peace Corps itself is separate from the agendas of any current or past political policy. Despite its myriad flaws, the ideal Peace Corps nonetheless represents to me a vision of America’s place in the world as one of benevolence, aid and good will. To be a Peace Corps Volunteer at this moment in time, during the transition from despair to hope, is to be suddenly representing a country rising from the ruins of the past eight years.

I had a hard day today. Nothing in particular happened, but the weight of hundreds of the standard PCV frustrations weigh more heavily on some days than others. Today I thought I would burst from the pressure of it, but as I watch 2 million of my countrymen gather at our capital to celebrate a new hour in America’s history, while I am half a world away, serving her in my small way, and I cannot regret being a Peace Corps Volunteer, the daughter of a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, no matter how puffy the mosquito bites on my ankles get or how much my permanently sodden (only) pair of shoes smell.

On September 11th, 2001, I was in math class in tenth grade in Hamburg High School. I remember every subsequent period of the day, and I remember the immediate impact of our nation’s biggest open wound. There was fear and anger and anguish, not the quiet unity of devastation that the media reported. For so long, it seemed that was my place in history. Like my father remembered President Kennedy’s assassination, I remember the burning Twin Towers, and I and my peers were briefly called Generation 9/11 by magazines needing buzzwords. Then seven years later, with sixtysome of my fellow soon-to-be volunteers, I watched President Elect Barack Obama step onto the stage in Chicago to announce his victory, and I knew I would remember November 4th, 2008 with the vast world of difference in emotion than I remember September 11th, but with no less gravity. Today President Obama takes office against seemingly insurmountable odds and the rather unattainable expectations of an economically and emotionally devastated nation, and I’ll remember January 20th, 2009 too. Should my children and grandchildren ever ask which dates around which history and my life pivoted, I will not hesitate.

I went to bed and woke up a little past midnight to catch the inauguration ceremony and President Obama’s speech. I felt like when Aretha Franklin sang, she turned those unnamed and unnamable emotions into powerful music and projected it into world for everyone watching and listening to feel with her. And instead of waxing lyrical on a speech I am in awe of, I will just say hey! He referenced the Philippines!

Welcome, President Obama. We have been waiting for you for as long as American soil has had memory.

Illness Near and Far

2009-01-12T09:28:00.002+08:00

The most miserable illness, perhaps, is the illness far from home.

Since early December, I have been battling various incarnations of a malady that has been since dubbed bronchitis with reactive airway; whether or not that’s the right diagnosis now seems moot and rather belated. I spent the holidays sequestered in my bed, coughing and choking with violent force, rather than celebrating. On New Year’s Day, instead of frolicking in the typhoon with my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers in Padre Burgos, I was admitted to the hospital because my cough had caused me to stop breathing and subsequently my hands to stop following my directives and my face to feel as if it had stopped existing. Connie, kasama extraordinaire, trundled down from Inopacan in the pouring rain to keep me company and make sure I was getting the proper care. A few days later, well enough that sitting upright or walking around a little didn’t threaten to cause me to lose consciousness, I flew to Manila to see the Peace Corps doctors and their colleague in a Manila hospital.

Ultimately by the time I got to Manila, I had gotten over the worst of my illness and there was little to be done other than to prescribe more medicines. The doctor in the hospital told me I would improve slowly and over a long period of time because the climate and air quality are somehow not conducive to quick recovery. However, the Sunday I left for Manila, I woke up with pain in my back and side that has been unexplained and has slowly gotten more and more crippling. I think I may have broken a rib coughing like Megan did once, in which case there’s nothing to be done except take pain medication and hope it goes away. Last night the pain hit a new level, and if this were a pulled muscle as speculated by the doctor in Manila, I don’t think the pain would be getting worse. I can’t say as I know for sure at all what it is, but any movement is agony and when I cough I feel like something sharp is about to puncture my organs.

Anyway, I stayed in Manila for six days. When I first arrived, I was very intimidated because it’s Manila. And I’m pretty much from Leyte. The contrast is staggering: urban jungle vs. actual mountainous jungle. I texted May Lynn, unsure of how close her site is to Manila, but it turns out she was passing through anyway and she met me at the pension and offered to be my kasama. So that Sunday, and the Monday following when I had my doctor’s appointment, May Lynn accompanied me. She showed me around Manila a little bit and we spent a really positive, rejuvenating time together. Being gravely ill for a month can exaggerate all your problems, magnify them and force you to wallow in the negative. Coming to Manila and having May Lynn there, then Marga, then a whole bunch of people from my batch who arrived for an HIV/AIDS workshop, ended up being something I really needed, if only to feel connected again.

On Tuesday, May Lynn had to get back to her site and I had another appointment. Marga from 266, whom we’d known from our Dumaguete days, happened to be in Manila for her own care and took up briefly May Lynn’s kasama duties. She took me to Greenbelt, a really posh mall in the nice part of Manila, and we ate Thai food lunch and talked about the traveling we’d done. Later, loads of people from my batch descended upon the pension, and many, not being Dumaguete people themselves, had never had the pleasure of Marga’s company. She was a big hit.

The first night we were all there, we went as a group to eat dinner at a shwarma restaurant. Megan and Karen and I, admittedly acting rather stupidly considering we were now in the big bad city, not Dumaguete and not Leyte, were passing around Megan’s phone when a man pried it from Karen’s hand. Megan, like someone with a brain, got the hell out of there, but Karen and I, clearly more naïve and provincial, stared at the guy like “why did you just take our phone and why don’t you give it back?” The moment seemed to stretch until he made a gesture as if to stab us, so we finally got a clue and turned tail to hurry away. Dan and John and some of the other girls were ahead of us, so we ran to catch up with them and feel a little bit more secure, in a sexist, helpless girl way. It was a jarring moment, and a frightening and sobering one, but it was also a lesson learned and a retrospectively entertaining story.

Over the next two days, I alternately did nothing and went to various appointments while my companions attended their conference. I had wanted to go to museums Marga had recommended, but I was exhausted from pain and illness and activity and never got around to it. In the evenings we got dinner and spent time together, which for my part was much needed and much appreciated. I really do miss people when I’m here; it can be isolating and lonely, made infinitely worse by illness. My last night in Manila, Thursday night, Syd, Dan and I ate dinner with May, our language instructor from training, her adorable daughter and her friend. May and her daughter are arguably the cutest people on the planet, and sometimes I feel like Lenny around cute things so I have to try not to squeeze anything to death. We went to the Mall of Asia, the biggest mall in Asia, the biggest mall I’ve ever seen, the most overwhelming shopping center I have ever been freaked out by, and ate a fine sushi dinner. Throughout my time in Leyte, since first entering service, I have not had a problem with gluten, which is a credit to my host family. Two months in, I had begun to think of it more in the theoretical rather than the immediate. Imagine my surprise about half an hour after a dinner I thought had been safe when I felt the familiar unpleasant twinges of a gluten contamination. In the Mall of Asia. The biggest mall in the entire continent of Asia. A crowded mall the size of my hometown. Well. Readers can imagine subsequent events without my expounding upon them.

On Friday, it was time for me to head back to Leyte. I said goodbye to those who hadn’t already left (some had early morning flights and so I missed them) and made my way to the airport before 10am. I arrived in Tacloban around 1.30, Mrs. Collins’s package of books which I had picked up in the Peace Corps office was the first off the conveyor belt at the airport, and I got on an overpriced jeepney headed for the transport terminal in Tacloban. I waited there until 3 to leave, hungry and unaware that I would be waiting so long, and finally made it back to Hilongos around 6. I spent a leisurely Saturday recovering from travel and yesterday, Sunday, I went to Sogod to visit Cassie and Sheryll, whose company I had been missing for a while.

Turns out, in Bato, I got the worst jeepney driver known to man. I'm fairly sure that I had seventeen heart attacks on the way to Sogod, not to mention the half hour when the jeepney broke down in the middle of nowhere and men had gathered round the jeepney making lewd gestures with their hands in their shorts, where I didn’t know if I was going to make it to either Sogod or back to Hilongos. But, we did manage to careen into Sogod, finally, at noon, my heart hammering in my chest.

I spent the day with Cassie and Sheryll in engrossing conversation and ate one bowl of halo halo. We also decided we have reached the point in our service where it is possible to get cold, and I was bundled to high heaven even though I was in the Philippines. Leyte, it seems, is colder than the rest of the Visayas, and never actually stops raining. Here I note that it’s not the rainy season, but I have not seen a full day go by without a downpour that shakes the foundation. And apparently that’s just how Leyte is. Perhaps this is a contributing factor to the high early termination rate of previous batches’ Leyte volunteers. Anyway, seeing Cassie and Sheryll was also rejuvenating, and I have resolved that in order to keep my sanity, I must see my fellow volunteers more often, even if it involves a lot of travel time and a brain damaged jeepney driver. It is so easy for Connie and I to see each other that I think we become complacent and lazy and end up only seeing each other. Not that I object to seeing her at all, on the contrary, I love seeing her, but it would be good for both of us to see others as well. Which sounds a lot gayer than I intended. I make no apologies. In any case, early in service like this, other volunteers can be our lifelines, and it stands to reason that the more lifelines we have, the stronger we can become in our resolve to stay, to be good volunteers, to complete service and, let’s face it, not to fall apart in the face of illness and turmoil and constant irritants. Next stop, if I can finagle it: Naval with Megan.

