Besao Part III: Soccer

There is a joke that has recently come to mind: Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym. It has become quite obvious to me that this joke is perpetuated by those who work in a cubical. They are jealous that there is someone making a living running around on the grass they gaze out the window at (if they work enough years to earn the ability to gaze out said window). Teachers are obviously collateral damage to reach the punch line.

I have spent the last 2 days as the newest assistant teacher at St. James Episcopal high school. I've been teaching soccer to kids as young as 11. It has been an absolutely amazing experience. I thought the students to be similar to my American peers when I was their age. I fully expected a few girls to refuse to jog or participate in the activity. However, to my amazement, there has not been a single person who has done that. In fact, when they are playing soccer or doing drills, they are all enjoying themselves. I expected to see that pure enjoyment on the faces of a few aggressive boys, but the fact that everyone shared the same smile made my month.

That is not the only expectation they have vastly succeeded. During one of my classes, there was a boy who is an inch or two shorter than any other boy in the school. He listened to everything I said, and after one hour, he now has the best passing in Besao. I couldn’t believe it when he told me he had never played before. Perfect form, quick feet…he’s a natural. I can’t wait to put him on the field during a scrimmage and watch him school a 17 year old.

Other than forgetting to wear sunscreen yesterday, my first week in Besao has been nearly perfect. It has become very obvious why all of the St. James alumni speak so highly of the school and the community. If there is one sentence to describe Besao, it is this: Everyone who has ever spent time in Besao calls it “home”. I hope to include myself to that list before I leave.

My Besao Experiance: Part II

One of the things that being in the Philippines has really taught me is about what I want and what I need. I wrote a long blog entry about it when I first got here. I spoke about living a life without what I thought I needed. Besao is essentially round 2 of the want vs need experiment. This time the biggest change I am making is adopting the Besao diet. I am living the next month without a refrigerator. There is also no market in Besao, and the meat available is either canned, frozen, or, if you’re lucky, from whatever animal was slaughtered that day. So far it has been a lot of fun. Going to the store is a lot like on Iron Chef when they pull of the sheet to reveal the day’s secret ingredient. Friday it was chicken thighs, Sunday it was pork liver. Sunday morning I had 5 potatoes, garlic, pepper, 2.2 lbs of green beans, 1 onion, 1 pack of Ramen, soy sauce, oil, half a bag of peanuts, and 1 lb of liver. I made liver and onion adobo with green beans. It was only a couple hundred grams of rice short of being a proper Filipino meal. I ate what I could, and I will eat the rest for lunch and/or dinner tomorrow (if ants don’t find it). I’m no expert, but I think this is basically how many people in the Philippines live every day. They take what they have, and make the best dish they can out of it.

So…why am I telling you this? It certainly wasn’t for sympathy. I got to eat a piece of meat that was so fresh it had never needed to see any form of preservation. Only a hunter or fisherman can truly know how special that is. I can’t really find the words to explain why I wrote this, so instead I will tell you a story that happened to someone, somewhere, sometime.

The NFL is currently in a lockout. People question, “Why can’t these millionaires and billionaires just be happy with everything they do have and play football.” Then they go to their refrigerator and say, “there’s nothing to eat” and get a little bit bummed out. The moral of the story isn’t to feel guilty, it’s just to take your own advice. Appreciate what you do have, because to many people you are the millionaire.

Anyway, it’s late at night. I hope you can understand the mad ramblings of a tired missionary.

PS. The mad ramblings of a tired missionary would make a far more appropriate blog title.

The Besao Experiance: Part 1

My work with my projects has started to wind down as they prepare for my absence. Therefore, I have had a little bit of extra time to pursue other interests. There were limited options in Santiago, so I had to expand my search a little bit. Luckily St. James high school in Besao, Mountain Province invited me to spend 5 weeks as a physical education teacher. The high school was established by some of the first Episcopal missionaries to come to the Philippines in 1910’s. It is also the alma mater of many of my friends and bosses in Santiago and the ECP. Besao is one of a few villages that nearly every Episcopalian in the Philippines can trace their roots to. While most of the Philippines is overwhelmingly Catholic, Besao is almost exclusively Episcopalian.

