Nuts and Bolts

11.8.10

We’ve hit a few roadblocks since September – work obstacles, village elections, minor but tiring illnesses – so it’s a good time to back up and fill in some details since work isn’t particularly exciting at the moment. I’ve realized that most of the updates on here are “what we’ve been up to lately”-themed and so we’ve missed a lot of the day to day stuff that you might want to know about.

So, what about the places we’ve lived in for the past year? In the more than fourteen months that we’ve been here, we’ve lived in three places:

#1: Tanauan, Leyte. 11 weeks: First host family experience during training. We lived along the national highway, about 10 minutes walk from the Leyte Gulf. The family owned a hardware store, which was located in front of the house. In the back, our host mother’s son had his house and a piggery where they raised and slaughtered pigs to make lechon – the iconic roasted pig on a stick. This made for many unpleasant morning wake up calls, with the vivid sounds of pigs being turned into lechon…


The house itself was two stories – a sign of relative wealth here in the Philippines. We lived on the second floor and most of the time had the entire space to ourselves. We even had a nice balcony up there, which was great for breezy language study sessions when the indoor heat became too much.

[living area outside our room, which is the door on the right side]

[our room]
[lived out of these suitcases for three months...]


[the hardware store - where we first learned Waray-Waray through impromptu evening language lessons with family members and customers]

#2: Guiuan, Eastern Samar, Barangay 3. 7 ½ months: Second host family experience. Here we lived in a bustling downtown neighborhood. As the village with the second highest population density, this was by far our most “urban” experience. The house, once again concrete and two stories, was huge. Located right on the Leyte Gulf, we had views of the water from our first bedroom. In the back, our host mother runs an attached boarding house, with about 20 rooms available for boarders.


We again lived on the second floor and most of the time had the space to ourselves. Our host mother’s children are mostly living abroad and renovated the house to American standards. As guests, we were given the nicest room, the one reserved for the children when they return to visit. Shockingly, we had a comfy bed, tv, an additional bunkbed to house our fellow volunteer guests, and the option of using an air conditioner – which we did sparingly during the insane heat of May. The room was huge – almost like a studio apartment, which contributed to our long stay there.

[our giant first bedroom in Guiuan]

When the children returned home in April for several months, we were (rightfully) ousted to a different room, built especially for us upstairs. For the two of us – especially the giant in the couple! – this space proved to be a bit too cramped and we started seeking a new place of our own.



[our second bedroom, which we lovingly dubbed 'the shoebox' - when lying down, Brandon's head was at one wall and his toes touched the other side!]

#3: Our current place, on our own. 4 months so far: Just across town we found a perfect place – two bedrooms with a small kitchen, bathroom, and common area, that meets the security regulations of our agency (a concrete wall creating a compound and a sturdy fence, bars on all the windows, etc). It’s in a more quiet residential area, and we live right across from the village basketball court. The house is actually much “fancier” than we ever expected when joining PC – no dirt floors and mosquito nets for us! Because it was the former vacation home for a retired couple, it came fully furnished and decked out in décor suiting an older Filipino woman, but that’s part of the fun.



[view from the front door]


[bedroom 1]
[bedroom 2]

It isn’t all posh though. For the past year, this has been our shower: The bucket bath:

It took awhile to get the method down, but now we’re pros! The cold water is wonderful during the hot season but a source of dread in the rainy months. Hot water is definitely the luxury we miss most.

On the CR (toilet) situation – we’ve been fortunate to have Western-style toilets at all three houses (many volunteers here have the squat kind), but for the past year they’ve been non-flushable ones. Easy fix – we use the wonderful, multipurpose bucket seen above for bucket flushing.

In the kitchen, we do have a refrigerator, which most volunteers opt to buy so we can stretch our food pesos with the option of cold storage. We have a sink with running cold water and cook on a two burner stove powered by propane. We’ve learned to cook many dishes on this guy, but sometimes really miss the options provided by an oven!


After living out of our suitcases for almost a year, it’s so nice to now have a place of our own. Overall, we definitely don’t rough it as much as we’d expected, but the developing world is changing (particularly here with the massive amounts of money being sent home by family members living abroad) and we live comparably to many of our coworkers. Plus, this experience has plenty of other challenges – cross-cultural, physical, and work-related – and I can’t really imagine the whole “living in a hut scenario” on top of all of that! There really is no place like home – for us, we still envision our cozy house in Athens – but in the meantime, we’re definitely carving out a place of our own here.

[Oh, and no home is complete without a shrine to the Santo Nino!]