**okay! This post is from a week or so ago.. but I'm behind. So I'm putting this one up then will pick up where it left off and get a more recent one to you asap!
Staff meetings, videoke, and floods! It's been a hectic week!
Last Friday, we had a staff meeting to introduce ourselves and mingle with our co-teachers and some other faculty. Staff meetings here involve giant plates of food and mingling means spending an hour in a giant dance circle with Call Me Maybe on repeat at 10 AM. Before the meeting, we were asked to go outside. Waiting in the middle of the school yard was Subic National High Schools newest activity - their dance team and band. It was awesome - they played a couple of songs, including the national anthem and Firework by Katy Perry, on mostly handheld xylophones and drums while the dance team twirled batons and dropped it like it was hot. We then went back to the library to munch on pansit (yummy kind of noodle dish that is traditional for parties), rice cake (purple rice cake), and a few other Filipino delictables. It started pretty tame with some great 80s ballads on the boombox but once Call Me Maybe came on, all formality was dropped. I honestly cannot explain how much I love the Filipino people - yeah maybe having a dance party instead of a formal meet and greet maybe be detrimental to our over all development responsibilities at the school, but it is awesome that these people are willing to take 2 hours out of their morning for a noodle and Coke fueled dance party. Its more fun in the Philippines! (or, since Filipinos generally cannot pronounce the F sound, Its more Pun in the Pilipinas)
Friday night was also a bit of an adventure as I ventured out of our barangay with 5 other trainees here. We hopped a jeepney to an area called Barretto - the area where all of the U.S. Navy men used to go out when they were docked in Subic Bay. It a strip along the National Highway that is moooostly strip clubs - The Wet Spot, Route 69 - but we had heard rumors of a place where we could get some tacos. The plan was to go to find a bar where we could watch some Olympics, but bars in the area are notorious for prostitutes soooo we went to The Coffee Shop: Home of the Jumbo Tacos. The tacos were nothing special - at all - but it was really nice to have some time for ourselves, have a few Red Horses and vent about the Department of Education... big Friday night.. And we ran into a couple of CYF people from the other barangays, so that was fun!
On Saturday, we had some sessions in the morning then free afternoon. At night, a couple of people came over to my house for videoke! So, my dad is the barangay captain but also seems to be the self-elected party captain. In our house, we have at least two disco balls, some stage lights, and this box that shoots lazers throughout the entire living room. So my dad set up a lights display and we started videokeing at 5pm. So.. my voice is not good. I have never been able to sing.. but it honestly does not matter in videoke. They just love to hear anyone sing and to sing anything. It doesn't even have to be any sort of event.. sometimes one of my family members will just sit on the couch and sing by themselves. Anyway, about 5 of my group came over and we took turns singing some classics - mostly dramatic ballads - while the stock videos played in the background. And the videos are so weird! Videoke is different from kareoke because the songs are set to videos.. but they are completely random. It started out with clips from old NBA games, then moved to women in bikinis on the beach, then there was this weird sort of doll commercial with creepy girls and creepy dolls, then there is the african safari video which features crocodiles viciously devouring different animals, then theres a photoshoot of naked girls with painted bikinis and painted sports jerseys, and finally there is an undersea video. All of this would play randomly under Girls Just Want to Have Fun or Hero, by Enrique (obviously my videoke go to). So we sang in the lazer lights for a while, then people started to head home and I ended up staying up until 11 with my family just singing - and went to bed with NO voice. I then woke up Sunday morning to my dad singing Michael Jackson in the living room at 9 am.
Sunday was a usual Sunday.. washing my clothes and lesson planning. My co-teacher is really, really sweet but gives me very little information to go off of, so for example of Thursday she told me that we're covering adjectives on Monday... and thats all she said. It gives me a lot of freedom but its also a challenge because I really can't tell yet what level these students are and what kind of activities are best. We were warned about this, but we've all been noticing in our classroom how the students are extremely quick and capable of rattling off information that they had learned before.. they can recognize an adjective and have some that they can yell out in class, but if you ask them to make their own sentence, they freeze up. They are just so used to memorizing everything and have had no practice in constructing their own sentences or using any sort of imagination. So I love putting in activities that they have to be creative and I think its good to encourage them to start thinking that way, but its just so frustrating trying to explain and to get them to even try. Its also really tough because when any student offers and answer that isn't right the whole class laughs openly at them. Its frustrating obviously because kids are too shy to even try. So, school on Monday was my first day of really crashing and burning in front of the class haha. I'm working with another trainee in my classes and we just didn't plan enough activities and they just weren't working as well as we hoped and so in class our teacher actually stepped up and took over for a bit then gave us excersises to run.. it was really painful at first but being able to improvise and get support from the coteacher was really good. She is so quiet when we try to talk about our lessons or how the classes went, but finally seeing her teach made me more confident that I do have a lot to learn from her. Also - improv is coming in handy so much here. Thanks Moeller and Montreal Improv!!
