Year 2

3.16.11

Happy 2011 everyone! (It seems like the year just started but somehow it’s March already…) As we knew it would, the pace of our second year of service has really increased and we find ourselves constantly busy with work. Our projects right now are helping to strengthen the management of a village fish sanctuary and creating a Coastal Resource Management Plan for our town.

A fish sanctuary is an area of the sea designated as a no-fishing/no-take zone, which allows coral and fish to grow undisturbed. The long-term goal, then, is increasing fish stock and protecting coral habitats for food security, but for our limited two years here, we see these sanctuaries as a tool for mobilizing the community around their resources.

Coral reef protection might not seem like the most pressing need in a country facing poverty, disease, and overpopulation, but without the reefs, there are few fish. And without the fish, this country is facing a serious food security crisis. Some projections are showing that most of the reefs will be gone by 2050 and fish catch is already in rapid decline, so action is needed now if the next generation is going to have enough food.

[Manapag Reef Fish Sanctuary boundary markers]

In our town there’s an island village that has been managing a fish sanctuary for four years now. The community managers of the sanctuary are very active, enforcing the no-take area by apprehending fishermen who try to fish inside the sanctuary illegally. They do this on a completely voluntary basis. Because they have few resources at hand, they’ve asked us for training and assistance to improve their sanctuary and make it fully operational.

[village education event - community members watching videos about healthy coral reefs]

[5 fishermen attended a coral reef monitoring training that Brandon put together. After a day of lecture indoors, the team went out to the reef and surveyed the coral, fish, and seagrass]

The project started in November and will continue through August, at least. Our main activities are helping the community write a management plan for the sanctuary, train community members in coral reef, fish census, and sea grass monitoring, rating the sanctuary’s current management level, enhancing the physical infrastructure (guardhouse, buoys, signs, etc) and doing environmental education events. We’ve just submitted a grant for funding through PC. If approved, this will fund construction of a guardhouse for the sanctuary as well as law enforcement equipment. It will also help fund a community celebration we’re planning in the village called “Reef Day,” which will be held together with the village’s annual fiesta in May.

[Tori works with the Management Council to review the current status of the sanctuary]

[Brandon works with the Monitoring Team to make a "transect grid" - a rope grid laid on the reef to help determine the amount of coral that is alive. Fishermen are masters at knot tying, obviously, and made a 300 sq. meter grid in under a half hour!]

It’s a cool project for us to work on together, because we can each use our unique strengths – Brandon is focusing on the snorkel trainings for fishermen and construction projects. I’m working on the grant proposal and management planning with the community, and we work on education events together.

[After the survey, the trainees tabulated their observations and came up with these results. This info will be used by the community to design new management strategies for the reef. Until now, the group has had no information to guide their decision making. Now they know where they are and where they need to go. They will use this info as the baseline to track and evaluate the progress of their resources in the future.]

We’re in the first phase of the CRM Plan project, which is compiling info on the current status of resources and community opinions. So for the next three months Brandon will be doing habitat surveys of mangrove forests, coral reefs, and sea grass beds alongside community trainees. I’ll be holding a series of 10 community meetings with my coworkers in the agriculture office to gather socioeconomic info and comments and ideas from community members. We’ll compile all of this and use it to write Coastal Environmental Profiles of 10 villages. From that, we’ll work with our counterparts in the local government to write a 5-year coastal resource management plan. Our goal is to have a draft submitted to the mayor by October. Until then it will be a very busy few months!

[the very active Manapag Reef Fish Sanctuary Management Council!]

From Here to There

1.10.11

Happy New Year everyone! We hope you all had a great holiday season full of family, food, and snow. We spent Christmas with our host family, doing our three most frequent activities: eating, singing videoke, and dancing cha cha. We then took some leave time and went to a very touristy resort island with fellow volunteers. It was a relaxing break - we marveled at the efficiency of transportation and the abundance of delicious Western foods in a place that caters primarily to foreigners. We were even able to go dancing several nights in a row, which you know was the highlight of the trip for Brandon, and we rang in the new year with beach fireworks. It was great for a few days, but we are more than happy to be back in our adopted home in Samar.

