Despedida!!

Part of the Filipino tradition is to have a party for any member of the family or community that is going away for an extended period of time. This tradition is called the Despedida party, and in the Visayas part of the country, it means lots of coconut wine, a heap of rice and shrimp, and a ton of laughter. This past Sunday, I hosted my Despedida party at the guardhouse for fisherfolks and others here whom I have worked with over the past couple years. Despedida parties are usually on dry land in a big barangay hall or somebody’s house, and although it made logistics a little more tricky, I thought that it only made sense to have the going away party at the place where the men and I have worked together tying bamboo and chatting and feeding fish for the past couple months. (It also cuts down on random freeloaders coming by to eat to have the party in the middle of the ocean on a floating platform.) The party was scheduled to start at 9:00 a.m. but it just wouldn’t have seemed right to start it on time, so, as usual here, everybody began rolling in at about 10:30. Most of the association members came about that time, holding a gallon of coconut wine in one hand, a Tupperware of rice in the other.

 One friend of mine from the local high school brought a bowl of eel cooked in coconut milk that his wife had sent for me. Several of the members who didn’t bring their own food began fishing with a piece of nylon thread, hook and nail for sinker when they arrived, and by 11:30, they had caught several more fish, one of which was over 3 pounds, to add to the food for the day. The weather was nice, and all day we talked and ate and drank as the guardhouse gently rocked on the current. My supervisor, Nimfa came around lunch time with a couple other women, a large box of rice in tow, along with shrimp, Kamote, and Cooked Pork. In all, we probably had around 15 gallons of coconut wine between the 40 people at the celebration as well, all of which was consumed by 5:00 p.m. when most of us went home. One really neat thing that I saw was everyone talking. We had persons from the local government, the regional government office, the high school and the fisherfolks association all at the party, all talking and eating together. I feel that in this place, people from differing socio-economic background aren’t accustomed to ‘hang out’, but at the Despedida, they did, and they all seemed to enjoy it.

Amongst the spread of food and wine was a huge case of coke, 12-1.5 liter bottles for the celebration, which I found out later had been a contribution of the fisherfolks themselves. Each man gave around 25 pesos to purchase it. When I asked a couple of the guys about the big case of coke, some of the fishermen just smiled, and didn’t say anything, winking. It really struck me as special that these guys who make less in a month than I will be making in a day put in for such an extravagant gift. Twelve bottles of coke isn’t a big deal in most situations, but it was to me at the Despedida. They all know by now that I am returning next week to wealth that they will never experience, and comfort that they will never have the privilege to feel. The men ask me when I will return and if I can come back to harvest fish with them. They want to send coconut wine and dried squid back with me, along with coconuts and pineapples. They get it. They know I’ll probably not be back, at least any time soon, that we’ll have sparse correspondence if any at all, but they still ask, just making small talk.

As an afternoon wind began to blow and the guardhouse platform began to rock a bit more, most of the guests stumbled onto boats and headed back to the mainland. Some of the fisherfolks stayed at the platform until 2 a.m. the next morning, laughing and singing and drinking more coconut wine.

Week 110 of 112

This week, I have been continuing to say goodbye to the  people I've gotten to know here, taking my lense and zooming back out from the minutia of the day to day to a larger focus on my experience here, the overall feeling of things, the sights and smells and experiences.  At this point, I feel that if I don't zoom out and look at things from a larger perspective, I'll wallow in wondering what will happen to all the people I've come to know.  Many of the people don't have much of a future to look forward to, with an uphill climb ahead.  I've seen progress in our little town, the first fast food joint opened up a couple weeks ago, along with the first gas station.  A couple new micro loan businesses have opened since I've been here, banking is more accessible, and international aid is more of a reality with more and more access to the internet.  Despite the progress, there's a lot of people, namely the fisherfolk and older community members that will never realize the luxuries of the progress that's happening all around.  The divide grows, and while elementary-educated rice farmers toil in the fields pulling a plow with a Karabaw, wealthy kids sit in an internet cafe  in town just a couple miles away, playing interactive video games with people half a world away.

