Kuya Mark: Remembrance and Reflection on Peace Corps in the Philippines, 2010-2012

Part I: Teacher

Burning Heart (June 2010)

The photos were raw: a teenage boy wearing a Marlboro shirt and holding an Uzi, two scrawny old men with old Chinese wiseman wrinkled faces officiating a cockfight, a crowd with fists raised singing the national anthem.

Part II: Student

Lovejoy: a Peace Corps Profile (July 2011)

She did yoga every morning. She had a stamina that consistently wore out volunteers half her age. I'd tromped across beaches and boulevards with her, myself dehydrated and dog-tired and ready to crawl into the nearest tricycle or pedicab while Holly strolled along blissfully energetic.

Interview with the Prostitute (October 2011)

It takes someone who has been in a whorehouse, participated in the conversation of the transaction of a body -- someone familiar with the bravado of the whore, the self-possession in her shoulders, her eyes -- as a painter sees the spectrum of green. Only a Lazarus can really know his Jesus. Am I the prodigal son?

Part III: Kuya

Cause and Fall (December 2011)

That morning there was rain and a drunk grandson yelling above his lungs at a door for the key. Yelling at a door. Grandson: we all have our old lolitas, even after we grow up. But what about the key. In this conspiracy the door has an accomplice.

Self Portrait Three (August 2012)

The role one plays depends on the story one reads. For me, the author of the story is quite umambiguously the Philippines. I am not a central character. But I am inside her, inside her body, drawn through a passageway two years ago, reading about my role day by day.