Manila

I find I don’t really have that much to say about Manila.

It was very big. Luckily, taxis were not terribly expensive.

It was very dirty. It is so easy to get used to Japanese cleanliness; you don’t even realize it until you go somewhere else and remember that other people litter.

It was clearly quite dangerous, although Aoe told us that it was actually better in terms of pickpocketing than it had been when Habitat was there two years ago.

It was sleazy: a thirteen-year-old boy tried to sell me child porn in Chinatown on the same day that we figured out that our hotel was a hotspot for old, fat, white Western men to bring their young Filipina prostitutes/companions/mistresses.

It was frequently depressing. We made the mistake of visiting the posh shopping/business area after visiting Chinatown, which made the juxtaposition between the child beggars of the afternoon and the extremely wealthy of the evening rather painfully conspicuous.

It was old. Or at least, part of it was. Intramuros has been around since the 1500s, when the Spanish built their forts and their town. It was basically destroyed by the Japanese and then the Americans during World War 2, and is now mostly a collection of ruins.

(I was startled by how much it looked like Quebec City, which of course makes sense given that both places were founded by Continental powers at about the same time. Still, it was a bit odd to feel like I was back in Canada when I was in fact almost as far from Canada as it is possible to be.)

It was very hot. Except when it was very rainy, thanks to the typhoon passing through a bit to the north.

It was basically totally unlike either Puerto Princesa or Bohol. Which made it a pretty appropriate send-off from a country that had spent two weeks mystifying us (well, at least me) with its contradictions.

Palawan and Bohol

Along with organizing our homestays, the Palawan H4H team also offered to organize two days of local sightseeing.  The day before we started building (Sunday), they took us island-hopping in Honda Bay, just to the WEST of Puerto Princesa proper.  We hired two boats and eleven snorkel masks, and off we set.  Over the course of the day, we hit up two islands and one coral reef, ate the first of a series of very large lunches, burnt to a crisp, and discovered why the Philippines is a beach resort destination: I have never seen water that turquoise-blue or that crystal-clear.  I thought they photo-shopped the pictures in National Geographic and travel brochures.  They don’t.

I also had the first of a series of odd bathroom experiences, involving roosters, being scolded for not knowing how to flush the toilet, and wandering barefoot through what appeared to be a partly-completed home.  I was pretty glad that Jess and I had done that girly thing and gone to the bathroom as a pair.

The day after we finished building (Saturday), we took a somewhat less successful trip to one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, the Underground River in Sabang.  Unfortunately, you will have to take someone else’s word that it is a wonder of the world: the torrential rains on Thursday and Friday had created currents so strong that it wasn’t safe to go into the caves.  We hung out on the beach for a while, ate the last of the very large lunches and then parted ways.  One of our team members had already left for Canada; six of the remaining headed north to El Nido, famed for its beaches, snorkeling, and scuba diving.  The four of us left had the afternoon and evening to entertain ourselves before catching morning flights.  

For the afternoon, we were taken to the Crocodile Farm (more officially known as the Palawan Wildlife Rescue and Conservation Centre) as a consolation prize.  Given that the Palawan government can’t afford to house its people (hence our presence), it shouldn’t have really surprised us that its zoo was decrepit and poorly cared for.  It was interesting to see some of the animals endemic to Palawan that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to see, but it was rather depressing to see them under such circumstances.

To be fair, the Centre’s policies (as outlined on various signs and in various brochures) were quite fair and humane.  They are doing the best they can; sadly, the area is just too poor for their best to be very good.

The next day, Russell left on an early morning flight back to Japan.  Taylor and Kaleb and I caught a somewhat later flight to Bohol, a small island tucked in the middle of the Philippines.  It is famous for basically two things:

1. very odd geological formations, known as the Chocolate Hills.

2. the world’s smallest primates, known as Philippine Tarsiers.

There are also a bunch of very old churches and bridges, a butterfly sanctuary, various hiking/biking/canoeing adventures, and a river cutting through the middle of the island that features cruises and floating restaurants.  Bohol is doing its best to become one of the tourist destinations of the Philippines.  Sadly, because we only stayed for two full days, we had to confine ourselves mostly to the Hills and the Tarsiers.