So, I’m still sick and missing the familiarity of home during my sickness. I’m still working through some issues I’m having with being here. When I think that there is no way I could possibly stay, I remind myself how much I wanted this, how hard I worked for it, how much I want what comes at the end of it personally, professionally and academically, how much I care about the people I serve alongside, and, possibly most importantly, how little I have to go home to.

In other news, Uncle Ed has died. He did not make it to 2009, but he did make it to age 90. He was my father’s uncle, my grandpa’s brother, and the general consensus in the family was one of little affection for him despite what he provided for us materially. I wonder if he led a lonely life, being a curmudgeon and a miser, and I wonder if it ever occurred to him that if he was neither he could be happier or have more meaningful relationships with the people around him. In any case, I am sorry for my grandpa, because no matter how he acted, Uncle Ed was his brother and my grandpa spent almost eighty-nine years knowing the man. That’s the thing about siblings, I think: your parents die, friends, companions and spouses come and go, your children grow up and leave you, and in the end who you will always have are your siblings. You are always bound to them by common experience, invisible bonds, and at the end of a long life they will have been your only true constant stars. Siblings, even if sometimes you can’t remember if they have a name other than That Dick, are gifts. Uncle Ken, my grandpa’s younger brother, will be giving the eulogy at St. Pete’s this Monday at 10am if anyone who read this in Hamburg is interested in great oration.

So, goodbye Uncle Ed. Thanks for the education. You finally broke out of that nursing home for good.

The Obligatory Christmas Post

2008-12-24T10:57:00.001+08:00

Christmas in the Philippines: the biggest holiday and most festive time of the year. I suppose I have two opinions about it, the first being - what about Muslims and other non-Christians? Aren’t we alienating them and thus sowing the seeds of discontent? And then the other is, in the States, we pretend to have this big separation between Church and State, when in fact my elementary school holidays were spent making Christmas decorations in the classroom and having Christmas programs and so forth, members of other religions be hanged. So really, the Philippines is just being less hypocritical about celebrating the holidays of their most predominant religious group. Let’s face it: in a country of 90 million, almost 100% of the population is Catholic; why not be upfront about celebrating?

Being non-Christian but nonetheless celebrating Christmas in the tradition of my no-longer-practicing Catholic family are two opposing things to most Filipinos. It is, however, common in the United States. I feel like, for many families but certainly not all, marking the Christian holidays has become a sort of cellular habit, ingrained not in faith but in traditions that no longer hold gravity. For many, Christmas is not about the birth of Jesus, but being with family and loved ones and being able to give gifts that at other times of the year would be somehow inappropriate. I don’t believe this is bad or hypocritical in and of itself, but it’s just not a religious observance. The Christmas season also inspires a feeling of charity, forgiveness and good will that should actually be in place throughout the year, indeed, throughout one’s life regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof, and to me, the fact that it largely isn’t and such sentiments are only “Christmas spirit” gives the atmosphere of the season an air of falsehood in the United States that I find distasteful.

I am not missing home today more than on any other day. My family has their Christmas, exchange of gifts, turkey, arguments, accusations, liquor, with little fanfare or feigned Christian feeling, which suits me. The fact is that the ones we celebrate with all live within 1-20 miles of each other, and we see each other quite regularly. Christmas is just like all other family gatherings, except it happens with a lot of wrapping paper and uncomfortable “nice” clothes. I won’t be there, and that’s okay the same way it’s okay that I haven’t been there for the last four and a half months, and won’t be there for the next twenty three. Sort of a distant missing, but nothing seasonally disproportionate.

I don’t really know how today and tomorrow will be going. I will just do as I’m told and see how my host family celebrates. I expect that it’s with a lot of food, like all things Filipino. What I do know, at the very least, is that the Filipino sense of Christmas is a sincere one, and that Filipinos are, no matter what else, always trying to be the best Christians that they can be, with a welcome on their lips and, best of all, without agenda.

A Note on Serving in the Peace Corps as a Volunteer of Color

2008-12-24T10:54:00.004+08:00

The volunteer of color faces a unique set of challenges in the Peace Corps. He or she faces stereotypes and misconceptions both virulent and baffling; he or she must constantly defend his or her credibility as an American, or, indeed, the very fact that he or she is an American; he or she might not receive much in the way of support or understanding from his or her fellow PCVs who are white. I knew all of this at the outset of my application process; frankly, I knew this not about just the Peace Corps but about life in general. Those aforementioned challenges are not and were not new to me, but I knew they would take on a new context when I chose to serve, and I knew it would become part of my job to try to dispel stereotypes and misconceptions of people of color from the US at my post.

I believe my experience in the Philippines has been fairly light in terms of how my racial identity is perceived, especially in comparison to other minorities or people of color serving in other Peace Corps countries. As a mixed person whose ethnicity is ambiguous, I have been able to blend in insofar as people don’t stare at me much; if they do, they’re figuring out something about my face, something they can’t place. Many have mistaken me for mestiza – half Filipino, half white – which is pretty much as close as anyone has ever guessed for my ethnicity. Marketplace anonymity is, of course, shattered when I speak English, or, more accurately, when I can’t speak or understand Cebuano. I lead a life without being hassled overmuch, which I appreciate. When I am walking with Connie or Cassie or Sean, I can say I am decidedly more uncomfortable. People stare, people say things that we consider rude, people generally think they have a right to your person that they do not, and that’s just to the white people. When I am with them, I feel like I am being judged harshly for keeping their company, much like the Filipinas who take up with fat old white men are judged in Dumaguete. And then, in the context of being introduced or being involved in a social gathering, the white volunteers are much more celebrated, while I am given only a cursory nod or sometimes ignored altogether, despite the fact that I am here in the exact same capacity as they are. This has made my companions possibly more uncomfortable than me, for which I give them sensitivity credits. But ultimately, I don’t spend much time with them at all, and the things I face without white accompaniment are more prevalent and more sigh-inducing.

Those things: being asked where I’m from, despite saying “The United States” already. Being told I look Indian or that I must be Indian or from India. In one particular case, one woman telling me that I was actually not what I said I was, but Latina. Being told I am not a pure American especially rankles.

Here’s the secret though: I have been told all these things since I was a very, very small child. Ignorant people in the United States had made growing up brown in whiteland a very difficult thing for a long time. If I am inwardly irritated by such comments or penetrating questions about my ethnicity, it’s not because Filipinos are saying them to me. It’s because I’ve been fielding such comments for over twenty years, and, indeed, in the States I navigated much more negative comments, comments designed specifically to hurt me or stated by those oblivious to how such comments punched me in the chest. I have been called every racial slur you can think of (ambiguous ethnicity not conducive to finding the proper insult), I have been the subject of racial bullying, I have been the victim of racial discrimination. But these are obvious forms of racism. Much worse, I think, are people who don’t think what they do is racist, or how institutions and practices and much of all Western society are permeated with racism. It’s easy to say “don’t you dare call me the N-word.” It’s much more difficult to explain to someone why you don’t appreciate being called “the perfect Asian student” or that people of color have the right to be called what they choose, and not what white people ascribe to them.

I believe that in coming to the Philippines, I got off light. Though it is sometimes wearying, having to tell people that I am indeed American and not Indian, not even Indian American (or American Indian, in fact), is not a terrible burden to bear. And when faced with the bald statement that I’m not pure American, I try to keep my irritation on the inside and explain that anyone born in the United States is a pure American, that people can become naturalized citizens and are also pure Americans, and that white people more than anyone else in the United States were long ago (or sometimes not so long ago) immigrants themselves, from Europe. There are, in fact, groups Filipino Americans in Louisiana who came before the turn of the 19th century, thereby making them 10th or 11th generation Americans, which is more than many of the white Americans that currently populate the US can boast, since many of them came a hundred years later. I know that some people think my “Americanness” is legitimized by my having a white father, but that is tempered by having a Thai mother; she makes me “not American.” I do not like that my white side gives me credibility, and I do not like that my Thai side is dismissed as being unacceptably not American. I want to be taken and appreciated (or reviled, if that’s how it’s going to be) for my own merits. I suppose this is the ongoing project of any person of color having to navigate the labyrinth of white privilege and racism.

I don’t know how volunteers of color in other places, namely Eastern Europe and Central Asia, do it. I was very close to being sent there, and I like to think that I could have persevered through difficult times, but it seems like it would be so difficult as to be almost unbearable. Syd tells me some of her companions in Armenia left early because of how difficult it was to be volunteers of color there. Here, I am not called names. I am not in danger. I lead a comfortable life of some anonymity. Could be worse things for a brown girl in the Peace Corps.

