I'm still alive!

Might as well blog. I know a lot of you have been emailing me asking me about things ranging from if I received your letters to if I'm still alive. Well, I'm still alive and all is well. I think it's safe to say that the affects of Parma and Ketsana have settled and the country is slowly building itself back up. In fact we have had some pretty pleasant weather here in Southern Leyte. I have been told that the snow has started to fall in Minnesota and while it's been hot as b@ll$ here, I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Christmas spirit is in full swing and it still strikes me as strange, even for my second time looking out on the sunlit landscape, palm trees blowing in the tropical breeze, that it's still so HOT and we are listening to "Jingle Bells". This December will be my second Christmas away from home. I'm certain my most memorable experience will be my dad visiting me from the 16th to the 28th! More on that another time. The most memorable thing that happened to me last year was a phone call from my friend Jess who was medically evacuated last November.
This brings me to another point I've been stewing over and wanted to share. Jess has now been readmitted to the Peace Corps, this time serving in Ukraine. The funny thing is, she is in the same batch as a friend from Augsburg who was in my German classes and roommate of a very close friend! And if the world were not small enough, they are in the same batch as my brother's friend's older brother! All that compounded with the fact that my friend from my Namibia program is now in the new batch of volunteers here in the Philippines leaves me truly admiring how small the world (and how incestuous the PC world) can be.
As far as projects go, I have finally finished setting up the computer lab to my liking; I finished this last month (mid-September) and have been focusing more on my library project. We now finally have all the donated books encoded into our online library system, which includes 607 books (and my Gramma promises that more are on the way!). Otherwise, I have been trying to come up with a way to help out the victims of Ketsana and Parma; living so far away from the site of the disasters and not being able to leave my site for more than a weekend makes it difficult to go off to Manila for a sustained cleanup effort, much like me and Brian's trip to Biloxi, Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. After doing some research, I found that there is a way to send money electronically directly to the Philippines National Red Cross (bypassing any sticky fingers along the way) and have been collecting spare change at the Municipality Government Hall and the High School. I am still in the process of collecting so I don't have any figures, but the boxes are getting pretty heavy!
The country director of Peace Corps Philippines, as well as my regional manager came to visit me at my site. It was an honor to host them in my humble little town and show them around the school, orienting them about my projects. They were very pleased with my progress and creativity with my projects as well as the glowing report the principle, Ma'am Rachel, gave them. The country director even asked me, towards my close of service, to help rewrite training material for future incoming batches to incorporate ICT content and include strategies for incoming trainees with no teaching experience. I was quite honored.
Some other things on the horizon, I am just finishing teaching a unit of computer troubleshooting and I couldn't be more proud of my students in TLE IV. While they still struggle to express themselves in English, their English comprehension is something of which the English department here can be very proud. They have the best comprehension I have seen here at the high school. I am thrilled I get to work with them for the entirety of the next semester (the new semester begins Nov. 3 after All Souls' Day) teaching them web design. There is still a whole semester left and I am beginning to miss them already! Jane, is this normal?
Come December 7th-11th, my batch (or what's left of it) will all meet up in Manila for our Mid-Service Training (MST). The reason I say what's left of it is because a slew of close friends have been leaving for various reasons including my good friends Jasmine, Loren, Jeff, Cassie and some close calls that have (at this point) decided to stay. Of the original 69 people in my batch, there are 53 left I think, mostly people from my training group in Dumaguete.
I'm super excited about my dad coming; it will be a litmus test to see what changes I have undergone as he will be the person with a base of comparison I will have seen in over 16 months. I am thinking we will visit Bohol, Cebu city, Dumaguete and parts of Leyte. This will be his first venture into the developing world and I couldn't be more flattered that he is coming; often times, the intimidation of going to a developing country outweighs the reasons for going (recall my blog posts of the dinosaur spiders, typhoid, typhoons, earthquakes, etc.). Anyway, as I told him, I'm still alive so it can't be that bad, right?
I'm not homesick anymore. Of course I miss people and I have some MAD food cravings, but the Philippines has truly become my home and it's where I feel like I belong. This feeling is compounded by the fact that I am still a resident of California, my dad has recently moved to Arizona and my friends are spreading to Wisconsin, Virginia and as far as Oxford, England to study (yeah, Brian for a Rhodes Scholarship, and I know him!). Actually I am feeling kind of...I really don't know the word. I was looking at a picture from graduation with a friend here. The picture is of me, Brian, Aaron and Jay. As I pointed across the photo, I found myself saying, "Brian got a Rhodes scholarship, Aaron is in law school, and Jay is running for congress in Wisconsin. And I'm in Peace Corps," still waiting to start my real life I suppose. But that's fine. Fine indeed.
K, bye!

