Text Capital. It had been almost three weeks since last seeing Alana, the longest we'd been apart since being married, and I was excited to be back together. I hear that the Philippines is the "text capitol of the world," that more texts are sent here than anywhere else. Texting someone costs one peso, talking on the phone cost 7 pesos a minute. So, it is way more economical with this phone system to text.
I rarely see anyone talking on the phone in the Philippines. The connection is usually poor and Filipinos seem very awkward talking to someone who is not present, unlike Americans who often appear schizophrenic, walking around talking to the air(cordless and hands free phones). When I do see Filipinos talking on the phone its like they feel guilty and want to get away from anyone who can hear. When there are people around, like in a store or office, they just pace back and forth like a rat in a cage, trying to find a "better" place to talk, like they want to get away from listeners and there is nowhere to go.
The whole time I was in Bacolod as a traveling teacher trainer, Alana and I were texting about a dozen times a day. A few times when we both had good internet connections we skyped and that was fun. And one time I enrolled in a special deal from Smart (phone company) that gave us unlimited talking for 24 hours for 20 pesos. What a deal! We picked a time when Alana was off of work and I had the day off from teaching and talked for 3.5 hours straight. The hitch? The calls were cut off every 5 minutes and we would have to call back. No problem, 42 mini conversations of gold.
Homeward Bound. After my two weeks enjoying Filipino hospitality, living in Filipino classrooms with very little access to a working toilet or shower, and enjoying teaching Filipino educators about how their brains work and how they can transfer that learning to richer classroom environments and instruction, I was ready to come home to Dumaguete.
Our last presentation day was Thursday and our little Dumaguete group decided to get on the 6-hour bus ride at 7pm and head home. I was ready to see Alana and she had been working hard for at least a week to set up our new apartment. To my understanding, we were going to move in Friday, the next day, and spend our first weekend in our own space since last July, 10 months ago. Since July, we were living out of suitcases, backpacks, bags, and boxes in other people's homes, who were gracious enough to host us, so we were excited to settle in.
Alana had been texting me about how she scoured Dumaguete looking for a place that we could afford that was also nice, safe, and would be good for hosting traveling friends, family, and wayward Peace Corps Volunteers. She found one and was working intensely to get it ready for us to move into. The "little guy" (the previous tenant who was still living in it at the time) was an American, sounded like ex-military, and was going to sell us his hot water shower unit, refrigerator, and bedroom air con unit for a good deal.
When we traveled back to Colorado last December, we tightly packed most of our stuff up and left it at our last host family's home. While Alana was moving it to our new place, the "little guy" gave her space to start bringing things over, she discovered mold, rat & insect droppings, and nests built in and out of our schtuff. She cleaned, organized, threw away, and brought a lot of clothes to the laundry in hopes of saving it. She is a trouper :-) (I don't pay him to say these things)
Bus Ride. The trip back to Dumaguete was survivable as I had presented for 6 hours that day and the 70 passenger bus was a non-aircon bus that made literally about 400 stops along the way, often just slowing down enough for people to jump on or off. It was very interesting and insightful to watch the culture of public transportation in this country, how smooth it ran, how little communication it took between workers and patrons, how efficient it was.
This bus ran at an average speed of about 40-50 miles per hour. Now, that doesn't sound fast when barreling down I-25 or I-10 in America, however these roads are equivalent to thin, two lane, windy, back country roads that are not well paved and have animals and small children in them. I quickly got used to the ear piercing horn that the driver blew on average about 50 times a minute. I also quickly came to peace with the fact that he knew what he was doing . . . and he wasn't going to run over anything :-) so I slept.
Break In. When we got to Dumaguete I quietly said to the bus attendant, "Hunong sa Mercury Drug palihug" (Stop at Mercury Drug please). I knew that the bus line turned toward the water at Mercury drug on E.J. Blanco and that was the spot closest to LCP (Little Children of the Philippines), where Alana and I were staying until we moved.
The bus driver slowed down enough for me to hop off and with my two backpacks I felt like a S.W.A.T. team member coming off of a chopper. Still 2 clicks (1.2 miles) away from LCP, drizzling, and 1am in the morning, I excitedly took point and enjoyed the quietness and emptiness of a city that bustles with over 400,000 people in the daytime.
When I got to LCP the gates were locked and the guards were nowhere in sight. Don't know if we've ever told you about security in this country. There are tons of security guards all over the place. They seem to be employed by the government and privately. They more often than not are carrying shotguns, often Barny Fife pistols too, are very friendly, and look bored. Once we saw a guard with a menu outside the restaurant trying to get people to come eat in the establishment he was guarding. Many establishments, like LCP, who have children living on campus, have guards at the gate 24 hours a day.
