Dad Visits the Philippines

For the picture gallery of the trip, click here!
Months of waiting and my dad finally arrived; two short weeks and he is now back in Phoenix. Needless to say we had a very fun, meaningful time together, traveling throughout the central Visayas.
He arrived in Tacloban where he met me on a very raining morning at 7:10. After getting the baggage sorted out, we jumped onto a jeepney and realized we were, in fact, sitting next to each other for the first time in 17 months.
We met up with a friend for a day in the city, seeing Imelda Marcos' infamous Santo Nino Shrine wherein she kept the Marcos' many gifts from Asia and beyond, including this very fancy chair made of 100% silver than our tour guide encouraged dad to sit in. The museum also includes collections of ivory given by Mao Zedong, tiled Gucci leather walls imported from Italy, Austrian crystal chandeliers, a fountain made of local corals and a chair used by the Pope. Unfortunately, her legendary shoe collection is kept in Manila.
After the museum, we went for a pretty fancy Italian dinner, the likes of which are quite uncommon for Peace Corps volunteers, and we gorged ourselves on fine pastas and delicious wine.
After our Tacloban excursion, we headed down to San Juan to join the teachers in celebrating their Christmas party and to partake in a celebration of our own:
Interesting side story, dad had taken so many photos since I had last recharged the camera that the battery had been dead all day. After lighting the candles for the last evening of Hanukkah, I tried turning the camera back on, hoping we could capture this moment. The camera turned on, took one photo and then died again. This, my friends and family, was our own little Hanukkah miracle in the Philippines. Please appreciate how the last picture was of our Hanukkah celebration and the next is of the Pig roast we dove into that same week.
The Christmas party provided a few firsts for dad: his first time meeting my counterpart, Sir Erwin, my supervisor, Ma'am Rachel and my old friend, Mr. Lechon (roast pig)!
After leaving my site the day after the Christmas party, we embarked on a 16 hour excursion through Cebu City to Dumaguete so Dad could meet my tita, my host-auntie who took such great care of me throughout my pre-service training. Dad was enchanted with Dumaguete. On our way back to my site, we stopped for a night in Cebu City so dad could get a truly "urban" experience.
We spent Christmas eve with my host family, joining them for the midnight mass and returning home for the noche buena, or meal at midnight. Waking on Christmas, we immediately started eating and didn't really finish until we passed out later in the night. The one break from feasting and drinking we had was going to the celebratory Christmas day cock fights. Dad said he had more fun watching the people than the actual fights.
For the sake of relevance, as this is my blog and not my father's, I will spare the rest of the itinerary and details.
It meant the world to me that dad came all the way to the Philippines to see me, my family and my projects. I cannot express the pride and validation I felt when I gave him a tour of the school and the computer lab especially. Dad and I have never needed a preoccupation to spend time together. We have become adept at both deep and shallow conversation with nothing but time on our hands; I believe it has to do with the hours upon hours we have spent in the car together during road trips.
I can't express my gratitude to the time, money and sheer willpower this trip required; it single-handedly legitimated my efforts here and made me feel as though I had not been living in a vacuum for the last 17 months.

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!