I have been in Besao for only a day and a half, yet I have already gotten a very distinctive homely feeling. My dad came to visit a couple of weeks ago. We traveled to Santiago, Sagada, Baguio, Manila, and Hong Kong. While in Sagada, we were invited by Atty. Floyd Lalwet to his home in Besao. My dad and I agreed that while the other places were all nice, Besao was special. The landscape here is incredible. There are lush green mountains with bright rice terraces everywhere you look.  There are seemingly hundreds of hiking trails here that go to every farm in every corner of this municipality. There is also a large grass field about a 2 minute walk from my house where I will be teaching gym class. I will also be headed directly there to sharpen up on my soccer skills right after I finish my blog. Anyway, I am a little bit short on stories were because I have only been here a day and a half. Hopefully my next blog will include stories and pictures from my hikes and classes. I promise, you won’t have to wait as long for the next blog. 

Compare and Contrast

The United States and the Philippines are two completely different places, each with their own rich culture. One question has come up a lot recently: which one do I like better. I have really been analyzing my relationship with the Philippines, and I have been relating it to the United States. I have come to the following conclusion: The United States does a few things better than the Philippines, the Philippines does a few things better than the United States. Most things, however, are a simple choice of preference and familiarity. For example, who has the best food system? The Philippines. Who has a better transportation system? The United States. Who has better food, or desserts, or college system, or 90% of the things you can think of? That answer depends of where home is. People naturally enjoy the things they are familiar with. It’s why I will always take a slice of pie over halo-halo, and why every Filipino thinks I’m crazy for saying that. It’s also why everyone considers the scenery in their hometown underrated.

Therefore, I prefer the United States. But, if I were born in the Philippines, I would prefer the Philippines. And if I were born in India, I would prefer India. However, I chose to spend this year outside of my comfort zone, and I chose to live in the Philippines. I choose to stay every day when I don’t fly back to my comfortable life in the United States.

This does lead to a more important issue. The issue is the few things that are actually legitimately better in one country than the other. It hurts my national pride a little to say it, but the way we get food in the United States is overcomplicated and vastly inferior to the Philippines. The US would do very well for itself if we stopped engineering our fruits to look bright and colorful 12 months a year. Rather, we should be selling 90% of our fruit only when it is in season. Our fruits would go back to actually tasting like fruit. Also, if the US government stopped paying everyone to do nothing, people would find jobs for themselves. Jobs like hunting deer and selling the meat at a market, or raising ducks for slaughter. This would greatly increase the availability of meat that has never seen a slaughter house.

Another thing they do better in the Philippines is small scale banking. In the United States many people rely solely on banks and payday advance loans when the need money. In the Philippines, there is another very attractive option: Co-operatives. Basically, co-op is a community bank where you can invest your money or take out a loan. It is only available to a certain group of people, usually just one barangay. (A barangay is a sub-city usually large enough for one small elementary school.) The key to co-ops is that the money stays in the community, rather than go to banks, who will decide what everyone’s interest rate is. Since the co-ops are made for community well-being instead of shear profit, they are able to offer almost similar lending and investing interest rates, with only a small difference to go towards paying one or two employees. Credit unions come close to accomplishing this goal, but they tend to be inclusive and drastically underutilized. 

When I return to the United States, I intend on supporting the implementation of some of these ideas. I think both of these ideas have huge possibilities in an economically struggling city like Kingston, NY.

I am encouraged by beer, but not in the way beer usually offers me encouragement. When Americans and Brits visited mainland Europe, they realized that Belgian and German beer was vastly superior to the stuff we had in America. Next, people started brewing craft beef in micro-breweries. Now, American craft beer is on the same level as European beer(Of course, I think it better for the reasons stated in the first paragraph). 

The tricky thing for me has been to try to introduce American improvements to the Philippines. Nobody wants to be told by an outsider an aspect of their culture is inferior. However I will, with all due respect to the other 99% of Philippine culture, give one quick example. The addition of more organized physical recreation into Philippine culture could do wonders for community health and camaraderie.

Sagada, Saliuk, and the Toledo Mud Hens

I spent holy week in Sagada. Sagada is a kind of touristy town in the mountains that gained popularity due to its hiking trails, caves, and American landscape. It is also one of the home bases of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines. The Mountain Province and Baguio are the only places where Episcopalians are the dominant denomination. In fact, most of the Episcopalians elsewhere in the Philippines are migrants from that particular region.  I really enjoyed my time there. I was able to spend the whole day hiking and come back to a big meal and a cold beer. The inns were all sold out, so I stayed with some local Episcopalians who had made friends with Melanie, the last YASC volunteer. They were the best hosts I could have ever asked for.