On the Occasion of Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T17:37:00.001+08:00

It’s that time of year: at home I imagine the air is crisp and brisk, smelling of autumn. Perhaps the citizens of my oft-maligned town can see the products of their exhalations, perhaps the first hints of frost are creeping along the tenacious flora, stopping now the season’s progress. The fall season by now has turned inexorably toward winter; sweaters are not optional, once-bright leaves in varying colors are now only brittle, curling brown blueprints of what they were, and the cautious are contemplating the installation of snow tires, tucked into a corner in the garage during the optimism of spring. And somewhere, deep in the village of Hamburg, three generations of Sawerses are arguing over semantics and opinions, cursing each other and their helpings of dark meat, descending somehow all at once into gluttony, irritation and ennui.

I, however, am exempted from such doubtlessly quote-worthy revelry on account of my Peace Corps service in a country which has probably never known the bite of frost outside Baguio. But, far from my ornery clan, fractured as we are by geography, by stubbornness, by spite and by guile, I can find the grace in this blood-soaked holiday. With my gratitude I honor not the genocidal tendencies of righteous Europeans who came to North American shores to plunder the livelihoods of those who already lived there, but the spirit of all those things for which I am grateful this year.

I am grateful to have completed a degree in creative writing from Binghamton University. I am grateful to have had talented and intelligent professors for the duration there. I am grateful to have been given the strength and discipline to adhere to a diet which has improved my life and probably saved it. I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to serve both my country and the Philippines in the United States Peace Corps. I am grateful to have as my counterpart a kind, compassionate, knowledgeable woman who works hard at a thankless job and treats her three hundred students’ educations with the utmost respect. I am grateful to have been placed on an island with some of the finest people I could ever ask to serve alongside. I am grateful to have bright students whose desire to learn moves me beyond words. I am grateful to my family and friends all over the world who have now and always supported me despite my myriad faults. I am grateful I have a host family who welcomed me into their home and took care with my dietary needs though they did not have to. I am grateful to have a sound mind, a ready pen, and a body whose faults did not prove insurmountable. I am grateful for halo-halo, tapioca, yellow mango, merienda, mountains in the distance, shade, electric fans, pieces of mail, enough pesos in my pocket, text messaging, passable internet, fine batchmates, comfortable shoes, good literature, a twenty minute ride to Inopacan, the prospect of travel. I am grateful for the wisdom and foresight to have made the choices I’ve made over the past few years which have brought me here. Mostly, I am grateful that I can survey my life as it has transpired and smile.

The Black, Ulcerated Bowel of America

2008-11-13T15:57:00.002+08:00

I come from Hamburg, New York, a town fifteen miles south of Buffalo. Buffalo, an All America city, was once the beating heart of American industry. It once sustained the northeast’s entire economy, it gave birth to Ford Automobiles and nurtured Mark Twain. Hamburg, on the other hand, settled unsurprisingly by dour Germans in the 19th century after driving out Erie Indians, has heretofore nurtured only the delusion that it invented the hamburger, a delusion still causing misplaced pride in the Hamburg citizenry today. As I grew older and more restless, too brown to continue bumping up against the borders of Western New York, I saw Buffalo fall into ruin, its once-great buildings one by one razed “for progress.” But progress never came, only dilapidation and suddenly empty lots. I left for an even worse city for college, chose an exponentially better one for study abroad, and when I graduated I aimed to leave Buffalo for years at a time by joining the Peace Corps. And on my first day in my official capacity as a TEFL education volunteer at Hilongos National Vocational School on the island of Leyte in the Philippines, I led my first year high school students in a pronunciation drill: “The lady passenger’s anger toward the proud stranger decreased her hunger for a hamburger.”

Holy Zeus it was like a nasal nightmare. A wing sauce and Chiavetta’s horrorshow. Every godforsaken vowel emphasized and elongated, every syllable a reminder that I come from possibly the most mockable and unfortunate city in the fifty United States.

When those unsuspecting students said “hamburger” as if they were from Hamburg, I felt a strange mixture of pride and shame. I’ve long defended the hard hit vowels of my pirate accent from the scorn of downstaters, Long Islanders, and other such aurally offensive vermin, but I found myself introspective on the subject of accents and “proper” pronunciation when given the rather staggering task of teaching students to speak like me.

The perpetual feeling of being an underdog is inherent in the Buffalonian; we are a race accustomed to losing Stanley Cups and Super Bowls, getting buried under seven feet of snow overnight and still having to go to work in the morning, watching our city sink ever further into dereliction, neglect and economic despair. So we foam at the mouth when questioned about the propriety of “pop” over “soda,” “wings” over the ever-reviled “buffalo wings,” just to salvage a little dignity in the face of our crippled way of life. At home I can feel oppressed by soft vowels not pronounced through the sinus cavity, get my hackles up over every errant “soda,” but here I introduce myself and hear only the grating “a” in my first name, the legacy of Western New York something I can’t eradicate from my speech.

So when, in the course of my first day in the classroom in Hilongos, two hundred and forty rapt Filipino students dutifully parroted back that same harsh “a” sound as prompted, I felt I should apologize for the displeasing sounds coming out of my face. That old inferiority complex was manifesting itself suddenly in actual feelings of inferiority rather than the usual Napolean-esque posturing of the threatened 716er. I began to doubt the “correctness” of my speech patterns. Despite certain personal elitist leanings, the way I speak is no more valid than any other regional accent in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean. Why should I take the soft Filipino vowels and transform them into bitter, acrid shadows of themselves just because I can say with fair confidence that I’m a native speaker of English?

“We want your accent,” my Filipino colleagues say. “We want the students to speak just like you.” So that is their wish. Not just that I help with the monumental task of fluency, but that by osmosis I pass along these vowels, this vernacular, this dogged sense of industrial and spiritual decay.

I imagine these clear-faced children down in a bar with an Irish name on the southside of Buffalo, tipping back Labatts with the old boys, who haven’t been to work since the steel plant closed a few decades back. They complain about the ball and chain and the Bills, but the Bills still manage to keep their loyalty. They eat whatever’s come out of the deep fryer in the back, they narrowly avoid a DWI on the way home, and when they wake up in the morning there’s frost on the ground and they don’t notice the very deep blue of Lake Erie and the sunbeams shining along that unending horizon.

All creatures on this earth are narrow things, defined by the places they’ve been, the sins they’ve committed, the others they’ve known, loved, crossed. I can get as far from home as it is possible to get, but Buffalo’s hard steel cityscape still looms grey as the backdrop of my life. It’s best, of course, in the summer and fall, when colors haven’t yet withered under the influence of lake-effect weather, but it’s never summer for very long and I don’t last there much longer myself. It’s home because somehow we landed there a century ago and made it familiar, it’s home because I was born there, and so was my father and his father, it’s home because when I speak, Buffalo still asserts itself like a patient but persistent suitor. Maybe it’s a dying city and the rest of Western New York should blow away with it, but there are too many of us whose tongues remember the sharp seams of words, living there on the border. In the end is it not the worst fate to be from Buffalo, and it’s not the worst fate to be taught to speak by one of Buffalo’s far-flung daughters.

We can, we can make a difference

2008-11-08T06:19:00.006+08:00

I woke up today a Peace Corps Volunteer.

We finally swore in after these long, difficult three months. And now we're parting ways for our respective permanent sites.

One thing that was amazing to experience this past week was watching President-Elect Obama get on stage at Grant Park. The mood here, at the conference, was overwhelming joy. We must have a unique experience; we are likely the only Peace Corps batch all together for the occasion. I cannot articulate the depth of my joy, so all I will say is "Yes, we did." And so we will continue to do.

Goodbye Dumaguete, I've got to go

2008-11-01T06:46:00.011+08:00

One year ago today I was nominated for a June departure to Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa. I have come through so much to be where I am today: a week away from swearing as a Peace Corps volunteer with the 267th batch of volunteers in the Philippines. I feel like my personal strides have mirrored my Peace Corps progress somehow. I was diagnosed with this autoimmune disease just as I was sending in my medical kit in December, and as I struggled to navigate and control my emotions around such a difficult diagnosis, a lifelong ailment that I could only control through strict dietary discipline, I struggled too to prove I was medically fit to join Peace Corps, that my mind was strong enough to overcome the failures of my broken body and strive regardless of my physical shortcomings. I had to prove to myself and to the Peace Corps that I could take care of my own health without faltering, and I finally grew more comfortable and less angry with my fate as a gluten intolerant just as I achieved medical clearance. Medical clearance came at about the same time I was awarded the Portia Dunham award in fiction from my university. I had to mount a crusade against a Peace Corps placement which would have insured my failure just as I was coming into the final assignments of my senior year, and I was placed to my immune system’s satisfaction, here in the Philippines, about the same time that I graduated. I was coming out the victor in everything I had striven so hard for: Peace Corps, my health, my fiction, my degree. And while I’ve been training here, I have been able to overcome despair, bitterness and frustration from many sides, such that I barely remember the sensation of having to force myself through to the next moment without losing control of my motivation, my emotions, my body, my hopes. Some days I can’t fathom how long the next two years in Leyte will be, but today is a big day for me. It’s a year of having been in the application process and training and coming out triumphant at every turn. It’s a year of personal gain and growth and healing. It’s a year where I’ve felt intense motivation for the work I’ve chosen in fiction. I breathe: mind over matter.

