I ate an early breakfast of plain toasted tofu squares and a mango on Wednesday. Day was just breaking when I crept out of the house, hurried down the narrow rocky dirt path and out to the CPG Avenue where I waited for the de facto Peace Corps jeepney to take us to the pier in Baclayon. (Her name is Green Monster People Mover. She is piloted by the fearless, faithful Jerry.) At the end of the dilapidated pier, we embarked a small pump boat and set out towards Pamilacan Island.
The possibility of spotting whales was the reason we were on the boat at 6am. Their favorite time to play is the early morning. But they were hiding on Wednesday. Instead the dolphins came out. Brought back memories of dolphins swimming alongside Semester at Sea’s S.S. Universe Explorer. The best part was watching our tech trainer Ambet giggle and cheer every time the dolphins surfaced. (As a street child he never experienced childhood properly, and he proudly explains that he sometimes makes up for lost time.)
The whales were also the reason we were headed to Pamilacan in the first place. The people of Pamilacan have hunted whale since the beginning of time. Which has provided them with enough money to live comfortably on their two kilometer island. Unfortunately, the whale population has steadily dwindled to the point of near extinction.
A few years ago, whaling was banned. And unlike most natural resource depletion bans here in The Philippines, the people have abided to the ban. The people love the whales and most of them, if not all, are content with the ban. There is even a museum dedicated to the whale in the works.
But all of a sudden, the main source of income on Pamilacan was extinct. So the women set up a bakery cooperative. (Why a bakery is not quite clear.) So eleven of us Peace Corps trainees went there to help the women figure out why they haven’t made any money in the past year. (When people in developing countries don’t make money right away, they tend to think their business is doomed. And one of the trainees was doomed by the sun. She got burned so bad she had to hire a boat to bring her back to the mainland for treatment before our workshops got underway.)
The first day on the island we spent lounging around, drinking coconut juice fresh off the tree, and planning our workshop on the beach. A big hairy black pig (the native pig) escaped her cage and we watched the islanders run after it every which way. The darn thing hurled herself through a barbed wire fence and didn’t even flinch. And the sunsets of Pamilacan are among the hottest sunsets I’ve ever been privileged to.
In the morning I woke at sunrise to have a snorkeling session. It’s simply amazing the living rainbows just below the surface. And the sounds of snorkel breathing makes me feel like I’m back in outer space. I haven’t been scuba-diving yet but I will when I get bored and lonely and feel like treating myself to a magic show.
We hiked up the hill (there are no cars or trikes and I only saw one bicycle and two wheelbarrows in three days) and were ready and waiting for our bakery women at 8am. 9am rolled around and only four of the 25 bakers were present. So Ambet went to their houses to corral them to the day care center we had taken over. Nineteen ended up seated in pint-sized wooden chairs (reminiscent of the days I taught English to Japanese tots.) This was their first opportunity to sit around for any length of time and discuss their bakery since some German NGO build the bakery and a government agency called TESDA came to the island to teach them how to bake bread and brownies. That was a while ago.
We each had one session to conduct. Mine regarded “The 5 M’s of Production.” Apparently these 5 M’s are pretty famous, but I don’t recall hearing about them in any class I ever took. This was the final session of the first day…so we moved over to the bakery to check it out. Picture a garage-sized rectangular cement building with a big table in the middle and a small oven in the corner. Conducting a session in the bakery was a mistake, cuz it was really hot in there (even without the oven on.) So while I was teaching them about Materials, Moment, woMan power, Machinery, and Money (though not necessarily in that order) the women fanned themselves incessantly and stared at their watches.
Before we cut the session short, we learned that one of their fears is that some of their bread will go unsold, which might eat into their meager profits. However, this is an unrealized fear, as they’ve always sold out their inventory. If they made more they’d probably still sell out, but another problem arises that they don’t have enough money to buy more ingredients. (There is only one “ferry” to the mainland per week, so they can’t just run to the grocery when they’ve sold out and have enough cash to buy more. They have to wait until next week.)
