RLS-Christmas

I know in the US, the holiday preparations for each holiday begin RIDICULOUSLY early. There are Halloween decorations sold next to back-to-school deals, and Valentine's Day preparations begin once that ball finishes dropping on New Year's Day. However, the Philippines, for me, has taken this to a new level. Perhaps because the country is 90% or so Christian, and the separation of church and state is a somewhat blurred line, Christmas is a big deal here. I mean, it's a big deal in most of the Western world, but this is absurd. Around the second or third week we had been here, in SEPTEMBER, Cobbie and Dessa said "this is around when Christmas season starts". It's not something I'm not too unaccustomed to because of the early beginnings in the USA, like I said, but it is disconcerting to be walking through the supermarket in Manila on Oct 5 and hear a slow, crooning "Silent Night" over the loudspeakers. In every market, Christmas lights and decorations are being sold, and there are random gift-wrapping stations popping up downtown. As I sit in my kitchen writing this, I can hear some slow Christmas tunes wafting through the open screen door (which may or may not be what reminded me to write this post).

The early thing is shocking enough for me, but since Halloween and Thanksgiving are not nearly as big a celebration here, if at all, I guess there are less holiday speed bumps on the road to the big Winter holidays. But most disconcerting thing is the weather. I've always equated Christmas with roaring fires, candles in the window, bare trees, snow, winter coats and sweaters, seeing your breath outside. Yesterday, I sat in a park, in the 90 degree heat, next to a few palm trees, near some very naked children playing in a water fountain (child nudity here is about as common as palm trees, actually, which is to say very. I almost had a naked child pee on my foot earlier this week 3 doors down form my apartment). The combination of the time of year and the weather just has me shocked that I can keep it together whenever I walk in a mall and here Elvis's "Blue Christmas" or see someone dressed as Santa in a market (what was he thinking? he must have been sweating bullets!). But I'm getting over it...slowly.

RLS

There are security guards everywhere in Manila and in most stores in the Philippines in general. I mean everywhere. Every mall entrance, every store and fast food restaurant, at every light-rail entrance, there is a security guard in a white uniform, often with a metal detector or a little wooden wand. Their job is to search your bag and "feel up on you", which is when they feel you waist area for a gun. They are looking for guns and knives, because apparently, theres kind of a big problem of people bringing these in the light-rail or into a mall. However, the searches are often half-hearted at best, and usually they don't expect the white kid to be bringing in dangerous contraband to hurt people in the mall.

The strangest experience so far was when I was walking out of this giant department store, Landmark, into a giant mall. Before I had stepped into line or made eye contact with a guard, I hear "Hey, dude, what's up?", and see the security guard beckon me over. I say a typically suspicious "hello", and he says "Dude, you wanna know why you are so lucky? Because youre so handsome!" And as I try to open my bag for examination, he jovially slaps me on the back out the door, and says "Have a good day, handsome!" Very professional for a middle-aged security guard who is supposed to be making sure I don't have dangerous weapons.

Random Little Stories (RLS)

Ok, some of these blog posts have been monstrously long, and I wanted to add in a little variety, so Im going to start telling these random little stories from each day (which I will call RLS) so they won't get stale in my mind as they wait for a longer post.

First RLS:

I went to church yesterday with one of my roommates, who sings in the choir there. Everyone shook my hand and they made me stand up and accept applause and such, the usual awkward and embarrassing stuff that happens. The service, however, had three events in the bulletin dedicated to an Air Conditioner (they call it AirCon in the Philippines). I thought it was a metaphor or something, but no: we dedicated it, prayed over it, sung a song about it, and counted down as it was turned on for the first time. Definitely not a metaphor.

The pastor also came up to me and said, and I quote: "Hello, you are from America? Which state? Oh, Kentucky. Well, if you ever want to come over and talk or play basketball-wait, you do play basketball? Yes? Great.- well, feel free to come over and talk and play basketball with me."

So if there is bball with the minister, I will be sure to post some pics.

Everywhere is Outdoors

I think it's interesting that humanity can discern "nature" as a specific place or topic. People can say they are "outdoorsy" or "not outdoorsy", mostly because, for most people (especially in America), there is that option.

We were surprised how "hot" the Philippines were when we first came here. No matter where we have gone, the sweat has followed us, as has the sun, and even without physical activity we have founds ourselves feeling sticky and nasty. We are unaccustomed to these feelings not because it is not hot in America; indeed, during one day at the Center for the Courageous Kids (where I worked last summer, in Scottsville, KY), the temperature hit 130 degrees, and Scottsville could certainly be described as humid. But why are we Americans, some of us from the hot South, so unused to the abusive heat?