Fecal Analysis, Book Donations II and Reading List

[Plot Spoiler: my first story in this post is about poop]

Hey there, hi there, ho there! It certainly has been a while. I am well though I had a bit of a scare earlier this week. I had convinced myself that I had intestinal parasites (having experienced 4 or so symptoms we were warned about during training). Psychosomatic or not, I was concerned, so I received the blessing of the Peace Corps Medical Officer and went in to the local medical clinic for a poop test.

Having entered into the medical clinic, I was led around to a building on top of the hill behind the clinic where a physician instructed me to "move my bowels" and collect a sample with a folded piece of construction paper and place that into a small glass vial, which I am certain had assorted uses preceding my own. Okay, so this was fine, I even had some in the bank, so to speak, as to not suffer a shy colon at this moment of truth. But when I stepped into the appointed comfort room (CR) some of my involuntary muscles clenched! The CR was lightless, had a soaked toilet bowl rim with no seat, no toilet paper and no running water although there was a bucket with a plastic ladle.

I guess sometimes you gotta just roll up your sleeves, avail of the construction paper pooper scooper and pray you don't get your shorts soaked by the ladle.

After the deed was done, I was again led all over the campus to deliver the specimen, which my host brother, who was with me and wanting to do me a favor, insisted on carrying the vial for me to relieve me of added stress. Waiting about 40 minutes outside of the clinic, my host brother and I watched a chicken pecking across the parking area and joked about being hungry, stoning it and eating it raw (see why I was concerned about parasites!?). The clinician came back out and looked nervous, which startled me. I greeted her in Visaya (at which point she looked very relieved, most provincial clinicians do not speak very good English) and told me the results were negative and that I owed 30 pesos ($0.60) to the front counter for the test. She also instructed me to get a followup test the next day.

Anyway, I decided to forgo the followup test since we have mandatory testing in December when my volunteer batch will all meet in Manila for our mid-service training.

--->

In COMPLETELY different news, my school has yet again received two boxes of books, this time from my Gram and her local Optimists Club. At this point, donors have sent my humble school over 500 books, well over doubling our library's collection!

My latest project has been working with the fourth year to catalog all of the donated books into a digital database, a first in my school's history! But how to go about this? Keeping the database on a local computer would be great, but what about data corruption and/or hardware failure? We needed a cloud-based (which is to say internet-based) solution. I happen to follow a couple volunteers in South Africa on Twitter, @stevegerner and @fizzyh2o, who recommended that we use a service from librarything.com. The two of them are currently engrossed in a project building libraries in South Africa and have a webpage explaining that project, which I encourage all my readers to check out; you can find a link to a Peace Corps hosted website detailing their project here.

