Invitation for Dinner

This evening I had one of those pure "Peace Corps moments" wherein I was invited to dinner by a parent of a student. Today is the student's birthday and I was invited to come for dinner.
This may not sound like a big deal, but I had dreamed of being invited for dinner at the house of a student since I read River Town by Peter Hessler, the account of a PC volunteer in China whom, after about one year at site, was invited to social gatherings at the residences of his students. To me, being invited to have dinner with the family of a student is the ultimate in acceptance, in gratitude. Having dinner with that family meant more to me than any number of thank you's I could receive from any number of people. I am in, I am integrated and I am appreciated. Indeed, tonight was truly a "Peace Corps moment".
An added bonus was that the birthday celebrant is one of my best students and I had a blast telling his mother how impressed I am with his performance and how much work and effort he puts into his projects. I got to be a proud teacher!

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.

Father and Son

My dad is leaving for the Phoenix Skyharbor airport in less than 12 hours. He will fly to Honolulu and catch a connecting flight to Manila, stay the evening in Manila and catch another flight to Tacloban, where I will be waiting.

Indeed, the endless months of anticipation have finally come down to the last two days. Tomorrow morning, I will head to Tacloban, stay the night, and wait for my dad at the airport early the next morning.

I cannot convey the excitement I am feeling. He will be here a little under two weeks, during which time we will visit my host family in Dumaguete (my first time back since training), Cebu City and make it back to San Juan in time for Christmas Eve with my family here. It's going to be a bit hectic, but the hours of transportation will give us a chance to do what we love best: yakking it up while heading down the open road (or ferry route as the case may be).

Aside from the general enthusiasm I feel about seeing my dad again, I am looking forward to his visit regarding two aspects in particular.

This trip will be his first to a developing country. This experience will be his first encountering absolute poverty, seeing some things that seem outlandish and exotic and, if I can get him drunk, his first time to eat balut (boiled duck fetus).

Secondly, he is the standard by which my growth and changes will be measured. After the last 16 months or so, I am certain I have changed, developed and grown in ways I cannot imagine, of which I have lost track. I am excited to see what shocks or surprises him that I see as being completely normative. To what have I become jaded? I will learn from my dad's reactions.

I may not update the blog for a while as he and I will be on the road, but I promise there will be pictures.

P.S. Dear mishpuka, I promise he will return in one piece.

Hanukkah in the Philippines, take 2

Tonight marks the first night of Hanukkah and, like last year, I have chosen to celebrate privately in my room. Thanks to Grandma Pickle for the menorah and candles that were meant to arrive just in time last year but wound up arriving in plenty of time this year!

L'chaim!

I added some other goodies sent by the moms (the Chieftains and stocking) and a snowman from Malena, to complete the holiday mood.

Update: I spent the evening watching the candles burn down and texting the other Jewish volunteers. Most of them forgot but we had a shared communal moment through SMS.

A Day at the Beach with the 4th Year

Saturday, November 28, I joined my fourth year and Sir Erwin on a beach outing. We went to our favorite spot (and the only sandy spot for many kilometers), PNOC, referred to as "penok" but stands for Philippine National Oil Corporation, who owns the lot.

The decision to go to the beach that Saturday afternoon was made at about 5:00 p.m. the evening before and I didn't know it was happening until about an hour before, when I received a text from my counterpart, Sir Erwin. This is usually how I find out about things and I have learned to be quite flexible.

Anyway, I took some transport out and met the students and sir Erwin already preparing BBQ fish, caught fresh that morning, and other delectables: kinilaw papaya, dugo sa baboy (congealed and BBQ'd pigs blood), pancit and butong salad.

We stayed out until about 5:30 when the sun started to go down. We had a blast: eating, playing games, building sand volcanoes (see below), having a chika, singing, eating.

To see more pictures from that day, please check out my picasa web album.