I called out for the guards for a few minutes, it was drizzling still and I was getting wet, and Alana was only 40 yards away from me now so I was getting impatient. Finally, I maneuvered my backpacks over the 7-foot fence and hopped the gate. I quickly scooted up to the dorm room where we were staying to find out it was locked and I had no key. I texted Alana asking her to come out and open the door. The whole time I'm sitting out in the open hoping not to get shot if a guard sees me trying to get into the dorm. "Maybe he will recognize me from two weeks ago? I hope he is not drinking!"
Alana quickly texted back, "Dorm? Where are you?" I texted her, "I'm at LCP, where are you?" In the excitement of getting our new place together, Alana was able to move into it that afternoon and forgot to mention that to me (or thought she had). I had no idea where the apartment was so we planned to meet halfway, which was just down the street. So off I go to jump the gate again, keep from being shot, and head to our new home.
Our New Home. It was amazing to see and kiss Alana again, texting and skyping just isn't as good as the real thing. There were so many questions I had for her as we walked the 1km to our new place in the middle of the night in the drizzling rain. It was like a dream when we came up to our new home. It is awesome! It is on the end of a five unit building, all two story units, built 7 years ago, very neat, very clean, very well put together.
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| Not the mud hut we expected from our Peace Corps Experience |
Our place is a two bedroom, two bath, cement construction, all tiled, 600 square foot unit. The downstairs is one big 12x25 foot room with a bathroom off the side and the upstairs is the two bedrooms with a bath in the hall with a little balcony off the main bedroom. We have a cement back and side yard. We love it! Clean, nice, 9 foot ceilings to keep the heat manageable. We are in a great neighborhood a 10-minute walk to Alana's work and 20 minutes walk from mine.
It was so great to walk up with Alana in the early a.m. for the first time in the drizzling rain and see it with the lights on and hear her stories about all her adventures working so hard to get it ready for me when I returned.
Street Money. One story Alana told me was that she got help from Uncle Bob (nice American man that sponsors LCP children to go to school and spends a lot of time doing things with the children there) since he had a car and could help haul things around. Of course Uncle Bob would always grab a couple of LCP children to help because it is good for them to be of service to others (and they are bored).
So Uncle Bob and a few LCP boys were helping Alana move some of our stuff into the apartment and they spotted the two jars of coins I had picked off the streets while walking. It looks like a lot of money yet they are all 1, 5, 10 and 25 centavos, so all in all maybe 40-50 pesos in the two jars. Nevertheless, the boys had big jelly eyeballs when they saw that much money :-)
Alana told them that was money I had picked up off the streets and they could also look for money when they were walking because people don't take the time to bend down for small coins like those. They seemed impressed and motivated to become "street coin hunters!" Yes!
Bamboo Bed. She would have liked to have the whole place furnished by the time I arrived and the time frame was quick so Alana at least wanted to have a bed. I had scouted bed frames before leaving for Bacolod and was finding they were between PhP 3000-5000 ($60-100). Well Alana (super bargain shopper) found a place near the local market that makes really nice bamboo furniture so she made our first big furniture purchase and bought a bed frame.
I told Alana about the bed frame prices I scouted and so when she asked about the price of the bamboo bed frame and was told "11" she thought that was a bit pricy. After a little more conversation she realized they were saying PhP 1100 and not PhP 11,000. Wow! That's a deal. So she jumped on that. Alana was unshakable in her desire to have it delivered that Thursday afternoon (it was raining and Filipinos don't work so much in the rain) as the furniture guys loaded up and hauled the new bed frame to the apartment in the weather.
The men went to haul it up the stairs and it wouldn't turn the corner so they left it outside. Our landlord, Susan (very nice lady, half Filipino, half Swiss, raised in Dumaguete), came by and offered to have her helpers pull the bed frame up to the second story balcony with a rope. Alana took her up on the offer and soon Alana, Susan, and two little lady Filipino helpers were hauling this big bed frame up and over the balcony with a rope while men walked by the apartment complex gawking at the working ladies. When they finished Susan looked at Alana and said, "That's girl power!"
Battle of the Ants. The first night in our own place was amazing. We stayed up until almost 3am talking and catching up and then not being disturbed and sleeping in the next morning in our own clean, comfy, bed was incredible. I awoke to check out the place in the daylight and found that even with a clean, well put together, tiled building, there are still ants, and thus began the battle.
Most construction is cement and there is not much need for insulation here because it's best to have windows and doors open for breezes. Windows and doors have screens to keep bugs out and for the most part the bottoms of doors are not sealed up well. Those little suckers were everywhere. They mostly use corners to travel in. We've seen them in the keyboards of our computers and hear that they can eat the hardware of a computer and destroy it.