We stayed for the first two nights at a guesthouse called Nuts Huts, which is run by a Belgian couple who have lived in the Philippines for ten years and who are the hippie-est hippies I have ever met.  They provided extremely useful travel advice, albeit with a sometimes annoying emphasis on being “real,” and extremely good food.  They also started drinking rum at about ten o’clock every morning, which explains why the wife was drunk when I tried to call one evening to reserve rooms.

The rooms were in a Nipa hut right by the edge of the river.

To reach the huts, you have to climb down a hundred stairs from the open-air lobby/lounge/restaurant (and also walk down a path that could become dangerous if the goats had been let out of their pen to graze; ever tried to get past a goat that has decided you shouldn’t have breakfast?).  To reach the lobby from the nearest city, you have to negotiate with a taxi/tricycle/motorbike driver, who all know Nuts Huts and don’t particularly want to take you there because they have to go down an access road extremely inhospitable to their automobiles and extremely inefficient given the “time is money” principle of driving people around for a living.  Then, once your automobile driver of choice has decided he can’t take you any further, you walk down however much of the access road is left before finding the first set of 150 stairs to the lobby area.

(One night, we walked the entire length of the access road, armed with two flashlights.  It’s no wonder the locals think that foreign tourists are weird.)

Speaking of locals, perhaps my favorite adventure on the island was when the three of us decided to take the public bus to the Chocolate Hills.  I don’t speak Tagalog, but it didn’t take much to understand what was going on when everyone craned around their neighbours to peer at me and then whisper to said neighbours about “la blanca.”  I then got into relatively long chats with two of the middle-aged men standing near me, one of them because he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I want to talk with you.”

What did they want to talk about?  Well, let’s see... was I married to Taylor or to Kaleb?  To neither?  Well, then, which one was my boyfriend?... My boyfriend didn’t mind that I was travelling with two guys?... Why didn’t I have a boyfriend?... How old was I?... 23?!  At 23, most Filipina women are married with five kids!  (That last bit is actually a direct quote.)

Once we managed to get off the subject of my disappointing marital status, one of them told me that people in Bohol are so proud when foreigners come to their island.  They don’t consider it worthy of visiting because everyone is so poor.    Somehow, telling him how beautiful I thought it was didn’t seem to ease the guilt of such unearned gratitude.  (It was at about that point that I stopped worrying about being pickpocketed.)

In the morning of the first full day, before the Chocolate Hills (I know, I know, my chronology is getting all messed up), Taylor and I joined a girl from Malaysia and a guy from the UK on a hike up this cliff:

and into these caves:

Nothing like climbing up a cliff in 100-degree heat and then getting to escape into cool, quiet, bat-filled (as in, when they got startled by our flashlights and flew, there were so many wings going that it sounded like the wind was blowing) set of caves.  They did quite nicely as Consolation Caves in place of our failed trip to the Underground River.

On the second full day, we left Nuts Huts in the morning via the river to the nearest town.  From there, we negotiated with a jeepney driver to take us to the Tarsier Sanctuary, which may or may not be completely off course for all public transportation (a man trying to negotiate a private hire is certainly not above lying about such things), and then to the main city of the island.  This is our jeepney:

I am pretty glad to say that I have now ridden in a vehicle reading “Sex, Drugs, and Alcohol.”  Especially one that also had a plastic Jesus on the dashboard and a glow-in-the-dark rosary hanging from the rearview mirror.

The Tarsiers were... freakin’ adorable.  There are no other words.  I cannot properly describe just how small they are; you just can’t believe how small they are until you’ve seen them, and even so I find I’m already forgetting.  They are nocturnal, and smart enough to sleep at the sanctuary, where food appears at relatively regular intervals.  So in the morning before opening, the guides go around the trails and find the sleeping Tarsiers.  Then they take the visitors to see them.  It takes maybe 20 minutes.  It was totally worth the entire side trip to a different island.