There are many challenges, all interlocked, and we were just there to help them get the discussion going, make some realizations about their cooperative. They’ll have to figure out what to focus on (scheduling, fund raising, exporting to the mainland, learning how to make breadcrumbs from the stale bread, etc.) After all, if we told them what to do, they’d expect the same when they have bigger challenges, and we won’t be around to hold their hands. That’s really what Peace Corps is all about…helping people learn to help themselves.
All in all, the women were really into our workshop, evidenced by the fact that they bothered to come back after lunch. (Apparently, workshop defections are the norm here.) They also showed up early the second day, and there was a massive hand-shaking session on our way out.
I spent my language study time lounging on a big bamboo bench with a bunch of teenage boys who sit out the hot hot heat, saving their energy for the cooler hours when they go out fishing, hoping to catch enough for dinner, and, if they get really lucky, a big lapu-lapu that can be sold to a resort on Panglao Island. (There are no fancy resorts, let alone a hostel on Pamilacan.) So they take it easy all day while the girls and women are busy doing laundry, feeding the goats, cooking, cleaning, etc. And since the electricity only comes on from 6-11pm, they are TV-free couch potatoes. There is, however a radio soap opera they listen to on a staticy old radio. For me, radio soaps are something my grandparents might have listened to. For them, it’s about as high technology as it gets.
Yesterday I was forced to play basketball with a neighbor, one-on-one. (When I tell people I’m baynte tres, the response is “Michael Jordan!” Too bad I’ll be baynte kwatro in a month. NBA action dominates the morning sports report on DYRT AM. A current promo for name-brand cough syrup is a free NBA basketball card, by Upper Deck. Obviously, basketball is huge here.) OK, outside the parentheses, let me describe the court. Picture mud and trash heaps burning. Rusty sheet metal is the out-of-bounds marker. The backboard is a piece of rotting wood, nailed to a tree. The tree has sprawling roots. The ball itself used to be orange. Now it is black. Miraculously it still retains air, but it’s not so easy to dribble on mud.
The challenger is at least three or four inches shorter than I, and the same age as my mother (who never sends me email,) but he is much more adept at the game my fellow American invented. (Another reminder of my time in Japan, except there the game was played wearing upmarket Nikes, not dog-eared flip-flops. And once there I walked into the gym, nailed a 3-pointer…swoosh…and walked right back out.) I try my best to pull out all my Harlem Globetrotter moves, such as guarding him with my buttocks, passing the ball to kids perched above the net in the tree, screaming gibberish, but nothing works. Final score: 12-3. 12 minus 3 equals nine, so my punishment for sucking so bad is having to crawl through his legs nine times. With half the neighborhood looking on. Before the kid a foot shorter and well-qualified to earn a shutout can challenge me, I go home and stand under the garden hose nozzle, which provides me a cold shower.
Last night, Fernando Poe Jr., the Arnold Schwarzenegger of The Philippines, unschooled action hero turned presidential candidate came to town for a big rally, right where Papa sells his peanuts. Mama spent an hour filling small plastic bags with water, which she chilled. She told me Papa was going to come home to pick them up, but I offered to help her bring them to Papa. But Peace Corps policy states we are not allowed to attend political events, since we are officially apolitical when it comes to host-country politics. (We can say whatever we want about George.) So I waited with the environmentally- unfriendly bags of water while Mama went to fetch Papa from his stand. The point of the story is that for all the work, at 70 centavos per water bag, then subtracting the cost of the baggies and the trike fare, the final take for all the hard work was about one U.S. dollar. (But the McDonalds dollar menu here only cost 20 pesos, or 35 cents. Thank you Ronald!)
This week takes us on another boat ride, to Dumaguete City for two days shadowing actual Peace Corps volunteers and some authentic Mexican food. Then next week I’ll fly up to Manila for probably the only Passover Seder in all these seven thousand Philippine islands. So as they say here, kadiyot lang or “for a while” when they translate it to English, but what they really mean is please wait. It might be a couple weeks until the next update. This one was long enuf.
Posted by dbs at March 29, 2004 09:29 PM