Ayo-Ayo Cebu

It's hard to believe that my time in The Phillipines is over, but things always have a way of coming to an end. I made some great friends there, discovered rock climbing, worked with some warm and inspiring people, and came to love a country I knew very little about only a year ago.

I'm writing this from Johannesburg, South Africa (or Jozi, as it's now called instead of Joburg), and I'll be back in Canada again in a few weeks. What a whirlwind, to be in three continents in the span of one month. I'm not sure if it's time to slow down yet, but I know I'm tired. Actually, not simply tired, but more like I feel the need to take some time to digest my experience in Cebu and not to move on from it too quickly. I want to feel its impact.

When I left I was given two very meaningful gifts. One is the most perfect "hat" that I can't wait to wear one day when I'm feeling silly, or in need of some serious sun protection. The other is a Cebu-made guitar that sounds lovely to my ears.

Ayo-ayo is Cebuano for take care.

A different kind of English

This is my favourite sign in the Philippines. It makes me smile every time I see it, and I get to see it in almost every shop, post office and bank...lucky me! English is one of the official languages here and as in every English-speaking country, the Philippines has it's own version. Sometimes I find that as hard as I try I can't be understood, and vice versa...and we're all supposed to speaking the same language!

Another language-related amusement comes out of the booming industry of bootleg movie subtitles. Since not everyone here speaks English well-enough to follow the fast-paced speech of many movies, there are often English subtitles for English movies. However, the person writing the subtitles may not have exceptional comprehension skills themselves, hence really funny subtitles to a native English-speaker. Have a look at the following photos showing the subtitles accompanying the movie Dodgeball. My parents and I watched it on a ferry to Bohol and the subtitles amused us more than the movie!


"Yeah, that is me, taking the bull bundle horn"


"They show us is fill in us by everything"

Eeeew!!

No, I'm not totally obsessed with McDonald's, but I can't help but wonder what genius thought up the idea for this combination of flavours??

In case you can't read the text at the top of the electric photo sign, it says: "The McDonald's Filet-O-Fish and Bubblegum Sprite Float Combo." Like I said...Eeeew!!

So what the hell have I been doing here?

I suppose some of you might be wondering why I haven’t written anything yet about the work I’m doing here. The truth is that until recently I wasn’t exactly sure myself and was doing odds and ends of work that needed to be done. However, more recently I've been working on a project that I’ll share with you now.

I’m working with a group of people who belong to the Community Livelihood Advancement Network Multi-Purpose Co-operative (CLAN MPC). The co-op focuses on the advancement and empowerment of people with disabilities, and they operate a small recycling center in Cebu City in order to create some extra income.

Most of the members live in sub-standard housing with no title to their land. In fact, currently there is some controversy about government land reclamation resulting in large-scale evictions. So far this group is not directly effected but it may be a sign of what’s to come. Certainly the majority of the group are worried about evictions.

I’ve been conducting a study of their current housing conditions and I will make some recommendations for their future housing needs. My host organization here, another co-op called the National Savings and Homes Co-operative (NSHC), will work with them after I’ve left towards the development of their own co-op housing project.

I have been to many of their homes and talked with them about their situations. Most have expressed a feeling of shame about where and how they live, and nevertheless they have been incredibly gracious hosts, friendly and honest. It’s been a humbling experience for me.

There are Nenette and Arnold who were both infected with polio as infants, neither of whom can access their homes in their wheelchairs. Nenette lives with her aging mother, her sister and her sister's four children in two small rooms with an exposed indoor pit-latrine. Her father recently passed away and Nenette cried as she told me that they are constantly reminded of their grief as they continue their daily lives in the same small space in which he died.

Arnold lives part-time in the kitchen of the recycling center and part-time in his family home where he has to crawl around in his small, second-floor room. He gets into his miniature bathroom through a small Alice-in-Wonderland-like door. In order to get from the main road to the house he has to be carried through a long and twisting alley-like labyrinth.

