PCPhilippines Update #83

Dumaguete Progress:  Just like anywhere in the world I guess, infrastructure and new buildings, along with updated businesses, are always being made.  Progress!  While at first I doubted progress would happen in Dumaguete, living here for over two years has allowed us to experience it just like anywhere else in the world . . .  and probably also a bit different than everywhere else in the world.

Bank Ng Pilipinas on National Highway

Since Alana and I arrived, foreign and local investors put up about a half dozen brand new progressive looking buildings on the main strip of the national highway running through town that have huge tented glass windows, star-studded lighting, underground garages, and tiled entrances.

Building Center on National Highway

These are buildings for companies like the Suzuki, a Bank Ng Pilipinas, A.M. Builders Depot (Filipino Home Depot), and Cang's Shopping Complex.  We can now imagine a brand new looking Dumaguete in the next 10-20 years if this continues, with modern looking storefronts replacing bamboo shack stores.

Cang's Shopping Complex on National Highway

We've watched a 15-story hotel going up downtown for the last 14 months and it is just about finished.  Although some of the building techniques, machinery, and technology used to erect a building like this at times seem outdated and unnecessarily laborous, the building ends up looking just like any other progressive building in the end.  The safety measures for the public, since the hotel is five feet from national highway, were extraordinary.

Safety Measures for the Public

At one point I watched a half dozen men labor over breaking up a slab of sidewalk that was 10x12 feet in size.  They did it with hammers hitting big nails that were pushed into half inch PVC pipe so they could hold the nail upright and not hammer their fingers.  This process took about 3 weeks.  At the same time down the road a bit I watched a hand held jackhammer at work operated by a guy with no shoes, no shirt, no helmet, nor any other kind of safety equipment.  He got his job done in an afternoon.

New Roofed Home

I've been especially observant of day to day building progress on my walks to and from school/work. I got to see all the stages of a new roof being affixed to a nice home.  They erected the new roof, tore out the old roof from underneath it, made improvements to the outside of the home and even added a small addition to the back, connected the new roof to the house, then patched, plastered, tiled, and painted the entire outside structure.  This process took at least 4 months and I noticed the family moved out as soon as the work got started and move back in immediately after the painting.  Where did they go for 4 months?  That may be a situation where the relatives move in and little Joey has to share his bedroom with Auntie Maggie.

NoName Neighborhood Eatery

Just down the road is a local neighborhood eatery.  When we first arrived to Dumaguete in August of 2010 I walked by it every day on my way to technical skills class during training.  The lot had what looked like a 5x5 meter (15x15 foot) bamboo pavilion on it and the man who I saw roaming around in it every day seemed to live in the 3x4 meter (9x12 foot) shack in the back corner of the lot.  Months later (it was on the same path as my walk to NORSU) there were tables and booths under the pavilion; then came a bathroom, then a painted gate, then an outdoor kitchen, and the place kept getting more built up and nicer every month.  I haven't seen anyone eating there.  Maybe it's because I walk/ride by during the day and he is only open at night.  It's a very nice place now even though there has never been a sign advertising it and the man still seems to live in the un-renovated shack.

Outside of NORSU Gates

NORSU Touchups:  One week I watched the process of repaving the road stretching in front of the governor's building and outside of NORSU's university gates.  It was a wild process.  They first dumped rocks and 3/4 inch gravel in the potholes.  Then they filled them using buckets and shovels with a tar looking substance they got from 55 gallon barrels they had built fires underneath.  After spraying the entire road with about 1/2 inch of the same tar substance, it got covered with 1/2 inch of dirt.

Tar 4 Roads

Students and faculty walked campus for days with handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses because of the tar in the air.  Cars and scooters almost immediately started using the roads and to pack down the tar under the dirt and the dirt eventually blew away in the wind or got washed away by the rain.

