...and I hereby promise NEVER to use a cliche that bad as a title for an LJ entry EVER AGAIN. Sorry. *headdesk*

But srsly guys, I also Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again.

Oh babe, it hurts to go.

*slaps self*

Srs Nao

I have moved out of my apartment. I'm now sitting in the OTHER apartment, which we have for a couple more days as some people are leaving for family trips, etc in a day or two. Kas just left, and so now I am super sad - it's like we've got a "GO HOME" sniper, picking us all off one by one. Josie and I are leaving at the same time, but beyond that, everyone's leaving individually - a million separate goodbyes.

BUT WAIT!

YA RLY, How was Boracay?

Totally awesome. Minus the ocean which, while clear as glass and a slightly unnerving shade of aquamarine, succeeded in BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF ME every time I stepped into it. That surf in the off-season is not screwing around, let me tell you. The highlight was when I was facing the shore, and Lisa was facing me, and we were talking and laughing and suddenly her face goes all serious and she has JUST enough time to go "oh god" before we both get CLOCKED with a wave that was, no joke, as tall as I am.

I know this because it hit me square in the back of the head, which was unpleasant. So both of us go tumbling head-over-heels down the beach, with a group of locals (who saw this coming, of course) standing a safe distance away and laughing their heads off. THANKS GUYS! *shakes fist*

Hell, even that was fun - the weather was beautiful for the most part, minus a couple of five-minute downpours that merited screaming and running around. The cocktails were DEEEELISH, and I am now several shades browner, though compared to my compatriots here I am still pink as a shrimp. OH WELLS. Only problem is that I didn't get anything for anyone; the shopping selection (at the most hilariously named shopping plaza ever: D'Mall) was so overwhelming that I just didn't end up buying anything, which is lame. No necklace for gp which he probably wouldn't have worn anyway. I could have gotten jewelry for EVERYONE ON THE PLANET, but I am bad at picking out stuff.

Oh, and Kris just reminded me - massage on the beach for $10/hour? YES PLZ. That was so very nice. And you are a little sandy, so you get all exfoliated...mmmm. I love foreign tropical beaches! I probably couldn't have stayed there for, like, two weeks - not enough to do that doesn't involve scuba diving, of which I am scared. But our stay was too short - I did need an extra day or two to lie about in the sun, drinking rum and wearing big sunglasses. After the craziness that has been my life for the past two months, it was exactly what I needed. The trip to Maine will also be wonderful, albeit on a lake, not a beach - oh, so much relaxation on the way. Yaaaaaaaay

Back to Srs Bzns

I don't know why I'm doing everything in lolcat today. PLZ TO BE STOPPING? K.

Anyway, these sorts of things (long goodbyes, endings, etc) always make me feel sort of awkward, because I am nearly emotionless about the whole thing - I don't cry, I don't get depressed. I mean, I make the sad faces, and I do a lot of hugging, but inside, its like my whole body is in denial of any kind of transition until I'm by myself on a plane, and then it all hits me at once, much like that wave that knocked me flat on my face three days ago. But until that point, I'm just like "yeah, okay, leaving? Sure" and my brain doesn't register anything at all. It is LAMESAUCE. But there it is.

I think I'm going to need a month or three just to process everything that's happened to me over the past two months. From Bato to Baguio and back again - bouncing around on jeepneys, plowing land with beasts of burden, wading through trash, befriending kittens, spending time with family, waving signs around in the air, panning for gold, skimming across the ocean on outriggers, eating blood stew (the latter of which just happened to me yesterday, and while it wasn't the world's best thing, neither was it nearly as *kak*-inducing as I thought it'd be). There's so much material there, and I haven't had the chance to weave it into stories (well, I did HERE, but that doesn't count, as it's not so much weaving as crudely whacking with a sledgehammer), to let it float around in my head long enough to turn into a kind of myth that I can then WORK with, poetically. Maybe once my semester gets rolling - HAR HAR, like I actually have time to write excess poetry during the school year.

The time away has also sort of turned my goals topsy-turvy...I was already kind of wigging out about the whole PhD-application-fiasco that, if I were to go next year, would be looming in front of me the minute I got back to the States. Now, I'm not so sure - well, no, I am nearly 100% sure that I am not going to go straight into a PhD program, but I still have to have all my ducks in a row for when I DO apply for one - probably next fall. So I still have to get recs, and take classes I don't really want to take, and worry about publishing criticism, etc etc ad nauseum.

Why am I talking about this? SO BORING

Anyways, it's been real. My first (and hopefully not nearly the last) extended period abroad, my first time EVER to Asia, my first time meeting my surprisingly (or not, in some ways) huge family. It seems like everything I do for the first time regarding new places, I do like I am trying to kill myself - first time backpacking? Why not spend a week no-trace summit-climbing in the ADIRONDACKS in JANUARY? Never been to the Grand Canyon? Camp at the bottom of it for ten days, then hike a vertical mile out! First time to Asia? Go to the Philippines for a couple months during typhoon season!

Like I said: go big or go home. I may be half-assed about a lot of things, but not about travel! NOSIR!

I've still got all my limbs, so I figure this is an okay strategy. When I lose a limb, I will rethink.

So I leave in an hour. To all the folks who have been reading and have sent me nice letters telling me that I'm entertaining, or funny, or interesting, thanks so much - from the bottom of my heart. As a self-esteem-lacking attention whore, that kind of thing really does keep me breathing. MAYBE LITERALLY.
I'll try to keep writing often when I get back to the States, but believe me when I tell you that my entries about, you know, cows in Pseudonymous College Town will be less exciting than the ones from here. Just a little. Not so you'd notice or anything.

So goodbye from Manila, and goodbye from the Philippines. Hopefully I'll be writing from here again, and soon. Meantime, I'm a slightly different person now, even if only due to the new layer of grime that my lungs have spent the last few months acquiring. Hack hack, y'all.

END SCENE

I'm getting bad at updating again. OH NOES.

Dancing with the Stars, and by Stars I Mean Old Ladies

What did I say last time? Lolas dinner? Right - well it was just about as awesome as I thought it was going to be.

( Horrible background before I get to the Good Stuff )

Okay that was depressing. BUT THE LOLAS ARE NOT! They are the most fun. So let's get back to the happy.

We knew the night would go well when we arrived at the Lolas' House (office/dorm room/counseling center) and they were ALREADY doing karaoke. I think it was an entire cd of the Carpenters. I didn't even know the Carpenters HAD an entire cd, let alone one remixed for karaoke. Holy mother of Mary. Anyways, so there's a giant living room thing, with said karaoke going on in the front and center, and all the Lolas are scattered about the back of the room in chairs, except the ones who are dancing. Yes, dancing - at age 90-whatever, with their nails all done up and their hair curled. They all had this hilarious grandmother-two-step thing going on, which looked kind of like a cross between the cha-cha and the Electric Slide. It was brilliant.

So we danced, and then we ate, and then we busted out some wine (which, since I was stupid and forgot my Swiss Army knife, somehow got opened with like a screwdriver and four forks or some shit) and then it was TIPSY Lolas dancing, which is even MORE fun than REGULAR Lolas dancing! We also got to talk to some of them one-on-one, which was wonderful and heartbreaking. They liked asking us girls if we were married. One told Theresa not to wait too long to find a husband and have kids - "you can't wait until you're over thirty!" she said, "you'll be too old to reproduce!"

Ah, yes.

Many of them found husbands, some of whom were, apparently, particularly good at helping their wives move past what had happened to them - Lola Narcissa in particular said something to the effect of "I like remembering him...you have to remember the good things to get past the bad ones. The good things are what will keep you going. You just have to think about that," and I'm thinking my Christ, she's telling ME to have a positive attitude and SHE'S the one who was abducted, imprisoned, and raped for months. She'd tell us that, and then go back to singing and clapping along with the Beatles. Unbelievable.

Lexie, I think, wanted to take at least two Lolas back home with her. She'd just lost her own lola, so I think it was especially good for her to have not one, but like FIFTEEN of them all fawning over her and dancing with her. I had a fantastic time just seeing how happy she was, with a Lola on each arm, bopping along. Lisa now has a new role model for octogenarian-ism: Lola Anastasia, who still gets mani-pedis every week and has ridiculous glasses and gets up at 4:30AM every day to do calisthenics. I mean, this is good work for REGULAR old people, let alone war victims! Astounded, I was.

So a good, karaoke- and food- and lola-filled night was had by all. If you're interested in learning more, you can click on that link in my last post to Evelina Galang's blog, "Laban for the Lolas." It's good stuff.

ALMOST DONE

I'm about to go off to "graduation" right now. This is it: the last day of anything in this program. I'll read some poems, we'll all do a bit of a performance piece, and there will probably be a lot of sobbing (not me; I am STOIC. Not really, but a lot of times things like this don't hit me until I'm by myself, which makes me seem like I'm either psychotic or an alcoholic or both). Tonight we leave for R&R in Boracay, the sort of South Beach of the Philippines - though blessedly, it's the off-season, so walking the boardwalk will actually be WALKING, and not CROWD-SURFING. Before we take off, we might go see Brownman Revival one last time. We come back from Boracay on Monday, have assessment on Tuesday, and then Wednesday afternoon, I leave for the airport.

And then my real life stars again? Pooballs.

...which, given pop culture at the moment, sort of sounds like I am protesting Batman as in the movie. Which I am not, because despite every snobby entry I hear about how much it sucked, I liked the hell out of it. So THTHBBBBTH.

I am so mature! Onward.

SONA

Almost-run-over-by-bus-count: 2.

I'd say the day was a success!

...

I have been a little remiss with my journal entries as of late. I'm getting to that point in the program where everything passes by in a little bit of a blur, and at the end of the day I'm just like "well, I could write about that, or I could...uh...nap."

BUT! Today was the state of the nation address, and thus was nuttier than usual.

And of COURSE, the person in charge of our little program contingent (same douchebag who, in a previous entry, I wanted to stab with my umbrella - so this guy is really winning some fucking points here) totally fucked everything up - was late, didn't know where we were supposed to meet, and therefore made us do like a two mile MARCH OF DOOM (keep in mind, this is now MARCH OF DOOM #2) to catch up with the protest, which had, as protests tend to do if you are late, left without us. So here we are, the 6-woman 1-total-jackass protest march, plodding along an 8-lane highway with no sidewalk (hence the bus count) as the REAL protest slowly moves away from us. I swear to god, I was ready to kill something. By the time we caught up with things, we were already sweating buckets, and I think I might have drained an entire litre bottle of water on the spot.

That stupidity aside, once we caught up with our contingent (the international bloc - which, like some sort of diplomatic barricade, was positioned right at the front of the march, thus making our frantic-run-towards-people-already-practically-running even MORE ridiculous), the march was pretty freaking awesome. Filipinos, being just mind-bogglingly artistic on a whole, had come up with some jaw-dropping effigies, signs, costumes, masks, flags - the pictures don't really do it justice at all. There were thousands of people there, and so thousands of banners and people singing and drumming and yelling etc - except, as chaotic as that seems, everyone was organized by, well, their organization. So everyone was in blocs, and had a leader who would corral people, and had chant leaders who would, uh, do their job description. Our bloc consisted of US students, Koreans, Chinese, one Canadian, and a small group of Belgians (!) who represented a democratic-healthcare organization whose name I now totally forget. Probably (no, definitely) the most fun thing was going under the overpasses on the highway; in order to get the media's attention (some of which were clustered on said overpasses) we had this ridiculous chant that involved high-stepping forward (so basically bouncing up and down) and yelling "HOY HOY!" in response to the chant leader screaming things like "WE ARE STRONG! THEY ARE WEAK! PEOPLE POWER! ANAKBAYAN!" and some other random (but syllabically consistent) politically-charged stuff. So we're bouncing along, bouncing flags and signs and banners in time, and it was very, very cool because we were LOUD and people were paying ATTENTION to us, and not in a bad way.