Birthday ni Sean

I spent my 24th birthday in the Philippines. My birthday was a reminded how valued I am here in the community. Friday evening at 5 o'clock, when schools got out, all of the students sang me happy birthday as members of the citizens army training (CAT) program brought me flowers one-by-one. All the way home, students called out to me "happy birthday in advance Sir Sean!" Even as I went out that night on a walk, all the students I saw wished me a happy birthday in advance.
Later Friday night, I went to a small karaoke house called Pajog ni Bebe, or Bebe's hut, with Sir Erwin, Sir Villbon and Sir Roy where we were entertained by live music. After the musicians performed, we had our own chance to play the instruments as the musicians sat back and had a few beers cheering us on. This was the first time I had an opportunity to play the bass since training in Dumaguete, over a year! But I think playing in instrument is like a bicycle, it's easy to get back on and ride.
I woke up Saturday morning, my actual birthday, to my host mom busily preparing all my favorites for lunch: fried chicken, chicken curry, spaghetti in coconut milk with tuna, lichon, fresh apples, mangoes and grapes and of course, her famous chiffon cake with homemade butter-icing. My family here really loves me and my host mom and started calling me son as I have been calling her nanay, or mom. She calls me her menopausal baby :)

Anyway, we sat down for a long lunch and photo-op at about 11a.m.

Please check my Picasa web albums for pictures of the event at home.
All in all it was a very memorable birthday and an event that made me feel at home here more than ever.

Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao

This is the first piece of sports writing I have ever done (and probably ever will do).

People in the United States may not be familiar with Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao, but he is a household name here in the Philippines and a national hero. Today he rewrote boxing history by becoming the first person ever to win seven world titles. He is the welterweight champion, hailing from General Santos, Mindanao, Philippines.

A lot of my friends and family back home might find this surprising, but I have become a casual boxing (as well as ultimate fighting) fan since arriving in the Philippines and I spent today, Sunday, watching Pacquiao's latest match against Puerto Rico's Miguel Cotto.

But the truly remarkable thing about Pacquiao's fights is not what happens inside the ring, but outside and on the streets.

I have been told repeatedly by many different people that when Pacquiao fights, the streets of Manila, a city of almost 1.6 million, are empty and the crime rate drops to zero, according to the Philippines National Police. I can certainly attest to the affect Pacquiao's fights have on my little town: the streets were almost completely empty, accepting children playing games outside, many of them pretending to punch each other. I had decided to go for a little walk just to get out of the house and wait for a couple rounds to advance. It was incredible to walk down a stretch of a few blocks and hear the same TV station tuned in, the sound leaking through the windows and to the street. I could literally walk the entire town and stay updated on the fight. Talk about surround sound. And no matter where I was in town, I could here periodic eruptions of cheers emanating from the auditorium where people where gathered to watch the match as it was meant to be seen, as a crowd.

To many Filipinos, watching Pacquiao is a patriotic obligation and watching him win verges on the spiritual. The best part of the experience is that there are two celebrations when he wins. His fights have most recently been taking place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and the satellite feed is typically a couple hours late here. All those in attendance in Vegas and watching live on HBO, many times overseas foreign workers (OFW's), or Filipinos working abroad, and expat Filipino-Americans text the verdict back here. Many here celebrate before the match even begins here over the satellite feed and again when he wins on the international rebroadcast.

One of the more humorous aspects of this match was the surname of Cotto. Here, in the Visayan dialect, cotto means lice and coincidentally, Pacquiao does commercials here for Head and Shoulders. We all got a good laugh when posed the question by a co-teacher, "How can Pacquiao expect to win against lice only using Head and Shoulders?"

