11/27/07

Sumaging Caves, Sagada

I was a child: grasping, touching, reaching, climbing through every black opening ahead, any unusual surface I saw and wanted to explore. No space was prohibited, no path too narrow, steep or ledge too high, none unconquerable.

There were caves so slick with cream colored calcium bicarbonate. My mind was tricked into seeing human inner space, and I was gliding along a tunnel of twisted tendons and stippled fat. It felt so natural to be in the caves, crawling and crab walking through low tunnels. The cool temperature, the gentle dripping water and the darkness lulled me into awe, into solace. I could have stayed there all day and just soaked my feet in the glowing green pools, lit by holes beneath the surface.

I imagined my ancestors’ lives to be like this: living on the rock face, swathed in damp clothing from walking/crawling through the cave to the family camp site. I saw the nightmares a lifetime in caves might have plagued me with as I waded through shadowy passageways dripping with staligmites’ sharp, silvery points. There jagged teeth often creating a natural fence to the next tunnel.

Despite the slippery surfaces, the sharp cliff faces and the fast moving water traversed my first spelunking tour undeterred until we came to a narrow ledge with a sharp drop. The three guides, created a two hand holds farther down the ledge. The taller people went first by stepping quickly along the ledge and reaching out and holding the rock ahead of them. I saw how high these rock holds were and knew there was no way I could reach them. I could try to swing across and just hope I could hold on long enough to catch the ledge and get my balance, but I chocked. I could’ve took a deep breath and just trusted myself but I made the mistake of looking down at the rushing water swirling into the funnel-like bottom of the cave. The problem was, I had no choice, I couldn’t stay here alone. So, I moved forward with a little help.

A tall guide came back for me and stood in the icy water for me and let me use his knee for extra support in case I slipped as I walked along the ledge. I was grateful but embarrassed at how secure and close the cave floor actually was or at least the guide made it easy to stabilize his balance in. I heard earlier someone slipped and fell on this very rock face so I didn’t feel bad for being careful. I saw it as being a smart spelunker.


8/07

With Less than a year Left......

With less than a year left, I was at first both relieved and proud of myself. Then, I realize how comfortable I've become with my life in Siniloan and how close I've become with my neighbors. And I felt a little uneasy.

My States-side life on Friday nights went like so: walk to the gym from work for a 45 minute work out; call my friends on the way home to make sure our plans for the evening were set; run home eat, shower and change; and jet out the door for the bars only ten minutes from my front door for an evening that might not end until, well, it ends.

Now, I leave work when my co-workers go home or I get hungry and decide to cut our lingering by the covered basketball court or tricycles despite the children squeezing by us chika- chika short. I walk home, waving until my arm gets tired at students passing by on trikes and then nod and smile a lot and occasionally stopping to talk to groups of old men and women who congregate beneath awnings or tree-shaded front steps on plastic-molded chairs. I go for a run through the neighborhoods and out onto the highway, past the grain mill, past the rice fields, past the fouls and calfs still healthy and unscarred, graizing next to their mothers on the roadside. I wander back to my house to take a bucket shower, eat dinner and then wander over to my neighbors house to play Tongits (similiar to Gin Rummy), watch TV Dramas, run around the sala (living room) with the 5 (Dedette) and 7 year old (Ehlay) or just chika chika.

Sometimes, I wander over to my friend and co-workers house two blocks away. She is not always home but when she is, I always stay until we're both too tired to stay awake. She laughs easier and is always in a good mood. Her house seems the social nexus for students and young adults. There is a constant flow of children and neighbors visiting. They ask her for advice, she either gives it to them or finds a way to make them laugh off their worries. She is my favorite person and one of many people it will be hard for me to leave.

I really enjoy all the chats I have with my neighbors. We share books, our dreams, thoughts on religion, men, different cultures. Now, they even confide in me about their love lives. And I'm finding myself thinking about them and my other close friends at work long after I am by myself. I worry about them and feel attached as I do to my friends from home.

But I'll see my friends in the states again and I know that even if I worry about them they will probably be okay. I don't feel the same about my friends here in the Philippines. I will feel in a sense that if I leave I am abandoning them.

