Ati-Atihan Festival, Day One

Our city is celebrating the Ati-atihan festival all this week. The opening ceremony took place at my school, and students from other schools came and performed. Here are some kids playing the Rondallia, which sounds neat and has FOURTEEN strings! I sat on stage with the Mayor and other important people. There are booths set up around our school courtyard, promoting things like the environment and natural resources and native species. Then, along the main road of town are about 50 booths, all made out of native materials (mostly bamboo) and selling native products and produce. Every school in Cadiz has a booth, and some other organizations do too. It's really neat to walk back and forth to school past all the booths. I buy a lot of fresh fruit and some other handmade products. We are also having a food festival at night, and there is music and carnival rides and things like that. The highlights of the festival, will be this weekend

Animal Planet

It's been raining a lot lately, and I think it's making the wildlife do crazy things. I saw the rat again in my bathroom the other day, and chased it out, but i felt kind of bad, cause it was basically a flood outside. Like that Winnie-The-Pooh movie where water is just everywhere. This morning, at 5am, I heard a loud and distressed meowing coming from very nearby. I checked out my house but couldn't find the cat. I eventually concluded that it was stuck in the ceiling, but I didn't know what to do about it. By the time it got light out, the cat I think got itself unstuck from the ceiling.

The rain was so heavy for more than a day, that I didn't even go to school. My little friend Jonica came over, and she left her flip flops outside the door like always and they floated away. The leak in my living room turned into 3, then 4 leaks. There is also a couple in the kitchen. Fortunately, my bedroom is still dry. I like the cooler temperatures right now. It's actually, truly, cool.

Snow!!!!

Probably the only post I'll ever make about snow during my Peace Corps time. But here I am with my brothers in our (their) snow fort during my Christmas Vacation. whoo!

At Anna's House

Tim and I went to visit Anna in her genuine Nipa hut in Capiz, on Panay. This is the traditional Filipino house in our area, and it's really cool to live in one. This one was custom built for Anna.

Peace Corps: Where Nightmares Become Reality

For years now, I have had a recurring nightmare. I’m asleep, and feel ants crawling all over my bed. I’ll jump out of bed, throw the covers off, and turn on the light. Then I see there are no ants in my bed, and I go back to bed. That was before Peace Corps. Now there really are ants in my bed. There’s nothing like facing your fears, though. For one thing, the ants in my nightmares are big, and all over the bed, everywhere. In real life, they are usually the tiny red ones, although sometimes the bigger black ones find their way onto the bed. And they are never ALL over. I’ve gotten used to just flicking them off my sheets, and it hardly even bothers me anymore. Not that I like it, but it’s not the stuff of nightmares.

But I suspect that when I go back home I will have new material for my nightmares. For example, I’m sleeping, and I’m awoken by the sound of something like a plastic wrapper or plastic bag being crunched on, or maybe, chewed. I go into the next room and turn on the light, and a rat the size of a house cat dashes off into the CR (bathroom), leaving behind a bag of snack food taken from my kitchen table. That could come up in a nightmare sometime.

Or I might have a nightmare where I’m eating dinner with my host family, and I take a piece of pork from the bowl and put it on my plate. It’s hard to cut, and I feel stupid working so hard at it. I flip it over and realize I am trying to eat a pig snout, hair included. That one has nightmare potential.

I just hope that the good experiences I’ve had come up in dreams too. I could handle a recurring dream about lying in a hammock under some palm trees.