Yay for screaming and jumping!

So there was a stage, on a flatbed, that puttered alongside the protest until we got to the end of the protest permit zone, at which there was a small army of the Philippine police force chilling out and eating McDonald's.

(SIDE NOTE: so, in yet another display of this country's BRILLIANT infrastructure, there was no warning to traffic that, you know, a major thoroughfare that has a concrete median would be closed due to giant protest - so towards the back of the march, there was this EPIC traffic jam, in which cars were just u-turning and driving the WRONG WAY down the HIGHWAY. Hahahahahaha WAT)

Anyway. The flatbed then turned and stopped perpendicular to the protest, and the march ended and the performances began - lots of speech-making, some brilliant dancing, a couple of good parodies, some media interviewing. The kids from ALAY (who we met in Baguio) did a hip-hop performance that really kicked some serious ass, and then later, they brought up a bunch of Filipino kids with whom they'd held a hip-hop workshop (hee, it rhymes HOW APPROPRIATE) and had THEM perform what they'd learned, and of course they were brilliant. How is everyone in this country so talented? I do not know! But it is intimidating. There was some more chanting. Then, because clearly it wasn't quite hot enough (blessedly, it was not sunny - I do not know what I would have done if it were sunny. Probably died a horrible, shrivelly-melty death. Not cool), we burned stuff.

[Beavis/Butthead voice] Fire! Fire! [maniacal laughter]

Not, like, RIOT burned. Symbolic effigy burning - much less, uh, life-threatening. The people at BAYAN (which means "country" or "people" but in this case is an acronym for something complicated in Filipino) spent days making this absolutely enormous effigy of GMA in a plane, which they suspended from a crane attached to the truck with the flatbed stage (yes, that is about as complicated as it sounds). She was in the plane, which had the US flag pattern on its belly, and below her, as a separate piece, was a model of the back end of a ferryboat, tilted to look like it was sinking into the ground, with "Bayan ng Pilipinas" written on it. Significance: GMA left the country to go visit the USA just as a passenger ferry carrying, like, 1000 people sunk off the coast of the Philippines during typhoon Frank, killing all but about 30 people. So people are dying all over the place, and the president hops on a plane with her entourage and spends a few zillion pesos staying in lavish hotels and the like in the States. This is, in many ways, wonderfully (and by wonderfully I mean horribly) symbolic of the president's entire relationship with the masses of the country. Thus, the effigy.

Anyway it went up in flames like WHOA, because it was paper maiche (uh, sp? Halp), and I have this hilarious Blair-Witchy video of people not realizing how hot it would be and backing/jogging away from it, so it actually does look a little like a riot, minus the throwing of things. It looks INTENSE, in other words. I AM INTENSE.

I also got to meet some of the Lolas, with whom we will all be having dinner tomorrow. They were, collectively, Filipina "comfort women" for the Japanese during WWII. Read: sex slaves. I will write more about the atrocity that is THAT whole debacle tomorrow if I get a chance. Meeting them was wonderful - and hysterical, as Theresa and I (who got corralled into meeting them by Evelina Galang, a fiction prof from Miami) somehow ended up crammed into a jeepney filled with like fourteen feisty, heart-wrenchingly upbeat Filipina octogenarians. As if I didn't feel like a giant ALREADY, there I was, folded about as awkwardly as usual, in the back of a jeep with several handfuls of women whose average height is approximately four foot five. Sheesh. They were the most precious, though - I can't wait to spend more time with them tomorrow.

Then we pottered around the protest some more, got rained on for a little, and went home, at which point I had to, like, physically scrape the dirt off of my skin with a putty knife. GROSS.

AND! I ended up on TV! From the press conference yesterday. Go me!

And Now, Miscellany

...

...

Hm. I was going to write about other things, but I can't really think of anything else OTHER than SONA, which was kind of the trump card of this whole trip. I think my parents think that I am going to become a Communist. I'm not, but I can see where they're coming from; this program has been intensely, insanely, overly political and all the politics are, how shall we say, left of center. You know, just a little bit. It does get annoying at times, but on the other hand, it's really tough to deny certain things when you see the human evidence before you. Mom was saying that we were being "set up," simply used to advance the political agenda of the Philippine left, and I got sort of (no, actually very) sad at that. I was sad for myself, that I could appear like such a tool (literally, now, come on), sad for the political activists we've met who, apparently given my parents' reactions, are just seen as manipulative fakers, and sad for the state of political awareness in general.

I mean, I am not politically aware, in any sense. I've actually got political blinders on all the time, mostly to avoid making a total ass out of myself in public. But to say that this program is manipulative is almost, in some fundamental way, akin to saying that these people we've met didn't have their husbands killed. Or their houses bulldozed. Or their sisters raped daily. Or their ancestral land snatched out from under them. It's not the SAME as saying that - no one would say that. The evidence is right there. But to SEE the evidence firsthand, and to talk to these people, and to realize what kind of people they are, sort of blocks out the notion of them being manipulative. Mostly, I've found, they just need someone to talk to. They just need, desperately, to share their stories with as many people as possible so they can ease the pain of being ignored by their own government. I mean, it would be one thing if we were given lectures on the beauty of the NPA every week. But we're not. I mean, yes, some of the lectures were definitely not giving the whole picture, and that is aggravating in a very fundamental way. But mostly, this program has just shown us stuff, and let us just...see. That's not manipulative. That's using those things in your eyesockets, swiveling them around and letting them absorb.

Muh. Anyway. I guess I did have some other crap to say. Go figure. I always have more crap to say. Personality flaw; can't help it.

(NB: I miss my momma like crazy. At least I could TELL her I was going to the protest, unlike most of the Filipino parents of my friends here, who would have their own children deported for even THINKING about it.)

The program closes on Friday. Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh

Okay. Time to take my newly sunburnt self to bed (first sunburn I've ever gotten on a cloudy day. It CAN happen! Also even my full-Filipina friends here got sunburnt, which was a first for most of THEM as well. There is a lot of rosy brownness going on around here). Home stretch, peoples.

Where have I been?!
Where HAVEN'T I been, really.

Art! At Ten!

No, that's not really true - haven't had much to say because the past few days have been pretty uneventful, with the possible exception of our day in Andoro, which is a town on the very outskirts of the metro Manila area (in Rizal province, actually) that occasionally gets slapped with the title of "arts capital of Manila" - which is sort of a funny name for a town that has, like, three main streets. Regardless, that was a fun day. We toured a bunch of galleries, the absolute highlight of which was the Blanco Family Museum. I'll upload, later, some of the paintings done by the children in this family - stark realism at TWELVE? Gaaaaaah

Also, in that gallery, I saw a spider the size of my head. It could have eaten my face. I nearly died.

Miscellaneous Crap That Does Not Bear Reading

Rundown of this week (this is mostly for my own purposes, blah blah SKIP blah blah):
Mon: Nestle
Tues: Bayan USA (SONA prep), meeting with Evalina Galang (re: Comfort Women)
Wed: Andoro tour, trip to Team Manila at Rockwell Mall
Thurs: Day off, Theresa's bday party
Fri: Day off (today!), except for pasalubong shopping at 4

Anyway. I have been sleeping a lot lately, because our schedule this past week has been sort of borked and thus we have more time off than usual. This is good, because I'm pretty sure that I am reaching my limits as far as my ability to sustain this kind of schedule is concerned. We leave for Boracay in a week, and then I leave the country.

That, ladies and gentlemen, feels very weird to say.

I feel like my time in grad school has just dropped away and I'm going to have HELLA catching up to do when I get back; I have a paper to write for a conference in October that I'm halfway through but have no idea how to conclude, I have job in the comp office that I have to sort out, I have a new class I'm teaching that I haven't thought about in months (even though I actually wrote the syllabus already, go me), I have a schedule that's not finalized yet. AND, as if that's not enough, I have to think about whether or not I want to apply for PhD programs this fall or not. Theoretically, that was the plan all along - to go straight to a doctoral program and start thinking about the big D, as it were. Now I'm not so sure. The more I think about it, the more ridiculous English departments become - and the less I want to spend my life being mired in one. In an ideal world, of course, I'd just become a creative writing teacher that also published criticism - not a critic that is forced to publish every four weeks who has to find time when she's not flipping out about that to write creatively. Of course, I could also go for a job at like Podunk State U and get stuck with a 5-5 teaching load and fade into obscurity. GREAT. I want more for me than that - but I don't know if the "more" I want necessarily correlates to a better teaching job than said job at Podunk State. It might mean something else altogether?

I can haz IDENTITY CRISIS

Uh, Back to the Philippines?

So maybe after my MFA I'll come back here. That seems like a wacky idea, given the fact that right now I'd sort of give my left arm to go home (I has a bit of a homesick at the moment), but I know that there is a TON of stuff around here that I haven't seen yet, and that I want to. Desperately. Also gp says he wants to come here - I told him he'd love it, if he could tolerate getting stared at wherever he went.

It's funny; every time I see a white person here (HAHA, like I'm not white) I'm all "what are you DOING here?" as if no one had any reason to be here that wasn't Filipino or married to one or a missionary. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't do that if I were in, say, Thailand, or Malaysia. The Philippines is just...NOT...a tourist destination. That's their own damn fault - they're bad at marketing. It's also not being helped along by the US flipping out about TERRORISM. I will say it now: this country, so far, has been RIDICULOUSLY safe. I have not once (not even in front of the police!) felt like I was in any physical danger. Mental danger, maybe. But that's a different story. So it's funny, and sad, that every time anyone sees a foreigner here they're all agog, and staring, and generally making said foreigner feel uncomfortable. There are so many things here that, if the infrastructure was even HALFWAY decent, would attract quadrillions of tourists - the entire island of Palawan, the Cordilleras, the beaches in the Visayas, the four zillion things to do in Manila. But no one comes here because everyone thinks it's "OMGZ DANGEROUS." It's just not true.

(Though I do sort of covet the stereotype; it makes me seem like I am a crazy person for travelling to SE Asia's final frontier. Which the Philippines, aside from maybe the jungles of New Guinea, is still considered to be. Countries like Thailand, on the other hand, who have gotten the whole tourism-biz DOWN, are not. So I'm intrepid! Don't bust the myth, Kim! They need to think that you are still cool!)

Wow, I digressed. I guess I don't have much more to say about my own completely-borked life itinerary, though. Other than I have no idea What's Ahead. Am I still young enough for that to be exhilarating and good? I HOPE SO

Okay. I should get going on a poem, or something, considering I'm not even halfway to my number-o-poems goal that I set when I got here. I have resigned myself to the fact that I am not going to actually PRODUCE that many poems by the end, but really, if I don't make it into double digits, I will be angry.

You know what else makes me angry? Heat rash. On my tattoo. Goddammit.

THE END

QOTD (okay, well, yesterday whatever):
"It is better to starve fighting than it is to die simply by starving." --Nestle workers' union president

(Whose name I now, regretfully, forget, but may look up later to edit this.)

Riot Police, Kim. Kim, Meet the Riot Police.

So, yesterday (Monday) was intense. Got much elaboration on awful documentary (but was forced to watch it again - I think it's way better, much like an inside joke, except tragic, if you've been there and been tear-gassed etc etc), met a bunch of striking union workers, and got to protest in front of the riot police.

Wait, what?

