Part 1 of my 5 part series: 5 Diaries for 5 Days - Life in Peace Corps Philippines

My fellow PCV blogger Travis had an entertaining Bill Simmons-esque post recently featuring a running diary through the course of a beauty pageant...the type of thing PCVs get trapped into judging frequently (you can find this post here). Bein both a Bill and Travis fan I've decided to follow in their footsteps. Despising everything about Boston Sports I've also decided to thoroughly one up them by doing a week long series of DRD's - Daily Running Diaries. I'll hopefully give you a feel for A Day In The Life and entertain you with the everyday comings and goings in the Peace Corps. I should probably disclaimer this and say it might not be inspirational fantastic stuff...it's literally my average day-to-day activities over the course of a week so who knows. Every entry shall remain unedited and exactly as I wrote it at the annoted time of entry! One of these days, if my busted camera works, I'll take a picture diary to correlate.

p.s. Check out my new background! The large, somewhat phallic shaped island in the bottom-middle is Negros, where I live!

Monday January 31, 2011

8:51 - Gettin ready for work. Mondays I begin at 10:00 am not 7:40 am because of my rotating schedule. Corned beef and hard boiled egg (and rice, obviously) for breakfast. Corned beef is easily my favorite breakfast food here. In the morning corned beef, scrambled egg and garlic rice is the folgers in my cup. Love it.
8:56 - Can't find my deoderant, not a great follow up from my CB, HBE, and R breakfast.
9:04 - The two mothers that live across the street were w/ their children outside the house. Our exchange:

Them: "Maayong aga"
Me: "Maayong aga man"
Them: "Ma-school ka na?"
Me: "Huo! Kita kits!"

Translated:

Them: "Good morning"
Me: "Good morning to you too"
Them: "Going to school already?"
Me: "Yep! See you later!"

9:07 - Arrived @ school, it's gonna be hot today. Sweatin already.
9:50 - 10 mins before class and we just decided what Filipino written essay to use in class today. We'll see how this goes...
10:19 - There's no such thing as a well behaved 1st year class (12-14 age bracket roughly).
10:23 - While writing directions on the chalkboard a mosquito bit my face. Right below my lower lip. Pimple chin for the rest of the day. Awesome.
11:24 - Was just asked for the 3rd time to eat my lunch. The other teachers can't accept the first chance I get isn't necessarily the time I want to eat. Plus, I peaked at my lunch na (already)...rice and some mystery meat with a slice of cranberry sauce. Unmotivated to eat pa (still).
11:34 - My counterpart co-teacher just gave me some lumpia. I LOVE LUMPIA! Lunch is saved. Bon appetite!
11:43 - Accepting the lumpia opened the flood gates of foods to try. I was just given some kind of peanut-brittle snack followed by dried mango. Btw, mangoes in the Philippines are the shit!
11:57 - Now stick bread, garlic flavored...the food continues.
12:52 - The one o'clock class bell just rang: puttin down my book to go educate. There are 3 sleeping teachers and 3 awake teachers in the faculty office as I leave.
1:10 - It just started pourin and what ever attention span class had just washed away with the rain. Unfortunately, my 2:00 classroom can be prone to flooding if it really pours for awhile...fingers crossed
1:57 - Journal reports in front of me by my students about their Christmas Vacation...nosebleeds galore. (a nosebleed is wat filipinos pretend to have when they don't know the answer or are to huya (shy/ashamed) to answer a question)
3:06 - A gay student in my last class was havin his journal read by his partner for this activity. To my surprise I was a part of his christmas vacation. Apparently, at some imaginary point, we were both at his neighbor's party and then we went swimming. Hilarious and yet slightly inappropriate.
4:21 - Had to tree/sari sari (small streetside shops) hop my way home, it's still rainin. Dry spot to dry spot all the way home (forgot my jacket). Unfortunately, I also had to pee...a trying test for one's bladder is waiting for the rain to let up so you can continue walkin home.
5:46 - Got a PB & J snack after checkin my e-mail and hoppin on a lil' Plants vs Zombies. i promptly then sneezed violently with a very large mouthful of PB & J...I've got sandwich lodged in my nose now. Picked a great day to keep a diary...
6:00 - Diarrhea. Ugh.
6:06 - Bucket Bathin.
6:29 - Diarrhea II (The Sequel...)
7:46 - This is no surprise to other PCV's but dinner was...chicken and rice!
8:36 - Scrubs and packin to move (Woo!). An exciting night to be sure. After postin today's blog I'll read some "Collapse" and listen to my iPod before passin out. Back to my 7:40 am class tomorrow.
9:13 - Wrappin up typin this up. There's a lizard here on my bed next to my laptop. I love lizards, they eat mosquitos. Great note to end on.

