Room of Good Intentions

The last few days here have been one of those weeks that go unmentioned. One of those weeks where things don’t go quite right, when your experiences don’t really add up to that image of a productive international volunteer, smoothly making change for those in need. However, I see a need to share the bad with the good.
On Monday, I walked around town, clothes sticky and sour with sweat, to find different people to talk to, different organizations to share coastal resource management information with. Not many people were available, some told me to come back later in the week when others were there, but the success of the day was talking with Antonio, president of the senior citizens association of Babatngon, a nice guy, agile for a 76-year-old, always willing to dance the Kuratsa for you, or sing a song. He told me that first of all, my 2 paragraph letter detailing why I wanted to share and what the subject would be was too long, one sentence would have sufficed. Secondly, their monthly meeting was on Wednesday, and I was warmly invited. I showed up Wednesday, and shared about the environmental threats to this region, and assistance that was available internationally to deal with the issues. Only my counterpart, the one person here who is supposed to understand my purpose and translate our goals to the community, did not attend. Said that she would come shortly, but then sent someone in her stead to let me know that she would not be attending. Without a community member and visible local support, my words came out, but seemed to fall on deaf ears. If no one from the community is willing to work with me, why should they? ( “This is just one more foreigner, with more ideas, more ‘assistance,’ but still no concern for what we want, where we want to go with this community.”)
I returned to the office, where my supervisor was telling staff her plan finally clean out the ‘back room.’ This is a 20x20 room where stuff is filthy, stuffing the door closed, without order; a place no one goes, except to throw something when its purpose is unknown. The room also smells foul, and in the morning, you can see rats scurry into and out of the room out of the corner of your eye when you’re working at your desk. We began in the afternoon, just moving plastic drums and light material on top of the pile of debris out of the room, and left the real work for Thursday.
Thursday morning I got to the office to find everyone sitting outside, talking about drinking and their lovers like most mornings. I waited for this to end, but after 45 minutes, I walked inside, and called others to follow. Mano Butch was the only person to respond with a nod, the rest of the staff just shot a quizzical glance my way, and went back to their chismis. The Japanese volunteer also came in to help with the cleaning of ‘the room.’
The whole morning, we cautiously brought out handfuls of half-eaten papers, and books, and posters. Everything had rat feces all over it, years of piss and grime, hundreds of copies of the national fisheries code, no doubt meant for dissemination to local fishermen, lists of ordinances, pamphlets and brochures, printed by The German Technical Cooperation, half of which we would keep out of habit, half of which we had no choice but to burn. Then we got to the next level of trash in the room, it consisted of computer monitors donated by Japan, more papers, 50 pound sacks of concrete, hardened from Philippine moisture and heat, taken out one by one, sweat bead by sweat bead, hand over hand. The lone Japanese volunteer, the lone American, and Mano Butch worked, as the rest of the office looked on, no hint of guilt for their laziness could be detected. We finished the day with nostrils burned, shoulders sore, and the room half empty.
Friday, we began again. Now lower in the pile, we found dead festering rats, and huge Philippine cockroaches, and more squalor. We found huge banners that read ‘Welcome World Bank Visitors’ and ‘Welcome Indonesian Aid Visitors’ and hundreds of packs of fertilizers, donated by political parties, meant for dissemination to farmers, to be spread on crops, eventually to help fill the mouths and stomachs of children here. There were pesticides, intended for the same people, and more papers, letters, books, good intentions. We now had another man, Edwin, helping to clean The Room, but still, the office staff sat outside, watching the armfuls come out, the posters dusted, new life being breathed into an old forgotten space. Friday we finally finished, the floor was visible, the worst burned, the remaining repacked, a quarter of the room empty when said and done. Still the office staff said nothing, just came back into the new space, continued conversations at their desks, seemingly oblivious to the effort that had just been given.
I don’t know why gifts are squandered and international aid isn’t appreciated sometimes. Of course people will say that the aid doesn’t ‘address immediate needs in the community’ or ‘isn’t implemented in a sustainable way,’ but some aid, nomatter how well planned, will fray and rip if the commitment of the community is lost. I also don’t know how people can sit around and watch others work, and do nothing, it makes no sense to me. While here, I will try my best to put resources to good use, to teach organization and engender personal responsibility, but I’m fully aware the room might very well fill up again with the same squalor in ten more years. All the oversight and transparency in the world will not ensure that donations and assistance are going to the right place. What I learned this week is that with all of the disappointment and frustration that comes from wasted time and resources, it beats the alternative. A world in which aid is given, and wasted, and then given again is better than a world, xenophobic and afrai to help, where aid is never given at all. Efficiency and progress is good, but love is great.

