One Man’s Trash…

Playing a little ball with the neighbors

Last week, I got a wild hair to start the process of cleaning the place up to prepare for my departure from here in 45 days or so. My family would attest to the fact that I'm not a very tidy person, so whenever I feel the initiative to clean, I figure I better run with it and make hay while the sun shines. The first and easiest part of the process of taking the place apart to get it ready for my absence is to start taking stuff off the walls. I've mentioned before that my mother is both a gifted an a prolific photographer, and during the course of the past 2 years, Selena and I have taken all of the pictures of home we've been sent and taped them all together in big collages all over the walls. It's really nice to see those familiar sites from home all over the walls whenever we're sitting around, the green green grass of home, you might say.

Unfortunately, a lot of the pictures have faded as a result of all the sun and humid Filipino air in our house. I took down the collages, one by one, and kept the best of the pictures, the least faded, and reluctantly trashed the rest. After dealing with the collages, I went through a couple stacks of papers, teaching notes from the Filipino Science class I taught, little notes from students, papers from the Municcipal Office, letters to various politicians here, notes from meetings from the fisherfolks, flash cards for language learning, receipts for coffee and rolls, snorkels, nylon and buoys, a pretty good paper anthology of my work here over the past couple years. I threw most of it away, charging my memory to retain most of those activities since it doesn't make much sense to pack pounds of little papers out all the way back to Virginia. It's always hard for me to get rid of that kind of stuff, although I'd probably never look at it again, it's nice to know it's all there just in case. After going through the papers, my itch to clean was all used up, and I went out to play basketball and swim at the waterfall.

Mana Bea, the mother of our host family, doesn't take kindly to her picture being taken.

Later in the evening, I came back to the house, and saw the mother of the family downstairs with those collages in her hands, the faded pictures of family and familiar places. The sound of the door clapping behind me startled her and she looked over at me from the collage that she was holding up in front of her like a newspaper. "Why you throw these?! We need remembrances."

It is always irritating when she gets something out of our trash, but she was earnest in wanting to keep all of those faded pictures so that they would have something to remember us by. It's not really even us though. She was keeping pictures of my uncles and aunts, cousins and friends whom she will never know, all faded, and pictures of trees and flowers that didn't have anything to do with us. It was more like she was keeping the proof that people had lived and laughed with them, people from a distant place, people who looked different and talked different. In my haste to wrap things up here, I sometimes forget the cultural divide that we have bridged and the importance of a foreign presence to people who don't have much else to be excited about. I'd like to think that we'll be missed for us, for what we have done, but more likely, I think we'll be missed for the sense of specialness that our presence gave to others here, the pride of their town being picked to have people come and live for a while, leaving nothing but footprints, taking nothing but memories.

This is Mano Ted, the family father and little Nobi, the youngest of their 6 kids, helping to fill flower pots.

Late that evening, the trash fire consumed all of those little notes, receipts for rolls and snorkels, letters to politicians, flames molded them all back into ashen newness. And lots and lots of faded pictures went into a cardboard box, evidence of these two years.

This old fellow reads incessantly at the little waiting shed at the end of our lane, and silently watches the days come and go, shoes repeatedly repaired, and beard bound with rubber band. I really like him and his satisfied way of being. Just being.