Thanksgiving 2006

This was a very memorable Thanksgiving. About 15 Peace Corps Volunteers went to Kevin’s house in Pandan, Antique, on Panay. We planned Thanksgiving dinner for Saturday, so we wouldn’t have to take vacation days to get there on Thursday. I left my city Thursday after school and stayed with our Filipina friend, Renee, who lives in Bacolod. Friday morning, Tim, Renee and I got on the boat to Iloilo and met Allan, another PCV, and the four of us got on a bus up the coast. Allan and I got off at Lau-aan, where we stayed the night with our friends, Ryann and Eli Heller. The next morning we got our stuff together, Eli picked up a turkey, and we caught a bus to Pandan. We were on the same bus as the Farvers and Ian, so the 7 of us showed up at Kevin’s together. Everyone started preparing food. I helped Ryann make an apple crisp. Some people brought pies, some of the boys started preparing the turkeys, and there were vegetables and stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy to make. Kevin’s house is on the beach, and is about 10 feet from a German volunteer’s house, so we used both houses to prepare our feast. They built fire pits on the beach to roast the turkeys on. It was a lot of fun to see everyone. The food was ready about 4pm, and we dug in. It all tasted great. You kind of expect a Peace Corps thanksgiving to taste wrong. But everything was just like home! I think this is probably because we have some really good cooks in our group. All I did to help was cut apples, and you don’t really have to be a good cook to do that right.
So we all sat around under palm trees on the beach eating our thanksgiving dinner, and we all felt very happy and thankful that we could be together. It was pretty cool.
After dinner, some people went swimming, I went on a walk, and we all just hung out. Later I played hearts, and we had a bonfire on the beach, and the Farvers had a Christmas trivia game with a grand prize of a CD of Christmas music. And I won! It was a great victory. I am putting this on my resume to give Alex Trebek when I get home.
Most of us stayed that night in Kevin’s house or the German volunteers house. There were a few beds, and I lucked out and got to share one, so I didn’t have to sleep on the floor. The next morning I got up too early (6:30) and went to visit my old host family in Oton, Iloilo. That was really nice too, I spent the night there. Finally Monday morning, I headed home. I got back to Cadiz about 3pm and had to clean my house and take a long nap. It was an excellent weekend.

Successes

Well, little things are happening, but the important thing is that things are happening. Here’s some good things that have been happening recently:

We got a shipment of books from America, and I went to one of the most interested teachers and gave her class a demonstration on how to take care of books, and gave each of them a library card. So now they come pretty much every day and check out books. It’s great, because they are excited, they like the books, and the teacher is encouraging them to read. Two of the students, Elaine and Ervino, love coming to the library, they ask me if they can sweep and straighten books on recess. Ervino likes to be the bouncer and stand by the door so no one comes in with food or drink. It’s hilarious, and I love it. Students from all grades come in to look at books on their breaks, which is good, but I can’t give everyone a library card because we only have about 100 books, and there are about 45 kids in each class. So 2 classes could wipe out all the books every day, and there would be nothing left for kids to come in and read. I’m trying to work out ways to get around this until I can get the rest of the donated books here.

I also have finally started the kids working on the World Map Project. I got one of the social studies teachers to do it with me, and we’ve got some of the motivated, top students working on it. So far we’ve painted the background blue, and played some geography games. I hope we can hold it together to finish this project by the end of the school year. The map is about 10 feet long by 6 feet high, so it’s a big undertaking. But I really think it will benefit the school if it’s done right. Some of the teachers have asked me if Canada is part of the United States. The teachers. They could use a map.

Another cool thing is that I have been matched up with a class for the World Wise Schools program. This is where a teacher requests to have a correspondence with a Peace Corps volunteer. The class writes letters to the volunteer, and the volunteer shares the culture of their host country. Any teachers can request a volunteer, so if you know any who might be interested, have them check out the PC website. Anyway, so my class is an 11th grade English class in Texas. The teacher was a volunteer in Paraguay in the 80’s. I think it will be neat.

My teacher’s English class has now completed 2 sessions. The first session was not good. It was pretty awful. I worked hard on the 2nd session, and it came out MUCH better. The teachers had fun, they paid attention and participated, and they practiced their English. We have 6 new student teachers at our school, and they are going to start attending too. I’m excited about that, because I think it’s much easier to impart teaching techniques and strategies to teaching students than to teachers who have been doing things their way for years. I just hope I can keep the sessions interesting and relevant. The teachers are terrible students. They come late, they don’t have paper or pens, they talk, and they complain if we keep working even one minute past 5 (even though we didn’t start until 4:30) But I can handle all that, as long as they are participating and trying the activities.

So hooray! Oh, and I also made fried rice that was not just edible, but actually good! And I did it on two separate occasions, which I think means I know how to cook something! Hooray for that too!!