Things Fall Apart - Sayang

So I am trying to crack a dilemma I am currently facing. We have recently done an inventory of our equipment here in the ICT lab and have come up with, among other things, nine dead hard drives. Herein lies the crux of teaching ICT in the developing world: while working technology is a boon for the quality of education, when the parts wither on the vine, so to speak, we are left with nothing but plastics, heavy metals, mercury, lead and silicon, none of which can easily be easily recycled. As these parts gather in landfills, the poisons seep into the ground water and the plastics take an eternity to decompose. At what environmental cost can we price the value of computer-assisted education? We have roughly six dead motherboards, two dead sticks of RAM, said nine hard drives and four dead monitors, all sitting i the lab, waiting for God knows what.
If we were in Minnesota, we could simply bring these parts to the Stillwater prison facility to be recycled by the inmates there. However, we live 10 hours away from the nearest place that could potentially recycle these parts: Cebu City. And I'm not even sure that they have a facility.
I've been thinking about this problem a lot; if we could find a way to recycle, or even downcycle, these parts, computer-assisted education wouldn't put such a heavy toll on the environment and I could sleep a lot better at night. I thought to crowd-source and ask the readership of my blog if they have any ideas for projects or ways to solve this problem. I have readers in 65 countries with almost 2,000 absolutely unique visitors since last January (according to Google Analytics). The web is a powerful tool, no doubt and I hope some of my readers can offer some advice and/or links.
I was thinking that a recycling project, turning these parts into something else, could be a great way to rid our lab of the parts as well as create a small income-generation project for the students involved. Some feasible ideas I have stumbled across thus far:

1. Hard Drive Platter Windchimes - wingie.org
   
2. Hard Drive Magnetic Art Projects (thanks @unteer)
   
3. RAM Stick Keychains - instructables.com
   

If any of you, dear readers, find any other ways to either recycle or downcycle our dead computer components, please pass them on as links in the comments section below (so others can find your contribution in subsequent Google searches on the topic).
Thanks!

-Picture taken from www.hackmod.com

The Barber of Santa Cruz

I went to get my monthly haircut today, at the same place, by the same person. The only difference was that there were two other guys in the salon and I'm usually the only one in there. As the barber began prepping his clippers, comb and razor blade (yes, they use a razor blade to trim the edges and it's awesome!), the two guys came over and just stared at my head. Before this would have just made me uncomfortable or angry but it's all part of the package deal here. Anyway, as the barber started clipping my hair, the two guys just stood in amazement, slack-jawed, staring at my falling hair. I can't even begin to guess at what was going through their heads, if anything at all, but there they were. The barber, totally unfazed by my being there because I'm a regular, told them to have a seat. They backed away slowly, mesmerized by the back of my head. As the barber finished up, the one sitting nearest to me started pointing out spots the barber had missed and the barber graciously went back over those spots. I then paid my 50 pesos (about $1) and left.

I learned today that a haircut can be a communal effort and that I have grown more at ease living the absurdity that is "the fish bowl." In a bizarre way, I think I may miss all the attention when I get back home and become just another white dude.

Exotic Shells, a Test, the Office and a Halloween Surprise

I'm going to chase this feeling. Tonight we had some pretty exotic (and fun) food. I can only assume what you must be thinking. After reports of eating duck fetus, pig brain, chicken feet and cow blood soup, this must pretty out there, right? Well, it's not exotic in that sense; what we had tonight is called kinhason in the local dialect. I'm going to let the picture speak for itself. Please excuse the quality and orientation as the pics were take with my phone; I would get such a scolding from my web design professor from sophomore year.
Before I get ahead of myself, I walked home from school today to find a huge container of these things swimming around and crawling all over each other. I told my host mom that they looked like aliens but I was anxious try them. My standards for "fresh seafood" have risen substantially since I have been here.
If you look closely, there is indeed a safety pin to get the delicious inside out. It's a giant shellfish with tiger-ish looking stripes. These things were seriously HUGE, some the size of my fist, and we had to fish them out with the safety pin. I turned out to be quite adept at jiggering them out. Once removed from the shell, a lumpy piece of flesh, trailed by some sticky intestines which slurped out, you get the morsel as seen in the top picture.
One must carefully remove the intestines because, as my host mom put it, they are walay lami or not tasty. I tend to trust her 100% when it comes to these things so I made a little intestine pile at the side of my plate. As I have formerly described, Filipinos by and large will never let any part of the animal go to waste, so having a moment like tonight, when my mom warned me not to eat the entrails, reminded me of that Farside cartoon with the native american holding up a nondescript piece of buffalo saying something