5 things...

About a week ago I passed the five month mark in the Philippines and this blog also just hit the 5,000 mark for visits so I thought it was an appropriate time to make a fun little blog post; a series of lists themed around the number five.

Things I have not done in five months:

1) Flushed toilet paper (intentionally anyways, old habits die hard)
2) Drank a glass of milk
3) Watched Sportscenter
4) Driven an automobile
5) Turned on any kind of heating device

Five things I do now without blinking:

1) Hiss at any stray animal that comes to close to me
2) Eat with a spoon in my right hand, fork in my left. No knives
3) Barter prices for food, rides, services
4) Consistently and borderline constantly talk about poo
5) Return my beer bottles from whence they were purchased

Five things I will eat immediately upon arrival in the United States in July:

1) Mexican food
2)Country Fried Steak
3)Cheese anything
4) Bang Bang Shrimp
5) Mac’s burgers

Five foods I did not expect to eat in the Philippines/ever:

1) Milk flavored chips
2) Cheese flavored ice cream
3) Banana ketchup
4) Blueberry and Hazlenut flavored Pringles
5) Soup egg

Five trivial things that have changed about me:

1) Tequila
2) Willingness to sing randomly in front of people
3) Comfort level with public transportation
4) I wake up at early hours
5) Attitudes towards water/waste management

And finally a revisit to my "5 Most Irrational Fears Going into Peace Corps Philippines"

5) Seafood. Totally avoided, check mark!
4) Snoring host family. Well the barn I lived in during Pre-Service Training certainly was susceptible to this fear and ome snored but more difficult was the 48 roosters that used to live outside my window, but I adjusted eventually
3) "The Golden Era"...hahahaha. Gators went 7-5 in football, the Broncos went 4-12, the Rockies missed the playoffs, but at least the basketball team is off to a somewhat promising start
2) Death of my iPod. Still hanging in there! Hallelujah!
1) SNAKES. I have seen two vipers, one python and some sort of garden snake. However, none except the long skinny garden snake was sprung upon me in terrifying fashion and hence I have avoided most forms of snake-induced trauma. Phew.

Impact

I came damn close to goin a month without a post after my renewed determination to remain frequent and regular (a vow that is often uttered in the context of one’s bowels in Peace Corps…). In fairness I have been all over the place; I’ve changed between islands six times over the past month. I have stories to tell and have been to tropical paradise and back (as well as gastronomic paradise and back…average mexican food!) Those stories are for another time. For now I’d like to share the impact I had at a Peace Corps Volunteer organized and executed teacher training and the impact the training, amongst other things, have had on me...and thereby justifying my melodramatic blogpost title.

I was a bit conflicted on how to structure this blog because the more linear timeline is the one I chose but the part I really would want you to read is at the end so if you’re not a patient reader just go ahead and skip ahead, no worries. Look for the paragraph that begins *Cliché Alert*.

