We had our swearing-in way back on April 12th, but I just moved to site yesterday. I won’t get into all the reasons for the delay, but I’m happy to finally live in Inabanga, site of my project for the next two years.
Of course it was bittersweet to leave the Ramos family, my caring hosts since Februay 8th. (I was only supposed to stay for 8 weeks.) They gave me a surprise despidita dinner on Tuesday night. Mama cooked my favorite: chickpeas. Papa even came home from his peanut stand early. They know and I know I'll be back often; I left my mosquito net there. Be it meetings, birthdays, fiestas…I have no excuse. It’s only ninety minutes or two hours away, depending on how stealthy a navigator the driver is.
I was escorted to site by Nimfa (our DTI Provincial Caretaker who affectionately calls me my son, my son) Blair (my mustached comedian "counterpart" who wears those funny Nike SHOX sneakers his brother sent him from Florida) and Stella (from Peace Corps, who travels all over The Philippines taking care of us.) Roy drove us in Rusty Maroon, the DTI 1982 Corolla.
We arrived at the Municipal Hall by 11am, and waited about an hour for the mayor to arrive for the meeting where we would talk about my plan for the next two years. An hour isn’t a bad wait, especially when you’re waiting for someone who has an entire municipality to run. The wait allowed us to chika-chika a bit. I also started browsing through two and a half months of New Yorker issues that had accumulated at the post office. (Abu-Ghraib scoop and all.)
When the mayor arrived we ate and discussed. If I were to write my résumé in advance, it would probably say “Oversaw construction of an environmentally-friendly vegetable dyeing facility, hired a bunch of eager local people to work there, and then co-managed the whole shebang and sheboozle for a couple years.” It would also say “Helped the public school install of computers donated by the Japanese government. Familiarized teachers and students with the computers so the machines would not suffer the same fate of neglect suffered by so much technology bestowed upon the 3rd world by their first world benefactors.” Finally it would say “Motivated Inabanga to win the Clean and Green Municipality award for all The Philippines.”
If I can cut and paste any of this into my resume come 2006, I’ll eat my fake plastic hat. For now, it’s time to get dinner cookin.
Posted by dbs at June 17, 2004 06:34 PM