There's Mary Jane who lives in a house that is precariously cantilevered over a river simultaneously used as water source, toilet and bath. To get there you walk through a small alley squeezed up against a concrete wall edging a university campus. While her husband is out finding construction work she is at home taking care of their four children, her father-in-law and her mentally ill sister-in-law. She also works some nights at a massage parlor to earn extra income for her sister-in-law's much needed medication.

I visited these houses in the intense heat of the day. I sat in their rooms and ate the snacks they prepared for me: bread, bud bud (sweet rice dessert) and coke. One woman gave me an enormous papaya. I asked questions like "what do you like and what do you not like about your home?" The most common answers were the same for both parts of the question: "we have no choice".

I learned that most of the questions I had prepared didn't yield the kind of conversation I had thought they would. Eventually the best interviews were the ones in which I asked fewer questions and let the conversation roll on its own. Sometimes it didn't roll at all and we just sat there quietly observing one another until I asked if it would be ok for me to take some photos.

I felt like an impostor, but they were happy to have an impostor like me in their homes. They're happy that someone out there is taking the time to listen and they hope that down the road their project will become a reality.

Some photos...

What is beautiful?

There's a question that everyone thinks they have the answer to but no one's answer is ever the same: What is beautiful?

Like so many of us, I sometimes look at myself in the mirror and wonder what I would change if I could change one thing. The answer varies, and sometimes it's a defiant NOTHING! But sometimes it's my nose. I've often thought that it sticks out a lot and has a little bump near the end. I've grown to like my nose over the years, and certainly it seems like I'm the only person who's ever been bothered by it. That brings me to something I've experienced here in the Philippines that has brought this subject back into my mind.

So many beautiful Filipinas here compliment me profusely on my nose. They say things like, "you're nose is so pretty," or "you have such a nice, pointy nose!" The first time it happened I had to ask the woman to repeat herself because I thought I had heard her wrong. She then said that she hated her nose because it was so flat, and that she'd love to have a big nose like mine. She did say "big".

The more time I spend here, the less I think there’s an answer to beauty. Here women get surgery to make their noses bigger while women back home are making theirs smaller. There are soap products here that advertise “whitening” properties, while I am excitedly watching my skin darken over the months and people back home are rubbing bronzing cream on their bodies. Maybe the answer is that there is no answer and we should stop looking for one, that we’re all beautiful. Maybe beauty comes from how we see, not how we appear.

A new perspective on slums

On the ground, slum communities can cause overwhelming emotions for those of us who live in the comfort of the “developed” world. Living in the Philippines I don’t have to go far to see a family sleeping on the sidewalk, children crossing dirty streets with bare feet and women bathing in buckets as modestly as they can on a sidewalk with heavy traffic flowing by.

Recently, I nervously sat on a plane as we approached our bumpy landing into Manila. I tentatively looked out of the window and saw how close we were flying over the slums occupying the coastal lands of Manila Bay just south of the city. It was a clear day and I felt as though I could touch the tin roofs of the houses. From my uniquely aerial perspective I felt like I was looking down over medieval European villages, with their organically-formed narrow streets in all directions, their jumble of roofs and, most of all, their central town square.

As we descended further, I realized that what looked like remote Italian piazzas were actually community basketball courts occupying central spaces in the slums. Among many things brought here by the American’s, basketball has become one of the most popular Filipino sports. Like Northern Spain’s Jai-Alai courts in the main plazas of Basque Country villages, basketball has formed the center of public life in many Filipino communities. I could see people shooting hoops and others cheering them on in a rich and close-knit life playing out below me. Then I remembered life on the ground, with overcrowded rooms that lack security, access to safe water and protection from the elements.

When I emerged from the airport into the reality of Manila’s frenzied ground plane I thought back to my surreal experience of seeing Manila’s slums from above. Many contrasting perspectives push their way into my path everyday here. I feel fortunate to have experienced this aerial perspective of a place where life is so grounded in the everyday need for survival.

