Bring on the bird and wildlife sanctuary!!

I feel it’s about time I write a blog update, so much has happened since I have last written, but instead of boring you with all these things that have come and gone, I will focus on what recently has inspired me to write in the first place. This may be a long one, full of nothing but good news and revelations. Enjoy ;D

So I just heard back about the VEG (Volunteers in Environmental Governance; US AID grant opportunity offered for Peace Corps volunteers) grant I wrote to develop Barangay Ginablan as a bird and wildlife sanctuary and ecotourism destination. This idea was one that my mayor and the community members brought to my attention when I arrived here last year. This was something they were interested in starting, I merely helped push it along by facilitating meetings and tapping into some funding sources. The project has three main goals I would like talk about.
First, the project is designed to conserve the ecological biodiversity in the lagoon area, mangroves, and caves of Ginablan. We have actually been hacking away at this goal since I arrived last year. This required getting local support in creating a Municipal Ordinance by which to enforce the local protection of wildlife species. Under national law, wildlife species are protected but especially in the Philippines, it is essential to create local laws and ordinances for effective enforcement.
Secondly, we will raise awareness, educate, and promote participation in coastal resource management amongst community members and visitors. This is where some of the funds come in. Most of the funds I have obtained through VEG go towards educational materials, trainings, technical surveying equipment, IDs, and uniforms. The NGO Sikat Inc. that I work with very closely contributed significant funds for the construction of the boardwalk, guardhouse, educational center, and proposed watchtower. The Municipal Government also contributed funds that will be used to conduct IEC (Information Education Campaign) in each of the 25 coastal barangays by providing gas and snacks for participants, as well as providing catering during the training. For this VEG funding opportunity, they required a 25% community counterpart contribution of funds; this proposal exceeded that amount at about 45% of the total funds coming from the community. This helps to ensure the community has vested interest in the project and has put forth their commitment. Without this community contribution, the project may likely fail because the community has “nothing to lose” so to speak, and the commitment is just not nearly as strong. This has been shown time and time again in community development projects around the world. As Peace Corps volunteers, we don’t come with funds necessarily, but we come as dedicated, educated, and experienced individuals looking to “help communities help themselves”.
Which leads me into the third goal, perhaps most important, is to build the capacities of community members in bird sanctuary management during a training led by Fauna and Flora International. We will host a training to teach the community members how to identify birds, conduct basic data analysis, giving tours for tourists, and first aid for injured birds. Not only will these community members learn about how to manage a bird sanctuary, but they will gain experience in environmental education, leading tours, and managing income-generating activities, all while improving their English proficiency.
Anyways, that was a very brief thrown together summary of what I wrote in my proposal. I will receive the funds on October 1. Then we start the construction of the boardwalk, watchtower, guardhouse, and educational center. While the laborers are laboring away, the NGO, my counterpart and I will be working on putting together a local educational booklet on bird identification, as well as preparing educational billboards, and a video. Then by December we will host the training after I have bought all the technical equipment, and by March will be going to each of the barangays to teach/spread awareness about the bird sanctuary and the importance of biodiversity conservation. I will try to be more on top of it when it comes to writing blogs, I have lost a little inspiration in the last several months to be honest.
On to new matters… I am no longer the only volunteer on my island. I welcome Julie Crow, a new female volunteer assigned to Romblon, Romblon as an English teacher at the high school. We work about 75 meters apart or so, but we live almost 10 km apart. I am no longer the newbie…. Feels weird, time sure does fly, I have been in the Philippines for over a year!
Lately, I have had a variety of different opportunities come up to visit different sites in the Philippines to help out with other Peace Corps projects, camps, and assessments, but I have turned a lot of them down to focus on my site. I really enjoy being in Romblon and want to push through my own projects here. I don’t think I could leave here without feeling like I have accomplished anything. On the other hand, it’s nice to know there is an abundance of other opportunities for work if things are slow here. If I wanted to, I could easily leave once or twice a month on work travel. In fact, in a year, I have only taken 2 vacation days because so much of my travel is to help with other projects. But I do love it here. I have never felt so relaxed in my life. I have the freedom to do as much or as little as I want. It’s a wonderful feeling really. If I wake up and feel like staying home all day and dinking around my garden, reading, chatting with random passerbyers, watching movies, doing some occasional data analysis, writing, and cooking, there is nothing to stop me from doing that, other than myself. But obviously, that it is neither satisfying nor rewarding to make that a habit, considering not only the sacrifices I have made to be here but the money you as taxpayers in the US have paid to send me here.