PROTESTING IN FRONT OF RIOT POLICE ACK

Okay. Before I get into that whole debacle, let me back up this blogmobile just a few blocks. We got to the union stronghold, which is (conveniently or something) right across the street from one of the main Nestle factories in the country. Damn thing's ENORMOUS. Anyways, the extremely short version of the history of this union goes something like the following (here's another one of Kim's Lists[TM]):

1. 1991: Workers go on strike because Nestle has, without warning, revoked their retirements benefits.
2. A few years later, success! They get a CBA mandate that says "you get bennies when you retire, good for 10 years, hit the negotiating table again when this comes close to expiring." Everyone goes back to work.
3. 2001 hits. CBA period is almost up, but before it is, Nestle yanks out retirement benefits for workers again, and also downsizes, laying off hundreds (thousands?) of workers JUST before they have worked there long enough to EARN said retirement benefits. Owch. Nestle implements policy (unwritten) of firing long-time workers in favor of cheaper, no-benefits-paid contract workers. Basically, this pits the poorest of the poor against the simply poor, because the former allow the factory to keep running while the latter are striking, but the former have no choice because otherwise they will starve.
4. Workers, thus, go on strike again. And THEY HAVE BEEN STRIKING EVER SINCE.

Seven years on strike. That's a long time to be on strike, people. Looooong time. The union funds for this kind of thing have long petered out, and so these hundreds of striking workers, about 20 of which were milling about the union HQ across from the factory we were near, are now living off of donations, their wives, and miscellaneous odd jobs. They have been blacklisted from any factory employment - Nestle made sure of that by trumping up an average of THIRTY SIX criminal charges against every striking worker - and their kids are blacklisted from going to school, so most have dropped out and are themselves working or running the house.

But wait there's more! We met the union president, who is, by all measures, a friendly, articulate, VERY well-mannered guy in his 50s or so and who worked at Nestle for almost 30 years. He didn't get elected in the normal course of union activities - in fact, no union president has been elected lately among the Nestle workers in that way. He was put into office because his predecessor was shot in the head by hired Nestle thugs. The union president before THAT one? Same fate.

So this guy's job, so far as I can tell, has a mortality rate of approximately 100%.

o_O;;;

I mean, yes, LIFE has the same mortality rate, but, uh, daaaaaaamn. A generous handful or two of Nestle union leaders have been, um, "neutralized" by either the police, the military (both of whom have, in blatant violation of the law, set up CAMPS [like they LIVE there] within the walls of the Nestle factories all over the country), or Nestle's hired "security." I don't think that a single one of these victims was armed at the time.

So that's pretty miserable, no?

Anyway RIOT POLICE?

Okay. So we're there and getting stories and there's only about 10 people at the union office. They tell us that the population is low because the other members are off at city hall protesting the militarization of their, you know, DAILY LIVES, and they'll be back soon. So we wait.

About an hour into our visit, we hear a bit of a racket across the street and walk to the gates of HQ to peer over the wall and see what's up at the Nestle factory. Hey! IT'S THE POLICE. Lots of them. At least 30 policemen, in full riot gear with shields, are setting up a minor battalion in front of the gates. At this point my eyebrows become fully glued to my hairline and stay there for a while, and we all start fidgeting, wondering what exactly is going ON here. One of the workers then throws the gates open (to our confusion and mild dismay) and is all "OKAY! Time to go see the police! This way!" and herds us through the gates and into the street and in the general direction of the police barricade, who by this point have noticed us (as HQ is on CONSTANT police surveillance, which is oh so very legal har har) and are sort of pointed in our general direction.

Uhhhhhhhhhhh.

At this point I am confused but not too nervous, as there are no guns or anything being waved around, the protesters haven't even shown up yet, and really, the riot police are just sort of standing there. The workers encourage us to take pictures, to document everything, so we whip out our cameras and THAT's when we notice that we're all on tape.

From the security booth next to the gate, a policeman is just standing there with a camcorder aimed directly at all of our faces. I have a picture of this guy. I have surveillance of BEING SURVEILLED. Ironic, hilarious, AND frightening! All in one convenient package!

So we observe that we are being observed, and we crack some nervous jokes about becoming political prisoners and/or killed, and THEN, haha, the protesters arrive. Bullhorns and flags a-flying. They set up shop directly across from the riot police (we're talking like 10 feet away) and start chanting and waving things around and showing signs to oncoming traffic - and at some point, I am finding myself weaving THROUGH oncoming traffic because I am, apparently, headed for the picket line? We all were - and so we ended up, the confused and nervous American ambassadors of the American left, the hilariously-out-of-place contingent of this particular protest, face to face with the Philippine police.

Wee!

I was telling Theresa earlier today, "you know, I haven't really been to any non-campus protests. I might as well start my career in extracurricular political activism by doing so in a third-world country with one of the most brutal and corrupt police forces on the planet."

Because why not? Go big or go home, that's what I say.

Oh, I kill me.

So, obviously, because I still have all my limbs, this protest was a nonevent; no one got hurt, the police didn't really have to move, and everyone made it back to HQ safely. But still. FREAKY. We spent the rest of the day learning about the history that I badly summarized above, and buying tshirts to support the union, and chasing chickens around their back patio thing. Then we went home and wondered who was watching that tape with all our faces on it.

SPEAKING of Being on Camera

I am going to end this here but here's a sneak preview of ridiculousness to come: Next monday is SONA, or the State of the Nation Address. As you might imagine, this is one of the biggest days for protests in the entire country, minus maybe Workers' Day, which is May 1. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is going to make up a bunch of HEINOUSLY wrong shit about the state of the Philippines, and about four zillion people will call her out on it.

I will be one of those four zillion people. Woo! I'll tell y'all right now - keep CNN on on Monday, and you might see my shining (literally! I will be a sweaty MONSTER!) face on the tee-vee. I'll try to make sure that my mug is not, like, getting nightsticked by anyone. No, I think it will be fine and safe. But it will be CRAZY. That much is certain. More details as events warrant, but for right now, bedtime.

Tomorrow: cave paintings? Mrrrr?

So, I woke up at 11:30 today to my phone text-alert-doorbell going off with a text message from my aunt that read "we're outside in front of the metrobank." Remember yesterday when I said that I hadn't been invited to the family Sunday shindig? Well, by "hadn't been invited to," APPARENTLY what I really meant was "have been assimilated into." ARGH WHOOPS

The Family Jewels?

So after the world's fastest getting-ready session (total time: less than five minutes, because I am awesome and apparently don't care about being butt-ugly in public), I had sunday lunch at Tita Nene's again. It was good. I am full of pork. (I'm back to eating pork again, now that my bowels don't haaaate me.)

Then Toto whisked me off to an outdoor shopping pavilion, where I got some pearls for my cousin in PA who has been doing nice things for me like checking on my mail and the pigs and making sure my house hasn't burned down etc. Then we were at a loss for things to do, so he decided to take me over to Tito Roger's (tacky and palatial) house, where I found out some very disturbing things about my relatives.

Remember when I was in Baguio, and I was blogging about mining? Let me elaborate on that for a minute, before I drop this little bomb here.

The indigenous people of northern Luzon are, in some part, small-scale miners. They use sluicing and panning as their primary methods, and rely on tunnel systems to, you know, get to the ore n' stuff. Not that this is, in any way, a perfect system - tunnels can and do collapse, and when they do use chemicals to get the gold/silver/manganese/whatever out of the ore, it washes off into the water table, which is no good. BUT! Large scale mining is every problem that small-scale mining has, plus a few, on a MASSIVE (um, duh?) scale, with the added!bonus of the ability to remove whole hillsides in order to do open-pit mining, which is disastrous and ugly.
Now granted, open pit mines, once closed, do grow over. In about half a century. More if you've taken down older growth. But sirs et madames, THAT IS NOT THE POINT - they still bulldoze entire hillsides, many of which are occupied by indigenous tribes who have claimed said land as ancestral domain for eons. (I think I might literally mean eons here.) So, you know, one Benguet mining site bulldozed an ancestral cemetary - bones mixed in with your gold hoops, anyone? So they drive these people off the lands, or force the small-scale miners to pay over 60% (at least) of their findings to the corporation.

Ultimately what you're dealing with is traditional indigenous culture (land ownership = flexible, ancestral, necessary for LIVING) getting in the way of corporate culture (land ownership = fixed and state-regulated, transferrable, necessary for PROFIT). Guess who loses? Yup.

Anyway that's the super short version, and the upshot is that the vast majority of indigenous peoples up in northern Luzon are struggling to eat daily, and live in constant fear of their ancestral homes being claimed and summarily bulldozed (all with gleeful backing from, you guessed it, the Philippine government) in order for these huge mining corporations to find more shit with which to back up other peoples' currencies.

So where does my family fit into all of this?

My uncle (EDIT: not uncle. Mom's cousin, so my second cousin? At this point, WHATEVER) was the CFO of Benguet Mining Corp before it downsized due to radically corrupt business practices.

He then moved on to become VP of Felix Mining, which is a slightly LESS huge mining corp that probably has most of the same problems, and is DEFINITELY still into bulldozing and bankrupting thousands of people. He mentioned this casually at lunch today and I nearly fell out of my chair. Of course, I didn't want to make a scene, so I kept my mouth shut, but inside I was doing something along the lines of "YOUBUYTHOUSANDDOLLARFISHINTHAILANDWHILELETTINGYOURCOUNTRYMENSTARVEYOUBASTARDWTF.

(And hey, people, this is what a PhD from Stanford will let you do! Fuck over your compatriots! Yay western ed!)

Anyway this was all before and during my visit to said uncle's house, which is this heinously ornate faux-Spanish-antique thing in an upscale Manila suburb. He has 9 (!) cars, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of these weird lumpy fish that are popular here and get entered in contests and shit. He's had at LEAST four commissioned paintings done of him and his family, which is somehow simultaneously hilarious, embarrassing, and really aggravating. They have a maid for every floor of the house.

Oh and did I mention that small-scale indigenous miners are relegated to crumbling dormitories that were built in the early 20th century and have not had one iota of maintenance done to them since? I didn't? Well they are. And the mining companies make them pay rent on said dorms, which were built right over their ancestral property in the first place. HAR HAR, indigenous miners. GOTCHA.

What. The. Fucking. Fuck.

That's all I have to say about that. I'm conflicted. Angry and ashamed? I guess those don't conflict. Okay. I'm not conflicted. I'm angry and ashamed. My family, in part, is rich off the blood of other people. THAT SUUUUUUCKS.

(At least my dad cures cancer. At least, directly, I'm the product of a minor superhero. Go dad! And mom! Plz to be making me not feel like I'm related to exploitative elitists! Kthx!)

Then I Went To See a Movie.

(Oh about the other part, I also feel mega-helpless, because, you know, what can you do? Nothing. Daaahhhhh)

So after THAT little debacle, I went to soothe my anger at the local cineplex by seeing The Dark Knight which, overhyped as it may currently be, was still pretty freaking awesome. Of course, any movie that has extended periods of Christian-Bale-in-an-insanely-expensive-suit in it gets my vote aaaaaany day. Ye gods, my blood pressure's going up just thinking about it. *fans self* Anyways, a lot of things blew up and many guns were fired and it took my mind off of how weird I felt that I am basically doing this pink-commie-immersion project while my relatives are growing fat (literally HAR HAR) off of the 85% of this country that can't afford a kilo of rice.

*breathe in* Christian Baaaaaaaale... *breathe out*

(It's my temporary mantra, donchakno.)

And Now, Tomorrow's Pinko-Commie Agenda

I just finished watching the WORST DOCUMENTARY OF MY LIFE, which actually has a pretty good title: There's Blood in Your Coffee, which is, supposedly, a film about workers' struggles at Nestle here in the Philippines. What it really is is a dude with a camera that gets sprayed with a water cannon, rendering his camera kind of useless, and some scrolling text that's just activist rhetoric that goes something like "Squash the Imperialist Nestle! Armed struggle for Workers' Rights to Benefits! The Capitalist Regime must Fall! GMA is a puppet!" (the latter of which is true, but).

