Bahala na: Maayong hapon!

Sh’na tova to everyone back at home! For Rosh Hashana, my friend Stef and I ventured into the market so I could bring some apples and honey to share with my clustermates. Apples were no problem to find, but honey was another story. After much confusion, and speaking broken Hiligaynon to many different vendors, I settled with milk chocolates instead. My friends in my cluster appeased me and ate the apples and chocolates, even though the chocolates tasted “like Rolos, without anything good in the middle” (according to one of my clustermates).

The five other volunteers in my cluster and I meet every morning with my cluster for language training with our teacher, Alvin. He’s the man- he tolerates our jokes, and language class has been very fun. We’re learning Hiligaynon (pronounced hilly-guy-nan), which is spoken in this region of the Philippines. I’m learning a lot, and it’s helpful that the alphabet has much fewer letters, and many vocabulary words are the same as in Spanish. My most used phrases are "kamusta" (meaning: how are you?) and "maayong hapon" (meaning: "have a good afternoon"). I'm learning how to say some longer sentences too.

In the afternoon, we typically have technical training. My job is Coastal Resource Management, and so far the topics we have covered include the fisheries code in the Philippines, basic marine ecology, and the general stages of coastal resource management. For my job, I will be paired up with an LGU (local government unit) working on improving coastal resources. There are a lot of things that people are doing and have done in the past to destroy their resources, which people’s livelihoods and food safety depend on. There seem to be many ways to improve the condition of those resources, and I'm very excited for my job to begin in a couple of months. The legislation in the Philippines that we’ve learned about is quite comprehensive, so it will be our job to make sure those laws are being effectively implemented. What’s also cool is recent ordinances have focused on devolution of power. So, the LGUs that we will be working for will have a lot of power in deciding what is done, whether it’s a marine protected area, a mangroves sanctuary, etc.

Today, we finally had a chance to get in the water. We practiced doing mangrove and seagrass assessments, and it great to play around in the ocean. The water around us is shallow and as warm as a bathtub, but it’s very murky. Today we had to travel about 40 minutes by boat to get to water clean enough to swim in.