My House

Some of you have seen the pictures of my house already, but here they are for those of you who haven't. It's a fine little house, even though it's not real nice. This morning a really incredibly loud roll of thunder made the plaster flake down from the ceiling. After that the rain came inside, but just in one spot, which is better than before, when there were four leaky spots.

Life is a Highway!

Here are some of the government-posted signs along the highway from Cadiz to Bacolod. Made me laugh. We need to tell people not to text while driving??

Avoid Texting While Driving

Slow Down

Driving with Liquor Don't Mix

Hands on the Wheel
Eyes on the Road
That's the Skillful Drivers Code

Masskara!

This weekend was Bacolod's big festival, Masskara. It happens every year, and involves lots of festival-type things like booths selling cheap crap, food vendors, bands, drinking, and lots of trash. The main events are dance competitions between local groups. All of them have elaborate masks (masskara...) and cool costumes. I went to masskara with 12 other Peace Corps Volunteers, which caused quite a spectacle at times. Ian is 7 feet tall. But we had a lot of fun and did lots of stuff. We watched the street dance competition on Saturday. There were a lot of interesting dances and costumes, but it's hot, and every team dances to the same song, so after about 40 minutes, you've seen enough.

We went to a local bar one night, and there was local artist doing free sketches, so anna sat for one. That was really cool. We also went out for pizza, (just 6 of us) and ordered a giant pizza. You can see it is huge. We almost finished it, too.

There were lots of carnival games we tried out. Here's Erin playing some kind of game where you bet on a color. I think she's more excited than the kids. Me, Anna, and Erin all tried the shooting gallery. I was proud when i shot a plastic indian and got a piece of candy until Erin shot nine plastic indians and got nine pieces of candy. That's a stupid game anyway.

We also did videoke and went shopping and ate good food. It was a very fun weekend, and it was great to see my Peace Corps friends that I don't get to see very often.

United Nations Week

Well, we have a school program every couple of weeks here at Cadiz West II Elementary. It's excessive. But some schools have a program every week. Every week has a theme, set by the national Department of Education, and some weeks, the different grades put on dances and songs to honor the theme. This week was UN week. It was a pretty cute program. Here we have the 2nd graders doing 'New York, New York', and the 6th grade boys doing a Chinese Dragon Dance. There was also representatives from Australia, India, Philippines, and Brazil. Seeing a cute little Filipina dressed up in Red, White, and Blue and waving an American flag was just too cute.

Life at Cadiz West II Elementary

We had our District Competetion last week, which is like a field day competetion among 11 schools, with cultural events too. My favorite is the native game Sipaktakraw (not sure of the spelling). Here's some pics of that. It's basically a bamboo ball, there are three kids on each side, and they try to volley back and forth using their heads and the inside of their feet, like hacky sack. Apparently it is really exciting to watch when the players are good at it. My students were lucky to get it over the net twice in succession. It was still cool to see a brand new game like that.

They also had foot races, soccer, and native dance. It was a good day.

Another thing our school is doing is being in a school-beautification competetion. This is getting silly. The kids spend hours every day, doing things like painting the rocks and trash cans, and sweeping the dirt. Many many new things have been put in the school yard. Here are some pictures of the Math Garden. There are cement fractions, and a cement slice of pizza to represent fractions. Cement math symbols, too. I don't understand it all, really. We've also gotten about 10 new murals painted, and they are absolutely beautiful. They're doing a big solid waste management program as well, which is pretty beneficial and important. But painting rocks? I just don't get it.

Fun Things!