to the tune of " we use all parts of the buffalo except this." When nanay says not to eat something, it is heeded, no questions asked.
The insides were delectable. It tasted like clams but 100 times richer and very tender. The entire time I was eating I was trying to imagine how they would taste in the San Francisco clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl, which made me a little homesick for a second, but it was hard to stay that may, my mouth, nostrils and mind trying to wrap around this crazy-tasty food! To the right is a picture of my brother Johny going crazy with the kinhason. He asked me what we call them in English, to which I replied "sea monsters." He just laughed and that's when I snapped the photo.
My host mom said these become available about twice a year and this is the first I have seen them. I'm excited for a repeat performance. But now that she knows I like them, I'm sure she will keep a watch for them. She's so awesome when it comes to making things I like and keeping an eye out for them at the markets.
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In other news today, I gave my first big test, a unit test on computer troubleshooting. All in all I am very pleased withe the outcomes as the class average score was 77.15% for the whole unit, passing! It's an indication I am actually doing my job correctly. I have learned that tests are not only an assessment of the students' comprehension and attained knowledge, but also of the teacher's abilities to pass on that knowledge. So I am giving myself that grade as a teacher; in other words, I get 77% on my ability as a teacher. There is room for improvement, but I am quite satisfied as a first attempt. My counterpart, Sir Erwin, even taught me how to set up an Excel spreadsheet to automate the grading process. I have never had a reason to fire up Excel, having majored in English, but I think I am getting the hang of it (he still has a lot to teach me).
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I started watching The Office, seasons one through three, that I had previously ripped onto my computer. Just seemed like it was time to watch them again. Memories of sitting at Aaron and Jay's house with Brian, Kari and Malena started pouring in and it felt like we were all watching them together on Aaron's monitor just like the good old days. After a few days of obsessive watching, I felt like I had not only reminisced about my college social circle but also saw friends I hadn't seen in a long time: the characters. At the end of season three, I felt like I had to say goodbye again. But it was a weird feeling, it wasn't sad at all but a very sweet feeling that I'm not sure I can explain. I have spent the last three years with these characters and it's as if they were just stopping by to say hi, just to me. Naturally I began wondering what the old gang has been up to more recently than season three, so I found and acquired season four, which I am now devouring! Boy do I feel behind the times. I have discovered a means to acquire season five and by then I will finally feel caught up. I thought the Dinner Party episode at Michael and Jan's place was one of the best written episodes in a long time.
I will also soon be acquiring Arrested Development :)
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Today, I also received a Halloween package from the moms and, aside from the assorted Tootsie bag from heaven, I got a TY bear named Haunted. Now my bear from last year, the guitar-wielding Treatsies, has a friend. Honestly I have no idea where the TY bear thing came from; it's a new tradition since I have been in the Philippines, but you know what? I think it's dang cool. Thanks moms, and Happy Halloween!

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!

Natural Disasters

Dear friends and family,

I have been receiving scattered facebooks messages, tweets and emails regarding the affect of typhoon "Ondoy" on me and my site. Fortunately I am safe and my site was relatively unscathed aside from some moderately heavy rains (which did not flood anything) and strong winds (which were not even strong enough to blow down the ants' nest in the tree above the hammock that plagues me so).

The devastation felt in Manila has obviously made the international press and may have caused a lot of you alarm. Indeed it is sad, but we are very far away from Manila. Typhoon Ondoy had a heavier rainfall in it's short-lived stay than hurricane Katrina and while the death toll continues to climb and there are half a million displaced, all Peace Corps volunteers and staff are safe and accounted for.

As many of you may know, there is another typhoon coming, typhoon "Peping". Peping is reportedly stronger than Ondoy and has the potential to become a super typhoon, which sounds like a thing that can only exist in my nightmares. This storm will reportedly get a little closer to my site, hitting the island to my north-east almost directly. However, we will not bare the brunt of the storm and again will only be affected by heavy (but not flooding) rains and strong wind (and, undoubtedly, the ants' nest will continue to thrive). We get regular updates from our safety and security officer via text and have backup emergency action plans (EAP's) that we have all been throughly trained in since PST.

As for the 8.0 level earthquake in American Somoa, there is a lot of talk about a tsunami heading this way. Again, my site is opposite the ocean, protected by a small mountain range. While there may be cause for concern in other parts of the already battered Philippines, I am assured we are safe here.