We spent that afternoon at Alona Beach, the resort destination of Bohol.  We had briefly considered going Boracay, the resort destination of the Philippines, but gave up due to time constraints.  Alona Beach is apparently like a mini-Boracay... which makes me glad we didn’t try too hard to get to Boracay.  I mean, it was nice enough.  There was white sand, and lots of hotels, and even more restaurants, and plenty of boats that would take you scuba diving.  And all the people selling sunglasses, shell necklaces, and massages that you could ever need.  But it was just kind of... boring.  I had more fun on the public bus.

Homestay

When we were arranging the trip with the Habitat volunteers based in the Philippines, we asked if it might be possible for them to arrange a homestay for us with a local family.  We were pretty excited when they responded almost immediately that they could do so with no problem.

We were a little more anxious when we found out, just after arriving, that we would be staying not with local people in the city, but with residents of the village.  Don't get me wrong, we liked the villagers -- especially the kids -- perfectly well, but we weren't exactly sure what they thought of us.  I haven't spent a lot of time in the really down-and-out places of my own country/-ies, but it seems to me that in the West (a loaded term that I am using quite intentionally), Horatio Algerism and the myth of the self-made man has come to mean that poverty is a stigma, an indication of bad luck at best and laziness at worst.  Most poor people are embarrassed to be poor, and treat the wealthy with a sort of defiant unease.  

Not exactly the recipe for a comfortable homestay.

There were also the more practical questions of whether they could afford to feed us, and whether we would be taking up too much room in their small houses.

As is perhaps usual, we underestimated the village and its people.

In the Philippines, and perhaps in other developing nations, poverty seemed to be viewed in a completely different light.  Poverty simply is.  Some people are poor, and some people are not, and it is just the way life is.  I am sure that the poor would prefer to not be poor -- but because they do not assume that the wealthy are judging them, there is no need for embarrassment, defiance, or unease.  We began to see and understand this during the week, as we worked with and talked to the soon-to-be-owners of the houses we were building.  But it became crystal clear during the homestays.

Most families of the village have children; they are, after all, very Catholic (one family has 11!).  So most of the homestay families came equipped with a bunch of kids who were only too eager to teach their overnight guest card games, learn origami, or color pictures.  In one case, introduce the foreigner to the pet monkey in the backyard.

My family didn't have any kids -- or monkeys.  I was placed with one of the pillars of the community, a woman so busy she doesn't notice that her husband's job as an island caretaker keeps him away from home five days a week, and her two sons aged 15 and 20.

I spent most of the evening with the 20-year-old, who just come home from college in Manila (they essentially skip junior high, so they go college at 16 and finish at 20) and was about to begin teaching theology to kids the same age as my students.  This gave us plenty to talk about, and when we ran out of funny stories about our kids, we moved on to other topics such as the fact that I am already Catholic (so that he could stop trying to missionize me, which I think came as a relief to us both) and my marital status (my living away from my parents before marriage was a source of confusion to the point of anxiety for many of the Filipinos I met).

Perhaps the second-most surreal moment was when his mother tried to get me to marry him, then learning not two minutes later that he is strongly considering priesthood rather than teaching as a career.

The most surreal moment was definitely when we finished breakfast the next morning, and they realized they hadn't made good on their promise to sing karaoke with me the night before.  So they hooked up the machine and had us all singing Green Day -- at 6 in the morning!  However, it did prove the road to friendship with the 15-year-old, who before that hadn't said more than ten words to me.

I left in the morning with a handmade thank-you card, a request for photos of apple trees (I couldn't visualize a mango tree; my host mother couldn't visualize an apple tree), and a much better understanding of the lives of the people in "our" village.  They study in Manila and then come home to Palawan.  They have guitars and karaoke machines and dreams.  They open their doors and their arms to strangers.

Today

When I moved to this country, I knew that there would be quite a few surprises coming at me. I do not think I realized that I would spend every moment completely clueless as to what might happen to me in the next moment.

Today...

--one of my 3nensei boys decided it would be funny to pretend to have a crush on me all through lunch and 6th period. (At least I hope to God he was pretending.) For some reason, they haven't covered how to deal with hormonal teenage boys in our training. Why is this?