When I came here a couple years ago from the states, I knew that I would see my American family and friends again.  I didn't worry that they would someday lack food on their tables or be at risk of assault and being mistreated.  However, I'll go home now, and most of these people will remain frozen in my memory as they are now, and I'll never know what happened to them.  That's what makes leaving here hard.  I won't miss the food or the heat or the confusion, but I'll miss knowing that things are okay.

 Bathroom at the Barangay Hall.

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.)

Panorama

The Philippines is a country with beautiful oceans, vast bright green expanses of rice paddys, and gorgeous mountain ranges, jagged peaks of adolescent volcanic rock poke out of many inland spaces, covered with a turf of banana and coconut trees on the gently rolling areas, and huge seldom-harvested groves of Narra, Jimalina, and Avocado in the upland areas. All of the wild jungle areas are thick with Balukawi Vines and unforgiving nettles in between the huge trees. These ecocsystems are beautiful by themselves, but when taken in with the entire panorama, when viewed together in one, they present a staggering combination of different forms of beauty. All at once, you can see vast soft waters on the horizon, steep forested mountains in the background, and verdant green flats carved with sweat and blood over centuries at the fore.


I’m still in my photo stitching infancy, but have started to try and capture some of the beauty of these combinations of landscapes here in Babatngon, Leyte, Philippines.

 This is the view from the guardhouse and fish cage project looking back on the town of Babatngon, and mountains in the background.  Every day it is a beautiful sight, on cloudy days, the myst gives the mountains a mistique, and on clear days, it really is a great view.

This is the view from the side of a road in a neighboring village of Babatngon, called Pagsulhugon.

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A gorgeous rice field I wanted to capture one day as I walked by.  I can't seem to get this picture to do it justice, but take my word for it, it's really nice.

Ang Kinabuhi Dito (The lifestyle here) - Pictures

Now that projects are wrapped up except for my daily check-ins with fisherfolks and co-workers at the municipal office, I have been cleaning up the place, playing some basketball, and snapping pictures of the sights of Babatngon that I'll be happy I froze in time when I'm back home in a different world in a month or so.  Yesterday, having cleaned the fridge and taken some bags of clothes and things to some very appreciative neighbors, I then hopped on the bike and headed out to one of the many little nameless villages off the beaten track and took some pictures.  Like always, people were initially skeptical of why I wanted to just take pictures, but quickly got used to the idea.  Below are the spoils of a slow afternoon, traveling around the place, taking some pictures of little-known people and places.

I asked everyone to be natural, and when possible, stand in front of their own house, so people 'in the internet' could see their beautiful homes.  They laughed, and enjoyed getting their pictures taken, and I enjoyed it too. 

Onward and Upward!!

I'm a pretty even-keel sort of guy, with a fairly predictable temperament. Usually. In this setting though, I've found that most days are a mix of two extremes. I go from angry days, when every slow jeepney and irrelevant conversation drives me crazy, I scoff at the dirty dogs running everywhere, and I end up scrutinizing everything from the size of the mosquitoes, (which are extremely well-fed) to the backyard trash heaps with unsorted recyclables. The other days are the sublime days, where I'm in the hippy-dippy mood of seeing the inherent worth in every little pebble, the wonderful smiles on faces, the place is infallible, rugged mountain vistas and glassy aquamarine waters are a backdrop to my, honestly, naïve outlook on things. The appropriate temperament, however, is no-doubt somewhere in between, where I should be able to simultaneously see the charm of this place, the people and natural features while remaining mindful of the faults that exist amongst the corruption, environmental shortcomings, and neglect of so many promising children.

As I talk to new volunteers who are in the first throes of their service, as well as friends who live here in this community, two questions frequent the dialogue at this point when I am transitioning out of the Philippines. The first question is, "What do you miss about home that you will have to do upon your return?" and the second, "What will you miss about this place when you have left?"

