I feel that I have the potential to get a few very special
things accomplished at site. From my experience over the past year, I know it
might not happen. The projects I’ve lined up could fail like half of what I’ve
tried to run already. However, the potential is there, and I think I’m up to
the challenge to do my part.
Disclaimer
In my last post I didn’t revise or edit it, and I accidently
worded a sentence very, very wrongly. If you’re curious to read the sentence,
you can check it out yourself. In the event anyone read my last post before I
edited it, and didn’t check back in, it was a typo.
Not only did I relearn the importance of revision, but I
also discovered that there are people I don’t know who read this blog, which is
actually pretty cool. In the vast ocean of the web, I’m a bit surprised I’ve
gotten a few readers. Since some of you don’t know me personally, I ask that
you give me the benefit of the doubt if I write something you find offensive.
Point it out to me certainly, but wait until I respond before you think less of
me (though feel free to think less of my typing skills). Also, I’m curious to
how people found the blog. As I said, I think it’s a positive that people are
reading my blog, but I’m interested to see what brought people here.
Standing Up
As I’ve said before, one of the challenges in the Peace
Corps is the unfamiliarity. Back in America when you have a hard time, you fall
back on friends, family, food, and habits, things that have been built over
years. Abroad, not all that is available. So when I hit my slump back in April,
and let all my good hobbies and stress relievers slip away, it didn’t leave
much to go besides stubbornness (luckily my stubbornness is as vast as the
night sky). I did have two things on my side though. One was time, and lots of
it. The other was an increasing familiarity with my home in the Philippines.
I worked through my problems one by one, starting with the
easiest such as getting the kitchen clean, to harder issues like getting the
rest of my apartment clean, and then I fretted over the big stuff like personal
relationships, and my role here. As my good habits from reading, to keeping up
with the news starting to become regular again, it made filtering through the
list of problems I was facing a lot easier. As for the familiarity within my
community, still getting better in Ilokano bit by bit, and just getting outside
more helped a great deal. I still don’t have what I’d call a very active social
life in Dupax, but I’m friends with my coworkers, and there’s quite a few
members in the community I stop and talk to when I see them. I also have plenty
of me time before and after work to just relax and pursue my own interests.
Whereas when I first got to my site, a party or fiesta was even more stressful
than work, with everyone staring at me, and having to stretch my Ilokano to its
limits, I think I can actually sit down and enjoy a social event now.
So really as I think about it, time and being comfortable in
your environment is pretty much the same way I dealt with problems back home.
It’s just tweaked here to fit the culture.
Birthday
My birthday was last July. I first celebrated with other
volunteers on a Sunday, at our favorite restaurant. I got three gifts that day.
The first was vegemite from an Aussie volunteer. I haven’t tried it yet, but
from what I’ve heard it’s something else. Perhaps I’ll spread some on Balut
whenever I get around to trying it.
The second gift was a cardboard, laminated, dress up clown.
There was clown outfit, tux, casual, and prison uniform. So I thank fellow PCVs
Becky and Amber for that gift. I had received a text the week before whether I
wanted a clown or a stripper for my birthday. Naturally I said both in one, not
realizing that it would actually have any impact on my life at all. Oh, and did
I say it’s laminated? It’ll be lasting for awhile. Woot.
The third wasn’t exactly a gift, but it came the same day.
At the end of our pre-service training last year we wrote a letter to ourselves
for the one year mark. I had no idea what I had written, and I was expecting
something fairly goofy. However, I was floored by what I had written to myself.
I was on cloud nine at the end of training. I was one of the top trainees at
learning one of the dialects, I had a good relationship with staff, and with
many of the PCVs. I excelled in a way that I hadn’t before in any other job,
and certainly not at school. Yet, despite having every reason to pat myself on
the back, and to say well done, my words were brutally honest and humbling.
I’ll give a small sample of what I wrote.
“Humility is said to
be the greatest virtue and it feels like anathema to me. It fills me with great
joy, yet a deep troubling feeling given compliments such as that all of me
impresses, or I light up someone’s life. Perhaps I am just scared that if I
accept these compliments, these friendships too willingly I will falter from
myself and no longer deserve this love that has been given to me.”
At the time I wrote
it, I was expecting that perhaps in one year’s time I would be arrogant having
ridden that cloud the whole way. I was trying to tell myself that even though
humility is hard to swallow sometimes, not to lose myself to pride, and to
always make sure I earn people’s respect, and don’t abuse it. Suffice to say I
wasn’t on that cloud any more when I read it, but it was a good reminder to who
I was, and to who I wanted to be.