Many Peace Corps volunteers are already mobilizing to collect donations, etc. at their site for the victims of Ondoy. We have been forbidden to enter many parts of Manila as they are still quite hazardous. Personally, It's a little overwhelming to think how we can help the effort in my little town, but I hope for clarity on that issue in time. Providing latent aid, as opposed to immediate aid, will still be welcome.

I am proud of my country as the American Embassy here has pledged $50,000 to relief efforts. Our government has also provided over $4 million worth in "dispatching medical teams and supplies [...], heavy equipment and helicopters [...]" (Inquirer.net). I think it's important that Americans know where their tax dollars go and there is a lot to be proud of with regards to our government and it's spending. In fact, I wish the ways in which we disseminate aid money was more publicized.

Again, I am safe and healthy,

Sean

Adopt a Cluster and 149th Annual Foundation Day Celebration

I just wanted everyone to know that I will be a father, a father of five. I know some of you will be shocked by this news but I thought the best way to let everyone know is by broadcasting it on my bog. Indeed, I am adopting five volunteers to serve as a mentor (gotcha mom!) for them for a little less than a week to aid them in their training. I'm headed to Tacloban tomorrow morning to stay with a cluster as the new batch 268 volunteers proceed through their own Pre-Service Training (PST). I don't have too much to say about this experience as it has yet to take place, but I am pretty excited to be a mentor of sorts, a resource to ease their anxieties and an assistant to the technical and cultural facilitator, introducing them to Bloom's Taxonomy, a bit of education theory.

Peace Corps has really given me some great opportunities for expanding my outreach beyond that of my own site. The PC office in general is super supportive of this kind of work and it's often a real pleasure to work with them.

In other news, September 15th marked my town's 149th annual foundation day. The day was celebrated with a parade and other programs out in the park, as well as me sleeping until 11:30pm and missing many of them. I guess I should refrain from letting my subconscious know I have the next day off from school as it tends to take advantage of the situation. Fortunately I did not miss the cultural program, including both native and modern dancing and singing programs. Each governmental organization (local government unit (LGU), elementary, high school, the court, etc) was expected to contribute one of each: a song number and dance number. Below are some pictures an videos I took while observing the program.

The following is a traditional Sinulog style dance performed by the LGU complete with live band and fire dancers.

The following is a traditional dance called the Tinikling in which two sets of bamboo poles are used in an elaborate dance. The elementary school's rendition is spirited and all in good fun!

Below are some picture. More pictures are available at my Picasa web albums page.

One group gave a rousing rendition of Michael Jackson's "Heal the World", complete with candles!

There were some pretty cool costumes

Indeed, these are men

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.
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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
    

Audience Response

This post goes out specifically to reader Roots and Wings and reader BLOGable (a former student).

I received comments from both of them that I wanted to address, the first coming from Roots and Wings regarding my trip to Samar:

"That's unbelieveab;e I'd love to go to the Philippines as a volunteer. My grandfather's from Samar. I've never even seen it."

While I was in Samar I took some pictures of places of interest (these pictures are also available on my Picasa Web Albums page). I took these photos for you Roots and Wings.

You can read Roots and Wings' blog here.

As for BLOGable's comment:

Yay!!! haha... new books!!!
Thanks a lot sir for your hardwork!!
...even i have already graduated from the school i still wanna thank you for all of it! haha...

This comment comes from a former student. I just wanted to say thank you so much for your support. I love working for the school because of STUDENTS LIKE YOU. You really make it worth it.

You can access BLOGable's assorted blogs here.

Nobody Home

Seems like I won't be at site for quite a stretch. I just got back from a training of trainers (TOT) in Manila for the Tudlo Mindanao program, a program funded by U.S.A.I.D. and manned by the Peace Corps to bring 150 teachers from the island of Mindanao (an island to which we as Americans are forbidden to go for security reasons) to either Cebu City, Manila or Baguio for a week-long training. My training group specifically focused on Information & Communication Technology (ICT). Six of us, roughly, will be holding classes for the incoming teachers to teach basic computer skills. The basic assumption is that most of these teachers (about 70% last time the program was held last year) had little to no experience with a computer before. Therefor, our lessons will begin with using a mouse and, by the end of the program, using Microsoft Office products. I have never worked with this level of novice before; it will be challenging but, at the same time, quite rewarding.

