Peace Corps: Home of the Small Victory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5263460308988529330" />

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

alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5263458260094075874" />

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.

alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5263457260209222466" />

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

alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5263456097757181986" />

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!