Bahala na: Still Standing

The rainy season is fully underway here in the Philippines. It finally cools down from time to time, although it’d still be shorts and sandals weather in Hanover, New Hampshire, but it can really, really rain. We’ve also been having lots of brownouts these days, although I’m not certain they’re related.

I had expected the rainy season would mean torrential downpours day in and day out, but thankfully in the western Visayas region, we’re out of the way from most of the typhoons. Instead, it’s just overcast all day and rains sporadically throughout the day but most consistently in the afternoon. We’ve have a couple serious storms, where the wind is really blowing hard, but I’m happy to report that my nipa hut is not leaking and is still standing. It even withstood a 6.2 earthquake a few kilometers off the southern coast of Guimaras. I woke up to my bed banging against the wall of my nipa hut at 4:30AM. In somewhat of a daze, I sat up and looked out the window, ready to tell Justin to cut it off. When he wasn’t there, I assumed that I was finally loosing it, and I fell back asleep.

Since the beginning of the rainy season, around the time of my family visit, it seems like every week and every weekend there’s something going on. The time is flying by, and my schedule is already filling up for the upcoming months.

I just got back from an incredible 12-day trip to Thailand, but I’ll have to wait until next time to write about it. Rob, I gotta get those pictures! Plus this was written before my trip; I just didn’t have a chance to post it!

I’ve keeping busy with my volunteer friends and my Filipino ones, particularly the other casuals in my office. Employees at the LGU are divided between permanent and casuals. The casuals get paid less and don’t get benefits, and not surprisingly they are usually younger. One of the casuals in my office, Josa, got married a few weeks ago in Calaya, one of the inland barangays. I was told it was at a church, so when I pull up to the hut, crammed with people, I was surprised (just a little bit). Thanks to the Spanish influence, each municipality, along with government buildings and a basketball court, has a big church in their municipal plaza. They are often very nice, well-built structures, some really quite remarkable, and generally they are tall, well-decorated buildings.

Filipino weddings follow similar wedding traditions in America. Lots of sermons, lots of pictures, lots of speeches. And of course, lots and lots of food. At the post-ceremony reception, they ask each group of people represented (e.g. his family, her family, etc.) to give short speeches. When it came time for “one of Josa’s coworkers” to get up and say something, all eyes went on me, and Joe Ann, my old counterpart, got me to go up and do it. That’s Peace Corps Philippines for you. No matter the occasion, we volunteers always seem to get thrown to the front to give a speech about something.

One Filipino tradition I saw for the first time was the money dance. For the first dance at the reception between the bride and groom, everyone is supposed to come up and stick pesos into the pockets of the bride and groom, or whatever crevice they can find.

The church in Calaya, Nueva Valencia where Josa got married.

Josa, her the groom, and the other OMAS coworkers in attendance.

Nini, Luzel, and Joe Ann.


Had fun seeing my old counterpart since she left OMAS.

Were you expecting them to look more Filipino?

I also had my office family day. After work two Thursdays ago, the casuals went to the house of one of my coworkers to prepare the food for the following day. I got to watch the laborious process of taking a fully intact pig and transforming it into nice little squares of pork. I don’t know how it looks when it’s done in a factory, but gutting a pig is some messy business. Those pigs have lots and lots of innards, let me tell you, but very little goes to waste here. I stuck mainly to chopping vegetable and moving chairs.

Other than getting ready, there was lots and lots of Tanduay. I even got to “bonding bonding” with the crew of the bantay dagat (the local coastal enforcement group) as we shared Tanduay and Illongo conversation on the bantay dagat boat, which is supposed to be used strictly for enforcement purposes only. I was even told that there were illegal fishers out in the distance. No surprise there either.

The family day began the next day. Lots of people, not just from my office but other LGU offices as well, came down for the launching of the newly refurbished bantay dagat boat. The Tanduay started early, and there was a lot of “enjoying” and lots of eating. I stayed over that night again. The other casuals made it through the day and stay up late, and we even went for a night swim. The water wasn’t the cleanest, but I’d seen studies showing the fecal coliform levels are within national standards, so I felt god about that. Well, I guess it didn’t take fecal coliform to give me ring worm (or some other sort of dermitius) on my left ankle, which is finally going away after about 3 weeks.

