A Philippines Peace Corps Blog
September 5Courtesy Calls
"Welcome, all of you. I am mayor of Palo. I was recently elected in the May election, before this I was the governor of Leyte, for three terms, that is the most terms allowed, and before I was a congressman, and most recently I worked for PAGCOR, not for the gambling but for th ... more
August 29
Arrival in Barangay Baras
"Be careful! Be careful for your head!" my nanay Rowena warned as I stepped into my kwartol, nevermind that the doorway was seven feet tall and I didn't reach six.
The room that would be my bedroom for the next 3 months was, by New York standards, spacious--a bed and a half in length & width. I had no clue what Filipino standards were but I had a sneaky feeling I'd been given the largest room in the whole ... more
August 26
Philippines Education 101
The two things I liked most about the first days of orientation were, number one, walking around our extremely posh compound/jail (we were virtual prisoners at a resort in Cavite City) seeing so many new but familiar faces, most of which I could attach names to, sharing sna ... more
August 23
Lifting Off
* names were changed for confidentiality *
This is a story about waiting in a very large airplane before said airplane lifts off for a 20-hour flight from JFK International Airport to Aquino International Airport. And though it has nothing to do with the point of the story, you might be interested to note that both airports were named after assassinated political figures. The point of the story is being present.
We we ... more
August 19
The Trip to Staging
I spent the five hour flight to Peace Corps staging reading an account of Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber turned Karakoram-humanitarian-school-builder. Which is a mouthful. But so is his work: from 1993 to 2003, Mortenson raised funds for, then built, 55 schools for girls. The book, Three Cups of Tea, stylistically speaking, wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. I blanched at some of the purplish prose passages that obtrusively fetishize the man, such a ... more
August 12
Hanggang (Tagalog Song)
A week before leaving for the Philippines, when I should have been ... more
August 4
Packing for 2 Years
Prior to joining the Peace Corps I taught college writing in California, and one of the sections I loved to teach was film analysis, and one of the films I loved using was Gran Torino, a 2008 Clint Eastwood flick. In it, the venerable actor plays a grumpity old crotchety old man trying to live out his life in a rough Detroit neighborhood which is getting rougher by the day.
I would tell my students that the film, though set in cont ... more
July 22
Social Networking
At the end of July, I spent one morning in a Hasidic-neighborhood Brooklyn doctor's office getting my H1N1 vaccination (as required for Peace Corps service). In the waiting room I watched two women recite their morning prayers, their fingers gliding over the Hebrew prayer books in their laps. Every few minutes one of them would rise from her seat, arms raised in supplication. Their devotion was a little mezmerizing. I realized that, for these women, their entire lives had been lived in the ... more
June 30
Why I Am Doing It
It was well after midnight. I sat in a Lower East Side basement theatre watching artist after artist step up to an open mic, tell stories, sing homemade jamz, howl poetry, dance the human condition--pretty much anything you could imagine as long as it didn't involve fire, or glitter (house rules) ... more
June 22
By the Numbers
As my departure date approached, I was all too aware that the Philippine history, literature, facts, and figures I was studying would be about as useful in my day-to-day Peace Corps work as a PhD at a Super Bowl party. But I persisted. Mostly out of a desire to know, but also out of a desire not to look like an idiot: a friend had recently claimed that the Philippines was below the equator; I was fairly sure it was above but not sure enough to dispute.
Scanning the demographics of ... more
June 19
How I Got Here
One.
During the year before my Peace Corps Philippines departure, I'd wandered the country from Los Angeles to Taos to Houston to New Orleans and finally to Brooklyn, where I spent the summer moving from sublet to sublet: hipster Williamsburg, Polski Greenpoint, industrial-wasteland Bushwick.
In Bushwick, my roommate was a heavyset gay man with a quirky sense of humor and a tendency to wax philosophical. He invited me to a Scientology meeting (I accepted); I invite ... more
June 17
Cavite
The first Filipino film I ever saw, which I saw only 2 months before my arrival in the country, was a 2006 thriller titled Cavite. Cavite is the name of a province just south of Manila which Wikipedia describes as an "historic, picturesque and scenic province providing a place conducive to both business and leisure."
I found Cavite among the 208 Tagalog-language films in Netflix's database. That's 208 out of over 100,000 titles, or 0.2%.
The premise is simple ... more
June 15
1961
For a week straight I'd been sneaking into NYU's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library on an expired one day pass, my mission: a haphazard, undirected and fairly aimless study of the Philippines. This generally took the form of wandering between the 6th, 7th, and 9th floors holstering books on Filipino language, culture, literature, and history, half of which I would never open.
I spent one day reading from cover to cover Kathleen Nadeau's more
June 11
If Open to Any Person
Through my teen years, which coincided with that liminal period between the heyday of text-adventures and the rise of MMOs, a period I am convinced history will remember as the golden era of videogames, I did my share of gamewhoring. For a long time afterward I regretted the hours, days, weeks spent in blistery-eyed self-obsessed wanton youth. More recently though, I have made peace with the past and now I view it with something like nostalgia.
One of my all-time favorite games was S ... more
June 10
Burning Heart
It was two months till my departure for the Philippines and I was biding my time in Brooklyn while writing my first novel and learning Tagalog and living off the savings of three years teaching college writing. New York had just turned southern-summer humid, an effect that made the center of the urban universe feel only that much more real--intensified the feel of taxicab smog, the stink of subway urine--and I loved it.
I spent the morning in my apartment redesigning my website, a fro ... more