I also notice that they send out scouters and when they find something to eat they call all their friends and family. So when I see a ton of them traveling furiously along a wall or across the floor, I follow them and usually end up at a piece of fallen bread or a dead cockroach. No food goes to waste in this country and it's important to not leave any food out on counters or in cupboards.
I'm pretty determined to have an ant free home if possible so off we went shopping for ant hotels and anything else we could find to deter the little boogers. We heard of and found an ant solution called "Stop Chalk." It looks like a piece of chalk that one would use on a chalkboard. One simply draws a line and the ants won't cross it. Kinda like challenging the little guys to a duel and they are too chicken to cross over.
So I have drawn lines across door thresholds, around windows, circles around little holes I see them coming out of, on pieces of furniture I see them using as highways. It seems to be working. They want to travel and look for food and the apartment is getting too complicated to maneuver in so they just go and do their business outside. We'll see how this works in the long run.
Bargain Shoppers. Now it was time for Alana and I to get out there and get the things we need to operate comfortably in our new place. We had started making lists a long time ago when we were dreaming of the day we had our own "pad." Alana had actually purchased our first two air mattresses for guest in Manila already.
We hit the town of Dumaguete on the first day out, Friday, and price shopped, looking in the local stores we had heard about and writing down and comparing prices and quality of the products we wanted. The second day we went out with empty backpacks and got what we wanted. Oh the looks and smiles we got at check out counters when we filled our backpacks with lamps, fry pan, blender, toaster oven, water dispenser, bake dish, fans, bleach, cleaning supplies, laundry buckets, dishware, bathroom shower organizer, material for curtains, stove burner, gas regulator and hose, a wok, cooking oil, can goods, condiments, etc. We carried our kitchen table and plastic chairs.
We also had rounds of big stuff delivered; bamboo kitchen chairs, bamboo living room chairs, bamboo couch, bamboo bed tables, bamboo shelves, futon pull-out couch for more guests, 5-gallon drinking water jugs, and the gas tank for our stove. The bamboo furniture is sold out of an outdoor dirt lot and I quickly noticed that some of the pieces were infested with ants! So, no furniture came into the apartment until it got the ant test from me, which was banging it down in the parking lot seeing if ants fell out of the bamboo legs. If it didn't have ants, it could come in. If it had ants, I would bang it on the cement for as long as it took to get those little pests out of the furniture! Ant whisperer!
All in all we feel pretty well set up now and in the end it cost us about PhP 60,000 ($1,200) to get set up. Peace Corps sets volunteers up with a move-in allowance and along with our stipend we were able to save up about PhP 110,000 before we left in December so we feel well settled in now. We now have a simple, usable, comfortable place for you to visit :-)
Ella. We were headed home Friday evening, after the first night of bargain shopping, feeling very settled with the list of things we wanted in our new place, feeling very taken care of by Peace Corps in an effort to make us as comfortable as possible so we can focus on serving in our placement sites, feeling very "American," when we came up to our front door and there was a cow sleeping almost on our doorstep. Alana quickly said, "Well, that wouldn't happen in America."
She wasn't a cow yet, maybe about a 150-pound baby Brahma calf. She was so cute. I guess the cement was cool to lay on. I scratched her little head and neck and she never even got up off the ground and probably slept there. Later we noticed that her, her sister, and her mother are neighborhood cows that get pushed up and down the street by a man on a bike as they eat the grass on the side of the road. We named her "Ella."
Baby Gekko. Along with our ants and our pet cow (we miss our pet rooster Charlie, who, Lola told us, got cooked up in a family meal a few months ago), we have a few baby gekkos that hang out on the walls. They are cute; one is a few inches long and one is only about an inch, tiny guy. At first, they make me jump and I want to shew them out of the apartment. Then I realize they are cute and no harm to anyone . . . and I think they eat ants! We have not named them yet.
Settled. So I sit here in our new home writing you. It's only been a week and I deeply enjoy coming home in the afternoon and getting into gym shorts, t-shirt, and going barefoot around the apartment, not worrying so much where I drop my stuff or who's food is in the frig. We are on the east side of the building so from around 1pm on we are in the shaded by the other apartments and as a result have a cool temperature space.
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| Jacques enjoying our first fresh salad and a beer! |
There are a few sari-sari stores within a few minutes walk and we have already learned where to get our bread, eggs, a quick meal if we don't want to cook, and beer. The people around us are friendly, helpful, and kind. In the evening, we can hear much of the neighborhood, dogs barking and people visiting, as most of the homes have open doors and windows to battle the heat. It's a nice soft rumble of community; we feel welcomed, safe, and settled.
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| Our backyard/Laundry room |
It's now 3am and all the lights in the neighborhood are out from the brown-out. It's quiet save for the rain bouncing against the apartment complex metal roof . . . calming . . . I will return to bed.
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