This weekend was Ben’s birthday, so Tim, Ben, me, and a few of Ben’s Filipino friends went to Bacolod Saturday and Sunday. Here’s the funnest thing. I bought SIXTEEN movies for $4. They are so cool, they come in from China, and they are 8-in-1 DVDs for $2 (100 pesos). So I bought two. Here’s the movies I got: Back to the Future 1-3, Freaky Friday, Chicago, American Dreamz, Pret A Porter, Millions, High School Musical, and some other ones. Actually I really only got 15 movies cause American Dreamz is on both discs. They aren’t top quality, like real DVDs, but they do have menus and were not shot in a movie theater, and come in real packaging. They are probably illegally imported from China, but they are awesome. So are the movie descriptions. Here’s the description, verbatim, for Back to the Future: “Dawn with a time machine back to the strange Boshibulang 1955, after a series of thrilling experiences, the two finally returned to 1985. However, the calm Not long after, strange and sudden Dr. entered the dawn of life, as he once again time to travel to the future and found some strange things might jeopardize the dawn of the next child, in order to ensure the future of Matignon family, and he and Dr. strange time again onto the shuttle machines to 2015.” Wow, sounds compelling, no?
A little thing but it’s fun, and fun things make me happy: I went to buy more minutes for my cell phone, and they had a bunch of phone covers for sale. I asked if they had any for my phone, which is kind of an older, cheap-o model. The lady looked apologetic, and said, ‘all we have is Dora the explorer.’ Perfect!! I love Dora! So now I have a super fun phone cover.
So that was awesome. Saturday night we went out, and first we got Pizza, which is great just in itself, cause I love pizza, and it’s not exactly available everywhere here. We got the giant party pizza, it is 30 inches across!! We couldn’t finish it. Not even close. After that we went to videoke, which is actually way more entertaining than karaoke is in the states, I think. I even did a rousing rendition of “I want to break free” by Queen, and we were all jumping up and dancing around, cause everyone secretly just wants to break free. I also got a perfect 100 score on ‘Pinoy Ako’. Everyone was impressed, because that is a Tagalog song. That was fun. I also played a round of pool with one of the Filipinos, and almost beat him. Really. I only had one ball left, and he had three, but then he got them all in and the 8 ball. But I was close.
Another fun thing is that I’ve started buying stuff for my house, with my host mother’s help. I bought a bucket and dipper (very essential), and a rice pot (also very essential.) I was going to buy the smallest rice pot, but my host mom said, what if Tim comes over to eat, you should buy the next biggest one. Tim can put away the rice. I got some pillows, and an electric water heater. The furniture could be a bit of a issue, but I do have a bed, so that’s the most important thing. Also fun is that they tiled my bathroom, before it was just a nasty concrete floor! Seriously, having a tiled bathroom floor is just so incredibly awesome, I can’t begin to tell you.
One more fun thing is this fruit called rambutan. I don’t think they are available in the states, but here they grow on trees all over the place. They are funny looking fruit, and taste sweet. We got a bunch for free cause they are in season now. I like them. They are funny looking but nice tasting.

PST2

I recently returned from a week and a half trip to Manila. All BETA (Education) and CYF (social work) volunteers were brought to a training facility near Manila for our Pre-service Training part II. Part I being language and culture at our hub sites. This was intended to be more technical and sector specific.

I went a couple days early to hang out with other volunteers I haven’t seen in months, and see what Manila was like. One of my friends from college, Ed, is a Filipino who lives in Manila, and he took me and my friends, Aaron and Erin (easy to learn their names!) out to dinner in the fancy part of town.

Basically Manila is a big city. Like most Filipino cities, the major attractions are all malls. I saw at least 7 of them in a 2-day stretch. Pathetic, I know, especially since Manila actually does have some cultural attractions, museums, and stuff. Oh well. One place we visited was the Mall of Asia, allegedly the largest mall in Asia. I was dying to go there to visit the ice skating rink. We walked up to the rink, and just when we arrived, a wonderful thing happened: it started to snow! Some man-made snowflakes came shooting out of the ceiling onto the skaters. It was fantastic. After that we got Mexican food, which all of us have been craving. Burritos oozing with cheese are just not available here. The Mexican food was great.

The only other thing of note that I did in Manila was get a bagel with cream cheese. You can see how most of my memories involve food. It’s not uncommon.

