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.