Note: The photo above is a Google Earth view over the coastline of Manila Bay, identical to my view from the plane. In the top left are strange clouds hovering over the bay; in the middle are rice fields with houses settled along a waterway; and in the bottom right is the edge of the slums.

Fruits

The other day I bought mangos, an avocado (but too watery), an orange and an apple. I also bought a small bunch of little bananas, but it didn’t take long for the ants to smell them and form a bustling highway. Aside from Cebu having the best mangos in the world that I get to eat every day (“the best” means sweet; small seed, therefore more flesh; and rarely any teeth-catching fibres), my favourite fruit here is called mangosteen. The only thing it has in common with mango is its delightfulness. On the outside it looks like a smooth purple passion fruit, but the inside is more like lanzone (another fruit I only discovered since coming here that looks a little like a baby potato on the outside). Gosh, this is difficult to describe… You break the tough, purple skin to find the sweetest citrus-shaped pieces of pale, white flesh inside. Inside some of the pieces are seeds, but often many of the pieces are seed-free and you can just squish the whole, sweet thing in your mouth without having to eat around anything. Really, I’m not doing the mangosteen any justice here.

There’s also a fruit called rambutan, red furry things that also taste very sweet, although the white flesh inside is difficult to get off the seed. As with mangosteen and lanzone you break the skin open, but inside rambutan you find what looks like a single, translucent tapioca pearl inside. It’s sweeter than a lychee but that’s the only other fruit I can think of to compare it to. I think it’s a very pretty fruit.

Next time you’re in a Chinatown somewhere and see some strange-looking fruits, just ask for mangosteen, rambutan and lanzone (pronounced lan-zone-eh, but the “eh” is pronounced like the spanish/italian “e” vowel and not like the Canadian “eh” we’re so famous for). Try them all. They’re very lami (delicious in Cebuano).

Uncle George Wants You

The pull/push to other countries is strong here. I’ve read that about 10% of the Filipino population lives abroad and that those people fuel a huge part of the national economy with the money they send back to their families. It is said that if that income is ever severed the economy would collapse.

Many people I’ve met here are waiting for their papers to come through to go to Canada or the US. How long they’ll have to wait no one seems to know. There are many schools here that train people to become caregivers in only a few months, and then help the graduates to go through the process of getting their papers to work in North America (although I’ve heard that unfortunately many of these “colleges” are money-grabbing hoaxes preying on dreams and desperation).

Nursing students, in their pink-shirted uniforms, are everywhere in my neighbourhood. Nursing students wear pink and medical students wear white, and all of the shirts button at the back. How do they get dressed in the morning? Well, it's rare for anyone to live alone here, so I imagine there’s someone there to help them get in and out of their uniforms everyday. (Well that was a random aside...)

The funny thing about the photo above (taken in downtown Cebu City) is that I didn’t notice the enourmous George Bush image hovering overhead, seeking nurses, care-givers and IT professionals; I only saw his looming face once I looked at the photo on my computer. I don’t have any philosophical waxing to come up with about that, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Maybe I’m just too used to seeing his face; I do get CNN on my television after all.

Carbon Market

Cebu City’s frenzied Carbon Market and many of its residential neighbourhoods share something in common: behind the initial street façade lies an enormous maze of informal settlement, stretching all the way to the façade on the other side, filling blocks like chaotic honeycomb. Penetrating Carbon’s exterior by slipping into one of its many alleys is like opening a gift that is wrapped in a thousand layers of curious faces, live roosters, sparkling dried fish, improbable videoke, baby Jesus statues and every colour in the world set against a backdrop of grey. It is an exciting and overwhelming, cheek-to-jowl place. In that way it is like many of the neighbourhoods that make up this city; you don’t know they’re there until you slip in and subtly discover the labyrinth.

more photos:

Ode to Instant Noodles

There you are in the cup I see
Swimming in your broth
No MSG to afflict me
Hidden deep beneath your froth

The Colombian didn’t believe in you
He said you’re just so cheap
But he didn’t need you as I do
His nasty criticisms ran deep

But here today I shlurp you up
I’ve got no energy to cook a pot
You’re easy made inside your cup
When sick, chicken soup is better bought

Pace

As in many parts of the world, things happen slowly here. I’ve noticed that people walking on the sidewalk move at the slow pace of the person in front of them. I’m still trying to get used to it and usually find myself trying to squeeze through any space I can find in order to walk at my usual speed. Sometimes I try to slow down and follow along with the people around me but it doesn’t take long before I find myself accelerating. My brain knows it makes sense to walk slowly in this heat but my body, strangely enough, hasn’t made that connection yet.