We all spent Monday through Saturday in grueling, all-day training sessions. 8am to 7pm. Grueling is really just another word for boring. Some of the sessions were useful, and some were interesting, but most were boring. Our main project of the week was to teach a real workshop to real teachers at a real school at the end of the week. We were split into groups, and the elementary education group did a killer job. There are only 5 elementary volunteers in my batch. Me and Ryann and Scott are all from Western Visayas, and know each other well. Vanessa is in the Bicol region of Luzon, and I had been in contact with her throughout training and at site. The only new person to me was Keith, whose site is about 2 hours from Manila. He’s a trained TOEFL teacher, so he knows what he’s doing. We taught about 20 teachers some new methods in teaching reading. It went well, and the teachers enjoyed it and claim they will use some of the methods in their own classes.

If nothing else, training gave me a little shot of confidence to start getting some real work done at site in terms of giving workshops and things. I also facilitated a session on classroom management, since in the Philippines, classroom management is usually whacking a stick against the board to get student’s attention. Many of the other education volunteers are not teachers in real life, so I was able to give them a couple of suggestions for getting groups of people to settle down. Yay me.

I also got chosen to help facilitate a teacher training in mid-October in Bohol. They asked me, Scott Farver, and Eli Heller, all of us Western Visayas people. I have to say, our hub (western visayas) is way awesomer than any of the other hubs. The other places have some real soplado people in them. (Soplado means snobby. It’s quite an insult here.) So Scott, Eli, and I, along with three education volunteers from the batch before us, got together with a woman from UNICEF, who is paying for the training, and worked out what we’ll be doing. It’s kind of cool to be doing something special like this. Especially because I came back to site and told my principal I was ready to do some workshops and he declined my offer. Oh well.

The nights were pretty fun during training. We had a large group from Western Visayas there, (9 of us) so we got back into our routine of nightly game playing. The other volunteers there who weren’t too soplado joined us, and some nights there were 30 people playing games. Whoo!

I flew back to Bacolod on Monday afternoon. Everything was fine, except the baggage claim in Bacolod is insanity. There’s basically a corner of a concrete room fenced off. Guys haul in by hand all the bags, and people shout and point until they collect all their bags. It’s actually fairly civilized on the passenger’s side, not much shoving or anything, but still. There’s got to be a better way.

more pictures from bohol

Here's some more pictures from our trip. Here you can see the outrageous entrance fee to the national park. It probably wasn't any good anyway.

There is Anna and Erin and I in front of some of the chocolate hills. There are hills that are more spectacular than that, but they were still not quite worth all the hype.
















That building way down there? That was Nuts Huts. We took this from up the mountain on the other side of the river, high up. By the way, the picture in the other post with a tiny house you can barely see up the mountain? That was halfway to the caves. we were very exhausted.



Erin and Anna are hanging out on the porch of our bungalow at Nuts Huts. Cool place, no?




And then Erin and Anna are with their guitars that they got custom built for them.

Bohol!

This weekend I took a trip to the island of Bohol with my best PC buddies, Erin and Anna. We did a lot of fun things, and had a great time. Here’s the highlights. We stayed in a place called Nuts Huts, which is a very hip, very eco-centered place. It’s built on the mountainside along the Loboc river. You can either take a boat upstream from the town of Loboc to reach it, or hike in from the national highway. We took a boat in. The main room (restaurant, lobby, hangout) is about 100 steps up from the river. And about 100 steps down from the highway. The bungalows are along the river, but all of them are raised up on the mountain, so you have to climb a ladder to get to your room. It’s a really cool place, but if you weren’t expecting a workout before and after every meal, it might not be the best place to stay.

We visited the Chocolate Hills, which are basically a bunch of small hills that rise up from the perfectly flat land in a series of bumps. It’s not that remarkable, but it’s a big tourist spot.

We tried to visit the National Park nearby, but while the entrance fee for adults was 8 pesos, for non-citizens it was 100 pesos. If we didn’t know we were being ripped off, we would have probably paid it, but even when I talked the gate guard down to 200 pesos for all three of us, we still felt we were being overcharged, so didn’t go in.