Sohoton, Beautiful Sohoton

Next stop on my tour of the incredible Philippine Islands is Sohoton National Park and Cave, near Basey, Western Samar. Selena and I happen to be relatively close to the park, so are fortunate to be able to go, with relative ease, to the park. Western Samar, especially places like the park where illegal logging still takes place frequently, are considered somewhat unsafe, so our trip there was with anxious caution, after hearing about the beautiful sites to see there. With us, we took Atsuro and Irei, Japanese volunteers who work in the area. We showed up at the Basey tourism office around 10:00, and then got our boat to take the hour-and-a-half boatride through the mangroves to get to the remote park that encompasses something around 850 hectares. The whole trip through the mangroves, you are passing villages, only accesible by boat, with docking areas in the center of town, with fishermen in dugout canoes, and children splashing in the brackish water, waving at the newcomers (us) all along the way. As you approach the park, jagged rocks begin appearing, jutting out of the water, covered with vines, moss and ferns. Huge Narra, Jimalena, and Mahogany trees provide the canopy as you continue on. Sohoton Cave, which was our destination for the day, was incredible, a huge towering cliff of gypsum, and limestone flowstone create the backdrop for the waiting area when you're waiting for a guide to take you through the cave. And the cave itself is full of breathtaking formations, nearly pristine, huge natural organs, tide pools, calcium falls, all sorts of incredible things. It's formations like those that make people like me crazy about caving, and it's natural areas like Sohoton that make me passionate about conservation.

Biliran, Philippines

Last weekend, Selena away and me with nothing in particular to do, I called up my friend Lorenz, to see if he was free to take me in for a couple days. He was free, and I shot up to his house in Naval on saturday morning, hoping to spend the day getting to know Biliran, the little Rockingham County-sized island above Leyte, renowned for its rice terraces and 11 active volcano crammed together. Well, it was just as beautiful as I was told, with rolling rice terraces everywhere, tall abrupt mountains everywhere, with a lush green, a mixture of the light green fields of rice, ready for harvest, surrounded by coconuts with a sligthly darker green, banana trees, still a little bit darker, and the hardwoods, mahogany, jimalina, etc, and wild vines high up on the mountains, the darkest green of all. The jagged steep mountains lend themselves to impressive waterfalls, still too young to have mature, rolling falls, they have reckless, high drop offs and raging water, so much water stuffed into the streams draining the watersheds, so much that when they fall off a drop off, they explode with lots of energy. Here you see a few of my pictures, but I'll be going back, to get some more of them, and to see some more of the incredibly beautiful little Island.

Livelihood Projects

Hello, everybody. Today, I start my blogging career to discuss livelihood projects, specifically mariculture projects, in the Philippines. There are an estimated 90 million people living in the philippines, a great percentage of which lives withing a few miles of the ocean, most of those people are dependent on the ocean for their food and income. With an ever-growing population here in the Philippines, greater and greater demands are put upon finite marine resources. At the same time, destructive fishing techniques like the use of active 'trawl' gear and dynamite fishing is still prevalent in most areas of the country.

This means that more and more resources are needed as less and less resources abound in and around coastal areas. To supplement the income of small-scale farmers, there are many options for secondary income. One of the ways to generate secondary income is through seaweed farming. Seaweed, contrary to what most might think, is a highly valued commodity worldwide. Seaweed and seaweed extracts are used for everything from gelatin and food thickening, to bacterial culture medium (Trypticase Soy Agar (TSA)) and toothpaste. It just so happens that much of the Philippines is in waters that can readily support culture of seaweed. Seaweed operations can also increase fish density with added habitat and cover. For these reasons, I'm working with the Municipality of Babatngon and regional government agencies to start a large seaweed nursery in coastal waters. Sporelings will then be dispersed to local fishermen for their own household operations. This picture is from the seaweed lab at the regional Beareau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources lab where they're growing lots of strains for culture in and around our region. Although many persons are not into the idea of learning a whole new trade, and would just a soon keep on doing what they know, there are a few people, including local and regional staff, who see a paradigm shift beginning. Many fisherfolks and their families are open to new ideas, but just need to be given the tools and the opportunity to change their habits. Part of my work here in Babatngon, Philippines is to find those people who are willing to do things differently, to find a new way, and help them make it happen.