The sidewalk isn’t the only thing that moves slowly. Some people have decided to consider the slow work pace here a problem. The Cebu provincial government is trying to apply productivity pressure on their employees. Three times a day (morning, lunch and home-time) the Provincial Capitol Building sounds a smooth yet startling bomb-raid siren to indicate when people have to be in their offices and when they’re allowed to go out. I wonder how they monitor what people do while they’re in their offices.

McRice Burger Revealed

As with many things in life, the McRice Burger is better left as a fantasy. I wish I could still have the childlike innocence of wondering what it tastes like, and I wish I didn’t know what it feels like to hold it in my fingers. When I ordered it I had to wait a whole five minutes for them to bring it out with smiles on their faces because someone actually wanted it. That was a bad sign.

It comes in a box. There are bits of iceberg lettuce and red cabbage stuffed between the rice “bun” and the burger patty. The patty isn’t the usual McDonald’s patty; it’s the kind of patty you expect to find in a bad-quality freezer-section box, not that the usual is much better. To top it all off, there’s a mysterious sauce glazed all over the patty and coated all over the lettuce mixture. My fingers got stupidly sticky from the first moment I touched the thing as I tried to get it out of the box. The taste wasn’t any better. Truth be told I really just don’t want to talk about it anymore.

No, I guess I didn’t really expect it to be great, but I did expect it to be fun and interesting. Instead, it was a big disappointment. I won’t be missing it when I’m back in Canada. I won’t be missing it tomorrow.

Coco Mall

The other morning I was walking through the courtyard of the building where I work and I got dripped on. I wasn’t under a cloud or an air-conditioner. I was under a dentist’s office (not Rolex Omega’s, but now that I mention it there is a dentist here named Rolex Omega) and the ceiling above me was dripping with water. Upstairs I couldn’t see what would be causing the water problem because above the leaking area was just a desk and a bench, no dentist equipment to be seen. Maybe the equipment in the next room was leaking and the water was traveling to the side before pooling and forming the drip. Who knows? Suffice it to say, this building is falling apart.

There’s a large and beautiful tree in the middle of the courtyard that has grown so much since the building went up that now one of its enormous branches is weighing down on the roof, creating a rushing waterfall whenever it rains. The waterfall pours out over the ramp that leads to the second level of the building.

Tucked under a staircase on the other side of the building there is a small popcorn vendor. The man who works there pops corn all day and into the night with only a small desk-fan to cool him. He, like many other people here, wears a cloth around his face to cover his nose and mouth in order to protect his lungs from the fumes that stick to the humidity in the air. I’m not sure if the cloth helps or just makes you feel hotter. I keep meaning to carry a damp cloth around with me for air quality emergencies but so far I always forget.

In one of the other suites in the building they are refinishing the floor boards with what smells like the most toxic urethane coating in the world. It’s so bad that every time I have to walk past, which means every time I go to the toilet, I try to hold my breath and walk very fast so that I don’t have to inhale the fumes. I’ve peered in occasionally on my sprint by to see a woman working at her desk and a man coating the floorboards with a paintbrush. They both wear simple cloth over their faces, nothing more. The door is kept open so that they don’t die in there, but other than that there is no extra ventilation. Air moves here like a thick, gelatinous soup; I can’t imagine spending a day inside that toxic office.

