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.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
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.
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.
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