For the first question, I've settled on family, friends, public lands and the crunch of fall leaves under foot as the things that immediately come to mind when I think of what I most look forward to going back to. Ofcourse, there are also material things like public water fountains (with water I can trust), steaks at Outback, the smell of a gym, chlorinated water in a warm swimming pool, watching my breath accumulate into small clouds as I run early on a fall morning. The autonomy of traveling alone, the feel of new clothes, a warm shower, my own couch, a firm mattress, sweet tea and a thick slice of red tomato on good toast with cheddar cheese.

For the second question, I'd have to say I'll miss the friendliness of all the neighbors, saying hello to everyone here on balmy mornings and blustery afternoons, the intimate rides to town on cool mornings, and riding back from town in the evenings, hitched to the back of a jeep, looking up at a starry evening sky, the last flecks of a pink sunset outlining the western mountains and the prickly coconut leaves in the foreground, the smell of cooking fires coming from little roadside nipa huts. I'll miss being part of a barcada with the fishermen, sitting around with a glass of coconut wine listening to their chatter of fishing and women, all in a little-known foreign tongue that I'll never hear again, much less have any use for speaking, except under my breath when not wishing to be understood.

We all probably have a problem with being satisfied, especially us westerners. We're either thinking of a way to get away from our present condition, or longingly singing of the Green Green Grass of Home. We forget about the good things about where we are, and forgetfully long for what we don't have, with no recollection for the associated hardships. A lot of people have a problem finding satisfaction, myself totally included. It's probably what drives us to be so successful, always upward and onward to the next best thing, without much of a respite to pause and observe all the blessings of the present. Exploration of the new world and manifest destiny and space exploration probably all exhibit some of this lack of satisfaction with the status quo, never accepting that the present is the ultimate existence in Western Culture. Well, what if the present is the best it will be? Would that really be so bad? How would we live differently? Imagine all the anxiety that would subside if we didn't have some itching desire to be bigger and better.

Everything in moderation as the maxim goes. How 'bout having satisfaction enough to be pleased with a good situation, without the ambition that excessively drives us to work, work, work, while maintaining enough innovation and drive to rectify a situation if in dire need of hard work. I get really irritated on my angry days walking around wondering how my neighbors can continue to live in filth and watch as their children feign attending school. I can't believe how anyone could be satisfied with a situation like that. On the flip side, I watch news from home and people with healthy families and beautiful homes jump to their death when the stock market takes a dive. Why can't they just be satisfied with a great existence and shrug off a bad day on the S&P? Everything in moderation, including satisfaction.

 

 

Pictures from the start of rainy season.

 This is a couple who I met on the nearby island of Samar.  They are working with volunteers Kelly and Gerid Buckshire on a reforestation project in the nearby mountains of Lawaan, Samar.  They're really nice people, and enjoyed showing me their herb garden of ginger, Lemon Grass, and the local fold remedy for everything, Kamalunggay.  (Don't know why there's a line in the picture, please disregard:) )

Siblings playing at the house in the shade.  As I took a walk to a nearby lookout point, these two kids were passing the time just looking around. 

The Rainy season has brought with it blustery weather.  As a typhoon rages through the northern island of Luzon, southern Visayas islands like Leyte glean cool breezes and the occasional deluge of torrential rain.  Taking advantage of the breezes, Aldrick and Angeline, two of the children who live downstairs fly paper airplanes.  When one of the flimsy planes catches a current of air, it sails up and around in circles, causing the kids to exclain with laughter and clap their hands at the show.

 One of the airplanes flys high, with an upsurge of salty ocean air.

 Every September, municipalities across the Philippines join in a worldwide coastal cleanup day where citizens get together and clean their respective beaches and coastal waterways.  This child looks on as people from Barangay District 1, Babatngon walk by, sacks and brooms in hand, to clean their beaches.

Our group of 75 or 100 local residents files by towards the coastal areas to pick up trash.  Most everyone has a broom made of rice stalks with which to sweep trash into piles to be thrown in sacks or burned.