Along with many others, I watched the governor's mansion ditch (next door to NORSU) being dug out, sewer pipes rerouted, the ditch cemented, and a sidewalk put up on top of it, again, all by hand.

Dr Sojor added a second floor to the dentistry and computer technology building.  This work was done, just like all the work I see, by men with no safety equipment, usually working in shorts, flip flops, and t-shirts tied around their heads to lessen their sun exposure. The addition took about 9 months to finish.  It's crazy seeing the conditions the men work under and how slow something simple looking can take because they have no tools.  Hand cranked cement mixers, materials hauled by hand, rope pulleys to lift anything to the second floor, rickety bamboo and wood scaffolding, and not a power tool in sight.

Circa November 2011

Circa January 2012

Circa April 2012

Circa July 2012

Even Ralph had students from the department of 'refrigeratorology' :-) come in and fix the English Department air conditioner when it was ready to poop out.  No doubt they got some kind of grade compensation for their efforts.  Ingenuity!

Krissy's After Remodel, Closed on Sundays

Home Improvements:  Closer to home, we've watched our favorite local eatery, Krissy's, get remodeled.  The counters got moved around giving the staff more room to operate behind them, the wall between the counters and the kitchen was removed to give the place a more open feeling, and an office was added with a huge plexiglass window and hole in it so the owner can manage all the money, keep an eye on her staff, and yell at them when they are doing something wrong.  They created a sit down counter and hired a local carpenter to built some 1950 looking, round barstools.  They even added a professionally looking bamboo table and chairs for a more homey feeling.  All in all, very funksway.

Across The Street, Nearly Done

I think in an earlier update I wrote about the house being built directly across the street.  I mentioned how the workers lived on site all those months while working on the house and even move into the house once it got a roof on it.  Progress seemed to go just a little bit slower once they move into the house probably because it was a nice place to live for a while.  The same workers did all the work; foundation; cement framing, electricity, plumbing, doors and windows, fence building, roofing, and plumbing.  Rarely was a specialist called in to do any part of the work.

One of the best building projects for us to experience was the improvement of the neighborhood streets all around our apartment building from dirt to cement, including the one we live directly on.  We watched 40 + workers for months work on about 300 meters (300 yards) of streets.  Again, they built little shacks and lived in empty lots in the neighborhood during the job until the work was over.  

Circa February 2012

Circa April 2012

Circa June 2012 

Circa August 2012

One little shack was like a framed bunk bed with a roof on it.  It had three small stacked rooms, each 1 meter wide, 2 meters long, and 1 meter high (3 feet, 6 feet, 3 feet), and the whole thing was under one tin roof, no electricity or plumbing, with a tiny outdoor space for cooking.  We would see them doing their laundry in the late afternoon with buckets on the street.

These men were starving for attention and would holler and greet us every time we rode or walked by on the way home or to work.  "Hello amigo!" "Good morning my friend!"  "Where are you going?"  "How are you today?"  After a short period of this I just started hollering at them first, "Happy birthday!" "Happy Independence Day!"  "Maayong buntag!"  They seemed to love it and I became famous in our neighborhood with the workers as the 'Happy Birthday Guy.'  Alana and I were riding our bikes down the national highway one Sunday night, a few kilometers from home, after dinner with friends, and we heard someone yell out to us, "Happy birthday!"  Alana believes I was becoming recognizable and making an impression citywide.

They started by building the road up a little by dumping loads of dirt and spreading it out with one of those big yellow road graders.  When I passed close by the dormant grader one day I smelled my Uncle Jim.  You know that smell of salt, dust, sweat, and rust all rolled into one? . . . my cousins will know what I mean.  Months after they level the road out the workers show up to start digging out, fixing, and cementing (or re-cementing if necessary) the ditches. 

When the ditches are all in order they move on to cementing one lane at a time and do everything by hand.  They seemed to move about 20-30 meters a day.