As to what, exactly, the Nestle workers are FACING, I have no clue. It's probably something terrible, and I don't want to belittle that fact, but boy howdy, this film did an absolutely shit-awful job of explicating to any degree what that terrible something is. Then I get all conflicted because while I feel very much at home with a lot of this leftist stuff, propagation of pure rhetoric just makes my blood boil. I HATE unsupported, vague rhetoric. I'm not even entirely sure why it makes me so angry...but it really does. I think it's because it makes otherwise good ideas (for instance, DEMOCRACY) sound just as empty and stupid as really bad ideas (for instance, FACISM). That's not the kind of playing field you want to level, guys. Back up the proverbial truck.

So hopefully tomorrow I will get filled in on what all the rioting and picketing and yelling and tear-gassing was about. Because right now I'm less than sympathetic because I have no CLUE what is going on. You know, I should really get used to that feeling here - I only know what's going on about 5% of the time, and I think most of that time I'm asleep. Everything else? No clue. Not a one.

More tomorrow. Bed now, after I finish making up my Tupperware of corned beef n' rice for tomorrow. NOM.

...today might have been the dumbest day I've had in a while. You know, one of those days where you get to the end of the day and you're just like "...wat?"

EXCEPT! I did get a mani-pedi today, and now my toes and fingers are all glossy. This will last, with me, approximately 45 hours. Then, I will revert back to looking mangy. That's okay around here, though. Lots of things look mangy. And by "look" I mean "are." *cringe*

This would have been a total nonevent (I mean, for chrissakes, it's NAIL POLISH) if, of course, we hadn't decided to go to the WORLD'S WEIRDEST SPA. Apparently Lexie and Kris had gone there before, and they had somehow neglected to mention how incredibly bizarre and sketchy this place was. Or maybe they did not notice that this place was really some kind of spa-TWILIGHT-ZONE, although how they could have missed that fact escapes me entirely.
Anyways. We'd just gotten some deeeeeeeeeelicious halo-halo (Filipino dessert comprised of ice, milk, coconut, banana, and creme carmel, among other things depending on where you are, regardless it is yummy) down the street from our apartment after having sat through the World's Most Annoying Feedback Session. This (warning: tangent time) consisted of us trying to tell our programmers, in as diplomatic a way as possible, they they are incompetent douchebags, and our programmers, in as Jewish-mom a way as possible, telling us that really its all our fault. I was ready to kill someone with a spoon. Holy crap.
Anyways BACK TO THE POINT. So we get our snack and then wander down the block and across the street to this large thing on the corner that is advertising itself as a "spa." It looks spa-like, if a little crumbly, on the outside. I only noticed that it had NO WINDOWS in retrospect. So we (we: me, Lisa, Josie, Theresa) get in and we mull over treatments for a little bit and decide to all get mani-pedis. Good on us. We pay, and our shoes are confiscated and we are given sketchy little purple plastic slippers. Then they wave us upstairs.
So we go upstairs, a little confused as to where we go AFTER we get up the stairs, and we are confronted by about four billion lounge chairs and a buffet (??!). Somehow, we then get shuffled along THROUGH the buffet and into the locker room (which is just off the buffet! Yes!), where we are shown lockers with robes in them. Lisa's already halfway into hers when she looks up and is all "uhhhh, do we really need to get naked for a mani-pedi?" and the attendants, who have been standing there creepily the whole time, are all "mani-pedi? OH NO HAHAHA come this way."

So back through the buffet we go, clothes still on, thoroughly weirded out by the locker room attendants and old men with silk robes on and naked ladies and THERE IS STILL A BUFFET UP HERE WTF and everything is sort of shabby, like someone was trying to go for shabby-chic and just ended up with, you know, broken. We pick out nail colors (they had like 15 choices, 13 of which were SAFETY ORANGE so we picked the two that wouldn't make us visible from space) and then they usher us into what I will now call the Lazy-Boy Graveyard.

Picture, if you will, a huge dark room with a single, 20" flat screen TV playing Pinoy Idol on one wall. This ENTIRE ROOM is filled with recliners. Rows of them! And it's like fourteen degrees in said room because there is too much a/c. So we sit in some of these giant recliners, and we recline, and someone throws a towel over each of us, and so then we're reclining under towels. In the dark. And then three manicurists appear out of nowhere with some equipment and DESK LAMPS and put the desk lamps near our hands and feet and proceed to work on us under DESK LAMPS while we're in LAY-Z-BOYS in a BASEMENT.

I think it's that whole critical-level-of-absurdity thing in this country. Every time I think my life has hit that level, something just feels the need to, yunno, bump it up a notch. Just a notch.

So that happened. Then we ate some more food. Then we came home and watched crap on YouTube for a few hours, and now I'm here.

Tomorrow is Sunday. No note from Toto about lunch with family, so I guess I'm not in on it this time. That, I guess, opens up the day for more possible ways to have Strange Shit Happen To Me. Stay tuned, people.

(PS for any human-rights advocates: eventually I will post numbers and addresses etc for people to send things over here. Trust me when I say that people in this country need your old WHATEVER more than the Salvation Army ever has or will.)

(PPS Nestle factory on Monday. Arrrrrrrrrr)

THIS, folks, is why I'm pretty sure I'm done with this whole English grad student BULLSHIT:



I mean, I lol'd. But really, it would be exponentially funnier if it weren't SO damned true. When you think about it, it's a really stupid field. I sort of can't believe I've been doing it for this long without realizing how dumb it really is.

I am now, however, going to have to make up some new lines for the whole "oh, you're a poet? WhatareyagonnaDOOOwiththatsweetie" thing that I have to endure every fucking day of my whole fucking life.

Anyway, tonight we saw a reggae band and it was awesome and reminded me of JBB shows, and then I got all nostalgic THE END.

So, nothing has happened in the past few days, really. After getting back from Baguio, we had a rest day, during which I blogged, slept, and didn't get anything else done. Wednesday was a rain day, which is just like a snow day in the States, except the reason you can't go to school is because IT IS RAINING SO HARD THAT YOU CANNOT LEAVE YOUR HOUSE.

So that was...claustrophobic. No, actually, I did get a little writing done. It's probably bad. No, I'm sure it's bad, but hopefully nothing that a little revision can't fix.

Today I sucked at Filipino class (again - I hate being the sped kid, which I am in this class, because everyone else has TWO Filipino parents who BOTH speak the language and...well...I am at a disadvantage, people! Take pity on the white chick!), and then we watched Orapronobis, which, aside from being produced in the 80's which gives it that horrible, shoulderpadded feel that all 80's movies have, is really something everyone should watch even if they have no actual connection to the Philippines. Because dag, yo - the human right situation over here is messed up. Have I said that already? OH RIGHT.

Tomorrow is more human rights stuff, and I think I might skip it, because I have to get a move on with this writing business. Really, my lack of productivity, poetry-wise, has made me really nervous about...things? Like, I can write if I have deadlines. You know, poem-every-week type of deadlines. I've been writing here, but not much, and when I do sit down to write, it's like I have nothing to write about, even though more has happened to me in the past four weeks than in the past FOUR YEARS of my life. Possibly (prrrrrobably ) more. Maybe I'm just overstimulated.

Yahrite.

Oh, on another note: I never thought I would be so glad to get back to our little apartment bathroom in Manila Did I note that I took the COLDEST SHOWER ON THE PLANET while in Baguio? No? WELL I DID. Really what it consisted of was standing around in a bathroom that had an open window and a fan (connected to the light switch so you COULD NOT TURN IT OFF WTF) blowing the 50-degree Baguio air into the 50-degree bathroom and then dumping a bucket of 50-degree water onto my head. I am surprised that I did not die because, you know, when you are that cold, you sort of forget to breathe.

Something something "builds character" something something? Mrrrrrr

Okay. It's late. I should try to finish up this bad poem that I am writing, then get some bad sleep, because I took an ill-advised two-hour nap this afternoon. OOPS.


(PS mostly I am posting this because I found this new icon and it makes me lol)

And I'm back. Lazy day in Manila today; I woke up at NOON. It would appear that I am back to my normal sleeping habits here on the other side of the planet; this is bad because our days start at like 8 but not ALL bad because it might make my jet lag less horrendous when I go back. Speaking of, I hardly had any jetlag (other than waking up at 5 for a while, which in Bato, seemed almost normal) on the way here. Does this mean it will hit me double when I'm stateside? PLEASE NO.

The Story of the DKK, and Other Things

So Baguio is an unspeakably neat place. I have determined this. After getting back from Itogon (THAT'S the name of the mining barangay whose name I brain-farted on earlier), we went straight to Baguio's version of an urban poor community. Basically, this means indigenous people whose land has been encroached upon by the ever-expanding city of Baguio, not to mention the many and varied, uh, "interests" of the national government, who seem to be at the nerve center of EVERY POSSIBLE THING that is wrong with this country. But anyways. These people are weavers - they do some subsistence farming, but to get by, they buy thread from local corporations, and make parts of things like bags, table runners, jackets, etc...then sell the parts wholesale back to the corporation, who puts them together and then sells them at a markup.  They do this because there seems to be no way for them to get enough startup capital to do anything that would even approximate eliminating these (rather exploitative) middlemen. Thus they're stuck making about $3 for 9 hours worth of manual work at a loom that looks as if it has been time-warped there from approximately 1756.

At least they're not living on a mountain of garbage? I dunno. Slanty-face.

On another note, most of the mining companies that have a stake in demolishing stuff up here are from the UK and the US - apparently we use THIS gold to back up OUR currency, while the peso slides because the national government sits on its butt. Crazy but true - the motto of the Philippine socioeconomic situation. Or "horrible but true." Or "unspeakably evil but true." Or "fucked the shit up."

So after our visit to the weaver community, we were whisked off to lunch. Lunch was uneventful, but I do realize that I've been skimping on my culinary blogging. So here are some interesting Cordillera food-factoids for you, some of which are gross:

1) The local delicacy around here is known as pica-pica, or as the locals winkingly call it, "killing me softly." What is it: a chicken that has been BEATEN TO DEATH, then cooked. This results in, basically, rubbery chicken. I have no idea why it's considered so good. I just felt guilty for eating a chicken whose last moments consisted of every inch of its body being bruised. I HAS A SAD

2) They also do the above to dogs. Dog is very common up here. I didn't eat any because I didn't have the chance; I might have, but then again, I might not have.

Hm. Those two do seem to be the biggies of the area. I'll list more if I can think of them.

For Real This Time

The DKK - otherwise known as Dap-ayan ti Kultura iti Kordilyera - I had to look up the D word, because it is in Ilocano I think and also I have no idea what it means (the whole thing means "Cultural Center of the Cordillera"). This is where we went after lunch, and stayed until the wee hours of the morning. It was, in other words, a REALLY LONG STRETCH OF BEING AWAKE. Turned out to be more than worth it, though.

The DKK is a group of musicians and artists that are committed to preserving the (extraordinarily) rich cultural heritage of the indigenous people of this country. This is not an easy feat, as nearly every province has a tapestry of different art forms. So it's a multi-chaptered group of people that do everything from make documentaries to record cds to stage protests and spontaneous mural-ings. They took us in for the afternoon to teach us how to play the more common indigenous instruments, most of which are made out of bamboo and fall into the percussion category. So we thunked things on the ground for a while, and hit things with mallets, and blew over the tops of some things to make noise. We made a lot of noise.

Then we took the noise outside, where we hit GONGS (the handles of which, back in the day, were made from HUMAN JAWBONES) with mallets and generally made a racket while dancing. Yes, DANCING. This is another hilarious/embarassing gringa moment, because here I am, Kermit-the-Frog-esque body waving around and shuffling my feet to indigenous festival and funeral tunes. The courtship dance is particularly hilarious; you basically get shoved into the middle of a circle with a member of the opposite sex and you have to dance such that you look as much like a chicken as possible. As if that weren't enough, as the female, you have to watch the male dance like a chicken and THEN, if he comes anywhere near you, you have to do your best coy-chicken impersonation and run away from him. It is great, and by great I do really mean great but also embarrassing and pee-your-pants hilarious.