In non-overarching metaphor news, I achieved a score of intermediate-mid on my Language Proficiency Interview. There are three sections, novice, intermediate, advanced, and within each there are three tiers, low, mid, high. Beyond that there is superior, which they really don’t award people, and then native speaker. A few people in Dumaguete achieved intermediate-high and two people achieved advanced-low. I’m very pleased with my score, with the scores of all of those in my cluster, and we’ve made our teacher proud, which I consider possibly the most important thing. Maybe I’ll never get much better than that because of the nature of my job and the Philippines, but this is tangible evidence of something I worked for during training. This is the fruit of the four hours per day I spent in class and the countless hours of homework and study I did outside of class.

So this is it for those of us who came to Dumaguete and weren’t assigned here. Early tomorrow morning we’ll leave for a conference in Bacolod, swear in as volunteers on the 7th, and head into this two year experience we’ve been waiting so impatiently for. Here now, a pictoral ode to my cluster, training and Dumaguete.

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Lechon. It's just not a party without one.

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The awesome Bantayan cluster. That's Sean, May, our teacher, Syd, me, Spiderman (or Denzel, Jessica's host nephew, who can't resist a picture), Dan and Sheryll. Bringing up the attractiveness statistics of Peace Corps volunteers everywhere.

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Lynn of the Casa Miani group, presenting something I only wish I could eat, yesterday at the handog.

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The cathedral. Built in 1754, the oldest and tallest Spanish church on Negros

old-timey firetruck

Happy Fred's on the Boulevard. I never went because it's always full of tambok og puting nga mga lalaki, but the name made me think of my grandpa. Hi Grandpa!

On the Impressive Ingenuity of Less Interesting Philippine Fauna

2008-10-28T21:00:00.002+08:00

Ants. Like a nosy neighbor, they will expose every weakness in your tidiness, every flaw in your careful Ziplocking, every distraction that yielded a moment’s inattention to crumbling foodstuffs. Into the life you thought you’d sealed so meticulously they soldier, a line of steadfast, tireless marchers searching out all the suspect morsels and convenient crannies that could be exploited for their own gains. Case #19,284,651,028: In my extensive toilet kit I included a small tube containing those tools which would someday help me repair my glasses. After two months here, I had reason to use the tiny screwdriver within, not for my glasses but for my death-rattling hard drive, and when I dug around to find the tube, what I found was a new ant colony. They had bitten through this hard plastic tube and lain eggs in the bottom. The hypothesis was that because ants are attracted to magnetic fields, perhaps they could not resist the sensual pull of a tiny screwdriver, but upon inspection I noted that they couldn’t care less about that piece of metal workmanship. In fact they seemed to avoid it like it was the smelly girl in a small class. They did nothing but attend to those eggs nesting in the bottom of my tube. Because I am mean-spirited and often cruel, I drove them out, killed their young and attempted to salvage what was left of my admittedly crude and now destroyed eyeglass repair kit. But they were not to be defeated. The determination, the ambition, the sheer pluck of the ant tribe is unrivaled. They came back, over hours and hours their numbers did not dwindle and their drive did not wane though I had lain waste to their home and their comrades. I admired them, I respected them, but I couldn’t live with them. I surrendered. I threw that tube and its contents, minus the tiny screwdriver, into the garbage, and presume they are living their ordered, pestilent lives in a quaint, homey sewage drain somewhere that’s else.

Rats are a less respectable lower lifeform. They come in the night like all your doubts and shames plaguing you, except instead of your strength and dignity, they ravage things you were keeping, things you can understand would tempt the appetite of a wee beastie, and things you can’t imagine could possibly appeal even to the starving. Upon my arrival here, I stashed many things in my closet, and had no cause to revisit them until last month when I visited my permanent site. Though I knew the rats were in there because they kept me up at night with their taunting scratches, I thought my things were safe. More fool I. When I opened that closet door, which I’d taped shut in a futile attempt to keep those little bastards out, I found that they’d ripped open my bags of Jolly Ranchers that I was keeping in case of children. Melted Jolly Rancher goo was all over everything, most of which I was able to salvage, but my crippled volunteer handbook I bade a regretful farewell. This, I thought, was the last of my travails with rats. They could make their home in my closet, but they had nothing more to consume, so once again I put their residence amongst my belongings out of my mind. Tonight I had reason again to dig around in my toilet kit, where I found they’d bitten through the mesh of one pocket, made off with several foil packets of Advil Cold & Sinus, and proceeded, I assume, to get extremely high off them. I found the discarded packets littering the floor, each pill removed apparently with both care and zeal. I can’t really imagine the effects of dozens of Advil Cold & Sinus pills, my favorite form of medication for ills from which I often suffer, I might add, on just a few rats. Back home, pharmacies now make you show your license and sign a release form just to buy Advil Cold & Sinus. Turns out any bit-rate drug addict who barely passed chemistry can make meth out of enough of it. Do rats like to party, I wonder, and are they jonesing for more? Or are they dead and waiting to stink up my bedroom? The final insult, among my empty, half-eaten stash of Ziploc bags and ragged, chewed toilet kit, was my Diva Cup. My silicone savior, my fearless feminine fanny fortress, had also fallen victim to the insatiable appetites of enemy rodentia. I feel only smug satisfaction that they have likely suffered a foamy, bleeding, drawn-out death by overdose.

Booklust

2008-10-22T17:22:00.006+08:00

Classics: books you want to have read without having to read them. I’ve spent enough time laboring over tiresome and painful materials written by such authors as Henry Fielding, Aphra Behn, Gustave Flaubert, Daniel Defoe and more to be wary of the term “classics.” I often thought in the past that while it would be nice and gratifying to my intellectual ego to catch many literary references plucked from the pages of the classics, my emotional well-being could be preserved greatly by not being subjected to the tedium of actually reading them.

But ask me how many times I’ve read Jane Eyre since I was ten. Ask Marlene how quickly I reread it when I found a tattered copy discarded in a hostel outside of Galway. Ask me how the last conversation between Jane and Mr. Rochester goes, ask me what Charlotte Bronte’s pen name was, ask me anything you want about that book and I will know the answer. It’s one of the greatest books of all time, a work of art unhindered by its age. What about The Picture of Dorian Gray? How could I refuse? And after so many rave reviews of Pride and Prejudice by a certain Jessie last year, cloistered and insular as we were in Hayes, I bought it, packed it, and two days ago finished it to my great satisfaction.

I’m still suspicious of the classics. I’ve been burned by Henry James, John Milton, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton. But what about the E. M. Forsters in there, the Mark Twains, the A.A Milnes, J.R.R Tolkiens and C.S. Lewises? Though contemporary fiction may be my preferred diet, I can't ignore the greats of the past.

For all of that, there’s Gutenberg.org. Some of you have already been aware of its existence for some time, and others like me are just shaking its golden hand for the first time. It’s a database of thousands of books which are so old they are no longer copyrighted. Gutenberg.org brings these books into the computers and minds of people like me who are 1) too lazy to buy or borrow a book, 2) impatient and want it now or 3) really far from a good selection of books written in English. Last night I saved twenty-five books and I don’t expect they’ll be the last I mine from this resource. I’d run out of reading material and was in a state of quiet panic. I knew you could get some classics online for free, so decided to look for more. Hello, Gutenberg.org.

Currently starting on The Call of the Wild. I’ve got the other most important London, three more Austen novels, six Dumas novels whose order of sequence is unnecessarily difficult to decipher, a couple of Dickens novels that I’ll attempt to work through though I’ve never been successful before, a Tolstoy and a Dostoevsky for posterity, Homer’s epics, another Bronte sister, Twain, Eliot, Hesse, Hawthorne and Burnett. Of course I prefer the flip of the page and the smell of a book long on a shelf, the crisp print on cool, bound sheets, the weight of escapism contained in my hands, but what I’ve got, this virtual paper, will suffice in the circumstances. In actual book form I have almost twenty mostly contemporary novels coming at me from the States to look forward to, and I’m running a list on the side of this blog of books I’ve read while here. Three down, ~50 to go. In reading we become better writers, and I must learn from the old masters as well as the new.

12 Minutes of Gold

2008-10-21T06:27:00.008+08:00

Thanks for saying it, Colin Powell: There is nothing wrong with being Muslim in America.

