Nimfa

Today I found myself thinking about all the worthless information that’s on the internet, the ubiquitous prose that abounds in cyberspace about every little thought and action of so many people that really doesn’t matter at all. About 99% of people in the United States under 50 can probably google themselves and get a couple mindless hits, a facebook profile, a customer review they wrote on some useless product ten years ago, maybe a thesis or dissertation abstract for the more productive of us, insignificant rankings of 5k runs in rural corners of the country, mentions in school newspapers, blogs, whatever.


For every person that lives in infamy on the internet, a raving review of an ergonomic dish scrubber or myspace profile with obscure homemade music that will never be heard, I bet there’s another 50 people that will never get mentioned, who live with integrity every day, working hard in some office, doing work that won’t get the recognition for meaningful accomplishments we’ve come to sort of expect.

One of the people that won’t come up on a google search, who isn’t caught on tape dancing to the Macarena at somebody’s wedding, is Nimfa U. Machate.

Nimfa has been my supervisor here in the Philippines for two years now. She is about 5 foot 1, with a great big smile and a wonderful presence, usually in jeans and high heels effectively ordering a couple other Agriculture Officers around who are a head taller than she. There’s been a lot of the time here when I haven’t been on great terms with her though. We haven’t seen everything the same way. To get projects through the red tape and beaurocracy, I have pushed at times when she would rather have waited. At times, I’ve felt taken for granted, that my time here has been wasted in some ways, and, she’s probably felt that I am a little too forceful, and a bit disrespectful of the culture I signed up to come and serve. She’d probably be right too, because at times, I’ve gotten lost in my American drive to produce results with work, to toil with utmost efficiency and objectivity, when a little bit of patience may have produced better results.

No doubt we’ve learned from each other, and expectations that we both had of our relationship two years ago have produced a reality that is considerably different. Amid our differences, the little spats we have had trying to reconcile our different cultural ways of working the system, we always come back to beliefs we have in common. Nimfa and I both believe in the importance of honesty, the value of serving others, and the significance of following through on our commitments to the people here who we are answerable to. These three similarities have forged a bond between us despite heated texts and my snippy comments, and extreme frustration on the bad days. Nimfa does her best, and she has been doing her job to the best of her abilities for over 25 years now in a place where it would be really easy to just sit around and collect a pay check. She’s my ‘nanay nga filipinas’ (Philippines Mom) and I’m really going to miss her.

When asked about how it is to work together, Nimfa laughs and says we are both workaholics and want to help the fishermen and protect coral reefs here. That about sums it up, (and now Nimfa U. Machate is googleable.)