Cebuano Phrase Book Poetry

The "poem" below is from pg 23 of Conversational Cebuano Made Easy. (Of course the book does include translations for each sentence, but I thought it was funny to imagine the string of sentences as one thought process.)

In Letter Writing

Hello!
How are you?
I miss you very much!
Hope you are in a good condition.
Have you received my letter last week?
Why did you not answer it?
This is my second letter to you.
Please, write me.
Please, answer my letter.
Please, remember me.
I'm glad to recieve your letter.
I'm so happy reading your letter.
I'll really be glad to recieve anything from you.
You mean so much to me.
Regards to all of you.
Please, extend my regards to your parents.
Till then. I'll write you again.

McWorld

Quentin Tarantino popularized the discussion about the worldly variety of McDonald’s. I hear that McDonald’s in India doesn’t have hamburgers and I know that the North American health craze has given birth to salads and wraps at the headquarters of fat. Well, I have discovered that the Philippines is no exception to the influence of local culture on the McMenu.

If there is one thing that people here eat at practically every meal (and that’s including breakfast, Granny) it is rice. It’s not surprising then, that the McMenu here contains fried chicken and rice. It’s strange that it contains pasta and tomato sauce with a few sections of unidentified sausage, but that’s another story. What does surprise me, however, is the McRice Burger. No, it’s not a warm, soft rice cake. It’s not even a veggie burger held together with sticky rice. The rice-patty portion of the burger takes the place of the bun! Sandwiched between the two rice-patties is the usual hamburger or chicken burger.

I’ve decided that I can’t let my stay in the Philippines pass by without giving this one a try. It’s so alluring; it draws my attention like a highway accident. I want to know what the texture of the “bun” is like. Does it stick together or fall apart? Will I end up eating it in phases, the inner patty first and then afterwards a plate of rice made of fallen bun-bits? Will my fingers get sticky? Will I love it so much that I’ll never be able to eat a regular burger again? Will the McRice Burger be the food I miss the most when I return back to Canada? I’m McDying to find out.

First Impressions

An orchid-necklace welcome at the airport. Hot sun, hot air. Breathing deisel soup. Fried pork fat. A pillow that, like carbon turning to charcoal deep beneath the earth, becomes hard and solid over time. Unexpected up-to-date American TV shows. American fast-food chains. Impashioned religiosity and belief in God, delicate. Small ants that can carry very large things. Heavy, short rains. Colourful Jeepneys for 6 pesos (12 cents) to go anywhere in the city. Noisy air-conditioner. Missionaries. Green trees everywhere. Rivers of garbage with a little bit of water. Shack homes along the rivers. Lots of smiles. Lots of questions. Strange but charming cell phone texts, so many, unexpected. Sun shining through rising smoke. Prayer candle tears. Arms straight and verticle in the air, hands at 90 degrees, waving to the golden Santo Nino idle. A blue guitar. No toilet paper in any washrooms, and if you have some don't flush it down the toilet. Fancy cars and beater cars. Noisy shopping malls. Children staring, then giggling and pulling on their mothers' arms when I smile back. Powdered milk. Time stretching and contracting each minute of the day. Concurrent loneliness and overstimulation. Morning birds chirping outside my window.

C-Boo explained

C-Boo: my attempt at a witty and apt blog name. I'm C and I'll soon be in Cebu City. From what I've heard, Cebu is pronounced like the blog name and yes, it's fun to say! (silliness is the elixir of life, is it not?)

But no, I'm not there yet. By early September I should be landing in Cebu City, Philippines for a six-month contract to do volunteer work with a housing co-operative. I say "mystery" because the job description is very vague and I'm expecting even that to change. However, thanks to some great friends and collegues in Vancouver, I learned that sometimes being job-descriptionless can be a good thing; having one can often raise walls and right now I want a clear view of the horizon. (Forgive my metaphors, but it's late and when I'm tired it seems like cheesy metaphors just slip out as an easy way of expressing myself...but only just.)

I'll try to use this blog as a space to share stories, observations and photos. I haven't had a blog before so let's see how this goes. Thanks for reading!