So I learned how to whack indigenous instruments and to badly approximate indigenous dance. It was super fun, until they told us that we would have to perform for them after dinner. WTF. So we spent a lot of time being nervous and planning things badly, until we agreed to let Philippe recite something over us demonstrating just how well we had learned to whack indigenous instruments. I should have realized that letting Philippe do his poetry thing would have been disastrous - as much as I told him to KEEP the motherfucking VOLUME down, he started, predictably, yelling things about spirituality and other nonsense concepts in the middle of our performance. I tried shushing him, but it didn't work. He's an idiot. But my rhythm remained intact, and they seemed to like it, so that was a thing. At least a puppy didn't poo in the middle of our recital like it did for some of the ALAY kids (San-Fran based Fil-Am youth org) who were interrupted in the middle of their hip-hop performance by said pooing.

After our ridiculous recital, the DKK members treated us to a bit of a jam session.

I am not sure how to approximate what happened then in words, because it's not one of those things that translates into words very well at all.  I think it might have epitomized how very musical the Filipino people are - honestly, for being some of the most downtrodden, poverty-stricken people on earth, they sing as if they had every reason to keep living. And even though I didn't understand a word of any of the songs, sung as they were in regional dialects (not that I would have understood them in Filipino, but you know), it didn't really matter - you know, transcendent properties of musical beauty and all that. HAR HAR. I think what was most moving was when three of the members started singing a particular song, and then when they hit the chorus, suddenly EVERYONE (that's about 20-odd DKK members that came out for this shindig) joined in. So it's dark, and we're sitting outside in a circle, and suddenly this chorus of voices crescendoes out of nowhere in PERFECT harmony...so many chills. Not to get emo, but it moved me to tears, it was that unspeakably beautiful.

Blah blah life changing moment blah blah blah

You know, you try to write these things down and you fail. I am going to stop failing now, and sign off, but suffice it to say that it was probably one of the single most emotionally-jam-packed moments of my life. I felt full to the brim with it, my proverbial cup running over. These people are amazing, and their culture is amazing, and I am amazed.

Quick update. I've got other shit to do, yo.


Barangay Whatever

I have no idea where we were yesterday, in other words. It was about 30 minutes south of Baguio. I thought it was going to be, like, camping out in a shack, but we ended up at our host's family-compound-thing (everyone out here has one, donchakno) and it was shockingly nice. They also had a small zoo: a few pigs, about four million dogs, a slightly lesser number of cats, a tadpole pond, chickens...anyway it was noisy. So their house was clean, and not made of plywood, and even had COUCHES. Yay couches. Only crazy thing was the bathroom - creepy-ass tiny hole in the floor in a shed outside. With no door. Errrrrrgh. It's a good thing I didn't have to, yunno, take a poo, because srsly guys, my aim is not that good. TMI SESSION OVER

So yesterday we spent the day touring the area in the CPA's jeep, which was enlightening ("here are the native mining sites" (tiny hole in the ground), vs. "here are commericial mining sites" (WHOLE MOUNTAINSIDE DEMOLISHED)). More on that later, if I remember.

At home, we were treated to a jam session by the local band, all of whose members are cousins. They were very good - and did hilarious covers of 80's country songs. I made friends with a tiny, malnourished house kitten. It slept on Becky's feet. I wanted to put it in my pocket and take it with, but, uh, it might have had fleas? Anyways.

Sorry this update is so short (no, no I'm not; my entries are usually HEINOUSLY long). Urban poor orientation now. Bbl, yo.

Because it is COLD up here!

Baguio, or, Land of the Vertical

I'm up in Northern Luzon for the next couple of days. Won't get to write tomorrow, because I will be staying in the middle of a poor mining community. Weeee?
Anyway, we left at like 1 AM Friday morning from Manila, on a bus. So I slept on a bus. Sort of. I think by slept, what I really mean is bounced around with my eyes closed for five hours. The upshot of this is that when I DID open my eyes, because it was getting light out, I had a hard time believing we were still in the Philippines. The Cordilleras are WACKY, man. Sheer mountainsides covered in little houses and impossible-looking rice terraces, mist that trails around between the ridges and looks as if someone put it there for dramatic effect, and a road, traversed at disconcerting speed by our bus, that makes the west-coast US 1 look like the Autobahn. Or Nebraska. Or both? Unreal, yo.

Our accommodations here are only slightly like camping; we're on mats on a floor but it is a CLEAN floor, and the bathrooms are sketchy but not TOO sketchy. The only problem is is that there's no hot water; while this is never a problem in 1305971-degree Manila, up here it is dry and borders on cold. I cannot tell you have weird it feels to walk around in the Philippines with a hoodie on. Weird but absolutely wonderful, as my pores are no longer producing like four gallons of sweat a minute. That's disgusting. But true.

Baguio is a seriously cool (now in the figurative sense) city. It's big, but not TOO big, and has the feel of a college town because most of its population is taken up by UP's campus, which is in the middle of everything. It also has one of the most amazing marketplaces I've ever seen - It's half-covered and half-open air, and because of the climate up there, the selection of produce for sale is STAGGERING. We got mangoes, lychee, strawberries (!), mangosteen, kamote tops...they even grow BROCCOLI up here. Anyway, I kind of wish the whole program was up here - but not really really, as it is rather isolated from...uh...everything (which, at the moment, is pretty much all of its charm).

We ate tonight at, I think, the only vegetarian restaurant in the entirety of the Philippines, which is owned by (surprise!) some artsy-fartsy types in film making or painting or something. It's called Oh My Gulay, which is verruh clever because gulay is vegetable in Tagalog. So most of the things on the menu are "OMG *insert food here*", which is pretty terrific. Not to mention that the interior looks like a cross between a pirate shipwreck and a botanical garden. To flush the toilet, you push on the a little tribal wooden statue guy. Bizaaaaaarrrrrre. But tasty! Uh, the food. Not the toilet flusher. Ew?

Anyway, I think I'm done for the night. I have a cold (for real this time; I can't breathe through my nose and it SUUUUUCKS) and I'm pretty sure whatever I bought for $3 at the drugstore isn't helping. Mrrr. Bedtime. Will update in two days, provided I don't fall into a mineshaft and die. Huzzah!

I got about 220 entries back on my flist before I gave up. I need to stop reading so many blogs that update 135 times a day. Cripes. Anyways, if anything truly significant has happened to you, blog-wise, and I have missed it, also blog-wise, leave me a note. I'll send you a postcard that won't get there until 2010.

Trip Up North?

Anyway, the subject line of this post refers, currently, to the situation that is going to be my life until Tuesday: a trip up to northern Luzon, specifically to Baguio (look it up on the map). This SHOULD, for all intents and purposes, be terrifically exciting - it has mountains and the ensuing cool air, incredible rice terraces, and is within arms reach of some of the tribal indigenous cultures of this country, who live in a kind of neolithic time-warp. It's a spot that even the locals like to vacation to in order to get out of the heat. Sounds perfect, no?

HAHA that would require that something involving the Philippine Forum, which is the US arm of this trip that I'm on, work with something akin to precision. Right now, from what I can tell, that organization is about as tidy as a 15-boxcar motherfucking TRAIN WRECK. The amount of sucking that they do, really, is something that cannot be adequately described in blog format. And it's not like I can write it off to extenuating circumstances - that would be one thing. No, the people that they sent over here from the States to "supervise" us have the leadership capabilities of cantaloupe. I mean, HERE is the entirety of the orientation for this THREE-NIGHT trip to a place we've never been before, in a country where we are, mostly, still getting our bearings:

"BAGUIO TRIP ALERT: We'll be staying at the CPA [editor's note: Cordillera People's Alliance, which may or may not be affiliated with the NPA, YOU NEVER KNOW WITH THESE PEOPLE] office for the duration, and they have mats for us, but they ain't (sic) got sheets, so bring a blanket. Also bring rainboots and a sweater."

Thanks, jerkface. Way to let us know a) what our itinerary was, b) WHY we are staying on someone's floor, c) WHOSE floor exactly it is we are staying on, d) what ELSE we might need to bring that isn't boots and a sweater, e) just generally what the shit is wrong with you?

I mean, we all paid a fair chunk of change to live here for a while and do this program. To me, thousands of dollars (which goes to hundreds of thousands of pesos omg) does NOT EQUAL sleeping on a mat on a floor with critters on your head in some guy's basement or whatever the fuck this is. It also DOES equal ADVANCE NOTICE OF ANYTHING EVER.

I mean, I am having a wonderful, wonderful, life-changing experience over here. Seriously! But it is in no way being helped, and may in fact be actively lessened, by the incompetence of the Philippine Forum. The AVHRC people have their shit together - no doubt, Ate Poty and Gibo and all them are just marvelous. But (irony alert!) the folks on the state-side of this whole deal seem to have their collective faces up their collective buttholes, and it is sending me up the proverbial goddamned creek.

Anyway I get to meet with jerkface in question in about an hour. I will try not to stab him in the crotch with my umbrella. Willpower, I has it.

Art Art Poetry Art Fart Art Art

So Tuesday night I went to the Centennial Literary Prize awards ceremony - not the giant, Nobel-esque award that I'd mentioned before. My proverbial balloon, however, was in no way deflated because this was still pretty awesome, and involved a guy dressed in wacky indigenous garb reciting a crazy poem in Filipino and then letting four pretty little red birds go IN THE AUDITORIUM. I think they have probably died in there by now, and that makes me sad. They flapped around for a while (hence me almost getting hit in the head) and then huddled in the corner, obviously freaked out of their little birdie minds. Moop.

Anyway after that I got shuffled off to the post-awards dinner thing, which was a nice (and free!) buffet where I met everyone ever and forgot everyone's names. The exception was Gemino H. Abad, whose name I certainly DID know from previous reading. Anyway he told me to call him Jimmy and then proceeded to drink with us and then, I am not kidding, play BUTLER (complete with British accent!) and drive us (who us? Me, another prof, and some Fil-Am dude from Berkeley named Jude) over to Mag:net, the same cafe where I'd done my reading the night before. So here I am, in a car, with a famous 80-something-year-old author who is singing along to the radio while swerving through Manila traffic to go to some smoky club where he will continue to drink with, well, us.

I HAS A WEIRD

Anyway the night was awesome; I met a singing duo called Blush comprised of two lovely young women named Leigh and Alex, and I am going to spend some time in their (rather exquisite) company next week when they play again. Toto showed up again, too, because for some reason he seems to like hanging out with me; also I think he feels obligated to drive me places, which makes me feel odd, but oh well, it's better than a taxi!

Also, this guy asked me out on a date. He was very drunk. We played 20 questions for about an hour. It was weird. I told him about gp at home, and he said "yes, but home is far away." I told him I was a faithful woman. And I meant it, for once in my life! Hoooooray. (He was very funny, but a little...forward...and also, um, how shall we say, pot-bellied? I AM SO SHALLOW)

So we watched many performances, and laughed a lot, and I didn't read this time because it wasn't a poetry reading, which is good, because while I think my poetry was on par with a lot of what was read up there on Monday (probably worse, actually; Filipinos are staggeringly good poets. I think this has something to do with a combination of the fact that they are basically made of pure emotion, but keep it in check with hiya. Look it up), I think my presence as an American who doesn't even LOOK Filipino at the reading might have been a little odd.