Among all the other strong and truthful assertions in this interview, Powell gives a powerful and moving rebuke to those who would have voters believe that a Muslim cannot be and will never be American. Barack Obama is a Christian, Powell says, but if he were a Muslim, so what? Powell asks: should a seven or eight year old American Muslim child not dream of being President of the United States? Muslims can die for our country, but not lead it? Republican politicians have been demonizing and otherizing those of the Islamic faith for too long. This has been the refrain of many sane Americans for as long as Obama has been campaigning, but no political figure before Powell has been willing to address it publicly. I have admired Powell since he had the courage and dignity to step down from his position as Secretary of State in light of the deceptions perpetrated during this vile war; he is a man of integrity deserving of our esteem. His endorsement of Barack Obama, for the reasons he has given in the interview above, is a boon for this campaign and this candidate, and I can only hope that those undecided voters who have heretofore supported and admired Colin Powell as I have will sincerely meditate on the wisdom of voting for Barack Obama instead of paying heed to the desperate attempts of a racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, war-mongering madman to discredit and demonize his opponent.

This is solely my opinion and not that of the Peace Corps or the US government.

Thor's Righteous Fury

2008-10-20T06:04:00.005+08:00

Last night around 1 am I woke to the most intense storm I have ever experienced. The rain was deafening and the lightning quick and close, each answering thunderbolt shaking the foundation of this concrete house. I lay awake imagining the force of each in combination would rend the house in two, and I didn't even get a warning text from John Borja.

Reflections on Teaching in Dumaguete

2008-10-18T12:24:00.008+08:00

All of us in Dumaguete have really been feeling the burn of training over the past few (grueling) weeks. Turns out Peace Corps Philippines has one of the world’s longest pre-service training periods, and this is a fairly new development. Why they would want exhausted and increasingly disgruntled trainees is beyond me, but the pressure should ease fairly soon as training winds down and we prepare for the big move.

My students and I have just recently begun to have a freer relationship with each other. Despite the rocky start in technical training and during practicum, I’ve been able to have a positive experience lately and I can almost let myself believe that I may have reached some students in some way, even if it wasn’t in “learning English.” I don’t really think I could have made a true difference in language with them in so short a time, but I received some notes from students my last two days with them that were really appreciative of a few of my techniques. It was gratifying to know that I hadn’t employed the ideas I’d had in vain and that students could gain from those ideas. I hope that they can take with them the knowledge that a teacher can and will give you patient, individual attention and that questions will be met with care and thought.

One of the goals of Peace Corps is that through our work, we can dispel some stereotypes of Americans and people from our communities can understand Americans better. This is not, in my opinion the most important of Peace Corps’ goals, but it’s one I face as a person of color. Of course one of the stereotypes of Americans is that we are all white. While I’ve been teaching here in Dumaguete, no student has asked me my ethnicity or put me on the defensive about my nationality the way adults have. I don’t know how it will be in Hilongos, but that has been something I’ve really appreciated. Maybe another thing these students can take from my time with them is that not all Americans are white and we are still legitimate Americans. From talking with other Asian-American volunteers, I know that no matter how long I stay here, I will still face confusion and even rejection on a racial level, but I’m heartened by these students’ reaction to me and cautiously hopeful that my students in Hilongos will be similar. If not, I can spend the next two years proving my legitimacy. My American street cred.

I wish I’d had my camera on me on Thursday, but my batteries were dead. At the end of my second class, the students put on a despedida, a farewell show, for me, and it was really touching that they’d do all this work and put on a whole show for me, complete with guitars, drums, karaoke machine. Of course I’ve already mentioned how musical a people the Filipinos are, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised when they sang nine songs, two in Cebuano, and did two dances. The nature of dancing here has not been something I’ve written about yet because I didn’t quite know how. Basically, at any kind of celebration, any at all, there will be many dances, and they’re very dirty. The dancers could be the most conservative people you know in a conservative country, but a dance comes on and they’re gyrating and undulating and rubbing on each other and being generally very scandalous. This happens in school, church, wherever. I’m not kidding. So that was the first dance they danced for me. The second dance, called “Papaya,” is absolutely the opposite, a kind of dance remniscient of the white man shuffle as immortalized in the fine Will Smith feature Hitch. You just point with your fingers to the left, to the right, up, down and then shake them a little bit. I suspect rhythmless, non-Filipino influence for this particular travesty, and of course it was the only dance fit for me, a rhythmless non-Filipino, to be cajoled into performing. So they dragged me up there, and with two much more talented students flanking me, I did this finger pointing dance in front of forty-five other students and my co-teacher, not to mention my technical trainer, Rustum, who was there evaluating my performance as a teacher. Luckily he couldn’t have evaluated me on my dance technique because another student soon dragged him up there to join us. This would be funnier to those reading if you knew Rustum, whose most assumed pose is one where he hides half his face behind his hands and looks generally like a shy mouse. Many pictures were taken on many mobile phones and in twenty years, maybe they won’t know my name or what I taught them about metaphors, but they’ll remember how I managed to butcher even the Papaya dance.

Yesterday I was supposed to teach at Negros Oriental National High School for the last time, but there was some confusion as to whether or not class was actually happening, so I spent my two class periods just hanging around my students. I got one more mini despidida in each class and gave out the pasalubong (thinking of you gifts, generally food) I’d brought them. I have been surprised at how well they seem to have enjoyed my time with them, surprised and gratified, and I am optimistic about my future as a teacher in a way I couldn’t be when I first started this venture. Teaching is a performance, it’s the smile you put on and energy you put out even when you don’t think you have it in you, every single day, every single class period. And the reward you get is the respect and esteem of your colleagues and students, and if you’re very lucky, the knowledge that you helped someone in some small way in the process.

It has only been in the past two weeks that I’ve grown more comfortable and confident inhabiting the role of teacher. Only that recently have I been feeling less like I’m going to melt in front of the class from nerves and more like I’m prepared to give my lesson and elicit positive responses. The nature of practicum is that we are not stable forces in the classroom, so I have always felt that what we give the students, and indeed, the teachers we’re paired with, is not exactly a fair amount of time and energy. We are spread so thinly between our myriad tasks that the students don’t necessarily receive the focus they deserve, and for that I feel like I’ve let them down. I’m moving on to Hilongos just when I’ve finally begun to build a rapport with these students, just in time to feel like I’m leaving them dangling. I feel beholden to them, yet there’s nothing I can do to ease that, and there was never going to be. I was always going to leave Negros Oriental National High School in late October and Dumaguete in November.

Do I still have apprehension about teaching in general? Of course. Am I nervous about starting from scratch with 240 new students come November? Only when I’m breathing. Am I up for the challenge? Always.

a cappella

Less than a quarter of my first class, in a classroom that isn't ours. I love disorganization and miscommunication.

Peace: the most popular Filipino photo pose

Some of my students and me, my last day

Insert Possibly Obscure Kate Bush Reference Here

2008-10-14T12:41:00.012+08:00

On Sunday, Dan, Syd, Sean, Sheryll, Dave, Heather and I took a multicab from Dumaguete through Sibulan and into San Jose, where we proceeded to scale the mountain so we could eventually get to Twin Lakes. Twin Lakes is a national park preserving a pair of crater lakes virtually untouched by human hands. Getting to the park was most of the adventure, if you can call it that. It wasn’t a fun adventure, at any rate. Let me back up: it was fun and scenic to be going up a mountain and being able to see gorgeous untouched flora, the coasts, the mountains, the sea and Cebu in the distance. It was fun the first time our lawnmower engine-powered vehicle stuttered to a stop and we had to get out and push it, running, up the steepest parts of the mountain. It was even fun to repeat it a second time with Sheryll having hopped into the cab at a crucial moment to take quick snapshots of the rest of us scrambling in after her, the cab gaining necessary momentum. It was decidedly less fun when we had to do this seven or eight times and I eventually became a shaking, nauseated mess while other, more vigorous people soldiered on without complaint. After about an hour and a half of this arduous journey up the mountain, we finally got to the park, where I lay out composing myself and focusing on not exposing my breakfast to my batchmates. Marga from batch 266 also caught up with us after a mix up where we accidentally left her in Sibulan, and from there we hiked up the steepest part of the mountain, sans running and sans pushing a multicab, to get to the first of the Twin Lakes: Balinsasayao.

We took in a leisurely lunch that greatly improved my mood and physical capabilities. I thought we were going to hang around the lake a little, maybe swim despite the signs that instructed us not to, but as soon as lunch was over people packed up their things and started on another trek. People don’t like to tell me things in advance, so after some time I asked just what in the hell we were doing instead of enjoying this fine fine lake, and it turned out we were bypassing it entirely in order to spend our time at Lake Danao. Getting there unwounded and alive proved to be my greatest victory of the day; the entire hike was made on slippery and often precarious rocks. I would call my survival a triumph, but mostly it was just a relief. Marga took the wiser route: renting a kayak and coasting most of the way there.