[a relaxing holiday: worlds away from our everyday PC life]

We are always reminded of just how wide the divide is between us and our community here when we go on trips like these, no matter how much we'd like to imagine otherwise. We know that we are choosing our lifestyle here of relative poverty, while our friends, neighbors, and adopted family will never see many of the places in their own country. We feel a strange mix of gratitude for the numerous opportunities we've been given and guilt.


For this post, we thought we'd do an overview of how we get around here - transportation is always an adventure, yet many of the crazy ways we get around have now become commonplace, so much so that I've forgotten to write them down until now. When I try to conjure up the four-lane highways, private cars, and bicycle paths of home though, it puts the 'strangeness' of all this back into focus...

The Put Put, aka Pedikab


The put put, a bicycle taxi so named for the funny little squawk its horn makes (long live onomatopoeia!), is our primary mode of transportation day to day, especially for going short distances. We ride them when going from our house to the office if it' s raining or we're feeling lazy, going to the market, and taking other short trips in the center of town. The fare is 5 pesos, about 11 cents in US money. The drivers are organized into a pedicab union and they wait in an orderly fashion outside our office for passengers heading home. The drivers range from the very young (those who should probably be in school...) to the elderly (those who should probably be resting in a hammock somewhere enjoying old age but can't afford to...) - we try to find drivers somewhere in the middle range though who can support our relatively massive American poundage.

We try to be polite and split up, riding separately, one per cab, but the drivers often insist, saying they want the double fare. And so we often cram ourselves into one of these together and enjoy the awkward stares as passersby gawk at the two Amerikanos spilling out of the put put. Sure, we had the initial guilt of having another human pedal us around, but it really is THE major mode of transport in our area. Plus, we're traveling emissions-free.Many of the fisherfolk we work with organize pedicab cooperatives as an added income for when fish catch is low - and as fish stocks continue to decline, secondary income sources like this are becoming more necessary. These drivers are inspiring - they put put around all day long, rain or shine, and they are often some of our best conversations we have throughout the day. Many of them now know our house without us having to point them in the right direction, so we just chit chat about any number of things as we ride along.

Our Own Pedal Power


These are our wonderful mountain bikes, which take us everywhere in town when the weather is okay and we aren't feeling too lazy from the heat. In the not-as-hot (but still hot) season we're in now, we are really racking up the kilometers while the thermometer is down. PC gives us a pretty hefty allowance for purchasing bicycles at the beginning of service, so we spent it all and splurged for the best bikes we could find in the nearest city. Well worth it.


The Tricycle



Tricycles ("trikes") are everywhere throughout the Philippines, and in most places they have entirely replaced the pedicabs described earlier (although not on the islands of Leyte and Samar where we live). They consist of a large motorcycle with a sidecar welded on. The design of these sidecars varies widely from island to island we've found, and it's always amusing to compare them when we're on trips.

Luckily for us, the ones in Samar are relatively roomy. There's a bench in the front that usually holds two people and an awkward little stool-looking contraption that is actually a seat as well. I find myself squished onto that too often. Then there are two small benches in the back that can each hold two people, and two people can ride behind the driver on the motorcycle. Oh, and there's a teeny little metal rack on the outside that boys sometimes cling to if the rest is full. An average trike then can hold about 9 passengers max, but they frequently hold more, especially if it's full of schoolchildren OR if you're in an outer village doing a training and everyone decides to go to a party during lunchtime. THEN you might fit all these people in a tricycle together for a 30 minute trip (plus Brandon, who is taking the picture!)