--another of my 3nensei boys asked if I was on a diet. Apparently my lunches are small. Jury's still out on whether he was asking because he thinks I should be on a diet.

--the same kid informed me that the art teacher and I would make a very nice couple.

--as they completed the sentence "~ makes me happy," I had to ask two of my girls if by "Beckham" they meant the actual soccer player or their homeroom teacher. (They meant the teacher.)

--I learned that, in Japan, Rock-Paper-Scissors is not only the arbiter of any disagreement and an amusing game in and of itself, but also the first step to another game that I had to play at least eight times before I actually understood.

--large numbers of my 2nensei students, in writing about their recent field trip, told me that they "played Zen meditation." The verb "suru" in Japanese can mean "do" or "play"...

--I found a snake coiled inside a drainage pipe on my walk home from school.

--I arrived home at 4.28 to find a contractor, whom I had told (through a translator) that I would be home by 4.30, waiting on my doorstep. He then proceeded to install a heated toilet seat with attached bidet and various other features I don't understand, which my landlord apparently decided I need.

Also, not today but recently...

--one of my 1nensei boys, in perfect seriousness, asked me if I am fluent in English.

--the tea lady offered me some fresh mountain greens, brought back from the 2nensei field trip. While I looked for chopsticks, she took my hand and deposited a mound of slimy, ice-cold greens into my palm. Mmm, oishii!

I had heard through the grapevine that many ex-JETs find post-Japan life to be rather boring. I mean, how could it not be?

[I'm not done with the Philippines; heavens, I still have over a week to talk about. But that's taking longer than expected...]

Habitat for Humanity Build Week, by the numbers

11: members of the Sendai JETs Global Village team

8: Americans

1: Canadian

1: Kiwi

1: Japanese

5: girls

6: boys

2: number of teams we were asked to divide into, as 5-6 is the ideal number for most of the tasks we were assigned to.

8: age of the Habitat Village in Puerto Princesa, Palawan

128: number of homes in the Village

400: goal number of homes for the Village

400: hours of “sweat equity” Habitat requires from prospective homeowners, which meant we worked side-by-side with the future inhabitants of the homes we were building. Getting to know them also meant that Team 1 and Team 2 later became known as Team Fidel and Team Randy.

>5: U.S. dollars per month required for rent. Rent can also be paid through labor, most frequently brick-making; there were two adults and three adolescent boys who spend most of their days making bricks -- when the foreigners aren’t taking up all their supplies of molds and shovels.

7+: hours each day during which the Village has no electricity (8 am to 3 pm). There are also unscheduled blackouts and brownouts (wherein there is electricity, but not enough to go around so some people don’t get any) relatively frequently. No power means no power tools, so everything from mixing concrete to pounding gravel into molds to make bricks is done by hand. There is also no running water, so all the water we used and the villagers drink either falls from the sky or is hauled up from the creek.

5: large piles of gravel that had been hauled up from the nearby creek, one in front of each house. The same gravel was used for everything: as-is for basic concrete, sifted for mortar, mixed with rocks (the rocks sifted out during the pre-mortar preparations) for the floor, and as a playground by the children.

10: number of bags of gravel, per one bag of cement mix, required for mortar and flooring.

6-8: number of buckets of water required for flooring, depending on how recently it rained.

30: minutes to mix a batch of concrete, pass it in buckets into the house, and spread it into a nice smooth floor.

8: batches of concrete required to complete a floor.

3: floors completed during the first three days.

80: shovelfuls of gravel, per one bag of cement mix, required for bricks.

113: bricks completed by 8 Sendai JET team members (5 in the morning and 8 in the afternoon) over the course of a 6-hour day. Not counting the ones that fell apart when we tried to remove them from the molds.

150: bricks completed in eight hours by one homeowner, who makes bricks to pay his rent.

3: number of wheelbarrows on site, used to move the bricks from the drying area to the under-construction house.

5-7: number of bricks that can be placed in each wheelbarrow at a time.

25ish: hours that one team or the other spent hauling bricks from one place to another.