Last night was a benefit dinner for Concerned Artists of the Philippines, or CAP. (This country lurrrrves it some acronyms.) It was also good, and a lot of the same people were there as were at the reading on Monday and the awards on Tuesday. Remember when I said it was a tight community? YES THAT. Anyways, all was fine (except for the fact that Alex, mentioned in my Chinatown entry, was the MC: "look they are FIL-AMS! ASK THEM ABOUT THE JEWS.") until Philippe did his spoken word thing, at which point I wanted to crawl into a hole and DIE because it was so inappropriately loud, absurdly abstract, and just generally ridiculous for the venue. I'll say no more about that, but everyone was, as usual, painfully gracious and nice about everything. And I swear if I ever hear the phrase "spiritual revolution" ever again, I will punch the person that says it in the kidneys. SO WATCH OUT.

Here's hoping for a blissfully uneventful trip to Baguio. Or a largescale revolt that results in me going to a cushy hotel and not speaking to anyone for four days. Either one!

Not to jinx myself, but here's an interesting factoid: because SO MANY PEOPLE have been taking SO MANY PICTURES of me in the past few days (just group shots of us, pretty much everywhere we go), I think I have figured out, finally, after twenty-odd years of looking like a total sack of shit in photos, to look good on camera. I just have to tilt my head down a little and not smile so broadly. Brilliant! Now I can at least hope for some pictures that don't make my face look like a potato with teeth. Isn't that gross? That's gross.

Lupong Pang Ako, The Promised Land, or, The Most Ironically Named Place on the PLANET

So, today was technically called "urban poor immersion." This is not really a misnomer, as we did in fact see the urban poor. What I think is misleading about it is that it implies some standardization of city poverty, when in fact, I'm not really sure if "urban poor" does justice to the kind of living that these people have to do every day.

Also, I was right about the olfactory thing. Today was the first time in my life where I came thisclose to throwing up in the road because of an odor.

What is up with the superlatives, you ask? Well LET ME TELL YOU. Lupong Pang Ako, which translated means "The Promised Land," is a small (~250 families) barrio about forty minutes outside of Manila proper, on the outskirts of Quezon City (which is where I live). This village is comprised, in its entirety, of people that must scavenge for a living. The place where they do said scavenging is, rather conveniently, right out their front doors: they live pretty much on top of a GIANT (and I do mean giant; the hill is about as big as a typical Appalachian mountainside I am not exaggerating) landfill. The ensuing question: why in the wide world of sports would you live on top of a landfill? THAT, sir, is bad property planning! True - unless you've been forced out of your homes by a BULLDOZER in the name of business development. Anyway, before I butcher the specifics (which I would undoubtedly do), I'll stop and just give you a link to Lisa's Picture Of the Trash. (Lisa, today, went hypoglycemic and thought that she was Going To Die At That Moment, but I will get to that later.)

Okay. Imagine, if you can, what a mountain of refuse that large must smell like. You can't do it, you say? THAT IS BECAUSE YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN NEXT TO A MILE-HIGH PILE OF GARBAGE. And if you have, you know what I am talking about. Holy mother of Mary. So bad. Soooooooooo. Unbelievably. Awful. In so many ways.

Anyways, so here is what life is like for people that live here. Remember my Philippine Farming Instructions(TM)? Well here's my Philippine Scavenger's Guide for Dummies:

1) Wade up mountain of trash. WEAR BOOTS.
2) Find things you can use. This means: plastic anything, scraps of wood or metal, and food. Yes, food.
3) Sort through and organize things by material. Weight them out in kilo-bags. This includes the food, which you must clean by shaking (this is why they call this particular meal pag-pag, which means to shake dirt off of something) and recooking. You will eat this later. It is made, mostly, of leftover fast food from McDonald's and Jollibee - this includes meat and fish that have been sitting in the sun for days. It may or may not make you deathly ill.
4) If you don't die from the food, sell off your plastics (at about 5-20 pesos, or less than half a dollar, per kilo) at local junk shops.
5) Check for trash delivery trucks.
6) If you find a trash truck, and it's coming from a nice condo building site, pay the equivalent of 75 US DOLLARS for other people's trash. Maybe a little less if you're not as lucky and the trash is mostly things that are already rotten. But pay you must.
7) Avoid the police, who routinely barge through your homestead to make sure you are not a terrorist. (Thank you, War on Terror, for keeping our country safe. FGHWTHGHADS)
8) Rinse. Repeat.

As if this weren't enough (and it is, you say! STOP IT, you say! I say - but wait there's more!), these people, who live in this stench, who eat this rotten food, are under constant threat of even THESE homes being demolished to make way for a railway that would connect commercial centers. Thus the land next to this to-be-developed area, i.e. these people's houses, is being bought up by foreign (!) business investors who want to commercialize the area. Where, then, do these people go? GOOD FREAKING QUESTION. The answer: floodplains. Yes, floodplains, which the government promises to develop but never does, and so leaves these people, who barely functioned before but at least had, you know, FLOORS, without so much as electricity, water, or any means to make any money or buy any food.

See, it's time #190257124 where I type something, but I dont' really understand it. Like, I can't comprehend it. i can't comprehend how one bit of humanity can do that to another bit of humanity and still sleep at night. Case in point: there used to be an even BIGGER mountain of trash next to Lupong Pang Ako. People scavenged in it. Hundreds of people per day. Well, when you scavenge for a living, you're not really thinking about the mechanics of what you're doing, and so the thing gets excavated from the bottom up. This led, eventually, to an ENORMOUS collapse/slide of the trash heap. It killed upwards of 300 people. Buried. Alive. In. Garbage.

Let's try this again: THESE PEOPLE WERE BURIED ALIVE IN GARBAGE WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK

*cough* Okay. So people lost half their families, because, you know, buried alive in garbage. (There I go, typing it again. It's not helping.) As you might imagine, this whole thing got a ton of publicity, and so donations came pouring in to the tune of a few billion pesos.

None of it reached the victims' families.

NONE.

I have no idea where it went, mostly because I don't want to know, but what I do know is that every day I am here, I am astounded anew at the capacity of the Philippine government for evil. It's mindblowing. It sort of makes the Holocaust look like small-time arms dealing, really. And that's not belittling the Holocaust, THAT is the scale of corruption and government-sponsored death around here. And don't even get me started on its US-sponsored "anti-terror" activities. I'll blow a frigging gasket.

And Then Lisa Almost Fell Over

In the middle of all this trash-meddling, hearing from community organizers (gut-wrenching; these people just want to eat food that is NOT GARBAGE, for chrissakes, they just want to not be called SQUATTERS in their own country, in their own houses, to be free from the stigma of TERRORIST), Lisa is looking a little pale, sitting on a fallen palm tree. She'd been sick with a (mercifully short) stomach bug the day before.

I'm listening to someone saying something awful, when I hear this little "Kimmmmm...." from behind me. I turn, and Lisa is green. GREEN, I tell you!

I have no idea why she yelled for me, but it must have meant something, because the minute I came over there I realized that she'd gone hypoglycemic. Happens to me every so often, and I know that it feels approximately like Slow Death By Squeezing. Poor thing hadn't eaten anything but rice and crackers in the past two days, and here we were, in the 90-degree wet blanket that is the Philippine Outdoors, surrounded by rotting stuff.

Nearest air-conditioned facility? WHO KNOWS! Anyway I started ranting about sugar and a/c and potassium, which caused three things to happen: a) me to annoy Becky, who was propping up Lisa's drooping head (I was probably talking too much, as is my unfortunate wont), b) weird things like ice cream to start randomly appearing from down in the barrio, and c) someone to find a coconut and hack it open with a machete. The coconut water would have been fine if someone hadn't poured it into the WORLD'S SKETCHIEST GLASS. Urk. Anyway we fed, at my behest, a bunch of sugary things to Lisa and I told her to sit tight and wait for the glucose to hit her. It did, and she stopped looking like something out a vampire movie. I breathed a sigh of relief, and got a little bit of a "hey, it would be kind of cool to be a doctor at moments like these" feeling until I realized that I would be the worst doctor in the universe.

Anyway now it has become the Lisa Almost Dying At The Foot of a Mountain of Garbage story. Really, morbidly, it's pretty funny. She almost fell off a palm tree into a heap of garbage and dogs because she forgot to eat. I mean, hell? THAT IS IT RIGHT THERE FOLKS, YESSIRREEBOB.

There was more garbage. Some sobbing. More stench. Then we went home.

Artsy-Fartsy Followup

The past few days of my life have been extremely arts-centric (punctuated, rather pointedly, by today's Day at the Trash Heap). We went to a benefit dinner, which was a little odd after having spent the day with people that have to eat week-old McD's boiled in soap every day. I'm not going to elaborate because I am tired, but suffice it to say that the Philippine arts community is well-heeled, sort of elitist, political, and they all hang out at all the same places all the time, which made me feel a little like I was in Bizarro-East-Village-in-the-60s. I got introduced to approximately 13987513098 people, all of whose names I now forget. Oh wait I think I said that already. OKAY BED


PS: spoken word poetry sort of makes me want to kill something?

Have I already titled a post "Gaaaaahhhhhhh?" I probably have. OH WELL.

This is short, most for future reference so I don't forget to write anything down:
1) Skipped out on factory-workers-day yesterday to write. Was sort of productive.
2) FIRST READING IN THE PHILIPPINES OMG. Was well-received? I think? At magnet, funky coffee shop.
3) Today = absurd. Got driven around by a famous writer, almost got hit in the head with a bird, got hit on by a tv personality, met some Fil-Am brethren at same coffee shop, hung out with cousin some more, listened to much music, got acquainted with the Philippines' university-hipster-artsy scene and it is...interesting. Met about 1389571304182 people, about 1341 of whose cell phone numbers I now have for some reason

Anyway yay? I am exhausted. Tomorrow - urban poor immersion. Read: WADING THROUGH TRASH. I have given my sinuses reason to hate me in the past, but I think that this might be the trump card. I has a scared.

Only giving myself thirty minutes to write this entry, because I gave myself a day off today in order to GET WORK DONE. I'm all alone in my apartment! Waaaah.

Sundays w/ Family

So, for the past two Sundays I have been having lunch at Tita Nene's house, which is just 15 minutes or so from my apartment. My cousin (actually my mom's cousin's son, so my 2nd or 3rd or something cousin... whatever, the cool thing about huge families is that after 1st cousin, apparently, there is no other designation besides just "cousin," which is nice) Toto picks me up and drives me there, which is wonderful because it means that I do not have to navigate public transpo, like I do every other day of my life here. Anyway, a fairly regular, it seems, crowd shows up, mostly consisting of my mother's cousins and their spouses and, in the case of Tita Sheila, her offspring: Toto and his sister, Marisa and HER significant other (whose name I think is Roy?). They ask me about school and make fun of me for not eating tilapia with my hands and wanting to clear dishes, etc. It's a good time.

Toto and I, especially, have been getting along famously. I think it's because Toto doesn't have a wife to attend to, and lives life a little bit like he's my age (he's actually pushing 40, though he looks younger than me). So we talk about vacation destinations, and what I'll do when I come back (I'm planning on coming back? I GUESS SO) after my MFA, his latest social endeavors, and the like. Anyways, this Sunday I agreed (even though I was soooo tired) to let him take me shopping at this place called Greenhills, which (I think?) is over towards Pasig City.

BARGAIN HUNTING AHOY!

Greenhills is a mall. Sort of. It has proper mall stores, and restaurants, and stuff, but it's not all contained in one building, and, here's the best part, a GIANT part of it is devoted to stalls where there are no fixed prices on anything. Thus, on Sundays, everyone and their MOM (literally!) goes out to try and catch a deal.

We were no exception, and Toto led me around the stalls, looking for clothes or shoes or bags or pearls or whatever. Well, once we got into it (read: once I stopped gawking and actually found something to try on), we really got into it: I'd pick something out, try it on, make some faces, and then Toto would haggle the SHIT out of the vendor. This resulted in some pretty good deals - three pure cotton dresses and a leather belt for $30, capiz earrings for $2, REALLY nice sunglasses (Cartier knockoffs but they were class AAA and honestly, I couldn't tell the difference in look or weight) for $50.