When riding a tricycle you have to throw all conventional facts about physics and safety out the proverbial window. And amazingly, despite what seems like a dangerous transportation method, there are few to NO accidents on these things and we are probably much safer in them than in riding in a car in America. Drivers are cautious and normally quite kind. We just stand on the side of the road anywhere in town and flag one down that has empty seats/stools/metal racks. The fare is 7 pesos (about 16 cents). Brandon usually rides on the back behind the driver and I squeeze in elsewhere. Often though, existing passengers will vacate their seats in the front to give them to the Americans. We try to argue but know it's no use.

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!]

Mabuhay sa Pilipinas!

(Welcome to the Philippines!)

10.25.10

We had been looking forward to September 2010 since we arrived more than a year ago, because it meant our FIRST VISITORS from home! My mom, Traci, and uncle Jeff made the more than 8,000 mile/18+ hour trek to the Phils and stayed with us here for 10 amazing days.

We met them in Tacloban, our nearest city and airport. From there we traveled together to our site in Eastern Samar and spent about four days so they could meet our friends and adopted family, see our community, and get a feel for what our day to day life is like.


[We checked out the beach on Calicoan Island, staying overnight right on the Pacific and enjoying the calming vibe of the waves]



[We hiked up to the yoga camp to soak up our only cool and breezy moments, while taking in the views of the Pacific]


[It was a must that they take part in the local ritual of hanging out at the town plaza at night and sipping on a "Sparkle for take out" - a Mountain Dew-like soda sold in plastic bags]



[And they met all of our people here - first an evening with our host family and then a trip to the municipal hall to meet our coworkers and the mayor]

Then it was on to vacation! Four days on the island of Bohol and two in Tagaytay, Cavite, with lots of traveling in between. Over the course of about a week we were seemingly able to do it all...

We stayed in 3 excellent places: Alona Beach in Bohol, with its touristy yet laid back strip of resorts and restaurants; a private resort on Panglao Island, Bohol; and a small hotel with award winning restaurant along the ridge in Tagaytay, Cavite, overlooking the Taal Volcano:






*To get there, we rode in or on nearly all forms of transport possible here:






*And while there, we ate like we haven't in a looong time:






*Some days were relaxing and some were packed with activities:

[strolling along Alona Beach, with its many resorts and restaurants]

[taking a one-day interior tour of Bohol, where we visited the tarsier sanctuary. Tarsiers are one of the world's smallest primates and they're endemic to four islands in the Philippines, including our island of Samar. These little nocturnal guys are about the size of your palm and can turn their heads nearly 180 degrees and jump crazy distances using their long tails. They also kinda look like Yoda...]

[going on a tough hike up to the top of the tarsier reserve, where we had an impressive view of the chocolate hills area. definitely worth it in the end, but also our most challenging trek yet!]

[visiting a butterfly garden and sanctuary]

[finally seeing the famous "Chocolate Hills" - one of the Philippines most popular tourist destinations. the more than 1700 hills, which seems to roll on forever across central Bohol, turn a brownish shade during the dry season, giving them their name]

[crossing a hanging bridge, just for fun]

[spending an evening in a karaoke room, of course. no Philippines trip is complete without]

[lounging in THE best pool I've ever seen for the good part of two days, with an amazing view of Bohol and Cebu in the distance]

[taking in the view of Taal Volcano from the ridge of Tagaytay. We visited People's Park in the Sky, the unfinished summer home of the Marcos family as well for another view of this 'lake within a lake and volcano within a volcano.' We couldn't visit the crater because it's had some activity lately (it's last major eruption was in '77), but the view was more than enough to make us happy]

We hope they got a good taste of what life in the Phils is like. We know we saw some very diverse parts of the country and sights that we'll never forget.

We spent our last day in Manila, taking in the urban setting and crazy malls. And then it was time to say our sad farewells...

[we all dealt with this in different ways, haha]

With one year left in our PC commitment, we're increasingly looking towards what is next, which can mean HOME:) It was so nice to have a reminder, if only for ten days, of what that's like.