The answer lies in the indoors. It has been pointed out that to go to work or school in the states, you can easily go from your air-conditioned house right to your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned job, spending a whole hot summer's day in 60 degree coolness if you so desire. Air conditioning in the Philippines, I assure you, is such a rare commodity that most people don't even notice it isn't there.

How did American humanity come to determine such a stark difference between outdoors and indoors?  For the whole history of time, there was no such thing as "nature", just the earth all the animals lived on together. Shelter is certainly common with animals and humans alike, but in the past few weeks spent often with the only shelter being a roof over my head, the appreciation of the amount of time I have spent "indoors" in my life has crept slowly over me.

The time I found this affecting me the most profoundly is the few days we spent on the island of Bohol. Bohol is a largely rural island, with much of its land devoted to farms. There is also a large part given to the Chocolate Hills, and a Tarsier aka Bush-baby preserve, not to mention a man-made forrest. After an extended amount of time in our site-coordinators good-sized hometown, Dumaguete, which is the capital of the state of Negros Oriental, and a 5 day stint in Cebu City, the second largest city in the Philippines, Bohol was splash of cold water in the face (something that incidentally happened to me a lot during this trip).

We stayed in the VERY spread out municipality of Trinidad in a "town" called San Vicente, which was mostly a rice mill, an elementary school, and a tiny convenience store in the middle of many families' farmland. Each night was spent in a different family's house, and our beds were rolls of bamboo tied together, often on a floor, table, or other hardwood flat surface (luckily, I got to spend one night in a hammock as well). For the four of us, each night was spent in fitful, pitch-black slumber as we tossed and turned on our hard beds. It was not strange to ask in the morning and have at least one person say they had not slept at all.

The food was excellent, plentiful, and repetitive. Fish, rice, soup, and sweet potatoes greeted us from every table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 5 straight days, a diet which we had already been introduced to but which became overwhelming for EVERY meal EVERY day. There were a few houses where we asked about the CR (bathroom), and were told that it was all around us (in other words, go outside and find a private place). One night, after a 2 hour walk in the country left me smelling somewhat worse than the squealing pig chained up in the backyard, I took a moonlit bath with no flashlight on the edge of the rice paddies, using water drawn from the family's well as sparingly as I could. We also were able to wash our hideously filthy clothes using, you guessed it, the well in the backyard, drying them in the sun on clotheslines when we had finished. The soapy water in my tub was almost black when I emptied it out. Yummy.

Then there was the digestive issues. Apparently, eating dry fish, rice, soup, and vegetables for every meal does not altogether agree with me. After leaving our hostel in Cebu City, there was a good 6 day period where my stomach got fuller and fuller without, uh, depositing any soil in the fields. The streak was finally broken in the now aptly named Chocolate Hills, but the memories of my discomfort are...haunting.

All in all, this experience was one of our favorites of the trip so far. We spent days and days without electricity, running water, or people who even spoke English. We ate food from the land and the sea, often picked right off the vine and handed to us. We saw all sorts of animals and plants, things we had seen in the city but actually saw used in front of us.

One night, one of the men we were staying with brought in a chicken while we were playing the western card game "BS" by candlelight in the main room of this dirt floor hut. With two cats rubbing against my leg, a giant spider on the wall, and three dogs constantly running in the house to see what was going on, the man showed us the chicken, and, grinning, asked what we thought about it in the local language. I thought there must have been something lost in translation, because I just thought it looked like a chicken, but as soon as the man entered the kitchen, our translator said "He will kill it, and we will eat it for dinner tonight". We saw the man cut the head off, drain the blood in a bowl, and pluck it out back, while we sat and waited in the candlelight for our fresh chicken meal.

All in all, our trip was our first real foray into typical Filipino life. Farmers are by far the majority of professions, yet the farms are, as they described, "backward". They still use cows, plows, wells, and wooden farming implements. The tracts of land are not the gargantuan corn fields of the big farming companies of the US, but usually are handfuls of acres of rice, squash, sweet potato, a vegetable called "merenga", and palm oil. They do not own the land, and do not make very much money, most of it going to the wealthy land-owners. But they are a people connected to nature.

Nature is just natural in the Philippines. It is not uncommon to walk through a town like Dumaguete and see goats, cows, and chickens. Palm trees are everywhere, as are the bugs that have eaten all four of us as if we are the most delicious meal of fish and rice of all time. In the small church in the small town of Mabinay in the mountains, where Abby is living and working, the 5 AM service began with birds flying around the main light in the sanctuary. The doors and windows are thrown open everywhere to coax in a breeze, and that church had random dogs and cats strolling in during the sermon, one even stopping to relieve himself right next to the pulpit. The presence of the outdoors is felt everywhere in the Philippines, and so there almost is no such thing as the indoors, so separation between the earth and the people who have thrived off of it.