On my actually birthday the next day I went to work as
usual. I skipped the flag ceremony cause well… the flag ceremony’s boring and
it was my birthday. For lunch, I cooked up some non-Filipino spaghetti.
Noodles, Italian style sauce, ground pork, and oodles of spices. Whereas in
America we get treated for our birthday, in the Philippines you treat others.
When I told people at my office about American-style birthdays, they thought I
was joking at first. They liked the spaghetti, and that was it. I’m twenty-five
now.
Two Big Projects
So I mentioned that I now feel like I have the potential to really get things done. There are two projects I have that will be great if they can be accomplished.
The first is the training I’m training to arrange for the
youth government (SK) in the province. I got a list of ten things that the SK
is struggling with. Most of them are ways of self improvement such as
communication, time management, ningas cogan which I’ve mentioned before and
will talk about below. A few are from outside their organization such as lack
of funding, and no guidance from those who know about governance. The first
part of the training will be to create a list of strengths and resources the SK
has, and using those trying to come up with a solution to their challenges one
by one.
The second half will be a modified project design and
management session. I’ll give them as many organizational methods and
strategies I can, give them hard and digital copies for reference, and try to
give them the confidence to give them a try. I feel confident the training will
happen, the question is how many members I can get to come. I’ve asked two from
each municipality to attend. Hopefully most or all will. If successful, I have
a feeling I’ll be asked to help organize a similar training for the different
municipalities which is a step below the province. That’s a lot of trainings,
but we’ll face the hurdle if it comes.
The other project is to help build a PYAP from scratch. The
PYAP is an organization similar to the SK, but for the out of school youth.
It’s an organization that is supposed to help out of school youth get
opportunities for leadership and critical thinking, and for them to use those
skills to help younger youth as well. It’s an organization that is mandated by
law to exist where there are out of school youth, but sadly there is no enforcement.
This is a project my supervisor at site and I have talked about a lot, and I’m
going to start now. I’m going to work with all fifteen barangays (perhaps just
fourteen as our furthest one may not be reachable right now due to the rainy
season [barangay=community that has government officials]) and to facilitate
the organizing of the youth in the coming months. I’m going to need partners in
every barangay to help me, and to eventually be the adult leaders that assist
the PYAP once its formed. It has to be every barangay individually at first
because I’ve come to learn that each one is unique, and each will need its own
approach. If we can get this to be successful, it will give opportunities to
the youth who currently have none, and create leaders out of many of them. I
think many of the future successes of the Philippines are going to have to come
from the out of school youth, and this is the best organization for that right
now.
Batch 271
I had the privilege of being a resource volunteer for Batch
271 during their Supervisor’s Conference. In part because I have a great
supervisor who came with me, in part because I have really close beliefs to the
Peace Corps staff about our work in the Philippines, and in part because staff
has yet to find out about my mysterious, dark, and alluring secrets, I was
chosen to help facilitate some of their sessions. There’s quite a few changes
that have been made in the past year. One is a focus on getting more older and
experienced volunteers. Another was to only teach Tagalog this year as opposed
to half Tagalog, and half other regional dialects. At the request of PNVSCA,
the Filipino agency that coordinates all foreign volunteers, and the Department
of Education (in the Philippines), the majority of them will be clustered in
Romblon, Bicol, and Negros. None of those are close to me. The nearest
volunteer is in the province of Tarlac, and is probably about a four hour drive
away. So on one giant positive, it was great to actually meet them, and talk a
bit, knowing that I wouldn’t have met many of them otherwise.
I think the session went well. Some of them were pretty dry
(the importance of monitoring and evaluation!!!), but I tried to joke when I
could, and to be as casual by treating the trainees as equals to me rather than
the new kids. When you’re in the position of training others, it’s very easy to
slip into a dominant role and to talk down to the people you’re teaching, but I
did my best to avoid that and make it more like I was having a conversation. I’ve
had a lot more success with that approach. For me, my job that week was fairly
easy. Many of the session were conducting by our staff in Manila. Some of the
sessions I ran were to simply give instructions to the new CYF volunteers and
their supervisors, and then to let them work one on one. My last session with
the new CYF volunteers was a forty-or-so minute question and answer, giving
them a chance to clarify things, and to get an honest answer for some of their
concerns.