Theeeen.. Tuesday was flood day! Like.. an actual flood day. I woke up around 6 to find that there was maybe three or four inches of water in my house, but the water wasn't too dirty and my neices and nephews were having fun pushing it out of the front door with brooms and mops. The water outside of the house was probably up to my knee but still just sort of fun, but the water kept rising. The back of our house is lower than the front so water was coming in through the back door and we tried to bucket it out of the front. The back of our house is also right up against the river that runs through the barangay but we have some concrete walls to keep it out. It kept raining until the water outside was almost above my thighs and the water in my house was mid-calf... then one of the walls in our back yard broke. And water came rushing to the front and into the house, bringing the water in the house up to our knees. Luckily, before that we had run through the house and picked everything up and moved things from lower cabinets to the top of tables. My room is up two little steps from the main floor so luckily water in there was only around my ankles and all of my stuff was piled on my bed. This is the point where it wasn't so much fun as it was scary.. my family had had some water in their house before from flooding but they were saying that it had never been this high. Outside, our street was literally the same thing as the river. The current was crazy and it was up to people's waist - people were out in the street trying to go buy some food and there were a few who would float by on an innertube having a great time - at one point about three boys floated by on a giant inflatable turtle. So the day had its fun moments, but when the house was filling up my family was really worried - my little nephew wouldn't let me put him down. But, luckily, the water stopped rising and slowly went down as my dad and some of his barangay staff bucketed water out of the front door. The kids and I all helped sweep the water to the front, but all in all the house was flooded from about 4 AM to 10 PM. It was a looong day for everyone. Four of the people in my group were actually moved from their houses - one woman, Jo, lives on really low ground and has had flooding problems since we got here and two of the other girls live behind the river, so they picked them up in case the water got any higher/didn't go down.
But, ultimately, we were definitely the lucky ones! There are other PSTs staying about an hour away in each direction - in a place called Morong (on the beach) and Dinalupihan. The Dinalupihan group is 11 education volunteers and they got the worst of the flood. I got the story last night but I'm afraid I'm going to mix up the details (and start some unintentional chika chika!) so I'll just give you the gist - half of the group managed to get their stuff and themselves to a safe, dry place but the remaining six were moved to a "safe house" that was two stories and on high grounds... but the flood was so bad that it reached the house and they were stuck in the second floor for 30 something hours. There was no power so people's cell phones were dying or they were running out of credit, so there was little to no communication with them. In the end, Peace Corps had the military bring in help and they six were picked up by a military truck. The entire group was moved to a hotel in the city right next to ours so they are all safe and sound now, although a little shaken up. There were three or four people who actually lost all of their stuff.. everything they packed for two years is underwater. We went to see them last night and had a big, happy reunion and despite what they went through, they were in really good spirits.
The Morong group was also there! Including Education and Coastal Resource Management kids.. they didn't have flooding in their place, but had lost power and water and were expected to be without both for the next two weeks, so they moved them out. So on Friday and Saturday my group took a 20 minute jeepney to meet all of these guys for dinner - which was so fun to see everyone.
Also on Saturday I went on a day trip with my family - including Carl - and my friend Allie! We went to Duty Free stores in Subic Bay... but after being there, I still don't really know what that means. We went to two kind of mega grocery stores that basically had regular Filipino stuff then a lot of American stuff for ridiculous prices - a small jar of peanut butter was about 6 US dollars.. ridiculous. But it was a fun trip and we drove in one of the vans that each barangay gets - its kind of like a prison van with some man's face on the side.
Other than all of that excitement, my group has literally been working non-stop. We only had school on Monday last week because of the flood so we didn't have much time at the school - where we are supposed to be collecting data for a community project. We have had very little time to do this so we are planning an entire community project based on not too much research.. so hopefully we can pull it off. The project we have in mind is a few parts.. first, we are definitely doing a teacher training session because that was one thing specifically asked for by the faculty. We are calling the event Innovations in Teaching (or something along those lines) and will be giving sessions on learning styles, pronunciation, how to use internet sources, classroom management, and a few other topics. At the end of the event we will give teachers a certificate that is signed by a Peace Corps representative and the school principal, then the teachers can use this certificate to help them get a raise and higher pay! So it helps everyone. We also have some pesos to spend so we are going to provide a sort of home made text/activity book for the teachers and then have a second (or third) project that we can spend the money on. One big problem at the school is that fact that students do not use English outside of the classroom - at all. And basically all Filipino children are obsessseeed with video games SO our idea is to try and buy some fun educational (oxymoron? lets hope not) video games to install in the computer lab at school. They have about 10 computers that no one seems to use so were hoping to utilize those. So! We have about a week to plan this 8 hour event for the teachers then about three weeks for get our other project together.. also if anyone has any connections with some computer game companies and think they might be able to get some discounts for the Peace Corps, please please please let me know!!
My family is still great! I'm really bonding with my neices and nephews - and have been thinking about how badly I am going to miss them when I have to leave! I'm already thinking that if I have the time/money, I'll definitely travel back here for either Christmas or New Years.
Also my sister seems to have given out my phone number to a random "text mate".. I woke up the other day to this text:
morning po xa lhat qng nkatxtmate kagv?
and the signature:
"mr'three" _much2luv_ 'can'produce'#-=baby=-#
Sooo.. first of all, learning Tagalog is challenging. Then I learn that the world of Tagalog texting is out there. Its ridiculous.. they have codes and patterns and stuff. To me it pretty much looks like someone sat on their phone and accidentally sent it.
Then, on top of that, my new "text mates" signature includes the fact that he is fertile?
My friend Allie and I could not stop laughing and considering we have heard nothing but the song Call Me Maybe since we landed on this archepelego, we came up with a little diddy for any new mystery text mates.
Hey, I've never met you, and this is crazy! How'd you get my number? Don't call me, maybe?
Love you all!! xxxxxx
"If you only do what you know you can, you never do very much" - Tom Krause
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