"Tagay" with some coworkers and the pig-slaughtering crew.

Hanging out with the casuals of the OMAS staff. From L to R: a sleeping person (whom I've never met before), Mario, Stefen, me, Luzel, and Riro.

The weekend after my family day, I took a trip to Libertad, which is Lindsay’s site. An 8-hour bus ride from Iloilo City, Libertad is the northern-most municipality on Panay Island. Lindsay and I met up in Kalibo City, which is on to way to Libertad, where are party partied for the night. The following day, we met up with Dan to go for a short hike up to the head of a river in the neighboring municipality. When we got to Libertad later that day, she warned us that the house very well may be flooded. If not from the trash-filled mangrove swamp that sits behind her house (and has already flooded her kitchen in the past), the tide from the ocean was getting dangerously close to her front gate. The nipa hut was intact when we got there, but what we were not expecting was the 72-hour brownout that lasted for my entire stay in Libertad. Lindsay’s landlord, apparently rather evasive and clueless, hadn’t paid the electricity bill, so wala power at Lindsay’s. Lindsay uses a charcoal grill, so we thankfully could cook dinner outside, under the awning in front of her house, but it was definitely a struggle. Well, it was for Dan and Lindsay, who did the cooking. They managed to pull off a rather tasty spaghetti and sauce with just the lights of our flashlights, wind blowing from both directions, and mist coming in throughout the whole night. It was up to me and Elizabeth, who came up from the neighboring municipality, to cheer them on graciously. It was initially our job to get ice and drinks, but we just gave 5-year-old neighbor a few pesos to pick up necessities. I assure you, he was happy to help!

It was frustrating not having power all weekend, but our struggles paled in comparison to Lindsay’s two neighbors, who were also without power. On Lindsays’s right was a married couple with newborn baby and on the left was a single mother with 5 kids, including one with cerebral palsy. Yet somehow they seemed less affected by the disturbance than we were. As one of Lindsay’s neighbors said smiling, “It is our sacrifice.”

After a nice morning swim in the ocean (and pouring rain), we traveled down to Dan’s site, where a former Peace Corps volunteers from the 1970s was in town and invited Dan (and therefore all of us) to a party at his wife’s house. As a volunteer, he ended up dating and subsequently marrying one of the language instructors, and they are still happily married. Their PhilAm (Filipino-American) kids were with them, getting to see uncles, aunts, and cousins they hadn’t seen in years. As you can imagine, the country is much different now from how it was back then, and it was fun hearing the former volunteer’s perspective. The Peace Corps as an institution has changed significantly as well, most of all by really having a much tighter grip on the volunteers. But considering back then there was no internet, no cellphones, and only phone centers in certain municipality town centers, it is not all that surprising. I was surprised to hear there was once a passenger train that stretched across the island of Panay and that jeeps around Iloilo City in his day was only 35 centavos (or cents). Now it’s php 7.50. He also told us that the exchange rate was only 7 to 1, not the 43 to 1 that it is today. Lastly, he shared many stories with encounters with the MPA, the overarching militant communist rebel group, which was much more active during the days of Marcos.

Most of my time with Lindsay was spend outdoors. I’d definitely call her crunchy, even for Dartmouth standards, and she’s really made the most of the wilderness in which she lives. Walking from her house away from the ocean, within 5 minutes you’re in a really rural residential area and within another 5 minutes, you are smack in the middle of the Filipino jungle. One of her favorite activities is caving, and she took me with her Filipino friend into a cave she had only heard her friend talk about. I’m not one for small, closed, dark spaces but exploring this cave was awesome. Known to only a few locals, the cave was in excellent condition, and exploring it was definitely one of the coolest things I’ve done thus far in the Philippines.