One of the most symbolic examples of this came out of our adventure up the mountains outside of Dumaguete to see a waterfall. After a lot of winding roads, our van reached a pretty substantial hill, with a drastic incline, and our poor vehicle decided she wasn't gonna mess with that, and gave out almost as soon as we breached the slope. With a sigh and smile, Cobbie, Shelby, and I looked at each other and realized that we would have to hike further than we thought, and up such a crazily steep incline. We parked and walked up the rest of the mountain. As we walked, we saw many examples of human and nature working together, or even seemed to be humans accepting nature as it was and working with it. There was a basketball court cut into a flat area of mountain, with the floor made of dirt and grass. There were beautiful plant stores along the way, and it was increasingly difficult to spot where the rainforest flowers stopped and where the flowers for sale began. There was a family who had built bikes to race down the steep mountain hills entirely out of wood, including the wheels, pedals, and brakes. The thing that brought me closest to nature was the actual walk down to the waterfall. Someone had built a huge flight of stairs down into this river valley, with encroaching rainforest on either side, and had also built a walkway to the falls. The walkway had been washed away years ago in a flood, however, so the hike to the waterfall was an hour or so of us navigating the treacherous and slippery rocks and river in our chinless (flip-flops). The end result was a towering waterfall, crashing down to the rive with terrible force, into a pool encircled on every side by mossy rock walls and rainforest. The journey felt so "outdoorsy", so much like humans accepting nature's challenges and adapting to explore the world, that I felt it necessary to let out a little yell at the waterfall. The past few weeks, I feel like our experiences have not only brought us closer to Filipino people and Filipino culture, but to the very land itself, and so much that the nature of these islands has to offer, and for that, I am immensely thankful.

Do not think that the irony is lost on me that I am typing this in an air-conditioned hotel using wifi. I very much get the irony.

That Stank

I don't think this smell will ever wash off.

I just took a shower, in preparation of a dinner at a mall in Dumaguete, Negros Oriental, the Philippines. The mall is just like any mall in America, with a food court, bookstores, huge department stores, a movie theater, an apple store, etc. Most things cost exactly the same there as they would in America, and many of the products are things I could find in America as well, such as the Ray Ban knockoffs I bought or the Champions League soccer ball, each costing about as much as they would in the states.

Even so, the smell will not leave my nostrils. 

It is said that smell is the sense strongest linked to memory. Like if I smelled fish frying, I might remember my time spent on beautiful Apo Island a few days ago. We took a little boat out to the remote spit of rock, covered in white sand and palm trees. An island with no running water or electricity, Apo Island boasts some of the best scuba sights in the area. We snorkeled with sea turtles, schools of colorful fish, and different urchins and sea plants, all in water a deep, unforgettable turquoise blue. We ate freshly caught fish prepared by a lady who sold t-shirts to tourists like us, explaining that on a good day she made 300 picos, the equivalent of 7 US dollars, to support her 6 children. 

But the smell of today lingers in my memory more than the smell of Apo Island.

Not the smell we encountered earlier today, as our language teacher led us to the public market to test our skills at the local dialect, Bisaya. Armed with a series of tasks and a puny amount of words we had just learned to say, we ventured into the tightly packed stalls full of food, flip flops, and flat-bill hats. We went to the fruit market, which was a jumble of citrusy smells, not altogether unpleasant though very confused and cacophonous, like the tuning of an orchestra before a show. Next we were off to the hot food area, where the aromas of sticky rice and warm chocolate (a tasty, popular, and very local combination) elbowed the other strong scents out of the way. The meat and fish markets were...interesting, filled with fresh raw protein, some of which was being cut from the animal before our very eyes. The intense smell of the ocean mixed with the heavy fishy smell and full meaty smell assaulted our nostrils as we asked what the local names for pig snouts were. 

And yet, even with these smelling experiences, some stronger than others, the memorable smell of the giant trash dump on the edge of town continues to not only linger, but swim to the surface. Our site coordinator drove us over there around 3 in the afternoon, and with the hot Filipino sun beating down, I smelled the stench of trash all of a sudden. With trees screening the dump, I waited for the trash smell to evaporate as we kept driving, as so often happens in Dumaguete as we speed past a myriad of different stores, each with different scents. However, when we pulled over to the side of the road and saw the dump, I realized that the smell would not go away, and in fact would get more pungent.

One of my immediate reactions was how to capture this. Pictures and videos can convey so much of what an experience is like, and are vital (and useful) to sharing an overseas adventure with others. I pulled out my camera, only to realize that what I wanted to share most of all was the stench, constantly there, slapping you in the face, bad enough to make you want to turn your head away at all times. And this was from across the street in the parking lot. I realized that there is no way to capture this, to plug my camera in and put this smell into this blog. 