So as I said, the fourth year has been hard at work encoding ISBNs and other information into our cloud-based database and at the time of this writing, we have 256 entries! If you are interested (and this is certainly a benefit of having a cloud-based solution), you can visit our virtual library to see what kinds of books our donors have been sending here.
But there was just one problem I hadn't anticipated using the online database! The free account only allows for 200 books to be encoded; a lifetime membership costs roughly 950 pesos ($19), a whopping sum where people live on about 50 pesos a day, all for an intangible investment in a rejuvenated library. Where would the money come from? The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to ask the school to pay for it; "ownership" is a bigtime buzz word in development and in the Peace Corps. This is a very nontechnical definition but ownership refers to an investment made by the target community to acquire resources. It is one thing to donate and provide goods and services for free (me volunteering my time here and the donors sending us books) but the community has not made an "investment" in making those free goods and services sustainable. By having my agency invest money into this project they are now stakeholders in the project and have a vested interest in its success and perpetuation.
I spent the better part of an afternoon drafting a proposal to submit to my principle, doing a cost/benefit analysis and practically begging that the school invest in this component of the project. The next day, the principle came in to see how we were doing and, before I could pitch my proposal, my counterpart, Sir Erwin, asked Ma'am Rachel to fund our membership. She looked around for a moment and approved of it in a matter of seconds! Working with Ma'am Rachel is a volunteer's dream come true! We now are the proud owners of a lifetime membership to librarything.com with an unlimited resource for encoding our books for the future growth of the library.
As I said, the fourth year was able to encode 256 books in a matter of two hours, during which time we had a brown out losing power and therefor access to librarything.com. But the power came back and the students finished for the day by taking some R&R and spending some quality time with that which they had worked so hard to enter into the database. Honestly, one can spend hours coordinating donations, hours researching viable and sustainable resources to compliment the project and hours having students enter book information into the database, but really, this is what it's all about (the student facing the camera is the principle's daughter):

More pictures are available here on my Picasa web albums page.
--->
Speaking of books, I wanted to include my own reading list:

1. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail -Hunter S. Thompson
2. Side Effects - Woody Allen
3. The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
4. Freakanomics - Levitt and Dubner
5. The Nasty Bits - Anthony Bourdain
6. A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah
7. The World According to Garp - John Irving
8. Hot, Flat and Crowded - Thomas Friedman
9. Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs - Chuck Klosterman
10. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -Hunter S. Thompson
11. Sarah Palin: how a hockey mom turned the political establishment upside down - Kaylene Johnson (don't ask)
12. Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama
13. Complete Idiot's Guide to Judaism - Rabbi Benjamin Blech
14. Pnin - Vladamir Nabakov
15. Dreams from my Father-Barack Obama
16. The Watchmen - Allen Moore
17. In Our Image: Americas empire in the Philippines - Stanley Karnow
18. Salt: A World History - Mark Kurlansky
19. Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
20. Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
21. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
22. I am America and So Can You - Stephen Colbert
23. The Next 100 Years - George Friedman
24. Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
25. Island - Aldous Huxley
26. The Rum Diary - Hunter S. Thompson
27. Over the Edge of the World: Biography of Magellan - Laurence Bergreen
28. Hell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson
29. 1968 - Mark Kurlansky
    

Book Donation Turnover

Last Sunday, June 28th, there was a Parent, Teacher, Community Association (PTCA) meeting to address quite a few topics pertaining to the beginning of school. One such topic was the official turnover of the books donated by my grandmother and members of her community.

As per Philippine tradition, when something is donated, there is an official ceremony wherein the donor symbolically turns over that which is being donated to the recipient. Because my Gram and the other participants could not be present, I stood in for them, passing on ownership of the books to the school before the entire PCTA.

The most haunting fear of doing development work is in the form of a question and is two-fold: is what I am doing sustainable and will this actually make a difference?

This morning I received a text from the head of the English department, Ma'am Alming Montonez, that said the following:

"Am now using your books; the activity is 'Response to Literature' for all 4th year. They will stay in the library every Friday the entire 1st quarter."

That simple text validates the efforts I have put into the project as well as those put in by my Gram and her community members. Being a long-term volunteer has its ups and downs and small acknowledgments like that text message really put me on a cloud like nothing else I have ever experienced.

