Of girls and dogs and cats

Toril and Patring
We then departed for Mindanao and Davao City. We were to live in Toril, the southern unit of the city. Toril is more like a town of it’s own, a suburb 18 kilometers south of the city proper, but still in the city limits. (we learned that Davao is the world’s largest city by area, including the peak of Mt. Apo - tallest mountain. in the country - within the city limits) Host country folks had found us a little bungalow to rent - three rooms. I thought we would be in a nipa hut! Our house had two bedrooms, a closet bath and a “great room” of living room with kitchen area at one end. We even had electricity! We bought a bed made from fishing line strung in a web on a bamboo frame. We hung a yellow mosquito net from the poles on the corners. For a mattress we had a woven banig mat. I tucked a sheet over the banig and then we tucked in the net under the mat. The bath consisted of a room the width of a toilet seat with room to swing the door open before it hit the toilet. The shower and the faucet below it were connected to a roof fed water tank in the back. There was only enough pressure to really shower if the tank was full after a rain, then the water was cold! We heated water to pour into the bucket, then took can showers from that.
After only a few days there, we told a neighbor (our landlord’s sister) that we were thinking about getting a labenderra (someone to wash the clothes). The next morning she told us that she had found us a “helper” but she couldn’t start till the 2nd, two days away! What to do? We had been told that we should have “SIP” smooth interpersonal relationships and not rock the boat - how did we say that we hadn’t decided yet? So we decided to give it a try. Patring arrived, she would be staying next door where her cousin was going to be the maid, and would work for us. She was 16 and attending high school in the evenings in Toril. She lived in a barrio up the mountain (Toril was actually near the base of Mt. Apo) so going home after school was sometimes a problem as the last jeepney (a local method of transportation) sometimes went earlier than she could go. She did the laundry in a tub behind the house using water from the tank then hung the clothes up to dry on a line in the back yard. Patring also cleaned the house and did marketing and some of the cooking. For this we paid her 30 Pesos per month (about $5). This was a little more than average for a “helper”. She paid her tuition out of that. I was happy to let her do the marketing, I really don’t like looking dinner in the face and have a hard time buying fish that are looking at me, or beef cut from a haunch hanging from a hook. After a month her cousin was no longer working next door so Patring asked if she could move into the other bedroom. During the 2 years we lived there the next door neighbor went thru probably 18 maids but Patring stayed with us the whole time.

Pochontis
One day Patring was very upset. She kept saying, “Ang polo ni sir!” (David’s shirt) Someone had climbed over the fence in the back and taken two shirts from the clothes line. She was certain that she would get fired for allowing that to happen. We just asked the landlord to move a clothes line to the front where it could be watched more easily from the front room. That weekend Patring went home to the barrio and came back the next day with a “watch dog”. We decided to name her Pocahontis, since she would be the “American’s dog”. We called her Pokie for short. Pokie turned out to be an unfortunate name which caused snickers among our friends. When asked to explain, Nang Tita said something about flowers and boxes. A list of “green words” that was distributed to agricultural PVC’s later explained the problem. Pokie was a slang term for a part of the female anatomy! A cowrie shell is also called “pokie” for it’s resemblance to the same part. By the time we found out the real meaning, it was too late, Pokie knew her name, and Patring said that we said it with the accent on a different syllable. So Pokie she stayed.
Pokie had been the runt of the litter and could be held in two hands. She soon grew up to a fine looking dog, about the size of a terrier. People thought she was an “American” dog because she was so healthy looking. Philippine dogs were usually watch dogs, not pets.