No romance for me that week. I say this because several
volunteers from my batch asked me, so I figure it may be a question out there for people. I kept it professional. Over seventy
volunteers applied for like twenty or so resource volunteer positions. Being
there was a privilege, and I was there to help
the new volunteers get through the trainings and to be a resource for
their concerns during a stressful time, not to put out a single’s add for
myself. Besides, I’m holding out for Toni Gonzaga, famous singer, and talk show
host in the Philippines! It’s destined to be! :P
I found myself at the end of the conference questioning how
good of a job I did despite glowing feedback from many of them, though. I think
that in part it tied back into my letter to myself that although the
compliments meant a lot to me, I always am hesitant to let it get to my head
too much.
There is one compliment I received in particular though
which was moving, and which does make me think I’m on the right track, is hard
to fully accept. The oldest volunteer in the new batch is in his early 80s.
Whereas I was working mainly with the Child Youth and Family volunteers, he was
an Education volunteer. However, he spoke to me in the hall when I was walking
out of my room and going to the lobby. He told me that I had a way about me,
that there was a subtlety there. The expression on his face was the same as if
he had said that I’m going to go far in life. It was an indirect way of him
telling me I was a good person, but the way he said meant a lot more. I don’t
know how to fully capture that compliment, but I think I’m doing a lot of
things right to have gotten it, and hopefully I’ll continue to earn it.
If I had one regret from the conference was that I didn’t
get to know the new volunteers well enough. I got to know some of my fellow resource
volunteers a lot more than before, as well as the staff, and I did have many
conversations throughout the week with the new group. I suppose it’s that I’ve
gotten to know people from my own batch so well after over a year, that meeting
a new group and only having five days felt like it wasn’t enough. Obviously I
can’t be best buddies with all 67(?) of them, but hopefully I can stay in touch
with many of them, cause we’re all in the same boat, just not with the same
timing.
Fire
I’ve mentioned ningas cogan a lot before, but I only just
found out its literal translation. It means buring grass in Tagalog. The fire
is there, but grass burns quickly. I learned that there’s also an expression
for the opposite, ningas bao. Bao is the tagalong word for coconut shell, which
takes a long times to burn. I had been debating internally on how much I wanted
to talk about ningas cogan. I do think it is one of the biggest challenges at
site, and it is an acceptable excuse for things not to get done in the
Philippines far too often, but I felt a lot of the times when I brought it up,
I was giving power to the term, that I was giving people an excuse by telling
them I knew what I was asking for might not happen. I think ningas bao gives me
what I want. Using that term instead can help me address the issue, to do it
with the positive instead of the negative, and it will be a term that was
coined by Filipinos to inspire them.
For my projects with the SK and the PYAP, I feel like I’m
walking with fire. I’m trying to ignite to interest and the enthusiasm of the
community to accomplish more. I’ll encourage them, motivate them, get them
together, help them think through challenges, help them organize, but they are
either the grass or the coconut shells, the success is up to how long they’re
willing to let the fire burn.
And that’s the Peace Corps. To offer my unique skillset and
perspective, but to ultimate let the real work lay in the hands of the people
themselves. If there was another way where I could put it all on my shoulders I
would in a heartbeat, but I’m going to trust the people I’m working for and
with, and if these two projects fall through, I’ll go back to the drawing board
and try again.
What’s to Come
I’ve just started learning Tagalog. My Ilokano isn’t
perfect, but I can run just about any session I want in Ilokano, and I can
communicate pretty naturally as I go about my errands, or talk about work, or
even joke with people. However, when I travel down south to other sites, or to
Manila, I feel pretty much like a tourist. Between that, and knowing the
national dialect is a good talent in and of itself, I’ll give it a whirl.
I took a look at a T’ai Chi book. After reading a bit more
on it, it seems to be quite difficult to get good at, so I’m going to hold off
on that one, and maybe get an instructional video for Christmas or something.
Mid Service Training is in October. It’s the last training
we get, and the last time the entire batch is together until our closing of
service.
My dance instructor moved to Baguio. Need to get a new one.
Also got an email saying that I’ve finally been matched with
a teacher in America to communicate back and forth between me and their
students. It took a year about for it to happen as I heard most teachers want
volunteers in Spanish speaking areas. So we’ll see how it goes.
As always, thanks for reading. Hopefully another update in a
few weeks. Maybe one with a lot of short stories.
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