Tomorrow I will leave for the island of Samar with my regional manager to scope out sites for the incoming batch (268) volunteers arriving in just a couple weeks.We will be visiting high schools who applied to receive a volunteer, interviewing host families, investigating needs of high schools etc. for the next three days. I feel honored to be a part of this selection process and that Peace Corps trusts my standard of viability for a site. Basically I am only coming along to give my two cents whether the site would be worthwhile for a volunteer for two years and how I would feel about being there myself. Very cool. As an added bonus, PC is paying for me to see more of the Philippines. We'll see how it goes.

Received the Boxes of Books from Emmy!

Yesterday we finally received five boxes of books donated to our school. They contained lots of fiction, non-fiction, National Geographic magazines and some school supplies.

You may remember the penpal program I started with my friend Emmy in California. She worked for an organization called YCS and with a group of high school-aged students that we paired with 15 of my students last school year. In a generous gesture, each of Emmy's students collected books in a book drive, loaded them up into balikbayan boxes and shipped them, along with their letters back to my students as YCS tshirts, to my school. I do not know how many books we have yet though students as well as teachers are excited to start checking them out!

I will be meeting with the penpal group today to distribute their response letters and tshirts later this afternoon. Their smiles were bigger than a crescent moon, and just as bright, once I announced the meeting.

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

Projects List Update

Projects I have completed:

1. Cleanup effort at Guinsaugon Landslide Memorial Chapel involving 30 3^rd year CAT-in-training students. Our students joined local government leaders and community members in picking up garbage from around the chapel site. This cleanup effort coincided with St. Bernard’s initiative to prepare the site for the 3^rd anniversary commemoration of the tragedy. I am still gathering documentation of this project.
2. I researched the possibility of creating our own printer ink in hopes of saving my school money on printer cartridges. After getting in touch with a friend well connected to the chemistry community in Minneapolis, MN, I have abandoned this project. They reported it to be impossible with the means available to us here.
3. Performed analysis of books, along with volunteers from the 4^th year, in the SJNHS Library and wrote up a report explicating the data collected. This analysis is meant to serve as a basis for seeking book donations for the school. This was completed January 10^th, 2009.
4. Researched possible library management software, either free or open source. We have selected a final candidate and because of the value of using this program, the library will be getting its first computer.
5. Worked with family and friends in the U.S. and have thus far obtained 171 new books for the library, including fiction for all reading levels, a number of dictionaries and a complete encyclopedia set.
6. Worked with other partners in the U.S. for a pen-pal letter exchange and book drive. Fifteen students in the U.S. have collected books and school materials to fill five balikbayan boxes (potentially 350 or more books) and they should be in transit at the time of this writing (June 26, 2009).
7. Implemented a firewall system that not only protects the computer lab, an invaluable asset to the SJNHS community, from many viruses, hackers and other malicious activities and software. This firewall also blocks inappropriate content, such as pornography and images of violence, from being available to students as well as harmful downloads that could infect computers on the network with viruses.
8. Implementation of free software SteadyState, a means by which to protect the lab from students changing settings or installing viruses or other unwanted applications.
1. My ICT co-teacher and I have already installed SteadyState on numerous computers throughout the lab, experimenting with configurations that suit the needs of our lab. SteadyState is “a tool developed by Microsoft that gives administrators enhanced options for configuring shared computers, such as hard drive protection and advanced user management. It is primarily designed for use on computers shared by multiple people, such as internet cafes, schools, libraries etc. SteadyState is the successor to the Shared Computer Toolkit.” –taken from Microsoft website
2. We have already completed developing a 4 page document of instructions on installing Windows XP from scratch, installing all necessary software and locking it all down with SteadyState. This documentation is written in a way that someone with very little computer experience can fix a computer themselves without relying on the presence of the ICT instructor.
9. Implementation of a PXE server in the school’s network. This server will greatly decrease the amount of time the ICT teacher will spend doing computer maintenance. Before, it took 4.5 hours to reinstall windows and necessary software per computer. This means that if a virus affects one or more computers, the teacher is already obliged to spend at least 4.5 hours on each computer, or exponentially more, fixing the computers. With the implementation of the PXE server, we can reformat a computer in a matter of ten minutes, thus being able to reformat the entire lab in one day. Ideally, if a student’s computer is misbehaving, we can reformat it back to the original, brand-new state in a matter of ten minutes, hardly interrupting the participation of the student in the class.