I had started to go a little stir-crazy in the office, so I took some time last week to get back to my roots, and help teach a week of VBS in the very rural village of Saliuk. I say get back to my roots, because I really got my start in mission work at St. Christopher’s mission in Bluff, Utah. For 6 weeks since 2000 I have flown down to the mission on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation to assist in teaching a vacation bible school to the Navajo children there. I learned many great lessons there that came in very helpful last week, such as the attention span of 10 year olds and the expansive definition of the word “projectile”. My job in Saliuk was songs, memory verses, and games. I introduced some of the Navajo’s favorite songs such as “in right out right”. I also taught them a classic game with a twist. It’s called pato, pato, gezu. If you don’t know what that means, read my last blog post. I spent the week living in Saliuk, where I had the opportunity to eat ants, ant eggs, and snake. Anyway, I must not have screwed up too bad, because I might get a chance to help with help with another VBS week in the nearby village of Abra soon.    

My aunt bought me a Toledo Mud Hens hat so that everyone in the Philippines would know where I came from. Sadly, in Benaue, I lost my hat. The next week I search through all the 2^nd hand clothes and hat shacks in Baguio to look for a replacement. I actually found one! I've been wearing it with pride ever since. I didn't put the hat there. The thorns were so sharp on my hike that it actually took my hat right off my head while I was hiking.

Pato

I though a nice light-hearted blog about my new hobby would be in order. After my mom went back to the USA, I started raising ducks. For the first few weeks I just had 2 ducks, a male and a female. I had been looking to buy 2 more females the whole time. However, nobody has given me a fair price on the ducks. Out here it is assumed that white people are all filthy rich, and don’t know the price of anything. Whenever I have inquired about buying ducks, everyone has doubled the price and explained to me how they were giving me a good deal. Finally, while I was visiting a wonderful local church, I found a house open to selling their ducks. When they found out a white guy wanted to buy 2 ducks, they didn’t see dollar signs, they just laughed. They loved the fact that I was raising ducks. They didn’t sell me the ducks for market price, or even Filipino price. They sold me two ducks for a friend price. They did this because they appreciated that I was raising them (They also said that I would be in big trouble if they find out I took them home for butcher). They really made my day.

Experiences like this are exactly why I came to the Philippines. I am here not only to assist as a technical advisor, but I want people to see me enjoying work they consider to be “below” white people. I can only imagine the amount of gossip that take place by people who have seen me raising ducks, harvesting rice, or walking down the road. They laugh because it is signs that you are poor or rural, and I am white, therefore I must be a rich city-slicker here to look at rice paddies and marry a Filipina. I don’t mind getting laughed at during times like these, because they are laughing at the absurdity of a white guy doing Philippine work.

I really have enjoyed raising these ducks for the last few weeks. They have subtle personalities and complex social structures. Plus, feeding and observing them actually gives me something to do after work. I find the ducks to be so low maintenance (and delicious) that I may continue raising ducks once I get back to the States.

Batad

As you could tell from my previous blog, I needed some time off. I left Santiago for the weekend to hearken back to my days as a backpacker (It’s been a long year and a half). I went to a rural community called Batud. I chose Batud because it’s famous “amphitheater” rice terrace and it has a nice day hike to a waterfall.  My weekend started by catching and early bus from Santiago to Banaue. Once in Benaue I caught a jeepney to the part of highway closest to Batad. After a two hour hike, I finally arrived in Batad and rented a room just in time for dinner. The next morning I had a quick pancake and was on the trail before 8am. Anyone who knows me knows how unlikely it is for me to wake up that early on a weekend voluntarily, but I had to if I wanted to get all my hiking in before dark. 

By 3 pm I finally made it back to the highway, where I talked to some locals and waited for the next Jeepney. That’s when I saw a white man walking down the highway. I asked him if he had walked all the way from Banaue. He said that he had, and it took him only 3 hours. He also pointed out that he was 59 and if I didn’t hike back to Benaue, I was a [wimp]. The man had a glorious Irish accent, and answered me with profanity laced excitement that only someone who has time with real Irishmen can recognize as respect. I hiked back to Banaue, caught a jeepney to the main highway, and finally took a van back to Santiago. After a well deserved McDonalds Cheeseburger (my first in a month) I made it home. 

Here are the pictures from the hike itself:

P.S. Dear 2011 YASCer who is going to the Philippines and is reading my blog while trying to decide if that is a good or bad thing, It's a good thing. Do it. And shoot me an e-mail if you have any questions.