Today is Sunday, July 18, 2010 and it is now 507PM here in San Franz, Mindanao.
Recap: An extra long ferry ride from Manila to Mindanao and was coming close to my destination.
This Entry: Finally arrived in Nasapit, the port that services Butuan, which is itself the major city for NE Mindanao. Our driver Ondoy was there to collect me and off we went.
It was late, said hi, played with Marian and Mayo (ages 10 and 6) and went to lay down. Most people here don't even have electricity, but those that do like Rizza's family don't even use fans. Me? Im a spoiled fuck, a/c all the way so I spend a lot of time in my house when its hot. Rural Mindanao has always had spotty electricity, what the locals call "brown outs," though in the West a "brown out" is when there is a purely localised stoppage. Here? Everything goes off and they use the same term and in fact, I have never heard the term "black out."
English as I have said, is an official language here. It is the language of govt.and of course the courts and yet many speak it only haltingly. Outside of Muslim and Hilltribe areas you can always find a person conversant in it but its a peculiar dialect to be sure.
For example, take food, a favourite subject of mine; "Native Chicken" is the label given to those birds that are closer to their jungle fowl ancestors than to anything a Westerner would recognise. White meat? Guess again mate.
For that you would need a "Broiler." "Broiler" being an American-agri term for a specific type of chicken, here it covers anything with white meat, with a breast.
Need a loo? A bathroom? Here it is a "Comfort Room," in capitals, or "CR" for short. That toilet paper isn't used is an altogether different issue.
I spent my formative years in the Jordanian Valley, living on what had been, just a decade prior, a Jordanian army base. Middle East habits are rudimentary as well though Israel has changed soooooo much in recent years (began changing rapidly in the very late 1980s). I am well used to squatting over a 10cm pipe outlet to do my thing, and not having paper afterwards. As precious as water is there, it having had to have been trucked in, we used it to clean ourselves as do most Asian Cultures. Just that in the ensuing years I have become spoiled, probablly "Americanised" as Israelis call it.
The thing here though? You go to a very modern mall (1st one on Mindanao was built in 2001 and now they are in every large city), you head to the bathroom, and it is as expected, modern.
You sit down feeling somewhat relieved only to find there is no paper. In many parts of Europe you use the bidet (for Americans, it is like a water fountain you squat over to clean those special parts) but in the Philippines, in malls, you have a trough (used on farms to water cattle and horses).
Being insanely private over these things as only SE Asians can be, noone is going to scrub their anus in view of 30 other men. Ergo, there are a large number of Filipinos walking around malls with crust in their ass. Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice.
Speaking of fun things, there is an interesting English word for mesntrual symptoms, "Dysopnea."Probablly a legitmate medical term, albeit one I have never heard of.
In any event, I was awoken before dawn by an earthquake. Mindanao has them about once every 10 days, usually well below 5 on the Richter. This one was 4.2.
Where do you think the safest part of a building is, during an earthquake? Counter-intuitively, it is the door frame! However, earthquakes are usually over so quickly that by the time I rolled out of bed it was over. After shocks are common though but I decided to throw on my shorts, tee and flip flops (rubber sandals) and head out into the compound.
Noone gave a shit, because as I said, it was a small quake and they happen so often that the dogs weren't even spooked.
As I walked into the mists that always accompany day break (I live in a mountain valley) a convoy of logging trucks were rolling down Mangga, the road in front of our compound. It made me very sad.
In 1910, when the US took its first real survey of natural resources here, preparing to rape the land, they stated that the country was 90% virgin forest (jungle). Today the country is down to 11%.
This in turn wreaks havoc on the land and its people. On Feburary 17th, 2006 in Barangay Guinsaugon, in the town of Saint Bernard in Southern Leyte Province, on the island of Leyte a very large hill disintegrated in a mudslide 4 km.long and buried an entire village. This is a nation where such things happen a lot, sad to say. This village was unique though because the mud, over 300 meters deep (nearly 1,000 ft.) buried a public school killing 246 of its 247 students and 7 of its 8 teachers.
I was in NY at the time, working, but I remember the horror I felt...and I don't often have that emotion seeing the things that I have. I also remember it keenly because at the same time San Franz was suffering from 6 much smaller mud slides and many people we knew were killed or otherwise made homeless. In fact. Col.Lademora's daughter Carie, my G-Dmother, who was our mayor then had the town declared a "State of Calamity."
Sad times all around.
The cause they say was 10 days of torrential rains where the village on Leyte received 200 cm (79 inches!) of rain! Imagine?Almost 8 inches a day for 10 days.
There had also been an earthquake on Leyte but barely 2.6. Most scientists say the rain was the culprit. The real culprit though was the rank deforestation and mining by multinationals.
I sometimes wonder what was going through the minds of those villagers whose kids, maybe all their kids, were trapped in that school...the villagers who had illegaly logged that hillside, who had worked for the mining companies.
Another interesting aspect was that the school being buried caused nations to just trip over themselves trying to get to the front of the lines with donations. It is great that nations wanted to help but in the end the villagers of Saint Bernard ended up in the same type of grass hut, on that same denuded hillside with nothing having changed except the loss of their children.
The Philippines suffers through these types of things all the time and they don't even rate 2 lines in a Western paper but because of the nightmarish aspect of those poor children under all that mud the checkbooks came out.
Right now, on this island, there is a Dengue (mosquito borne) epidemic, a 60% increase over last year and Monsoon is just kicking off. There is also a malaria epidemic, a cholera epidemic (yet again) and on and on and on...Life as I know it.