Of course, the best is always last. We were wandering past oodles of bag vendors when a "Coach" bag caught my eye. You know, the patchwork ones - well this one was this season's, and was a remarkably good looking imitation. I moved towards it and was immediately assaulted by the saleslady, who quoted me at P3000. That's about $75. I was like "yikes!" and she lowered it instantly to P2500. At this point Toto wanders over and makes it clear that he is with me, at which point the price miraculously drops to P2000. Toto says something to the effect of "lady that is RIDICULOUS" in Filipino and suddenly she is all "special deal, for you only, do not tell" and drops the price to P1500. We mull over this for a while. Then, Toto says in a tone that was just redolent of the promise of amusement, "we need my mother."

So we go have a drink and meet up with Tita Sheila and Toto's brother and Toto's brother's gf. We tell Tita what we're looking at, and the other thing that I wanted to buy, which was a classic white pearl necklace (every girls needs a rope or two, donchaknow). She nods sagely, and then we march off towards the pearl section of the stall-mall.

There are more pearls for sale here than I have ever seen in my entire life, and I shit you not when I say that some of them would fetch tens of thousands of dollars in the US. I have no idea why they're still in the Philippines. Maybe the US pearl market is saturated?

Anyway. Tita Sheila leads me through these vendors, searching for god-knows-what, and stops (randomly, to me, though I'm sure she had her reasons) at a vendor and points to some pearls hanging in front of us. The vendor takes the rope bundle down and Tita riffles through the pearls. This continues for a while, until she finds some that are white enough and round enough but aren't locked away in the glass case (those are MUCHO pricey). She asks "magkano dito?" (translation: how much for these) and the vendor says something I don't catch. Tita then puts on this HILARIOUS pained expression and says a bunch more things in Filipino that I also don't catch. (I don't catch most things in this country. It's great.) They get stuck around P350 a rope - Tita wants them for P300, but the vendor won't go any lower. Keep in mind that we are now in the territory of a 12-inch long rope of REAL pearls going for less than $10. Well, we're surrounded by pearl vendors, so Tita thanks the lady and we move on. A few stalls later, we find similar pearls, and THIS vendor is willing to part with them for P300. I wanted a long necklace, so we agree on 2 ropes, Tita Sheila picks out the best ones from the bundle, I pick out a clasp, and then I watch in mild amazement as my necklace is made in front of me - this lady strung the beads, knotted the string, reinforced the ends, and attached the clasp in about three minutes. I was astounded.

So now I have a gorgeous necklace that would cost I-dunno-what in the States. I paid $15 for it. Rock.

Last thing - back to the crazy Coach vendor lady. I show back up and vendor lady is THRILLED, pulls down a few more of her wares, and proceeds to regale me about quality. The bags are most definitely leather - the emblems are all right, the seams are intact, the hardware is actual hardware. I let Tita take over, of course. She takes the bag I'm interested in and pokes at it for a while, all the while haggling the HELL out of the vendor lady. They get stuck around 1400 for a while - vendor is unwilling to go lower. Tita is not amused. At this point I duck out and start looking at the watched in the next booth with Toto, because I am a) confused, b) wary of looking dopey/white, and c) about to crack up at this whole process. A few minutes later, the price has gone to P1200, or about $30 - from P3000 an hour ago when she thought I was stupid and American and DIDN'T have a one-woman haggling army with me. Anyways now I have a bag that someone will think I paid like $500 for. Brilliant.

So, haul: three dresses, one belt, bracelet, earrings, bag, real necklace, sunglasses: not even $200.

Win, yo.

Saturdays around here always fuck up my week-trajectory, because we STILL have class, and so it makes me think that it’s actually Friday, and then I get really disappointed when I realize that I only have Sunday to goof off, and by goof off I mean try and get all the work done that I’d meant to do all week but didn’t because I was dead every night. *cough* Today was no exception, but I’m all giddy now because finally, FINALLY, I got to meet my poetry adviser, and the meeting went very well.

He’s great, agreed to help me out, invited me to the centennial award ceremony for the equivalent of, like, the Nobel Prize in Literature for the Philippines on Tuesday (!!!!), and offered to accompany me to a reading on Monday, AND said he’d put my name on the list of folks to read at said reading. I was like “oh HELL no,” but he said “no, you should read, then you can meet with the other writers from that group every so often and go over your work together.” This is pleasing to me on many levels – it means that, hopefully, I will get to sit in a little café with other writers and talk a little shop over tea and merienda. And, hopefully, those writers will be open to having a half-blood in their group who doesn’t really read Filipino – though from what I can tell, this reading is going to be in English, so.

So yes. Productive day, and I still have a little energy left over to read and/or write, so I am a happy pig.

Gp told me yesterday that blogs were selfish. I got sort of irrationally angry at him for it. I feel bad about it now, because we’re so far apart; the LAST thing we need now is to be bickering over email. But I’m still a little itchy about it – yes, of course blogs are egocentric! They’re narcissistic by nature! But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re SELFISH. There’s a fine line, and I think I prickle at being called selfish because so much of what I do in…life…is so self-centered. I know that about myself, and I am ashamed of it, so I’m sensitive about it. Too sensitive, perhaps – I should learn to take that criticism to heart and try harder to change it. I do try – but sometimes I can’t, don’t, forget…I dunno. Problem with being an artist, I guess. You think you’re worldly, but we all have blinders on.

Anyway. Today I learned how to count in Filipino, also. And to name parts of my body. That is going to be very useful when, say, I am taking a cab.

“Where are you going?”
“FOOT!”

Anyway. Tomorrow, day off. Possibly crazy Chinatown market, but more likely, sitting around reading. Later gators.

Hahaha. Here is my entry from two days ago, aka 7.2.2008:

Today I ripped half my right big toenail off.
In other news, Women’s Rights lecture today. Tomorrow, Chinatown. Here’s hoping I don’t get massively pickpocketed. Joy.


ANYWAY.

Hummmm. Sorry no entry yesterday; I was DEAD TIRED and many things happened to me. Nothing, fortunately, happened to me today (of note, anyway), so I can catch up now. Weeeee. Hooooo.

Binondo

Aka Chinatown. Every city has one; Manila is no exception - in fact, it might be one of the world's very FIRST Chinatowns, as the Chinese have been scooting back and forth between their home and the Philippines for about one thousand years, give or take. Most Filipinos, it would seem, are some mix of indigenous, Chinese, and Spanish. So anyway. The district that houses Chinatown is known as Binondo, and we went there yesterday for a trip around the area with our tour guide (who had also shown us around Intramuros), Alex Umali.

Alex might be the most ridiculous person I have ever met. This is saying something, given the fact that our OTHER guide, Rommel Forbes, is a crazy gay peasant's activist who takes belly dancing classes. ANYWAY.

Alex is a historian with a few amusing shortcomings; he's well-read in the Philippine history department but when it comes to American culture, he is hilariously uninformed. So he sort of views us as little gems full of factoids about American culture - and while that may be true to an extent, none of us works for the census. So when he asks us stuff like “how many Irish Filipinos are there in America?” we all just sort of stare at each other and try not to crack up. I mean, imagine, if you will, a tiny, wiry Filipino academic looking over his glasses at me, very seriously, and asking in a Filipino accent:

“So. How is it, you know, how are…the Jews? Are they tolerated in America? What do you think of them?”

I sort of flapped like a fish for a minute, then said, slowly, “Um. Well, I think, post, you know, the Second World War, that the United States, you know, figured that the Jews were okay?”

o_O

He then interrogated us about Jewish business policies, African-American employment rates, and the titles of various Elvis songs. All of this, mind you, in a Starbucks in Binondo while we were waiting for Philippe to show up from getting stabbed in the arm with rabies shot #2. After we were “complete” (another Alexism; when he tries to round us all up somewhere, he goes “complete?? Are you complete?? Are we complete??” etc), we headed towards the Binondo Church, a 17th century monument to Catholicism that has, I shit you not, the most ridiculous statue of Jesus in it that I have ever seen.

This Jesus statue – a Jesus, mind you, standing upright while nonchalantly toting a giant cross, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t the case at the time – had on, I think, something equivalent to a parody of a mid-19th century prom gown.

It was red, and COVERED in sequins, and had lace trim on the sleeves, collar, and hem. It was like someone had gone to a Joann’s fabrics and raided the “SALE” section for sparkly things, then sewn it into a dress, then had filched the lace from someone’s grandma’s tablecloth, and tacked it onto the hems, and then said “you know what? I think this would look good on…JESUS CHRIST. LITERALLY.”
*facedesk*

Moving On: The Ankle Chronicles

So we left the church and started walking towards the marketplace of Chinatown proper, aka Ongpin Street. (Oh: we also saw Cory Aquino’s ancestral house, which looks spookily like my lola’s ancestral house, except even MORE!dilapidated and abandoned.) At this point I was toodling along, not really paying attention to anything, when my right foot found a perfectly Kim’s-right-foot-sized pothole. Into the pothole my foot went. CRUNCH, went my ankle.

Holy damn.

I didn’t break it. I just twisted the HELL out of it. So I nearly fall over (keep in mind it is also raining, so in addition to my ankle hurting, I am also damp and covered in city-mud, which is like regular mud, only about four hundred times more foul), clutch at my ankle, and start hopping after the rest of my group, trying to tell them to stop. Two people stopped, but the rest just kept going – they didn’t hear me. So now they’re gone, and Kas and Josie and Jona (an associate of the Philippine Forum that had joined us for the day and, mercifully, spoke Filipino) are stuck with me, who has suddenly and irrevocably become a gimp for the day. I said “I need ice asap.” Jona runs off to procure some from the nearest store, and I contemplate what to do. We weren’t far from the church, so I figured I’d just go back there and sit down with some ice on my foot until I could get my bearings straight as far as the rest of the day was concerned. Jona comes back with the ice, I put it on my foot, and start gingerly making my way back towards Binondo church.

This is where things take a turn for the weird.

I hadn’t gotten more than about 7 steps when some guy off the street comes up to me and starts talking in Filipino, gesturing at my ankle. I told him I twisted it. Out of nowhere, this guy produces an empty glass Coke bottle and puts it on the sidewalk. I look at it, then at him. He gestures at it, and then tells me to take my flip-flop off. I must have looked about as sketched out as I felt, so he took his OWN flip-flop off, and proceeded to roll his foot back and forth on the Coke bottle – just like one does in physical therapy when working one’s ankle, granted with something, uh, slightly more sophisticated than a glass soda container. He also saw the bag of ice in my hand and said something to the effect of “no! No ice! Need hot! Hot for ankle!”
I said “no, I need the ice for the SWELLING.”
He goes, “No ice! Hot!”
I said, “Swelling!”
He said, “Ice for head.”
I said, “What?”
So we did that a few times. Then I rolled my foot on the Coke bottle a few times to humor him. I told him I was going to the church to sit down. He asked me if I was sure I was okay, I said yes, and then I was on my way.

This sort of encounter happened a couple more times before I got to the church. I shit you not when I say that the church was about 200 YARDS away. It is amazing – the minute you appear to be injured, every Filipino within spitting distance stops and attempts to help you. No matter that you’re white. No matter that you can’t speak their language. They drop EVERYTHING and try their damndest to get you to feel better. Hey, it’s time for more boggling! Boggle boggle.

(Switching to present tense now. Is easier.)

So I get to the church, throw my leg up onto a pew, and plop the ice down onto it and feel sorry for myself for a while. I am accompanied, at this point, by Gibo, one of our program organizers, who might be the best person on the face of the planet. He’s shy, efficient, works relentlessly, and has shuttled us all over this damn city in the past two weeks. The man’s patience, I swear to Christ, is completely boundless. Anyway, he sits down with me and starts texting Alex, telling him what happened and where we are. Then he shuffles in and out of the church, making phone calls and coming in after each one to tell me what’s going on. I told him we could meet the group for lunch, wherever they stop, because then I could just sit. Gibo said that that was a good idea, because lunch was soonish anyway.

