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.