Once we were there, it was amazing. The water was absolutely still and clear. We were the only people there. Barring Syd and Sean, we got into the lake and puttered around, basking in the perfect serenity of the location. Most tourist sites are so teeming with civilization, the bad kind, that one cannot possibly enjoy oneself properly, but here we were isolated, alone and content. I was reminded of Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, summer 2005, when we’d gone so early in the morning out of necessity that we were the only ones there. I would have liked to have spent more time at Danao, but I guess my companions got restless, and we soon left the water for a short viewing of where we’d just been from an observatory tower, and then we headed back to Balinsasayao and home. We’d left at 8am, were back in Dumaguete at 3pm, and I managed to feel as if I’d both run myself into the ground and experienced nothing special. It was beautiful and untouched and lovely, but also physically demanding to the point of unpleasantness, which may just cancel each other out. I saw it, I did it, and that’s the end of some experiences, I suppose.

On the way up the mountain, San Jose model farm

Sheryll on some steps that we didn't know would later be hiking foundation. Ironically, the picture taken right before this one has her mid-stumble, a prophecy for the ages

Lunch

Lake Balinsasayao

Sean and a manstance I presume he deemed sufficiently safe to assume on those rocks

Heather, Syd, Sheryll, Dan and Dave, having finally made it

Dan and the clear waters of Lake Danao

Danao from the observatory

An amazing photo where it looks like I've pissed myself

That Leyte Feeling

2008-10-06T08:56:00.009+08:00

So at an ungodly hour on the 28th of September we trundled ourselves and a fraction of our hefty belongings into a bus and traveled to Bacolod to meet our fates. The Peace Corps staff were deprived of torturing us Dumaguete people by an office accident: we learned the locations of our permanent sites almost immediately upon registration because someone mistakenly placed a paper with our site names on it in our registration packets, so we didn't have to wait for the Peace Corps "find your site" game. So that’s my big news: my permanent site is Hilongos, Leyte, in the typhoon belt.

We stayed in Bacolod for the Supervisor’s Conference until Wednesday, October 1st doing extremely dry and exhausting things. I met my supervisor, Mrs. Proserpina V. Rubio, the head of the Communication Arts department at my school, Hilongos National Vocational School. Leyte being all the way in the Eastern Visayas, I feel like we took a camel, answered riddles and sacrificed seven virgins to get there, but we eventually made it there about lunchtime on Thursday.

Hilongos is an intimate coastal town of about 50,000 people, which makes it a large town or small city. I didn’t have time to find any beaches, but I’m assured that there are some. I don’t suppose that there is much going on there, but I’m sure that in what I suspect will be my precious little free time, I will find something to do. Ten out of twelve of us Dumaguete education volunteers were placed on Leyte (although Dan and Megan are technically on Billiran), so I won’t be far from many of those who have become my dear companions these past eight weeks.

My new host mom is known and respected throughout the town. All I have to say is “I’m staying with Vivian,” and people know who I’m talking about and where I will be. She is a very nice woman and is being especially solicitous to my diet needs. She has many siblings, and I met quite a few of them, in particular another teacher at HNVS. My first night there, Mama Vivian took me to a wake service, where I met her sisters and some other people in the town. The wake service was for a 90-year-old neighbor, and mourners were crowded inside and outside the house. The musical aspect of Filipino culture came out in particular relief during the wake; in under forty minutes, those in attendance sang no fewer than eleven songs. Filipinos in general are very accomplished singers and music-makers, and it is not unusual to hear them sing as they go about their business around the house or around town, and they’re very sincere about it. Cynics in America would call the same behavior schizophrenia and cross the street to avoid it, but here an entire busload of people will sing along to soft rock hits on the radio and no one is fazed.

I spent the majority of my time in Hilongos at the school, but managed not to speak to a single student. Hilongos National Vocation School is, as you might imagine, a place where students can learn a useful trade in case they don’t continue their educations in college. Some courses are dressmaking, electronic repair, automotives, IT and furniture and cabinet making. The student population is about 1700, and I will be teaching four first-year classes of varying proficiency in English per day. There are sixty students to a class, which will no doubt prove a challenge in learning names. In addition to my 20 hours per week of teaching, which is spread out between the hours of 7am and 5pm, I have to implement a community project or two during my service, so I’m not exactly seeing the famed Peace Corps down time.

In some bad news, we lost another trainee to family tragedy and Sally fell in the pool at the hotel and is now in Manila awaiting surgery – three pins will be inserted …somewhere and she will spend the rest of the time until swearing-in there in Manila doing rehab. The good news is that she will not be going home because of this, but our cluster will feel like she’s our phantom limb. Luckily her permanent site is her current practicum site here in Dumaguete, so she doesn’t necessarily have to do all the checking out and assessments we had to do for our own.

After so much travel and and so many travails, I am back in Dumaguete with not a single rest day in a couple weeks and only a two hour reprieve in language class. I feel like staging a mutiny because we got two of our Sundays taken from us, and between them an incredibly hectic, exhausting week, but what’s done is done and I have to get ready to start this train on its tracks. Three more weeks of training in Dumaguete, one week of another tedious conference in Bacolod, this time with all of 267 in attendance so at least that will be fun, and then we swear in and these two years will finally commence.

The oldest and tallest Spanish belltower on Leyte is in my town

And I just thought this was really funny

Apo Analysis

2008-09-21T16:56:00.009+08:00

Today, most of the trainees in Dumaguete went to Apo Island on a snorkeling trip.

It was not an ideal day; tendrils of a passing typhoon made the sky and the seas ominous, and our boat ride over was choppy and wet. I had wanted to bring my digital SLR camera, but as I was leaving the house, Keith told me the ride over would be too wet, and he was right. I had a strange experience on those cresting waves though, while my companions battled seasickness and epic splashes. My mind was completely still, unaffected by the crash and slam of our roughshod journey, and I thought: I have had an amazing life. I have made the most of my opportunities, succeeded, done well, thrived. When I reach my mid-twenties, I will have lived most of my twenties outside of the United States and liked it that way. I have written fiction and published it, I have won awards and accolades for it, I have a future in the craft of writing. I even have friends who send me certificates of excellence for being awesome. I was sent to the Philippines, and though some days I have to force myself to make it through the next five minutes, I don’t regret joining Peace Corps and I don’t regret that I was sent here. How could I possibly regret that, when I get to do things like see a volcano in the backdrop of my city every day, go to a waterfall on a whim, island-hop and eat mangoes? Yesterday, I seriously, without doubt, knew that I was going to be here for the next two years, and today my sense of my permanency here only grew stronger. Nothing big, no change or event, just the silent knowledge that I am ready.

Snorkeling was also an incredible experience. I saw beautiful things, and because I’m legally blind without my glasses on, I saw them from a fuzzy distance, bursts of color, light and movement. I imagine I saw the underwater world as a newborn sees the open air one: all things are new, unknowable wonders, impressions, immediate and emotional rather than concrete. For me, there were no hard lines between one coral, one fish, one color and the next. I felt a great sense of peace though I could not make out the beauty of what I was seeing with any precision. All I could hear was the sound of my breath through the snorkel: inhaling from undearneath water, traveling through the tube, filling my mouth, my throat, my lungs, exhaling - the sound of it sharp in my ears. It seemed life-giving in a way I’d only thought of in terms of my heart before. It was elemental to be there, mostly blind, floating above a previously-inconceivable environment, listening to the rhythm by which I lead my life, this life. My own existence suddenly seemed both profound and utterly simple.

My day at Apo ended up not particularly being about the snorkeling. After lunch and an epic battle with coral, I was exhausted and didn’t go on a second snorkeling trip further out, where I knew I would be able to see even less. I managed to sleep sitting up, lying down and even upright and clutching hands with Megan on the rather terrifying boat ride home during which I thought we were definitely going to capsize. I have a hard week ahead of me; I can only describe my feelings on teaching in an analogy in which I am a bad comedian and my students are an unlaughing audience. It’s almost 6pm and I have dinner ahead of me, a community project for which I am absolutely out of my depths to plan and a skit with Sheryll to plan rather independently, both for tomorrow. And, if I knew what was good for me, I’d do my work on Cebuano. I am getting through this week with the knowledge that maybe this time next week I’ll know the location of my permanent site.

Mga girls: Heather, Beth, Megan and Connie

Syd and me

Coasting into harbor

Apo rockface

Hut

Trudging on

2008-09-14T17:45:00.009+08:00

The days are long and pass slowly. In general I have nothing to update: I get up at 5.30, get to language class with my cluster at 8, go home for lunch around 11.30, then either have tech training, practicum or medical briefings in the afternoons, then I eat dinner about 7 and go to bed between the awesome hours of 9 and 10. Weekends are short and we still have long tech sessions on Saturday mornings. We are approaching week 5 of training, and the next event to look forward to is at the end of week 6, which is when we learn where we’ll be for our permanent sites. After that, we’re having a conference in Bacolad and then visiting our permanent sites, and after that, it’s a few more weeks of training.