This past week I was a facilitator at the “Aklan Comprehensive Treacher Training” in Kalibo. The training itself came just before the beginning of the famous Ati Atihan festival in Kalibo which is a traditional indigenous Ati festival that was then, of course, influenced by the Spanish as follows, I quote the cheer heard multiple multiple times this week: “Viva kay Senor Santo Nino. VIVA!”…a celebration of the child Jesus. Anyways, we got to get some culture as we were givin some knowledge. There’s a Peace Corps experience for you: spendin a week sleepin on the floor in two class rooms with 14 other volunteers for the opportunity to train Filipino teachers and see a famous indigenous festival.

Why are these training sessions so good? Because Four Hundred and Thirty teachers attended from the surrounding province and if half of those teachers change their lessons for the better and half of their 50 students per class acquire some knowledge from the improved lesson than we can reach Filipino students by the thousands instead of by the 50 or so we see per section in our own classes.

The session I facilitated was Teaching Pronunciation. I will spare you the nitty gritty details and just highlight some of the cooler points. In an effort not to replicate the mindless pronunciation drills and to hopefully shift some teachers away from that I focused on how to go about teaching pronunciation. We covered the English consonant system, the English vowel system, and connected speech. Major themes were the disassociation of written English and spoken English, targeting difficult sounds for students, and maximizing your materials to influence and accent pronunciation in lessons where there may not be any pronunciation.
An example of an exercise showing the disassociation of written English and spoken English:

Q: How do you pronounce the word “ghoti”?
A: “Fish”
gh as in “rouGH”
o as in “wOmen”
ti as in “moTIon”

Another exercise regarding how sounds assimilate in native speech:

How do I say “He’s in pain” or “It rains in May”?
If you’re a native speaker reading this blog say it out loud and you might here yourself say “He’s im pain” and “it rains im May”.
This is because the “N” is assimilating to be more like the “M” and “P” in that you’re pronouncing it bilabially (using both of your lips) instead of on the alveolar ridge (the ridge just behind your upper teeth).

Doing this training for me was one of the most satisfying things I’ve done here, certainly in terms of volunteer work. Raising the awareness of teachers about English pronunciation and then helpin them identify ways to improve their classes in teaching pronunciation is a far greater impact than my “9-5” job (which is actually a 740-400 job) of teaching high school English. I don’t disvalue my job teaching, I love my students and teaching them, but influencing the way a teacher teaches their class might have an impact on students in all of their classes which is a far broader positive impact than me potentially having an impact only on the students I teach. Exercising the linguistic training and TESL training I received in college to help teachers is far more satisfying for me and more productive in terms of impacting as many Filipino students learning English as possible.

The other great part of this session was the opportunity to see other PCVs teach other sessions that I normally would not get to see. Many sessions were English-focused as the majority of the 430 teachers that attended this training were English teachers. However, this training featured some non-English non-classroom sessions as well. There were consistant shouts, exclamations and the occasional scream from the HIV/STI session. If you were within 3-4 classrooms of that session you always could hear when the PCV demonstrated the proper use of a condom on a banana.

*Cliché alert* Peace Corps for me was also about broadening my own horizons. In the sections of my awareness of my own intellectual shortcomings dimmed by my own embarrassment I do realize how little I know about the environment and the problems we face therein. So I was excited to attend two other sessions: Solid Waste Management and Climate Change. In addition, I am currently reading, “Collapse”…the less well known counterpart to the famous “Guns, Germs, and Steel” book by the same author. Unlike “Guns, Germs and Steel” which details the rise of civilizations, “Collapse” thoroughly analyzes the collapse of past civilizations and categorizes the causes into 5 main factors (climate change, environmental damage inflicted by the civilization, trade or cessation thereof with friendly neighbors, political and cultural change, and hostile neighbors).

It blows my mind to attend these environmental sessions, watch "An Inconvenient Truth", and read about the collapse of past civilizations and then look around at the environmental problems in the world right now. I cannot recommend enough to anyone who’s curious, concerned, or conflicted about this to read “Collapse”. Look at civilizations in the past that collapsed, look at ourselves and the environment in the present, and tell me it's not at the very least troubling.