Alana learned to make an amazing desert, crushed chocolate graham crackers and coconut cream, rolled up into balls the size of golf balls and put in the freezer.  Yum!  As she was making some for the LCP youth one Saturday she decided to be neighborly and make a batch for the road workers.

Already she was a favorite of theirs as they innocently flirted heavily with her every time she went by.  One of the workers specifically called her "Gwapa," which means beautiful, and in turn she teasingly called him "Gwapo," which means handsome, so she didn't have to ask his real name.  It was all in fun and they were all nice guys . . . until she brought them that batch of chocolate balls!

Workers Moving In And Setting Up Camp

3x3 Foot, 5 Foot Deep Holes Go In For Cement Foundation Post 

Let The Scaffolding Begin!

Framing Out The Second Floor

Let The Second Floor Cementing Begin!

I was with her and as soon as she turned the corner holding a plate of something, from 40 meters away one of the workers said, "Oh . . . thank you for bringing me something to eat." in jest of course, yet she really had.  When she started to reveal that the desert was really for them all 40+ workers started running towards her.  She quickly handed them off to her friend Gwapo and he got malled while we walked away.  Before we were out of site though, Gwapo yelled out something like, "Thank you for bringing us more tomorrow!"  These guys work hard, seem to have nothing, and seem starved for attention.

The lot next door to us, where the boys moved into the tree last year, has been under construction for about 4 months now.  The workers immediately built a 2x5 meter (6x15 foot) shack, split in half, one side for sleeping and side one for cooking, laundry, and bathroom.  They live on site and are pretty nice to us, which is helpful because they see and greet us every single day and they can now look right into our apartment windows.  It's hard for them not to look at us or talk to us because they literally work spitting distance from our little back and side yard.  The pictures are taken from our second story window.  We have them greeting us now with "Happy Birthday!"

One day I was around the back of our apartment getting our secret key we use to get into the house and I checked to see if anyone was looking.  No one was so I grabbed it and opened the back door.  I went to return the key and when I turned back around a worker's head was peaking right over the fence looking right into our little back yard area, and right at me hiding the key.  "Great!" I said, "Now I have to stop leaving a key outside."  In the end, I just found a new, better hiding place.

The latest greatest news is about the new Mall.  The only mall we currently have, Robinson's, is across town, on the outskirts of Dumaguete, about 4-5 kilometers  (2.5-3 miles) from our home.  We recently caught word that the SM Mall of Asia corporation plans to build a new mall in Dumaguete right in the middle of town JUST ONE BLOCK FROM OUR APARTMENT!

Red diamond is our apartment, red hexagon is LCP, bottom right by the 'G' in Google is NORSU.

There is a huge empty field right on the edge of our little neighborhood where we've watched locals for a few years graze their cows and goats and stop to pee along the fence line.  Such a nice, huge, open piece of property with big oak looking trees on it.  Now we understand who those nicely dressed men were looking at it about 6-8 months ago.

Yellow diamond is our apartment, one block from the new site for SM Mall of Asia.

Progress is sometimes a bummer and it'll be sad to loose that nice big open area right in the middle of town. It will no doubt add another few degrees of heat to the neighborhood and a whole bunch of new traffic I guess.  Wouldn't it be nicer to have the city build a big dog-walking park, running sidewalks, baseball diamonds for local t-ballers, or maybe a pond to feed the ducks (if people actually walked their dogs, ran, played t-ball, or if there were actually ducks here that is) instead of cementing the whole thing?

Alana and I are just glad we are getting out of here before all that chaotic construction starts happening.  It will be weird to visit this place, even on Google Earth, a few years from now when the mall is completed and national highway is littered with new, space age looking storefronts.  While I tend to call it progress, Alana calls some of it necessity and some of it disaster.  As always, only time will tell.

InHarmony

- Jaco

J Jacques Fournet II

US Peace Corps Volunteer

Philippines Batch 269

Daro, Dumaguete City

Negros Oriental

NORSU
LCP