I’ve been here a month now. I’ve been having trouble with being gluten-free, which I think we’ve ironed out, but when I initially went gluten-free I did not become truly well for several months, and now that I’m back to where I was before being diagnosed, I can’t tell if there has been progress or if I’m still ill. I don’t want to spend the next few months getting better from something I should have already defeated, especially when so many other diseases could befall me.

Two friends of mine are in the hospital. That’s where most of us spent the majority of Friday and Saturday, keeping them company. One girl, after a week of travails, has found out she has an amoeba and is doing much better with treatment. The other girl is keeping in good spirits now that she’s in the hospital, but the prognosis is murky. I haven’t been updated today and didn’t visit them because of my own poopy issues, so I don’t know if there has been progress. Last I heard, she would be released tomorrow on the approval of a specialist.

Before we got the call on Friday that both of them were in the hospital, we had a cookout in language class to practice Cebuano and then had our site placement interviews. The former was a lot of fun at the market and at Dan’s house, and the latter was at first nerve-wracking but then fairly heartening. Sometimes, with the ear infections and the amoebas and the gluten and the technical sessions and the language barrier and the people insisting you’re not an American, it’s difficult to remember the reasons you’ve chosen to follow this path. But then, you end up having to justify this choice to someone who is giving you this chance, and you suddenly remember how much you wanted this and everything that comes with it. Fiona, one of my flatmates from my now-golden Scotland days, reminded me that the tough days are the ones we learn from most, and they make the experience whole. I had a lot of tough days in Scotland, especially the entire first semester, but now all I do is plan for my triumphant return. Someday, some months from now, I will forget the struggles of these early weeks.

I have some trouble with the idea that I’m coming to another country to teach English like an imperial force, but I remember that the countries to which Peace Corps volunteers are invited have requested us and they control which programs are implemented. I also see the unique position of the Philippines as a country which has based its entire education system in an understanding of the English language; if students are not proficient in English, they will not be educated because all classes are taught in English. Teaching is going to be a difficult job with many expectations on me, most importantly my own. It is easy to favor the students who are already fluent, who are succeeding so well; it’s harder and more crucial to reach those who need it most. With co-teaching, there can be more individual attention apportioned to students, and though I find it draining work, I know it’s important work. Currently jealous of the apparent leisure of the Coastal Resource Management volunteers, wink wink.

We recently met some more volunteers from last year’s batch. I really like them and hope that I can succeed as well as they have.

Because I know you clamor for picspam, here are some from recent weeks. I know, I have none of the beach or other great scenery, but when I’m in that scenery I’m in it, not trying to capture it. Also, it takes ~50 years to upload just one.

Sean with some new Filipina friends (he wishes)

The art of making pansit

At Dan's with our feast

This one is called Sheryll in Junob with mountain

At a parade

Scandalous

A Day of Exposure

2008-09-03T20:23:00.006+08:00

So, today was one of my more bizarre days here. We are obligated to take a malaria prophylactic every Monday, and on Tuesday nights and Wednesdays during the day I feel the side effects, which are insane dreams and minor diarrhea, the latter of which is not what this story is about. I dreamed that my clustermate Dan’s family all got stuck in a Mayan temple which was for some reason in Zoar Valley and helicopters had to rescue them. The disturbing part was that I seemed to get a very vivid, long parade of his family members, whom I’ve never met therefore were just made-up white people, coming out of this temple haggard, naked and clutching their severed limbs. So that’s how I started my day.

In the morning at 7.30 I walk from my house about ten minutes to my teacher May’s house, traversing my barangay Piapi to Syd and Sally’s barangay Bantayan and ending up in this sort of Bantayan/Piapi no-man’s-land. Today, I had my first real day at my practicum site, Negros Oriental National High School, so I had to go to May’s in my nice clothes, which include unforunate pants because I left all my skirts and dresses in a suckpack behind my bed in the burg. As I popped an Immodium to stave off my malaria poops, I noticed that two of the buttons on my exorbitantly expensive Banana Republic shirt had come undone and I was flashing all of Bantayan. I have no idea for how long I was treating the world to a peepshow, but I’ve decided to put it behind me and stop feeling embarassed about things that happened in the past. I need to exercise this resolution about other things that have happened, but I have a hard time.

As I further made my way towards May’s, gathering to myself my tattered dignity, I saw a man wearing a shirt but no pants and no underwear. I walked past with purpose and managed to embarrass neither of us, but it was still a curious occurance. Men, while willing to expose their rounded beer bellies as their version of a come-hither look, are not as prepared to bare the full story, so to speak. I’m sure there’s a tale to tell there.

The weirdness of the day ended there, but I still had some tough stuff to deal with. It was my first real day at the school, and we couldn’t find my co-teacher and Sean and Sheryll’s were absent, so Sean had to teach for the first time by himself without a plan or even warning, and so did Sheryll. For the first hour, I was with her scrambling to find something productive to do, but we just ended up fielding questions about ourselves and playing hangman, a game during which these second year students read our minds and made short work of us. After that period, my co-teacher was located, and it turns out she doesn’t have class before 2pm anyway, and we Peace Corps Trainees leave the school at 4, but her classes go on until 5, so there is no time for us to plan together, which was frustrating and troubling.

I am trying to do my best in something with which I have no experience, for people who are depending on me to help, and I feel bad that I cannot provide the resource they thought they were being given in hosting a Peace Corps Trainee. It is my hope that despite the rather arbitrary schedule (One day this week! Two the next! Sometimes three! Sometimes none for weeks at a time!) and instability, I can gain a lot from this experience and it will be in some way mutually beneficial. My main personal goal is to (attempt to) reach out to the students who are overlooked, marginalized, left behind or ignored. If I can help them in some small way, even if I never know about it, my Peace Corps experience can mean more than all the benefits I will get out of it.

Now, for your personal enjoyment, some pictures courtesy of Sheryll because I’m too lazy to take pictures myself.

This is my cluster, minus Syd who was being studious and Sheryll, who was taking the picture, obviously. Here we were visiting South Seas, a gorgeous resort that’s just hiding in some nook in Piapi, totally blowing your mind and taking you by surprise when you stumble upon it. The best thing? 1000 pesos a night, which ends up being little over $20. From the left are Dan, Sean, me and Sally.

And here’s a dog on a motorcycle. I have two of these exact same ones at home, except they don’t ride motorcycles. Unless they are leading secret lives.

Dumaguete: Day 6

2008-08-26T18:23:00.006+08:00

I arrived last Thursday in Dumaguete City. It has a really positive education atmosphere and laid-back pace; no one breaks 20 mph in Dumaguete. Our group of 69 trainees split into city groups – some went to Batangas and Bacolod – and each group is learning a different language. Within those groups we were split into “clusters” for language training depending on our sector (mine is education) and assignment (mine is Negros Oriental National High School). In my cluster are Sally from Texas/Colorado who is 80, Syd from Nebraska who just finished her tour in Peace Corps Armenia, Dan from Pennsylvania, Sean from Minnesota and Sheryll from LA. I think we are all in agreement that we got the best training site here in Dumaguete and wouldn’t change it.

Here is Syd and me in a petty cab, which is a motorcyle rigged up to be a trike for getting around town.

My host family are really amazing people. They are so caring and kind. Tita Andring is a midwife, Tito Jaime (as in hy-may) works at the power plant, their son Kieth is an engineer and his girlfriend Ellen is about to become a nurse as soon as she passes her board exam and NCLEX. Kieth’s sister is in America, and the family misses her. My host family situation is really ideal. I am so glad I was placed with them. Last night I got a little sick (and I’m fine now), but they were really taking care of me, and now Tita Andring has brought me my favorite sweet: a sweet sticky rice cylinder wrapped in banana leaves and sometimes containing chocolate.

On Sunday Keith and Ellen and Ellen’s cousins Eric and Neil took me to Valencia, to a place called the Forest Camp, because there was a brown out (no electricity), so it was really hot. At Forest Camp, it’s cooler because it’s by a mountain (dormant volcano, I think, actually) and there are cold, fresh mountain springs. The whole day was pretty amazing, and I hope my fellow trainees get a chance to go, though on that day I know most of them went to a beach. So here are some pictures of that.

This is all of us

This is Eric, me and Ellen.

Here in the Philippines, they have a thing called merienda, or just plain snack here in the Visayas, where the whole country is like “Dude I need a snack” between breakfast and lunch and then another between lunch and dinner. I have really gotten behind this idea. I am a fan, and actually, now I require my merienda. I have been doing an epic amount of eating here because I really like the food, it’s easy to be gluten-free and is exactly to my taste. I know some trainees have been having some trouble with the cuisine, but I am very lucky to have exactly what I want pretty much all the time. They have a variety of rice sweets, and I’ve been converted to the joys of the mango, which is vastly superior here than stateside. Also, despite the epic eating I’ve been engaging in, I appear to have lost weight. It’s like a dream: eat what I want, lose weight.