Well that’s all for now, more later on as the project progresses….

Ingat po kayo!

Grabe!

Life has been crazy here lately, the hot season is beginning which as I have found out also means pigsa season. As some of you know, given my emotional phone calls and emails, I have been dealing with a nasty skin infection, making it really painful to do anything. The doctors here have been giving me lots of different antibiotics to fight the infection not realizing what bacteria I had and which antibiotics would treat it. So consequently I ended up with a "superbug" a very resistant strain of staph infection. I am now finally on the right antibiotic and my boils are improving, a month and a half later. Now I just have to prevent them from coming back, which will involve using a strong antibacterial wash intended for use by doctors to prepare their patients for surgery, for an indefinite period of time... The bacteria hides in your nostrils so I also have an ointment I apply with a Q-tip in my nose. Of course, the real solution involves boosting my immune system. My body should be able to fight off these bacteria, before they become serious illnesses and diseases, I think it's no coincidence that I keep getting infected with one thing of another. Thus I'm starting a regime of raw garlic everyday!

Other than this episode things have been quite alright at site, when I have been here at least. I have been traveling a lot over the past couple months, and it always feels so amazing to be back in Romblon. I really love it here. My garden is full of veggies and my puppy is growing into a healthy dog right before my eyes! Next week, we are heading to Negros for our In Service Training seminar where we will learn how to design and manage projects, and access funds made available to Peace Corps Volunteers. I'm really looking forward to starting this project it's about time already. I've been diving a lot lately with the NGO to restock the giant clams and do our annual photo documentation survey of our 14 marine protected areas. SIKAT received a huge grant from US AID and expanded their operations to another municipality! Great news! After the conference, I'm headed to Cadiz to visit my family, the town where my mother grew up!


We just had Easter here, I wasn't able to experience the brutal devotion/ self mutilation of Filipinos during this holy week in Pampanga, seeing someone nail themselves on a cross to be carried around town Grabe! It'll just have to wait until next year...

Anyways, to all of you who have supported me in the past week through all the chaos, I thank you for being there and hope all this crazy illness is behind us.

old news...