Ma'am Rachel Cuevas Introducing Me

Me Addressing the PCTA on Behalf of my Gram and her Community

The Blog, Guitar, Thailand, Library Project and Post-Colonial Identity

This blog isn't going to write itself. It's been a while, about two weeks I suppose. There is a lot I would like to share, some news, some things I've been up to, a project I am just finishing and then some reflections for good measure. This is going to be a marathon of a blog post.
First of all, I wanted to thank everyone for their kind words on my last blog. I got some really excellent feedback and many compliments and it was so flattering; the positive responses made following up the bike trip a bit intimidating.
Last week there was a poisonous snake in the office. Now the office smells like nokost, or squid. You can never tell what surprises lie waiting in the office every morning after the national anthem.
I have been collecting some statistics on my blog readers (no personal information, just location of access, etc) and wanted to share some of my statistics with all of you! I use Google's free service, Analytics. Basically, I installed a little invisible application inside my web page that collects the anonymous data and sends it back to a easy-to-use portal for me to look at. So, here's looking at you! Since I installed the app, I have had 300 hits, 168 unique visitors from twelve different countries, including readers in Saudi Arabia, Australia, Northern Mariana Islands, China, Singapore, Senegal and France. From the U.S., I have readers from 26 states! I get the most hits from California from 18 different cities from throughout the state.
I am beginning to realize I have a lot of readers whom I do not know. I would like to sincerely thank everyone of them for reading my blog. Aside from The Echo, this is the first time I have had a public voice and, to tell the truth, it's quite addictive.
I also have been playing a lot of guitar here. I bought a guitar during training and named it Temba, meaning hope in Zulu, the name given to me by my first homestay family in Johannesburg, South Africa. Here is a video of a song I have been working on, on and off, for a few months, since September.

So that's my guitar. It was 3000 pesos, about $60, and is the cheapest friend I have ever bought. I bring it to school every once in a while. Here is a video of me and my co-teacher, Sir Erwin, rocking out to Freddie Aguilar's "Anak." The song is in Tagalog so I have no idea what the words mean, but it's a good time. It was recorded by my fourth year web design class.

I also have some pretty thrilling news; I just bought tickets for Thailand! I will be going with about seven other friends in April after our In-Service Training for 10 days. We scored round-trip tickets from Manila to Bangkok for $140. Why not go? Anyway, look forward to that blog post come April.
Just to prove that I actually do work out here, here is a project I have been working on for the past 2 weeks or so. A couple days after Christmas and then that following Saturday, a handful of students volunteered their time to collect information from 368 titles from our library, almost all of the books in our possession. Here is the report for those who are interested. I designed to to submit to potential book donors so they can see what needs to address with their donations.

The following details the titles of books currently held by the San Juan National High School (SJNHS) library, San Juan, Southern Leyte. The statistics were gathered by student volunteers of the fourth year on two separate occasions: December 28^th and January 10^th. Under the supervision of Ma’am Alma Montañez, head of the English department, and Sean Stanhill, U.S. Peace Corps volunteer, a rotation of fourth year students sacrificed a holiday and Saturday to collect the following information from books in the library. The data is not all-inclusive and is meant to serve as a survey, though should be considered close to accurate as nearly all books were inspected (we collected data from 368 titles). The numbers also do not reflect the true quantity of books in our possession; each unit in the following measurements represents one title, not one physical book. For example, volumes included in an Encyclopedia set, 24 in total for example, are counted as one unit, not 24.

The following graphs, “Titles of Books by Year,” in which the quantity of titles are organized to show a trend in the recency of our titles, “Number of Titles in Three Genres,” in which the library catalogue is artificially divided into three genres, fiction, non-fiction and textbook, “Titles by Country of Publication,” in which texts are categorized by place of publication, and “Quantity of Titles Issued by Philippines Government,” in which the titles are categorized as either being issued by the Philippines government or not, should provide reasonable insights into what titles are available to students here at SJNHS.

