Last weekend, I visited my counterpart, Riro (nickname: Ro), at his hometown of Barotac Nuevo, a small town about 30 minutes north of Iloilo City. I finally got to see where Ro is from and had the chance to spend time with his family. Ro lives on a compound with anywhere between 5-10 houses (it’s hard to tell), and everyone on the compound is related. There were kids everywhere, of all ages, all of whom were first, second or third cousins. Riro alone has 7 siblings. Big families are very, very common here in the Philippines, especially in "the provinces," which describes anywhere outside of the big cities but really anywhere outside of Metro Manila. Riro also has a baby, Chow Chow, who is adorable, with his wife Alyza. Alyza is from the neighboring town, Anilao, and I got to visit her house as well. Her family was super warm and friendly towards me (as it usually goes here), and her siblings were quite the characters. She’s the oldest of about 6, so it was funny to see her younger siblings, who can hardly walk themselves, playing with their nephew, Chow Chow. There, I helped Ro prepare a duck, which he killed just for me for lunch. I spent most of the afternoon playing Tong-Its, a three-player card game, very similar to Rummy, that’s very popular in the Philippines. It's fun and easy to play, but the betting system was very confusing. It was my first time playing with Filipinos. I think I got hustled.
I had almost forgotten what it was like to get to place where the people aren’t used to seeing me. In Nueva Valencia, when I ride around on my bike or walk through town or to the market, people smile at me, say hello and ask me where I’m going, and often call out my name (more commonly Johnson or Sen, but close enough). Very commonly, I'll see mothers pointing me out to the babies or children in their arms, and in a few cases, they tell their little kids to give their “amigo” a high five (or “a-pears”) whenever I walk past.
In Iloilo City, where the people are generally more exposed to foreigners (although 90% of those foreigners are older white men married to very young Filipina women), I get lots of “double takes” but not so much overt staring. Or at least people hide it better. Then when I travel to a smaller, mid-sized city like Roxas City or Kalibo (two provincial capitals also on Panay Island but not nearly as big as Iloilo City), generally I’ll get “Hey Joooooooooe. Where are you goiiiiiiiing?” Often in obnoxious, high-pitch tones. It definitely gets under some volunteers’ skin after a while, but I thankfully don’t get it too often. As you can probably guess, that’s leftover from a time when most of the white people in the Philippines were U.S. military personnel, or G.I. Joes. Usually when they call it out, it’s a young boy in a group trying to impress his friends. Although in some situations, I've found it’s just people trying to be friendly.
Back in Barotac Nuevo, where most of the people, at least the kids, have never seen a white guy in person, everything stops. The kids stop playing, adults stop talking, and they’ll just open-mouthed gawk at you walking by. And then when I start saying “Maayong hapon,” or other phrases in Illongo, that’s when they get really get excited. “You speak Illongo?!” people will say to me, in English and Illongo, with an appearance of total disbelief. I would say just about every conservation I have with a new person begins that way.
What was crazy about my weekend in Barotac Nuevo was the range of people that I met. I spent lots of time on Ro’s compound, where everyone just wanted to stare at me or hear me speak Illongo. Filipinos (in general), love making comments about your appearance. Most often I get, you are so so tall (I stood out like a giant in Barotac), you are skinny, or “taas ilong!” (meaning tall nose). Filipinos don’t have that same sort of angular nose structure that we have, and they love commenting on it and even grabbing it as well.
Then, just a two-minute walk from Ro’s compound where everyone showers in an open pump-well, and the kids most sleep on a different floor of a different house of the compound on any given night, is my other friend Roy’s house. Roy works on Guimaras as well (he’s the one who I spoke to about needing a new counterpart, and it was his dad who recommended Ro, “a family man”). Both Roy’s parents are college professors, and they lived in a nice little house, fully equip with an indoor kitchen, a living room, and private bedrooms. There was even a functioning laptop hooked up in the kitchen. I slept over at Roy’s the first night, and as we stumbled into his house after a long night of T5, he brings me into his parents’ bedroom to introduce me! His parents scramble to get up out of bed, in just their pajamas of course, to greet me. That’s Filipinos for you.
I had a very time talking to Roy’s older sister as well as his parents about the Peace Corps and my job as a coastal resource management volunteer. Particularly Roy’s father, who is a professor of fisheries, was very interesting in hearing more about my work, and we’re going to work together to plan some sort of meet-and-greet at the school where he works, which is the only fisheries college in Region VI. It'll be a chance for us volunteers to share our experiences with the students, teach them a little about CRM, and learn more about what the fisheries students learn about.
The second night I also spent some time with Roy’s (self-identified) emo friends, who really could have come out of the American suburbia. They were the first Filipinos I've met to be really into music (outside American pop songs and Tagolog love songs). While so many people that I met over the weekend didn’t understand any English and our conversations were quite basic, these kids were smart. Very smart. I was impressed by their English, impressed by their questions about my views on America, and by their progressive and open-mind perspective to things like religion, politics, and overpopulation problems facing the Philippines. That perspective, particularly about the role of the social conservatism espoused by the Catholic Church having an impact on the rapidly growing population of the Philippines was not a usual conversation for me to have with a Filipino, even though my volunteer friends and I talk about it frequently. I was really floored during a conversation I was having about how Filipinos in America have a good reputation for working very hard, one of the guys said, “Yes, but they can never reach self-actualization, as in Maslaw’s hierarchy of needs.” Maslaw's hierarchy of needs?! I haven't heard about Maslaw's hierarchy of needs since my high school psychology class. It could be more different from hearing "taas ilong!"
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