So last month, I finally was allowed to move out on my own, I moment I have been dreaming about since I arrived in the Philippines. While staying with a host family is an essential part of integration into the community, I must say it gets old being waited on hand and foot, having all your meals cooked for you and then not being allowed to clean up after yourself. It’s especially hard considering most of us have been living on our own for the past five years. This comes as a quite a shocker to most Filipinos. They are always surprised when I tell them I know how to cook, and are even more surprised when I tell them I know how to wash my own clothes. Anyways, I feel so alive now. I can do anything I want, I can cook when I want, sleep when I want, and come home when I want. It’s great! I have a puppy named “Bantay” which means like guard, or watch in Tagalog. My neighbor picked it up off the street and gave it to my host family which then gave it to me to have at my new place. He’s very smart already, potty trained after just a few days of having him. It’s nice to have a companion here, always playing with you. My boyfriend Jed left for his overseas job as a seaman marine engineer aboard an ship where he’ll be for the next 9 months. I am not sure how Filipinos do it here. It is so common here for one spouse to work overseas while the other stays home to take care of the kids. Typically they will go one to five years without ever returning home. Sometimes, by the time they come home, the marriage is has already strayed and there is not much keeping them together, they are so used to living apart. There are not many other options here, they do what they have to for their children.
I live on the same property as my host family, which is on a farm with rice fields, coconuts, bananas, native mangoes, manadarins, pomello trees, and pinapple plants to name a few . It’s the house that my host father grew up in, a quaint little cement house with two bedrooms. I find I am a lot more busy now, between washing my own clothes, cooking dinner, breakfast, packing a lunch, washing dishes, shopping, bathing and feeding my puppy, and cleaning (sweeping is necessary everyday or little dead bugs accumulate and you’ll have lots of ants). ANTS ANTS ANTS… they get into everything. I still have a lot to learn about living on my own when it comes to storing food. I can’t even leave a bag of plain uncooked rice on the table for a few hours without it being infested by tiny ants. I can’t imagine how people can store their food without a fridge, which I guess brings me to my next point about the abundance of plastic here. Everything is packaged in single servings for this reason, and of course also because people cannot often afford to buy any more than a asingle serving at a time. We have no garbage pick up where I live, which is also true for the other 25 barangays on this island. So I have a burn pit in my backyard, where I will burn my trash everyweek as much as I hate it, there is not much of another option. I could bring it to town and it would then just get thrown in the dump site and get blown into the ocean because it sits right on the coast and is never covered. There are a lot of projects we have been thinking about. One I am particularly interested in, and the mayor also (yippee!!), is to purchase this machine that shreds plastic which you can then add to cement blocks or roofing material, or melt it back into molds to make chairs, buckets, baskets, or what have you. They are just as sturdy, and it’s a great way to store the endless amounts of plastic that Filipinos use. The machine would be placed at the dumpsite and we would then hire municipal workers to segregate the trash. People from the barangays could then sell their plastic to the municipality by the kilo. Of course, this has it downfalls, as you can imagine, if people are able to sell their used plastic bags, there will be no incentive to save or reuse bags, instead people may begin to use even more plastic…
The other day we had a watershed tree planting event where people from many different barangays, colleges, high schools, technical schools, and the municipality participated. The site for planting was about an hour and half hike up a mountain and then back down a sleep valley to the riverbed. We had a huge turnout and people were all very excited and into it. However, the problem with these events is the accumulation of trash. Because merienda is essential if you want any participation, people had to bring food, and consequently we ended up with a lot of trash. Next time, we will make sure that the merienda involves little if any trash.
Anyways, I received my package so I am finally able to take pictures after three months without a working camera. Thank you all for your lovely donations of food and presents! I was absolutely overwhelemed with all the goodies and I shared them with all my neighbors.
So I have managed to get some nasty disease, illness or rash every month since I have been in the Philippines. This month, I got a pigsa. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a skin infection that starts when a bug bite gets infected with bacteria and fills with pus. Mine got pretty big and was really painful, I will spare you the details, but all sorts of ungodly things were oozing out of it which then created a hole/crater in my leg. After two weeks of strong antibiotics its starting to get better. Im excited to see what I have in store for next month, hookworm? A cockroach bite on my eyelid? Malaria? Don’t worry, I am using a mosquito net now, I sleep so well now, who could have guessed… now I am not waking up in the middle of the night because I feel something walking down my arm, oh wow look at that, that’s a giant poisonous centipede.

For those of you who want to know what it’s like to actually be a Peace Corps volunteer this video actually sums it up quite nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-wDq17zyN0

Looking back on it, I don’t think I picked up any valuable information during technical training that I use at site. They expect that I know a lot more than I do. For example, the other day I walked into work about an hour late, because well I was under the impression there were no activities scheduled for the day. Anyways, as I walk into the office, they all approached me and said where were you this morning??? You were supposed to lead a training on pearl farming in Tambac!! I was literally speachless, I had no idea what to say, I have absolutely no experience with how to cultivate pearls. Or they will tell me I will lead a training on how to plant mangroves and create a nursery. Well I know about mangroves, their importance, some identification, and a bit about their biology, but I have no experience growing them in a nursery nor techniques for planting them. I am finding I am learning much more from Filipinos than they are learning from me…


I am kind of in a slump now- the natural ups and downs of a Peace Corps volunteer (I actually wrote most of this blog last month but had yet to post it so it probably started off pretty chipper). It’s sure nice to live on my own, but I have got a lot of free time now- more than I know what to do with, which gives me a lot of time to reflect on what the hell I am doing here.