1.5: depth, in meters, of the hole needed for sewage. (It was then to be covered with a concrete lid that would keep out the smell -- and, presumably, keep everyone from falling in a la Slumdog Millionaire.)

4: hours that Team 1 worked on The Hole for Fidel’s house.

>.5: depth, in meters, of The Hole at the end of those 4 hours.

3: meals provided on-site, by women whose cooking, I think, was their rent contribution to the month. It was lunch and two snack breaks (merendas) -- but they provided enough food for them each to be a meal in themselves.

4: approximate number of mangoes I ate every day. Not counting however many go into a mango smoothie, which I drank basically every dinner if they were on the menu.

2: grand total of Tagalog phrases learned. Salamat po = Thank you. Magandan umaga = Good morning.

3.5: hours required for the children to overcome their shyness; ie, until lunch the first day. After that, we all had lots (and lots) of new friends. Their favorite game was to learn all our names, then shout them one by one to see how long it would take us to turn and wave. This game was especially fun if they were up in a tree or hiding behind something.

3.5: days of brutal sun and temperatures in the 90s. From Monday through mid-day Thursday we all burnt to an absolute crisp and sweated enough that we had to keep an eye on ourselves and each other to prevent dehydration. But just after lunch on Thursday (and just after mixing a fresh batch of concrete), the engineer came running up calling “Stop! Stop! The rains are come!” The rains, as it turned out, were torrential and not quite so brief as torrential rains I’m used to. That was the beginning of the working-while-constantly-wet and smelling-like-rainwater-all-the-time phase.

2: long-suffering souls provided to keep an eye on our stuff during the day and keep an eye on us at whatever shopping outlet/dangerous part of town we decided to explore after work.

3: number of days on which we decided to delay showers so as to explore and/or purchase necessities like non-Japanese sunscreen (ie, sunscreen that might have a chance of working) and aloe (because Japanese sunscreen doesn't work).

∞: stares intercepted as we wandered around splattered in an aromatic mixture of sweat, rain, concrete, and mud. Plus the pricelessly polite comment from a store clerk: “Why are you wet, ma’am?”

2: (air-conditioned) vans and drivers provided to transport us to the Village and then back to the hotel -- and to whichever restaurant we chose for dinner.

90: preferred speed, in kph, of Roy and Lolo, our drivers.

30: average speed of a tricycle on the National Highway.

2: number of lanes on the National Highway, not counting the equally-wide footpaths on either side. Also the number of solid yellow lines running down the middle of the road most of the time.

24: other vehicles passed during the drive on Friday.

60: minutes required to drive from the hotel to the Village.

45: minutes required when we were running late on Monday morning. We tried very hard to never be late again.

2001: average year of release of the American pop songs we heard on the radio.

1986?: year of release of the CD of Filipino favorites they unearthed to play for us whenever there was electricity. Just whistle while you work -- or, rather, sing along to songs whose words you will soon memorize even though they aren’t in your language. I still have “Oomba Papalicious” running through my head.

5: homes dedicated and occupied by their new owners in a ceremony on Friday afternoon.

Tadaima!

Loosely translated, I’m back!


I arrived back in Sendai at 5.45 am on Sunday morning, about an hour ahead of schedule. I have now unpacked all my bags, and the physical evidence of the trip is hanging to dry, put away, or neatly displayed. I wish that coming to terms with everything I’ve seen in the past two weeks was that easy.


Sorting through my reactions, to say nothing of my stories and photos, and deciding what to share is going to take a while. I promise there will be full blog coverage eventually. For now, I will leave you with a short list of things that I didn’t know I didn’t know:

--Poverty means nothing to a child. There are worse places to grow up than a village with a hundred other kids, scaffolding, giant piles of gravel, and foreigners to play with.


--Manila is a good example of a worse place to grow up.


--I am 23, unmarried, and childless. Therefore, I fail at life. (I learned this from a couple of middle-aged men on a bus in Bohol. They also had a lot of trouble accepting that I was not married or attached to either of the two boys I was travelling with.)


--People in Bohol are honored that foreigners would come to their island; they don’t consider it worthy of visiting because everyone is so poor. (This was after we established the depth of my reproductive failure.)