“Titles of Books by Year”

Upon inspection, titles from 1997 through 2005 represent the largest chunk of our library’s collection. There are a few legacy titles from the 1950’s on, yet we were surprised to find that our collection, on the whole, was quite modern, having been published within the last 20 years or so. Looking at publication dates gives us a great idea as to how updated the information available to students is and whether the information accessible to them keeps them competitive as far as contemporary ideas and theories are concerned.

“Number of Titles in Three Genres”

In order to get a rough idea of what kinds of titles are available to our students, the student volunteers were told to categorize the titles into three general categories or genres: fiction, non-fiction and text. As hypothesized, textbooks made up the vast majority while fiction represented the minority. SJNHS, at the time of this report finding, is working with partners in the U.S. to sponsor a book-drive, which will ideally supplement the fiction available to students. With more fiction available, students will be able to browse for pleasure reading and teachers will be able to implement fiction reading in the classroom, providing each student with his/her own book. Creating a culture of reading is central to school programs outside of the classroom as well. November is English Month and to facilitate programs such as “sustaining the Love of Reading,” last year’s English Month theme, the school must have a ready supply of fiction. At 10%, fiction only represents 37 tiles (with non-fiction representing 89 titles and text 242).

“Titles by Country of Publication”

USA – 65%

Philippines – 25%

Singapore – 3%

Unknown – 3%

United Kingdom – 2%

Canada – 1%

Hong Kong – 1%

Australia, India, Italy, Spain, Venezuela – less than 1%

The breakdown of country of publication indicates a large quantity of titles as imported, donated or otherwise somehow obtained from the United States. Only one quarter of the titles were published here in the Philippines with a smattering of titles from Singapore, the United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong and elsewhere. While many of the titles published in the Philippines, much of those titles were published by Western publishers, such as Prentice-Hall, Inc. and McGraw-Hill and Companies, Inc., under the auspices of places like Metro Manila and Quezon City.

“Quantity of Titles Issued By the Government of the Philippines”

In DepEd’s commitment to provide “education for all,” the government of the Philippines has provided students and teachers with government issued textbooks. Many of the standardized textbooks used by students are issued by the government under Secondary Education Development Improvement Project (SEDIP) loan agreements. This chart represents a generalization in that upon compiling this report, aspects of each title were considered, including author name, title, publisher and place of publication, and used to designate a title as being more than likely to have been issued by the Philippines Government. While 28% may seem low, the library serves as a book depository, housing extras that were not issued to students. This number only represents books in the library, not those that have already been issued to students. Another factor that must be considered is that, again, these data only represents titles and not quantity of books. If individual books were to be considered in this report, they would by far outnumber non-government issued titles by sheer quantity of duplicates.