We hired a local guy, Joseph to take us up the river to the waterfalls in his boat. We thought it would be a nice relaxing afternoon ride. We were wrong. Joseph ‘docked’ the boat on some rocks (I really didn’t think he saw them, the way we crashed into them) and took us on a hike along the river that made me feel like I should be in an REI catalog. It was very intense, and if you slipped, you would probably fall 30 feet into the river. Joseph did it barefoot, just running along like we were on a sidewalk. It was neat though, lots of climbing up rocks and on tree roots until we got to the top of the waterfalls. After we were filthy and sweaty, Joseph led us back to the boat and Erin and Anna took a swim, and got a ‘hydro massage’ from the waterfalls.

The next morning we thought we would do the ‘exciting cave hike just across the river’ advertised in the Nuts Huts main room. Joseph came and picked us up in a tiny tiny boat. We couldn’t all fit in it at once, so he took me and Anna across the river and went back for Erin. Joseph points up the mountain and tells us the cave is up there. Then he starts zooming up an almost vertical narrow pathway. Also it is covered in wet leaves, this being the rainforest. After about 20 minutes of this, when all three of us thought we couldn’t go another step, and Joseph was walking along while weaving a basked and telling us stories, we took a break in a clearing where some local men had been gathering firewood. While the three of us gasped and tried to find a single dry spot anywhere on our clothes that we could wipe our face with, Joseph started chopping wood. I’m not kidding. We asked him how much farther, and he said we were almost there, and there was no more straight vertical like that. We believed him. After another 15 minutes or so (and it wasn’t as bad as the first part) we reached his brothers house. From his brother’s house, we could see our bungalow, hundreds of feet below. We rested at his brother’s house for a bit. When Joseph said we were halfway to the cave, Erin, who wasn’t feeling well even before we left, decided to wait for us at the house. Joseph and Anna and I trooped on. More intense hiking, and we were over the top of the mountain and finally, to the cave. The first cave we went through was small, and there was a family gathering bat guano to use as fertilizer. One of the neat things about this trip was how authentic it was. Joseph taught us about local plants and their uses, he told us about the livelihoods and history of the people of his village, and we ran into people really doing things, like gathering guano. We continued on to a second cave, where Joseph told us people hid from the Japanese during WWII. All I could think was that they must have been pretty safe, because who in their right minds would go through all that work we just went through to find some poor Filipino peasants. At times Joseph was actually using a machete to clear away plants from the path.

The caves weren’t that amazing, compared to some National Parks caves we’ve been to, but they were still neat to see, and you could touch anything and walk wherever you wanted. After the caves, we began our descent. Joseph left me and Anna at one point to go and fetch Erin, then the four of us continued down the mountain. At times we were worried about falling head first down the side, but we didn’t. Back at river level, we walked along the path that the villagers take everyday to the market, and headed back upstream to where we’d started. We passed kids playing in the river, women hanging up laundry, people doing their daily activities. It was a really neat hike, and both Anna and I had been wanting to do a hike like that since we arrived – but we were definitely not prepared for such a hike to take place that day. We had no idea what we were getting into when we decided to ‘explore the caves’. Back at our bungalow, we took showers and hung our sweat-drenched clothes out to dry. None of us could imagine climbing the steps again, our legs were like jello. But we had to check out. We asked Joseph to come in his boat and take us to town on the river because we were not going to be able to climb 200 stairs up to the highway.

The town’s river landing is also a tarsier viewing spot, and we stopped to see the tarsiers. Tarsiers are the smallest primates in the world. They are about the size of my hand. They look kind of like gremlins, and have huge eyes. After the tarsiers, we got a jeepney back to the capital of Bohol, Tagbilaran. We got lunch, and even though we were exhausted, we went to pick up Erin and Anna’s custom-ordered guitars. We hung out at the guitar workshop for a while, then went to a pension for the night. The girls had bought me a harmonica so the three of us could jam once they got their guitars. We had a fun night.

The next morning we took a ferry back to Cebu, and the girls got on their flight to Iloilo. I had 5 hours to kill until my bus left, so I went to the mall and saw a Filipino movie called You Are The One. It was great. If you can get your hands on it, and if it has subtitles, you should watch it. It’s a cheesy love story, but explains a lot about Filipino culture, and it was cute.

I got back to Cadiz about 9:30 and went to bed. It was an excellent trip.