Maybe that sounds foolish. They are intelligent and competent people who will get by. that's part of the reason that I am friends with them. They didn't have access to the resources and support that I've been fortunate enough to have and yet they are successful, happy and confident people.

But people help each other here. If someone succeeds, it's expected that they will use their success anf financial stability to help their family. And my neighbors, my co-workers, my hosts families have become family to me. So, how can I continue to help them all in some way when I leave Siniloan in a year?

Where's the Art?!

6/07

I went to the Museum of the Filipino People. It was interesting but mostly swords and pottery retrieved from sunken ships near Cebu and Manila Bay. As a girl who grew up 30 minutes from NYC where art was always at my finger tips, I found my visit completely depressing. I wanted so much more for my students in Siniloan.

I went to the appropriate offices to get more information and was pointed to galleries where paintings and sculptures were for sale in malls in Makati and Quezon City. So, finding art in Manila has become one of my many personal missions while in the Philippines. I scour the newspapers weekly for information about Filipino artists. (Usually, they are traveling to Thailand and Singapore to exhibit their work in famous museums.)

Some of the volunteers think I’m nuts for complaining that there isn’t much public art available cheaply to the public that are bigger more pressing issues such as tackling economic and environmental issues. I agree but what buoys people when things are difficult? Who helps them remember to see beauty even when life seems void of it? Artists, musicians, dancers…. There aren’t any hard cover books with glossy 4-color photographs of paintings or sculptures in the library. (The library was a classroom until last month.) And there aren’t any shiny instruments tucked in cupboards of the music room. (Instruments are owned individually by students so their voices are the only instruments heard on the school grounds, and so many of my students are somehow pitch-perfect despite their lack of training.)

Okay, one more thing and I’ll get off my soap box. When I go to bookstores to the Filipino Literature section, there are plenty of wonderful books. But the anthologies are all the same literature of varying length of course by the same publisher. My students deserve to see how many accomplished modern Asian writers there are NOW and read work they can relate to not just folktales and essays written by people a century ago….(Not that I don’t appreciate the wonderful folktales and older written works, I’ve read them in English and greatly appreciate them.)

Anyway, my mom is collecting books and sending them to me in a bulk mail shipment, so if you feel so compelled, by all means send a handful of used books her way or with a Baltimore/DC contact (TBD) to collect books in Baltimore/DC.

YouTube Link from a Teacher Training

7/07

I didn’t go to the teacher training in Cebu for Tudlo/Mindanao teachers, but this is hysterical you’ve got to see this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM9feghIpvQ

Pumasok sa eskewelehan (School is opened)

6/17/07

Summer was a flurry of activity. The main events include two major workshops and one very sad memorial commemorating the passing of a dedicated fellow volunteer, a woman I truly admired. And now another school year lies before me like sweat trickling down my back on a humid, sunny morning, slowly and inevitably but with hope. Chalk caking the underside of my fingers, manila sheets of lecture notes, refusing to lie flat, flapping in the breeze of the fan and outdoors. The inevitable nausea and half hour snooze/collapse on my desk that follows my two hour classes due to only one working fan in a very hot tin-roofed classroom.

Summer was a flurry of activity. The main events include two major workshops and one very sad memorial commemorating the passing of a dedicated fellow volunteer, a woman I truly admired. And now another school year lies before me like sweat trickling down my back on a humid, sunny morning, slowly and inevitably but with hope. Chalk caking the underside of my fingers, manila sheets of lecture notes, refusing to lie flat, flapping in the breeze of the fan and outdoors. The inevitable nausea and half hour snooze/collapse on my desk that follows my two hour classes due to only one working fan in a very hot tin-roofed classroom.

Vigan City, Illocos Norde

5/07

My favorite spot in Vigan was the pottery factory. I loved the sweet smell of wet clay, soil and grass on that rainy day. The room was low-ceilinged and windowless. A blonde-tailed pony grazed behind the house beside a tall mound of red and brown broken bowls and handles. I sat beside the man whose hands moved up the walls of the clay pot until they were tall and running vertical with narrow rivets.

