Since Then...

[our training group and technical trainer]

11.25.09

After completing our community project, we took our Language Proficiency Interview and both passed – we are officially “intermediate” speakers of the Waray-Waray language after three months! We then packed up our things, said farewell to our first host family with a goodbye party, and headed to Manila for a conference and our swearing-in ceremony.

[Arki, the comical baby who shared our home. We're looking forward to returning to Leyte in January to attend his first birthday party]


[saying goodbye to our neighborhood gang - these kids followed us to and from class each day and loved getting rides from Brandon. hanging out with them was a highlight of our training]

[at our host family thank you party with Nanay - we already miss her a lot!]

Each volunteer has a Filipino counterpart who will work alongside us for the next two years, so they attended the conference to do some basic planning and “getting to know you” activities with us. We were scheduled to have our swearing-in ceremony on Friday afternoon at a Manila hotel, but on Thursday evening, PC staff announced that we would be having a special morning ceremony at the US Embassy, and that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be the one addressing us and giving the oath!

We boarded a bus early Friday morning for an embassy security check point and then proceeded to the embassy to rehearse the ceremony. We practiced for maybe three hours for what was only a 15 minute ceremony with Secretary Clinton, but it was well worth it! She gave a brief speech about Peace Corps’s role in frontline diplomacy and the Obama Administration’s commitment to expanding the Peace Corps worldwide. We then raised our right hands and took the patriotic oath of service. It was an honor to be sworn in at the embassy by Secretary Clinton, who has been someone we’ve admired. This was a really unique opportunity for Peace Corps volunteers and will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of our time here.

[Cameras were not allowed in the embassy, but Peace Corps will be sending professional photos and video along soon; we will post when available.]

[the 20 Leyte trainees, our trainers, and PC staff]

Later that afternoon we had our originally scheduled ceremony and reception. The mayor of our site came all the way to Manila to attend this, which was very kind and demonstrates our community’s commitment to the Peace Corps partnership. (Only a handful out of 60+ mayors made the trip). In the end, 63 trainees swore in as volunteers (69 began the journey in San Francisco in August).




Swearing in was the exciting beginning of our service, but it also marked the end of our time spent with our fellow trainees. We spent a brief weekend in Manila together, stocking up on dive equipment, eating LOTS of good/unhealthy food, and saying our temporary goodbyes. We have become close with the 18 volunteers assigned in our region, and it was bittersweet to head off on our own.


We boarded the plane for Eastern Samar on November 16th and have been settling in nicely ever since with the help of our work counterparts and new host family.

What to Do with All the Stuff...

[finished community project]

11.6.09

All PC trainees complete a community project before beginning service. Because we saw firsthand the waste problem in our community during training, our training group decided to focus on waste management education for both our community project and our practicum in a local elementary school.

In week 7 or 8 (they’re all blurring together) our training group planned and taught waste management lessons with children in grades 5 and 6. We led an activity about decomposition and how long it takes for different materials to break down. We then taught a short lesson on recycling and held a litter relay race, where the kids sorted waste items into different categories (reuseable, recyclable, or residual).

[after the elementary lesson]

I think we were both surprised by how much we enjoyed these activities, since neither of us has much experience working with youth education. The kids were enthusiastic, and their energy was a good boost for us at the end of training. Because we’ve been working in the same village for over two months, we’ve also enjoyed seeing some of the kids who come to our events regularly and have become our fan club.

During our early focus group discussions in the village, the adults said they’d like to have waste bins on the beach, so for our community project, we decided to hold a workshop for building waste bins in the village. Brandon took the lead on design and construction, and I worked on the planning/reporting and education activities.

[waste education on the beach]

[community build]

A highlight of the project was strengthening a partnership between the village council and a local manufacturing plant, which agreed to donate waste bags for the bins on an ongoing basis. After construction, the fan club painted the bins a bright green, and the council made plans to place 7 more in the village.

[the painting crew]

The project output wasn’t particularly grand (the community constructed 3 simple, bamboo bins), but community members worked together to address one of the needs they’d identified and it served its training purpose – we learned a lot about working with barangay councils and community members AND doing construction without power tools! (Our egos were bruised, when our instructors had to lend a hand with the very basic construction – oh, how we take drills for granted in the US…)

[training group and trainers, building the prototype]

All the STUFF

10.30.09

Solid waste is a problem everywhere. We all know there’s no ‘away’ place to throw our trash – it’s all sitting somewhere, outlasting us all. But several factors are converging here in the Philippines to push the problem to a crisis point.

In the US, everything is jumbo-sized; here, almost all products are sold in single serving bags or packets. Shampoo and laundry detergent in one-use metal sachets, just enough bagged soy sauce and vinegar for one meal, peanuts and chips in snack-size bags only. So tiny plastic pouches proliferate.

At the same time, population continues to rise (the World Bank projects the Philippines could soon have the highest growth rate in southeast Asia; currently around 2%) and municipal governments are unable to afford the expensive sanitary landfills we take for granted in the US. Instead, waste is normally dumped in open sites, with little on-site management and no barrier to prevent contamination into groundwater or nearby streams and neighborhoods.

With these constraints and without organized recycling programs in the provinces, communities have developed other systems for managing reuseables. Waste isn’t segregated before going to the dump site, so scavengers (often children) will comb through the waste at the site to pull out recyclables and sell them at local “junk shops.” These junk shops collect the reuseables/recyclables and sell them in bulk to factories in large cities or to companies abroad (mostly China, we’ve heard).

[touring the local dump site with municipal officials]

There is weekly, municipal garbage collection in our community, curbside on major roads, but often on a common neighborhood corner. An obstacle, though, for municipal waste management, is the mixing in of human waste with regular household waste for collection. Many homes here, particularly those in the fishing village where we’ve been doing our practicum, lack indoor plumbing, so the alternatives are to use the sea/seashore or the garbage truck.

Communities here are way ahead of us, though, in the realm of food waste. All food scraps are either fed to animals or buried for composting.

These are just our impressions at the 3 month point, so take them as somewhat uninformed observations –we have much to learn about waste management here, and it’ll be a big part of our work, particularly for Brandon. Our permanent site is fortunate to have a full-time waste management consultant on staff, who seems to really know her stuff and has many creative plans for engaging the community through waste education. We’re looking forward to gaining more experience in this area and hopefully making a small dent in this very large problem.