So we wait.

I’m sitting around, icing, when this church custodian guy sees me looking pained and comes over to my pew. He peers over the back of the pew and then starts talking rapid-fire Filipino at Gibo, who translates for me when he’s not talking back. Apparently, Custodian had the same issue with the ice as Coke Bottle Guy. Something about ice only being for head wounds?? Anyway, I know from many injuries/doctors as parents/LOGIC that cold reduces swelling, so I’m very, VERY wary of Custodian’s medical prowess. But he seems to know exactly what I’d done to my ankle; he pokes it in exactly the right spot (I go “OW!” and he gives me this look like “wimp.”)  and then makes this ankle-spraining motion with his hand and wrist. I nod; yes, that did just happen. He is emphatic about his no-ice policy, so I take the ice off my ankle and look at Gibo imploringly, like my eyes were going “whaaaaaaaaaat plz let me put the ice back on it kthx” – Gibo starts talking to Custodian, who makes a bunch of hand motions out the door and says something like “ointment.” Gibo tells me that he is going to a Chinese pharmacy down the block and he’ll be right back. I tell him to get me a bandage, if he could, so that I could wrap it. Gibo disappears out the door. I am left with Custodian, who pokes at my ankle some more, says he’ll be back, and then goes back to doing, you know, HIS JOB.

About fifteen minutes later Gibo comes back with some menthol/camphor ointment, a wound bandage (whoops), and an Ace bandage (yes!). He says, “I didn’t know which one you wanted, so I just got both. Hope these are okay.”

If this man isn’t already a candidate for sainthood, he should be.

Anyway. I start gingerly applying ointment to my ankle – it’s like a topical analgesic, think Icy-Hot or Bengay (har har). About two seconds into that process, Custodian is back. He waves my hand away from my ankle, clucks at me like a mother hen, scoots around the end of the pew, kneels down on the kneeling bench next to my ankle, tells me to RELAX PALA (translation: already, you silly girl) and proceeds to scoop up some ointment and rub it into my ankle.

Okay. I am sitting. In a pew. In a church. With a badly twisted ankle. With a church custodian. Who is now, apparently, my new doctor.

He rubs layer after layer of ointment into my ankle, checks me to see where it hurts, checks the swelling around my ankle and on my foot, massages my heel, my toes, the bottom of my calf, and my arch with shockingly gentle hands, all the while mumbling at my ankle and, occasionally, at Gibo. I learn during this process that he stopped school in the 6th grade to work – that’s why, he apologized to me, his English was so bad. I told him I felt awful that my Filipino wasn’t better. He said it was okay. He rubbed my ankle for, no joke, about 15-20 full minutes.

Then he bandaged it up as well as I could have done it, or better, asked me if I was okay, told me not to walk, and disappeared into the back of the church.

The rest of the day, really, pales in comparison to that little episode. I didn’t even have a chance to tell him maraming salamat po.

The Executive Summary of Everything Else

We saw some museums. I crutched around on my umbrella. The Philippine Post Office is the most ridiculous building ever, because it sort of looks like the US Supreme Court. I got my sister a canvas tote. Alex continued to be ridiculous. Then I rebandaged my foot, rebandaged my toenail (I swear to Christ I should just cut my right leg off at the knee; it’d be better for everyone) and went to bed.

Today we learned more about how fucked up the Philippine socioeconomic system is.
It’s fucked up.
The end.

I thought I was itchy before. Now I have heat rash from yesterday! Huzzah! Also the skin on my toes appears to be falling off. Also, my internal temperature has not quite yet normalized, so I feel irrationally hot even when I'm in the a/c, which is not often, so when I'm in the hot, I'm REALLY hot.

I also realized I mentioned lung cancer not only in yesterday's entry, but in the entry previous. Me? Worried about my pulmonary system in Manila? Surely you jest.

Anyway I'm going to take my itchy self to bed. Today I learned a lot of more depressing things about migrant workers. Maybe I will elaborate on it later, or maybe I will continue to complain about my increasing number of skin abnormalities. The suspense! It kills!

I am not entirely sure if today was the most interesting day of my life, or the worst. Maybe both?

Ready, Set, Agriculture

Today was “peasant integration.” It does not mean that we attempted to integrate peasants into regular (HAHA, there is no such thing in the Philippines, JUST KIDDING) society. It means that we integrated OURSELVES into a rural peasant community.

I have never been so hot or so dirty in my entire life. And I’ve been pretty hot, and pretty dirty, many times before. This day made all my camping trips combined look like an excursion into a Silicon Valley clean room. A neurosurgeon’s table. Holy Jesus.

I am getting ahead of myself. Back up the proverbial truck!

A word of background: as much as I am enthralled that I am here, and as much that I am learning every second of every day, the program that I am in is, uh, how shall we say, very FILIPINO – and by Filipino I mean hopelessly disorganized. That’s an awful stereotype, but it is also pretty true. We have been missing notification for things like times, transportation, money needs, class locations, etc for the duration of the program – a mere week and change, but there you have it. This is usually just frustrating, nothing much more – after all, when in Rome. You just sort of roll with the punches and get annoyed at the Fil-Am coordinators in New York that, even though they are PLENTY American, cannot seem to grasp the fact that Americans are, generally speaking, used to about four hundred percent more efficiency and advance notification of…stuff…than people in this country. And as much as we’d like to “assimilate” (ha), we are still very much American, and that should be taken into account. Blah blah blah, anyway – so, things are frustrating. Or, were frustrating.

Today, the lack of preparation moved into the realm of the medically dangerous, and THAT, my friends, pisses me right the hell off.

We were scheduled to leave at around 7 AM for Bulacan, which is a more rural province that’s still within a long throw of Manila. We actually left around 10. This is about normal (they call it Filipino time, which is well approximated by the sum of scheduled time + phone calls + jeepneys + eating + napping). Problem is, by the time we actually got to Barrio Visayas, which is the little barangay that was hosting us for the day, it was about 11:30. Our first scheduled event: a hike around the planting fields. This is a fine plan if you’re starting at around 8:30. We started at about noon.

NOON, PEOPLE. IN THE PHILIPPINES. AT THE END OF SUMMER.

They hadn’t told us what to bring in terms of provisions – just “oh, bring water and lunch.” Not “oh, you’ll be hiking for an hour in the noonday sun in an open, 18-degree sloped field. BRING ENOUGH WATER SO THAT YOU DO NOT DIE.” I am finding myself using caps lock a lot here. It is because I am incredulous at this. Not incredulous. Okay, maybe a little incredulous. I shouldn’t be – at this point, I shouldn’t even be batting an eye. But again – medically dangerous. I think at that point, I really do start to boggle at how grossly misinformed we were about what we were going to be doing. I brought about a litre and two-thirds of water. Some people didn’t even bring that much. Hell, I didn’t even think to bring that much until the last minute, when I bought a litre of water on the way out the door in Manila, thinking “well, we’re late, it’s probably going to be hot.”

I’m pretty sure there are no words for exactly how hot it was. And humid. With relentless sun. Yadda yadda, I am complaining, yes, but what really makes this significant is that, honestly, someone could have died. We were miles away from the nearest TOWN, let alone the nearest competent medical care. If someone had fainted, or, god forbid, come down with heat stroke, they would have been COMPLETELY fucked. Now, if we were adequately briefed, and someone had come down with heatstroke, it would have been one thing. But if, in this case, that had happened, it would have been directly the fault of our organizers. I think I have said this once before, but allow me to say it again: lkafjo;ihtoiur3a23qo;iuaksjndgao;iedfjA;OIRUSELFKHJ. 9813751!~

Anyways. It was kind of awful.

Enough about that. What went RIGHT today? Well, many things, actually, including a chance to see the kind of Philippines that most people do not get to see, and for good reason – these people are as poor as poor gets. Worse, they do not actually own the land that they are on; the land is owned by a landlord (in the case of Barrio Visayas, the Araneta family, the family-in-charge of the Bank of the Philippine Islands) who routinely bulldozes entire settlements so that condos or other luxury developments can be built. Nevermind that the Aranetas own THOUSANDS of acres of land all over the Philippines; nevermind that these people cannot feed their children; nevermind that they have tilled the land with their literal sweat and literal blood before the Araneta family was even aware that these lands existed under their name. They are squatters by law, thus, they are routinely harassed (and by harassed I mean bugged AT GUNPOINT), their crops are slashed, their homes flooded and then leveled. All so that the rich might become just that much richer.

I am not a Communist, but daaaaaayyyyyyuuuuummmm, son, that is shitty.

So we talked with some farmers for a while, met their (many, oh god) children, and got to see the kind of work that they do. Remember up there, a little while ago, when I was yammering on about how hot I was, and how hot it was, and how we all almost died of dehydration? Yes, well, these people put in MANUAL labor, ALL day, EVERY day, in those conditions. Without so much as a bottle of water by their sides. In bare feet. With bare hands. You see, they’re so poor, and the Philippines’ agricultural laws are so backwards, that there is no way for them to get any kind of farm equipment. So here’s how you farm when you don’t have diddly:

1. Get yourself some SERIOUS palm calluses.
2. Go find a suitable plot of land (this land that you have picked out will be covered in waist-high grasses, and may or may not be steeply sloped) on which to plant whatever you’ve got: potatoes, kalabasa (pumpkin-ish things), the occasional banana palm. Don’t even think about planting rice, the most profitable crop, because you cannot afford the water that it would take to grow it.
3. Go get your resident carabao (sort of like a cross between a water buffalo, a cow, and an ox). Hitch a single blade plow to said carabao.
4. Follow the carabao around your chosen field on foot, pushing the plow and steering the beast, all in bare feet or flip-flops. Watch out for thorns.
5. Put carabao out to pasture. Set about pulling up all the grasses in your field by hand, knocking arable soil off their roots, and putting the weeds into massive piles for disposal. Keep watch for thorns, because this time, they will go into the flesh of your palm or wrists, rather than just the soles of your feet.
6. Plant seedlings. Go get some water from the well about half a mile away, lugging it in five-gallon buckets tied to the end of a bamboo pole. Water plants. Repeat.
7. Find another plot of land.
8. Repeat from step 3.

Sound like the Dark Ages? THAT’S BECAUSE IT IS.

The work that these people do in two weeks would take a guy with a John Deere TWO HOURS to do. And they do it all under this sun, on impossibly sloped land, with minimal food to keep them going. Gaaaaaaack

On the funny side, owner of the resident carabao let some of us (myself included) try plowing, old-school style. So here I am, gringa-extraordinaire, pushing around an iron plow blade, yelling random syllables at a giant, confused ox-like-thing with a string coming out its nose (no idea how it got there, but it’s the ox-equivalent of a steering wheel) and trying and FAILING to keep the stupid plow going in a straight line. I’d plowed like half a furrow before I was like “too tired, too American, take back your carabao, I lose at life.” But shit. I got to plow a bit of a field with a goddamn single-blade plow and a BEAST OF BURDEN. How horrifically retro.

In Other News

Philippe got mauled by a dog yesterday. It sort of, apparently, attached itself to his hand and the back of his leg, leaving several significant bite marks, but no chunks of flesh missing, thank god. He doesn’t have rabies, but we thought he might, so we sent him to the hospital this morning for shots. He missed the Death Hike. Damn him. I would have taken rabies. That’s not true.

I think, also, that if I come back to the States and find that I have developed lung cancer, I will know exactly why. I have taken every possible form of public transportation possible today (tricycle, bus, jeepney, taxi) and I am sort of surprised that I am not currently dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. I’m doing like the locals now and walking around with a hanky over my face. Ugh.

Tomorrow, regular school day. Thank Christ. Over and out.