I miss that feeling of acting intuitively without saying a word and see your ideas transform into art. And even when it is finished, it feels like something that can't possibly have come out of you. Is that detachment, release or grace? I'm not sure.

Being there made me realize I need to start painting and sketching again. I keep wanting to try my hand at mixed media art. Now is the time to do it....I walk by the hardware store all the time with ideas. Feeling the tactile urge to fiddle with wire, paper, plastic and paint. It's time to act. My friend, Valerie is shaking her head right now at me, I'm sure of it.

Homecoming

4/27/07


I was away from site for a while and it feels good to be back in Siniloan, where life that still means peace, friendship and kindness. I saw my home town with fresh eyes.

Walking down the street where little kids bathe under pumps or water pipes, women swatting on low stools before wide silver bowls filled with laundry, their hands gloved in bubbles, their hands never still, always scrubbing, scrubbing the bacteria and sweat away.
Yet, their faces quietly alert to every passerby, never missing a chance to nod or smile at people with familiarity or curiosity.

The kids weaving around me on their bikes or running up to me to slap me five, screaming, “Moria, Moria! Kehmoosta Keh!” (They loved making fun of my nasally accent.) The kids hanging over the bridge with plastic, diamond-shaped kites with long white tails, the name of a local grocery store stretched out but still visible on one corner of the plastic tail.

I immediately received text messages from co-workers. “R u back na?” and “Don't run alone, ok?” They always worry about me. It's really sweet.

Siniloan is becoming comfortable to me. I enjoy spending time with my neighbors who are around my age. Their kids come over and run around my kitchen or sprawl on my floor and draw on loose leaf pages in blue and black ink. I just taught my neighbor's 6 year old how to play hangman. She is addict already. We usually only use 3 or 4 letter words, sometimes in English and sometimes Tagalog, but she usually figures out the word in time. Matallino siya talaga. (She's really smart.)

I'm reading a lot. Read “Notes from the Underground” finally. I'd been holding onto that tattered used book forever. Fascinating ideas. I read it twice, introduction and foreword by author and all. Uncannily true. That we thwart our own goodness and evil nature by will and inability to be completely committed to one lifestyle or the other. Doestoyevsky says that its the nature of man to be unable to commit to being completely bad or good due to too much self-consciousness and self-awareness. He acts as if self-awareness is bascially a pre-occupation with your own thoughts, selfishness. It can be. I can't figure out how he came to that theory exactly, when he found religion in jail or due to an interest in socialism.

Regardless, I totally agree that many people do exactly what he says. Their awareness of themselves ruins their chances at perfection. Or is their awareness an uncessary state of being and should they be more concerned with themselves in relation to others? Maybe what he's saying is that no matter how hard you try you can't reach perfection. Actually, I think that he wants us to not come to any conclusion but just observe this anti-hero without pity. What I wonder sometimes is this, do people think they can be better people by not being in contact with other human beings like monks and just sitting in silence all the time?

How do monks know they've succeeded if they've only mastered enlightenment within the monastery? How does a person know they are truly corrupt unless they've encountered the silence of a monastery? We don't live on individual islands for a reason and each person we meet is an opportunity for an exchange of ideas, thoughts, and a challenge. Maybe one that will break the very core of our constitution. And should. We can't be whole until we are broken. Removed of any precipis that is plastic only and does not represent or with stand challege and isn't true to what we truly believe.

Do I feel challenged here? Absolutely. But there will come a time when I will feel ready to leave. It's hard for me believe one more year will be enough. I feel like I have so much more to learn from my Filipino friends and work associates, yet.

A life unfinished but far from forgettable

Julia Campbell: out-spoken, a leader, a mentor and with so many more titles undoubtedly to add after her name.

After succeeding as a prize-winning journalist, a career in the international non-profit world was next on Julia's list. I didn't know her as well as others, but I regret that world has lost the influence of someone with such strength, courage, generosity and lightening speed wit.

When I think about whether I could possibly carry on anything I'd learned from her in any comparable way, I feel daunted. But optimism seemed a constant in Julia's tone of voice, so I'll try to find the semantics if not a tone on par...