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.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Thursday, November 13, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
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.
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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!
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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Tuesday, October 28, 2008
On the Impressive Ingenuity of Less Interesting Philippine Fauna
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Booklust
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
12 Minutes of Gold
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.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Thor's Righteous Fury
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.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Reflections on Teaching in Dumaguete
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
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.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Insert Possibly Obscure Kate Bush Reference Here
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
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.
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