Enero festivities

Goodness, it’s been quite some time since I have written in my blog. We’ve been pretty busy here, lots of celebrations and piyestas. Christmas was a blast here, we went caroling all day around the Barangay and collected money for our piyesta. Then at night we had a dance party near the Barangay captain’s house. For the piyesta we had a benefit dance the first night, followed by a rest day (hahahah), then a beauty pageant the third night which I had the honor of judging. Lots of fun! Then for New Years I went to Boracay, one of the most out of control touristy places here in the Philippines with about 40 or so other Peace Corps Volunteers, madness absolute madness. Not sure I am interested in ever going back though, once was enough. I gorged on amazing expensive American food all weekend, but was sure happy to get back to my typical Filipino ulam and kanin… After returning from Boracay, the whole municipality was just preparing for the Biniray Festival. All office work was put on hold. We spent our days making our costumes and decorating the town and we spent our nights practicing dance moves and drumming. The Friday before the piyesta started, we took down the statue of the Santo Niño in the church because it is normally protected in a glass case high up set in the wall. It was one of the most fascinating things I have ever experienced. As they brought it down, crowds of people came rushing up to the front, it was like a mosh pit, like a celebrity, people being trampled, people taking photos with their cell phones, people shoving their way to the front to wipe their handkerchief on the statue, the Philippine National Police acting as body guards and crowd control. All for this statue, the symbol brought by the Spaniards during their colonization. Apparently as they were trying to leave Romblon, they tried seven times to bring their Santa Niño symbol, but the sea was too rough so after the seventh attempt they left it on shore. So now as part of the tradition, we take bangkas out and make seven loops off the pier. The next day at 4 am everyone from my Barangay headed to town for mass at the high school followed by the parade around the town. Almost every Barangay participated in the parade, they each have their own tribe, unique costumes, and drums, and they compete for best costume and best sound. Soo fun, Filipinos really know how to party, I was pretty lasing by 10 am hahah, shots of brandy flowing left and right. Then the rest of the week there was an event in the town plaza every night: women’s night, Barangay night, tourism night, Romblon National High School cultural show, Holy Rosary Concert, etc… We also had a photo exhibit in the center of town showcasing the work we do with SIKAT and through the Department of Agriculture, livelihood projects and a wealth of information about community based coastal resource management.


Anyways, I really enjoy being at site, I feel very content here, I never really have the urge to get up and travel. All of the volunteers have just been visiting me at site! I really lucked out with my placement. Work has been slow in the office with the piyesta and all but next month we are starting a coral propagation project. So we will be using SCUBA to place down these cement domes in sandy substrate to create an artificial reef. We will be collecting small pieces of branching Acropora hard corals and creating a nursery where they can grow a little larger before we attach them to the cement structures. We will be hosting a training event and I have invited a couple other Peace Corps volunteers to help out. Should be fun!! After that we will be starting our fisherfolk and boat registration for the year 2011. That means we will be going around to each of the 31 barangays among the four islands in the municipality and visiting with the fisherfolk. This should bring in a lot of money for the local government unit. I look forward to meeting all of the small-scale fishers here. Hopefully my Tagalog is sufficient to carry conversations with them… We will also be going around to the other marine protected areas and removing crown-of-thorns, the ferocious coral-eating sea star. Starting in March, we will also begin a bird survey off of San Pedro point, where I had mentioned earlier about creating a bird sanctuary ecotourism destination. We have the balinsasayaw here, the infamous bird that creates nests made of saliva which are sold on the market in Manila for up to 200,000 PhP a kilo ($ 4,762 a kilo). It’s illegal to take, purchase, or sell these nests but there are many restaurants still selling these on Palawan. They make their nests in caves or off steep cliffs, and we are going to work on protecting their habitat.

I found a house that I am going to move into next month. It is actually the old house of my host father when he was growing up. It’s right down the road from where I am living right now. A simple little concrete house, two bedrooms on a good plot of land. I had a few options but I settled on this choice because I really wanted to stay in the same community. I have developed relationships with the people here, and it has really helped to integrate with a host family here. There was a much nicer house closer to town, made of marble, right on the beach, land to make a garden, yard, porch, pool table, couches, beds, TV, oven, complete with all the appliances, the works really and for a good price, only the equivalent of about $70 a month, but I don’t know anyone in that community. I could see myself just getting off work, heading home, and having a big ol’ house to myself and no one to talk to. And there is not a People’s Organization there either. Here in Agnay there is a very active group of people passionate about conserving their marine resources so this is where I am meant to be, even if 9 km from town. At least it should keep me in shape while I am here, riding my bike everyday to town. I love the people here, they treat me like family, they watch out for me and I truly feel very welcome and safe which is why I want to stay here. Everyone in this Barangay is literally related to each other, they are one big extended family. I love them.