The only way I can find to describe it is "the stench of poverty". It sounds kind of corny, like a Michael Moore documentary or a sensationalizing book. But no one would, could, should have to ever be driven to walk purposefully closer to this stench every day, pick up as much trash as possible, and sort it, barehanded, wearing only flip-flops, for 60 hours a week. One woman we met was in her 20s and had a 5 year-old child with her, the child's face stuck shyly in a big-eyed stare. The usual workers made upwards of 100 pisos a day (about $2.25), and they were described as "members"; this lady missed the member list, and was forced to sort through the members' leftover trash in case they missed anything. In order to feed her and her child, she came every single day just to look through this already sorted trash to try to make any money, and you can bet it was less than $2.25 a day.

There were countless hovels there, full of people who not only worked there everyday, but lived on top of a trash dump in order to be competitive in their work. My first question was "How?" and then "Why?". I went past sad and angry to inspired. This is a reality, sad and true, but feeling bad for these people, these real-life survivors, would not accomplish anything. Today, my heart hardened, but I feel truly that my work here, our work here, whatever it may be, is about making this country and this world better to live in. I wanted to put a smile on that girl's face.

And so, the stench of poverty lingers on on me, and I'm not sure if it will ever wash off.

Week One: What I've Resorted to Doing

We stepped off of the plane in Dumaguete, Negros Oriental, and this is the sight that greeted us: mountains on one side, ocean on the other, paradise in the middle. We had to get down from the plane on stairs because the airport was not big enough to support one of those tunnels; in fact, there was only one little baggage claim area, where we could see them physically grabbing our bags from a cart and putting them on a tiny conveyor belt to our anxious fingers. The two tiny, crowded bathrooms in the baggage claim had no running water or electricity, and the area around the conveyor belt was packed to the gills with the hundred or so people who accompanied us on this flight from Manila. If I craned my neck just enough, I could make out the smiling face of our supervisor, Cobbie Palm, smiling as he baked in the Filipino sun and eagerly awaited our arrival. Where were we exactly, and how had we even gotten here?

"Here" is a college town called Dumaguete on the island of Negros in the Philippines. It is in a group of islands called the Visayas (a name which lends itself to the dialect of Filipino spoken in the area), and Dumaguete is the provincial seat of the eastern side of the island, an area called Negros Oriental. "We" refers to myself, Mallory Tober, Abby Kraft, and Shelby Miller, four excited twenty-something kids who decided to take the plunge and become a YAV (Young Adult Volunteer) for a year. 

YAV is a program through the Presbyterian Church that has been around about as long as I have been alive. Last week, 68 (or so) kids around my age got together at the Interfaith Community in Stony Point, New York to go through the orientation about what it means to be a YAV. After a week of listening to warnings, rules, guidelines, suggestions, laws, expectations, feelings, and most importantly of all experiences from a motley assortment of people, I'm still not sure if I fully know what it means to be a YAV. It's something I may never completely understand. 

The gist of it is that the 68 of us impressionable Americans have travelled, domestically and internationally, to different sites around the world, where we will be helping communities for a year. In order to support our living, of course, the Presbyterian church helps to pay for some of the costs of a person's living arrangements while we ourselves also had to raise some money, a tiresome but fulfilling process. After some interviews and deliberations, our sites were chosen, and our orientation began just last week after almost 8 months since the beginning of the application process.

Now, after essentially two whole days of travel, the four YAVs for the Philippines are here in this country and ready to get started. Sort of. I went from Newark to Detroit to Nagoya, Japan to Manila to Dumaguete, a journey totalling around 26 hours of purely flight time, not to mention the 1.5 hour layover in Nagoya, the 3 hour layover in Nagoya, and the impossibly long 9 hour layover in Manila. Needless to say, after about 7 hours of fitful sleep in the past 3 days, coupled with constant lugging of luggage and carrying of carry-ons, we could use a break. And, as if straight from heaven, the second sentence that Cobbie said to us after we greeted him was "How would you like to spend the next four days in a resort?"

So here we are. I personally am working for my placement apart from these lovely ladies in Manila, where I will be mediating peace talks between social unrest groups (which probably sounds WAY more glamorous than it actually is). But now, I'm happy to sit back, relax, and enjoy the island paradise all around me. I'm probably going to be posting once a week, working in different things like my "huh" moments and my song of the moment or the most awesome Filipino person I met this week. For now, I'm just going to say Mabuhay and leave you with the sunrise I saw when the jetlag prevented me from sleeping and I got locked out of my room at 3 A. M.