Phew! So there is the report. See, I do actually do work here. I actually just finished guest-teaching an economics class on the credit crises. It was really cool and I think some of the kids are really getting it!
So now a few words on post-colonial identity. Post-colonial identity is by far the most interesting topic I encountered during my history studies. In essence, it addresses how peoples of previously colonized countries build their own narrative, often times diverging from that of the colonizer. The Philippines is a really special place for the very reason that it is still constructing its own narrative from Spanish and American colonial periods; the Philippines has influences from America and Spain for sure, but also China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Arabia and India. Their influences are exemplified in the language, for example, "hey older brother, put your umbrella on the table" is "Hey kuya, butang imong payon sa taas sa ang la mesa." This sentence contains borrowed words from English, Spanish, Chinese and Ancient Austronesian (Malay). Philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, say that language is the means by which we interpret our reality. In what ways does the potpourri of language here define the reality of Filipinos? Obviously they do not think about metalinguistics when they are telling their brother to put the umbrella on the table, this is just something I have been thinking about.
But aside from language, after almost 400 years of being a colony, Filipinos, just like any other budding nationality, musk ask themselves, who are we really? Many Filipinos I have spoken with refer to their "colonial mentality," that which values imported goods from America as inherently better than anything produced domestically. As an example, they will buy second hand American clothes before they ever buy anything new domestically. The great irony of course is that it all comes from China and Vietnam anyway.
It would be unfair for me to reflect on answering that question, who are Filipinos really, as it is not a question for a person of the imperialist nationality to ask, so I will reflect on America's "colonial mentality." Remember that the States were a colony of Britain?
Hypothetically, if I were to ask you, an American, if you would prefer Hershey's or Godiva, which would you pick? Or what if I asked you, would you like Hershey's or this chocolate, it comes from Europe, which would be your pleasure? Like my leather shoes? Their Italian, my clock? Swiss. I always set my watch to GMT, (Greenwich Mean Time). My point is, if it's European in origin or standard, Americans tend to think it's inherently better than anything we have ourselves. Many Americans are of European stock and consider the products of the "Old World" more sophisticated. Europe is the symbol of high culture, class, art, sophistication. This, I am certain, is what drives our own colonial mentality.
Americans also, generally speaking, have a very violent bent to them. This is where post-colonial identity comes into play. The U.S. has been involved in wars in seemingly every decade since the Civil War. But was is the means by which we were founded, right? The United States is the only former British colony, to my knowledge, that staged an all-out violent revolution against our oppressor and won by those means. Places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand were all forced into independence; they still have pictures of the queen on their money and their government supposedly reports directly to the British monarchy (they are not federal governments). Melissa, the Australian volunteer, told me that Australia had a chance back in the 70's to vote for a federal government and to cut ties with the U.K. and the voting measure failed! Why does the idea of monarchy bother so many Americans? We fought against it; we are unique in that way. India sought her own independence as well, but not by the same violent means as the U.S. Consider their national independence hero, Gandhi. Ours? Revolutionary war heroes.
Ever since our genesis, America has solved its problems through violence and it should come as no surprise that we are in the midst of two wars being fought concurrently. This is a living narrative based on our post-colonial identity.
We value that which we fought violently for against European powers but are still Europhiles when it comes to goods: the interplay between colonial mentality and post-colonial identity. It is a very complicated subject but it is important to realize that developing countries are not the only countries having to deal with self-determination and constructing their own narrative, the U.S. just had a head start. It also does not mean that The U.S. narrative is inherently better, it just suits the cultural needs of its people. Every nationality tells its own story, its own narrative. Listening intently and openly reveals the beauty, the uniqueness and the delicacy of culture, narrative and post-colonial identity.
Friends, that concludes this blog post. Thanks for getting through it and I really hope this last section made at least some sense. It's important to question our own heritage, just as it's important to delve into understanding of other peoples and places we visit. For as much as I am learning about Filipinos and the Philippines, I am learning equally as much about my own heritage, cultural narrative and nationality.
Peace.
*Update*: I have been prompted by a professor I greatly respect and admire for his honesty concerning my writing to give due consideration and clarification to some of the content above. When I implied that the U.S. had the only violent revolution, I certainly am not forgetting the Sepoy Rebellion of India nor the bloody struggle for independence of most if not all Latin American countries, our neighbors to the south whom we inspired and aided in independence along the way (although that is absolutely contestable). My point was simply a generalization that, of all of the specifically British colonies, the U.S. was the only one to successfully obtain independence solely through militaristic means and declared warfare. That is simply my overarching point yet I am glad to be corrected if I am wrong.
Secondly, he pointed out the irony of a meta-colonial power, of sorts. Again, to my knowledge, we are the only former colony that has evolved into an imperial power in and of itself. The irony and historical implications of this truth are things I feel entirely inadequate to speculate upon.
Speaking of identity, I am currently reading the book In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines and there is a passage I have just read that I would love to share; the author, Stanely Karnow is comparing the war in the Philippines, having ended in 1902, to Vietnam 70 years later. This is why I stated above that Filipinos are now charged to ask the question, "who are we really?" Karnow writes, "The Filipinos lacked a recorded history and common identity. Their chain of islands had been a geographical accident rather than a society before the arrival of the Spanish, who had deliberatly perpetuated the disunity of the archipelago to maintain their rule" (pg. 185, publish date 1990).