Recap: An extra long ferry ride from Manila to Mindanao and was coming close to my destination.
This Entry: Finally arrived in Nasapit, the port that services Butuan, which is itself the major city for NE Mindanao. Our driver Ondoy was there to collect me and off we went.
It was late, said hi, played with Marian and Mayo (ages 10 and 6) and went to lay down. Most people here don't even have electricity, but those that do like Rizza's family don't even use fans. Me? Im a spoiled fuck, a/c all the way so I spend a lot of time in my house when its hot. Rural Mindanao has always had spotty electricity, what the locals call "brown outs," though in the West a "brown out" is when there is a purely localised stoppage. Here? Everything goes off and they use the same term and in fact, I have never heard the term "black out."
English as I have said, is an official language here. It is the language of govt.and of course the courts and yet many speak it only haltingly. Outside of Muslim and Hilltribe areas you can always find a person conversant in it but its a peculiar dialect to be sure.
For example, take food, a favourite subject of mine; "Native Chicken" is the label given to those birds that are closer to their jungle fowl ancestors than to anything a Westerner would recognise. White meat? Guess again mate.
For that you would need a "Broiler." "Broiler" being an American-agri term for a specific type of chicken, here it covers anything with white meat, with a breast.
Need a loo? A bathroom? Here it is a "Comfort Room," in capitals, or "CR" for short. That toilet paper isn't used is an altogether different issue.
I spent my formative years in the Jordanian Valley, living on what had been, just a decade prior, a Jordanian army base. Middle East habits are rudimentary as well though Israel has changed soooooo much in recent years (began changing rapidly in the very late 1980s). I am well used to squatting over a 10cm pipe outlet to do my thing, and not having paper afterwards. As precious as water is there, it having had to have been trucked in, we used it to clean ourselves as do most Asian Cultures. Just that in the ensuing years I have become spoiled, probablly "Americanised" as Israelis call it.
The thing here though? You go to a very modern mall (1st one on Mindanao was built in 2001 and now they are in every large city), you head to the bathroom, and it is as expected, modern.
You sit down feeling somewhat relieved only to find there is no paper. In many parts of Europe you use the bidet (for Americans, it is like a water fountain you squat over to clean those special parts) but in the Philippines, in malls, you have a trough (used on farms to water cattle and horses).
Being insanely private over these things as only SE Asians can be, noone is going to scrub their anus in view of 30 other men. Ergo, there are a large number of Filipinos walking around malls with crust in their ass. Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice.
Speaking of fun things, there is an interesting English word for mesntrual symptoms, "Dysopnea."Probablly a legitmate medical term, albeit one I have never heard of.
In any event, I was awoken before dawn by an earthquake. Mindanao has them about once every 10 days, usually well below 5 on the Richter. This one was 4.2.
Where do you think the safest part of a building is, during an earthquake? Counter-intuitively, it is the door frame! However, earthquakes are usually over so quickly that by the time I rolled out of bed it was over. After shocks are common though but I decided to throw on my shorts, tee and flip flops (rubber sandals) and head out into the compound.
Noone gave a shit, because as I said, it was a small quake and they happen so often that the dogs weren't even spooked.
As I walked into the mists that always accompany day break (I live in a mountain valley) a convoy of logging trucks were rolling down Mangga, the road in front of our compound. It made me very sad.
In 1910, when the US took its first real survey of natural resources here, preparing to rape the land, they stated that the country was 90% virgin forest (jungle). Today the country is down to 11%.
This in turn wreaks havoc on the land and its people. On Feburary 17th, 2006 in Barangay Guinsaugon, in the town of Saint Bernard in Southern Leyte Province, on the island of Leyte a very large hill disintegrated in a mudslide 4 km.long and buried an entire village. This is a nation where such things happen a lot, sad to say. This village was unique though because the mud, over 300 meters deep (nearly 1,000 ft.) buried a public school killing 246 of its 247 students and 7 of its 8 teachers.
I was in NY at the time, working, but I remember the horror I felt...and I don't often have that emotion seeing the things that I have. I also remember it keenly because at the same time San Franz was suffering from 6 much smaller mud slides and many people we knew were killed or otherwise made homeless. In fact. Col.Lademora's daughter Carie, my G-Dmother, who was our mayor then had the town declared a "State of Calamity."
Sad times all around.
The cause they say was 10 days of torrential rains where the village on Leyte received 200 cm (79 inches!) of rain! Imagine?Almost 8 inches a day for 10 days.
There had also been an earthquake on Leyte but barely 2.6. Most scientists say the rain was the culprit. The real culprit though was the rank deforestation and mining by multinationals.
I sometimes wonder what was going through the minds of those villagers whose kids, maybe all their kids, were trapped in that school...the villagers who had illegaly logged that hillside, who had worked for the mining companies.
Another interesting aspect was that the school being buried caused nations to just trip over themselves trying to get to the front of the lines with donations. It is great that nations wanted to help but in the end the villagers of Saint Bernard ended up in the same type of grass hut, on that same denuded hillside with nothing having changed except the loss of their children.
The Philippines suffers through these types of things all the time and they don't even rate 2 lines in a Western paper but because of the nightmarish aspect of those poor children under all that mud the checkbooks came out.
Right now, on this island, there is a Dengue (mosquito borne) epidemic, a 60% increase over last year and Monsoon is just kicking off. There is also a malaria epidemic, a cholera epidemic (yet again) and on and on and on...Life as I know it.