Here is a youtube video of the PXE Server in action!

Projects I am currently working on:

1. Developing a working, semester-long lesson plan, teaching fourth year students the basics of web design using open source, free software.
1. My co-teacher and I are running a demonstration of the plan and will create the documentation so it can be replicated at other sites.

Projects on the back burner:

1. I have a contact at the University of Saint Catherine’s in Minneapolis, MN that is interested in starting a book drive and donating books to San Juan National High School. Because we are already working with YCS, we will also distribute any of the collected books fro St. Kate’s throughout Southern Leyte, depending on the shipment size.

Projects in the pipe:

1. I would like to develop an outline for a “ICT Lab Stewardship Program” wherein, during the school year, I will train 3^rd year and fourth year volunteers on the basics of computer hardware and software maintenance, the idea being that, year after year, fourth year students will be able to train 3^rd year students before they graduate. I intend to provide documentation with a basic outline of this program for others to follow.
1. Not only will this provide our highs school with basic computer technicians to service the lab after I leave SJNHS, but also
2. To provide students with a necessary skill set that they may eventually use these skills outside of school as a means of income generation.

Personal Interest Statement:

As a volunteer with a background in and passion for ICT in the classroom, I see myself leaving a lasting impression on my community by developing easy-to-follow documentation for projects that bring ICT into the classroom in a sustainable way. A lot of online documentation requires a basic knowledge of computer skills and terminology. I intend to put the power of ICT in the hands of anyone who wishes to utilize its potential without the prior know-how. Hopefully this documentation will be easy enough to follow that PCV’s of all sectors can utilize these projects in an easy-to-follow manner.

Happy Independence Day, Philippines!

Happy Birthday, Philippines! Today is independence day here in the Philippines and it's certainly not quite taking shape as I thought it might. Despite my best efforts not to let my American identity dictate my expectations here, I did expect something a little celebratory, but in the provinces, it's just another normal day, a work day for many.

This morning I met my counterpart, Sir Erwin, and a group of students outside my house at 9:00 am to bring the books my grandma sent to the school. We lacked transport, which we sufficiently made up for in manpower. Each student carried an armload of books from my house to the school, about a 12 minute walk away. While we waited outside my house for more students to arrive, Sir Erwin asked one of the students how old the Philippines is today.

"111 years old, sir," he responded.

What!? What about the American and later Japanese occupations? I mean, the Philippines officially was a colony of the United States until July 4, 1946. And why would June 12th be independence day when the Philippines became independent on the 4th of July, a symbolic move on the part of the U.S.?

This takes some explaining. One hundred and eleven years ago today, Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence from the Spanish on June 12th, 1898. Filipinos regard this event as the first and only declaration of independence and view the American presence here as a usually amicable occupation, of which the Philippines had remained independent throughout the duration (this is an inference on my part).

After the United States abdicated sovereignty to the Philippines, the newly-founded Philippines government decided to move the holiday to their self-proclaimed day of independence; but Filipinos are forever gracious and declared July 4th Filipino-American Friendship Day.

I sent out a blanket text to the Filipinos near and dear to me and I did get some interesting responses. I wanted to be sure to share two of them. The two responses come from two highly educated women who continue to inspire me with their wisdom and lovingly critical opinions of their country. The first, "Thank you. I am sad about the situation in my country today. I hope it will get better after the election next year." Text the second, "Thank you Sean, but I still wonder whether we are really independent yet." I do not include these to provoke heated political debate but rather to exemplify the fact that while it's fun and easy to get drunk with your buddies, have a BBQ and blow things up with illegal fireworks from Wisconsin, Missouri or North Carolina like we do in the states, there are people in other countries who spend their independence days contemplating the nature of their democracies and the welfare of their country and it's people. This realization, I must say, was truly moving.