So as happy as I sounded in my last blog, it really isn’t quite as magnificent and carefree as I made it out to be. I still felt like a tourist in my last entry, everything was new and I was just beginning to discover the island. The poverty here is real and prominent on the island, the Philippines certainly isn’t paradise for the people who live here. They struggle everyday to make ends meet, they have no concept of saving, planning for the future, just living day to day. Many have no jobs or work only temporarily, and many talk of one day reaching America. But I have conversations with them about America as well. America also isn’t the paradise they dream of. I tell them we have poverty too, we have many people living on the streets begging for money, and the economic gap between the rich and poor is alarming. People are struggling to find jobs in America as well I tell them. They ask if we have squatters, and well we don’t really. I tell them we just have people begging on the streets because they don’t know how to build their own shanty house, they don’t know to raise chickens and crops, trade for food, and sustain their own livelihood, they just weren’t raised in that type of environment nor is there the space for that kind of life in a town, but they do know other skills, like maybe how to use a computer, do construction work or fix a car, but got sick and weren’t able to pay their medical bill, maybe they are disabled, maybe they have a criminal record, maybe they are veterans or maybe they are emotionally unstable because they had an abusive upbringing. Many of them were raised in the city or in more densely populated areas where there are no farms or other natural resources to live off of, and that’s where they end up, on the city streets begging for money because they don’t know how to sustain their own livelihood like a squatter usually does. Anyways, I really enjoy having these conversations with Filipinos, because many people in less developed countries just see America for what is in the media and on television and are unaware of the inequality and poverty that also exists in my home country.
I live in a beautiful place here, but as you can imagine living in a foreign country is vastly different from traveling to a foreign country. In all my previous travels, I have had the freedom to be able to pick up and leave, catch the next bus out, and be on my way to a new place surrounded by unfamiliar people. I have made the commitment to leave here, get to know the people, the language, and work to improve the livelihood of the Filipino people. The most difficult has been the language barrier. Unless I am being talked at directly, I tend to just sink into the background and try hopelessly to pick up what they are saying because not only do they speak very fast, but they speak the local dialect. There are miscommunications everyday, they take me for an idiot sometimes just because there is that lack of understanding which I guess could happen both ways. I also have a really hard time because I talk slower obviously than a native speaker. So I get cut off a lot and interrupted because well that’s how Filipinos talk, they all talk at once really fast and whoever talks the loudest or longer seems to get their point across. I really enjoy one on one conversations because I have more time to compile my thoughts in Tagalog before being cut off and I also get laughed at less. And if you do know something, never say “I know” here because it is taken to mean “I know all” and that you are a snobby American. Today I had my first session with my new Tagalog tutor at my house. She will be coming here Tuesdays and Thursdays for one hour and then three hours on both Saturday and Sunday. She is wonderful, her name is Mercedes and she is actually a 4th grade teacher so she really knows how to teach at an elementary level. I am really looking forward to becoming fluent in Tagalog!
My work started off pretty busy working with the NGO on the giant clam restocking project, but it has settled down quite a bit. I was warned about this everyday of orientation and training. The work pace is much slower here than in the United States as I am sure you can all imagine. When I come into work at 8 am, we chit chat about anything really, speak with other government officials or community members that stop by our office, play computer games, read some papers or books, look at pictures, sometimes just stare into space, take trips to market to look at the fish available, take naps, walk around town, and well do whatever you want really, it’s up to you how productive you want to be, then we all head home at 5 pm or sometimes have a drink at a sari-sari store after work. We also take trips to other parts of the island to meet with other People’s Organizations and their projects they have going there, like vermiculture (composting with worms), greenhouses, tilapia farms, and mangrove restoration projects. I started looking into starting a freshwater pearl farm here but I am not sure if we have the resources to start something like that here. It really has to be pretty big scale if you want to profit from it at all as an alternative livelihood project. So as some of you may know, mussels produce a pearl as a reaction to a foreign object inserted into its tissue. So you can artificially inject them with sand and they will produce a pearl, but for about every 100 pearls you inject, only 50 will survive, and only 10 of those perhaps will produce a nice pearl. Couple the survival rate with the fact that it can be a 5-10 year process and well, that calls for a pretty big operation, patience, and a lot of capitol investment. We haven’t ruled it out, but we are looking into more feasible projects.
One that my mayor suggested during my site visit was to create a bird sanctuary. I actually just visited the site earlier today. There are mangroves in the area which block off a decent sized body of water which only really mixes with the ocean during really high tide. There are wild migratory ducks, hundreds of them, they come to the lagoon around 5 pm every afternoon and leave every morning during sunrise when the squatters that live there start walking around. They are threatened apparently because people remove the nests and eggs and sell them for a high price in Manila. We want to not only create a bird sanctuary but develop the area as an ecotourism destination where tourists can walk on a boardwalk through the mangroves, watch the ducks, take a small paddle boat out and hook and line for bangus, and have a kitchen for them to grill up their catch, paddle out or take the boardwalk to a tiny little island just off the coast and hike on a trail to the top. While it all sounds ideal, we of course have to be very careful to not disrupt the natural ecosystem here and ensure that this ecotourism will not further destroy the habitat and thus further threaten the wild duck populations. It is a delicate situation that must be approached with caution. We will have to stock the pond with bangus (the national fish of the Philippines- milk fish) and maybe insert a mesh barrier where high tide ocean water enters the lagoon to prevent them from all escaping. We’ll have to build a guardhouse to watch over the area which can be connected to the kitchen area. However, there are, as of right now, eight families of squatters on the land. While they have no permission to be on the land, and we have every right to kick them off of the land if they are encroaching on land used by endangered species, it is a difficult and sensitive situation. These people have lived on the land for a long time now whether it is federal land or not, they have established a home here. The one I walked by today had a decent house, very well maintained yard, raked clean, and complete with flowers and a garden plot. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds, it will be hard to tell these people they need to leave.
Last weekend, two other Peace Corps volunteers came to my site and we went diving on Cobrador Island, which has some of the nicest reefs because the island is not nearly as populated as the main island. We planned on cooking up an Indian feast here for Thanksgiving with my friend here from India, also a volunteer but working as a director of a catholic school teaching kids technical skills. However, we got back late and came back to his school to find our meal was already waiting for us, prepared by his talented cook! Very delicious, spicy chicken curry! Not your typical Thanksgiving dinner, but masarap talaga! I met a few ladies the other night that also work in the Municipal Office. I walked by a sari-sari store on my way out of the office and I was convinced to come in and have just one beer, then it was just one more, then isa pa lang, then one for the road, and so on and so one. They bought me several beers, dinner, and paid my fare to get home despite all my effort to pay. Filipinos are so generous here, it’s really in their blood. They are my newest friends here all in their 50’s, one of them is divorced and another is a widow. We talk girl talk and about how we don’t need men and are independent, haha, but then the next minute we talk about how I will keep my eyes out for single men for them and that they will be looking for a nice lalaki for me. Filipinos are very keen on finding all of us volunteers a Filipino spouse. Usually the third question I get after how old are you and where are you from, is are you single?
Anyways, that’s all for now, overall it’s been great, my first few weeks of work have really flown by. I have my good days and I have my bad days, but as another volunteer put it, without a bad day you would never know a good day.