Today I observed a classroom at the high school at which I will be teacher training. I will be co-teachcing with a teacher of the 2nd year. Generally, the age range for that is 13-14, but can contain older students as well. It was really nice there today, and allayed my fears a little bit, but I’m sure I’ll be nervous again when I actually have to get up in front of a class.

Yesterday my host family got wireless internet, so I have been sitting and basking in my internet connection. I hope it doesn’t distract me too much, but it does mean I am better equipped to respond to messages now, so don’t hesitate. I am kept very busy by the Peace Corps, but I will get back to you if you email me.

So It Begins

2008-08-20T19:14:00.008+08:00

Today, the monsoon finally came to prove its mettle. I have been in Antipolo, Manila since arriving in the Philippines on Saturday night. The weather has, until today, been typically tropical: hot, humid. I suppose despite the intense torrents it’s still pretty hot. I am not complaining about the heat, but I am feeling it, and I hope I can get acclimated soon so it stops bothering me.

There are sixty-nine people in our volunteer batch. We are staying in a hotel outside of metropolitan Manila. So far I’ve been mostly functional throughout the day, no naps, but I am still unable to sleep more than about five hours a night. I hope this jetlag does not last much longer. One perk of the not sleeping, however, is that in the early dawn, when the world is still grey, I go out on our balcony and take in our view of Manila.

We have mostly just been doing policy and housekeeping kind of stuff, very dry, so I had nothing to report until today. Last night after a trip to the Mall of Asia, which is the biggest damn mall I’ve ever seen, some fellow trainees and I took in the sunset over Manila Bay from across the mall.

And today, I found out where I will be trained and in what language. Tomorrow, I leave for Dumaguete City on the island of Negros, Oriental Province, among the Visayan Islands in the south. I will be attempting to speak Cebuano, the regional dialect of the Visayas. At this point, I’m really glad I was unable to get Rosetta Stone Tagalog to work, since it would have been a waste of forty hours of my precious, precious time.

Training will begin in earnest soon, about which I am both apprehensive and excited. I will have a host family and professional counterparts and all of the sudden will have to act like an adult in the world. It’s very intimidating, and I’m going into it like something natural but I don’t know if it actually is, if I’m going to wake up every morning and force myself to get out there beyond my fears. I think it would be the same with a “normal” job in the States though, really. Concerns here are really immediate: safety, health, cultural sensitivity, interpersonal relations. But these aren’t chief among my concerns; I’m plagued by thoughts of failure and remaining juvenile in a (mostly) adult setting.

On those immediate concerns though, I seem to be faring well. I don’t mind the bathroom facilities I might see soon, I really like the food, I’m going in being open to new experiences. However, all sorts of health/safety issues are befalling me; I hope this means I am getting them out of the way at the outset, and I am fated for a better time in general. At LAX I ran over my toenail twice and lost the top of it. I burned my tongue and developed a raging canker sore, the former of which just got better today and the latter of which is slightly better today but still alive and sensitive. I fell down the stairs yesterday morning and really twisted my ankle and now it keeps cracking, but the doctor said it’s okay. And, after some travails with poo, I thought I was on even ground, but today the anti-malarial prophylaxis I took on Monday kicked in and gave me some belly sadness. It raped everyone else yesterday and apparently just took its sweet time over here. Gluten, however, has yet to be an issue, knock on wood.

Dumaguete City has ample internet (and many other amenities; it’s the poshest training site in Peace Corps Philippines), so I hope to update with more news and pictures and all that good stuff. Although, right now I'm having trouble posting pictures, so we'll see how that goes.

The Obligatory Introduction

2008-06-06T01:00:00.006+08:00

It's been a long road frought with peril and bureaucracy, but I'm finally here. On May 29th, I received my invitation to join the 267th group of Peace Corps volunteers in the Philippines, leaving on August 13th. I am both anxious and excited, and I know that this will impact my life in ways I can't yet anticipate. I am very much looking forward to meeting my fellow 267ers, my students, my co-workers, the people of the community in which I'm placed and anyone else who might cross my path. My life is gaining momentum.

Here is an overview of my journey to the Peace Corps:

My father is an RPCV who served two tours in Thailand in the early to mid 1970s. For my entire life, I have known what the Peace Corps does and how drastically it changed almost everything about him for the positive. During college and especially during my own application process, I came to realize how much his time in Thailand, which lasted much longer than his service, has meant to him. I began to consider joining during my junior year in college, which I spent in Scotland being ecstatic and frolicking over every available surface.

My father always said, "I wanted to see the world, and I didn't want to pay for it." The benefits of the Peace Corps, which are certainly not limited to the professional and financial, were too wonderful for me to pass up. In the Peace Corps, I could see parts of the world I'd never imagined, become a better version of myself, experience a completely different life, develop valuable skills, meet incredible people and maybe even contribute to society if I'm very lucky. So, in mid-October 2007, I began the application process.

On Halloween, I had an interview with my recruiter, who would become my strongest supporter and for whom I have a lot of appreciation and admiration. On November 1st, she nominated me for my first choice location, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, leaving June 2008. I was very happy. I got my medical kit in during the third week of December, mere days before I would be diagnosed with gluten intolerance by a gastroenterologist. Though devastating, this diagnosis would explain debilitating symptoms which had disrupted my life since the summer I was fifteen. Unluckily for me, my medical kit did not read "gluten intolerance" but "IBS." On December 27th, I was told I could not join the Peace Corps with "IBS," but since I suddenly had a name for my actual medical issue, I was determined to go forward. I wrote an appealing letter, including my new medical evidence, and received a call from my screening nurse, who said she would reopen consideration of my case once the efficacy of my new diet was reevaluated in March.

At the end of March, I was officially diagnosed with gluten intolerance and my doctor sent my screening nurse the latest medical evaluations and a letter stating his confidence in my ability to serve in the Peace Corps. I got another call from my screening nurse saying I was cleared on gluten intolerance, but now she had to go over the rest of my medical kit, which had apparently not been cracked since December. I was relieved and happy, and during April, I sent in a few more labs and statements for final medical clearance.

On May 2nd, I received the much-coveted medical clearance. I really cannot now articulate the level of my happiness, as I thought this was the end of my travails. There was a two page list of countries that could support my diet, and I was driving hard into the busy end of my senior year. About a week before graduation, I received another call, this time one that would raze my spirits and make me very, very nervous.

I realized that it was just slightly too late for my original nomination date, but that suited me just fine as I now wanted to go to the Wesleyan Writers Conference, which would have been later than my leaving date. The call I got, however, said that I could not go to Francophone Africa at all. For six months, I had anticipated time in that region and was rather unhappy about not being able to go. Then, my placement officer said she wanted to send me to the Central Asian Caucasus region. I knew nothing about these countries except that they were practically in Europe, and didn't that mean they ate exactly the food that I really, really cannot? I did some research and found out not only do they eat that food, but they sometimes revere it. Going to the Caucasus region would be tantamount to a death sentence. I would not have been able to eat much of anything, I would have had to be rude to my hosts by refusing meals, and, most likely, I would have had gluten reintroduced into my system and become ill again. I contacted my screening nurse, who assured me that any country on the gluten-free friendly list was safe, but nonetheless offered to check with country-specific medical to confirm.

A week later, the Friday before graduation weekend, I received another call from my screening nurse saying that the Caucasus region was indeed not the best place for me. She took it off the gluten-free friendly list of countries, and now no one with my affliction will ever have to go there and be ill. I was relieved, though now I had no nomination and no idea as to where the Peace Corps might send me.

A week and a half after that, I was still operating without news of a new nomination. I was hoping for Asia or non-Francophone Africa, but I was willing to go anywhere they wanted to send me and always had been. My father had not originally wanted to go to Thailand at all, but clearly he had a wonderful experience, and I was sure that wherever the Peace Corps decided to send me, I would be able to appreciate and enjoy that place as well. While visiting with my friend and her parents on Tuesday, May 27th, I received a call from placement asking me how I felt about Southeast Asia, teaching secondary school English, mid-August departure. Of course I was incredibly enthusiastic about both the location and the bountiful (and safe) rice that I was sure to encounter, and on Thursday, the 29th, I had that invitation to the Philippines in my hands. I probably didn't stop squealing for a solid five minutes. After looking over everything with loads of delight, I accepted my invitation the next morning.

So, I've sent in my passport and visa paperwork. I'm now working (procrastinating) on my tailored resume and aspiration statement. I've set up this blog so I can keep people back home updated during my service. I am so excited for what I have chosen to do with this time in my life after undergrad, when the opportunities seem boundless and I have no obligation but the one where I keep myself happy and stimulated. I know I've made the right decision, and I'm so happy to have been placed in the Philippines. I could not imagine a better placement, and I can't wait for the latest adventure to start.