Alcindor
One evening we decided to go to the movies in town but on the way to the highway to catch a jeepney, there was a lot of yelling by our neighbor’s house. A neighborhood boy had been throwing rocks at on of Juanito’s dogs. (they were named Chamberlain and Alcindor for the American basketball stars) Alcindor didn’t like being tormented so he bit the boy. Philippine dogs aren’t usually vaccinated against rabies so that was a concern. We helped by catching the dog and tying him up with Pokie’s leash. Then in my best Cebuano, I told the kids of the family that we needed to keep him tied up to watch for rabies. David got our Peace Corps first aid kit and cleaned the boys bites and treated them with merthaolite and bandaids. I then told the boy’s mother that he should get a shot for tetanus so he wouldn’t get lockjaw. I was quite proud of myself for all the talk in Cebuano. We slept late the next morning since it was Saturday. When we ventured out we discovered the “rest of the story”, the mother had gotten the boy a shot from our neighbor, a doctor, then taken him to a “mananambal”, a local herbal doctor who chastised her for letting us clean the bite. He then proceeded to slap a poultice of mud and who knows what else on it. Juanito hadn’t heard what I had said about watching Alcindor for signs of rabies so he gave the doomed dog to his cousin who proceeded to make a stew out of him. I lost my cool! Juanito was educated, the brother of two doctors, and the dog was cooked! They tried to reassure me that Alcindor had also bitten his litter mate (a pregnant bitch the doctor owned) but that day I did not have any “smooth interpersonal relationships” like the Peace Corps training preached.

Makililimos
Pokie wasn’t our only dog in Toril. “Maki” showed up at the back door, begging for food. He was licking up water from the kitchen run-off . Patring felt sorry for the puppy so she started feeding him some of the leftover rice and fish we had. Each evening he would stay outside when we closed the doors. One night he looked at me with big brown eyes as if to say, “Can I stay in?” I told him, “Okay, but if you want to go out and wake me up, that will be it.” He stayed the night and from then on we had two dogs. We named him Makililimos which means beggar in Cebuano. We called him Maki for short. Poor Maki was clearly besotted with Pokie. She wouldn’t have anything to do with any of the dogs in the neighborhood, including Maki. Maki grew healthy with Patring’s “dog food”. He thought he was a lap dog even when he outgrew my lap. He would hop on the settee with me and drape himself over my lap. Again, a Friday evening in town to see the American movies at one of the five nicer theaters in the city. Coming home only Pokie was there on the porch to greet us. We called for Maki but he didn’t come. The next morning, he still wasn’t home so I started to walk around the neighborhood asking people if they had seen them. Most said, “Geihaw segurio!” to the question. “Probably eaten!” Now, I don’t have anything to say about people eating dog. It is a Filipino custom in certain areas and tribes. And Filipino’s have a different outlook about dogs. But this was my dog they were nervously chuckling about. And it looked like someone might have taken him. Only one person said she was sorry about the lost dog. I hoped that Maki bit the guy who took him! Months later Patring told us her brother had heard some young men had indeed taken him. He didn’t want to tell us because he was afraid that David would do something rash, but then the guy was killed in a knife fight in a local bar so then wanted us to know.

Tabian and Aswan
We had another pet in Toril, a cat we named Tabian, meaning talkative. She seemed to own our house, she just let us live there. She kept it free from mice and when she had kittens, they were distributed to neighbors who needed mousers also. We kept one of the kittens that we named Aswan, meaning witch. They would play hockey on the kitchen floor with the giant cockroaches we would get. Nothing would kill the cockroaches, not even a direct spray with “Raid” ! The other animals in the house weren’t pets but a source of entertainment since we didn’t have TV. They were the little suction-footed “tiki” lizards that lived on the ceiling. We liked them because they ate mosquitos. The tiki were called that because of the sound they made “tiki, tiki”. About 4 inches long, they were territorial, and would get into standoffs over prime ceiling space, the best being near the light which would attract other bugs - “yum-dinner”. Sometimes we would bet on them like a prize fight. David was convinced that one of them liked him because it would position itself on the ceiling when he was reading on the settee and then drop down upon his head. It would sit there for a little while then scamper from his shoulder to the wall and back to the ceiling.

Moving
After two years in Toril, we heard that there weren’t enough volunteers for the requests they had in the new education group. So we asked Peace Corps if we could extend into one of the new spots. The regional rep told us about several that wanted two volunteers in math and science so we decided to check out the assignment in Bohol, a Cebuano speaking island to the north of Mindanao. After talking to the math-science supervisor we decided to extend our stay as Peace Corps volunteers. We told Patring’s father that if she wanted to come with us we would like to have her. He left it up to her. He was originally from Bohol, so she had and uncle and cousins there. We had to consult the vet in Davao about taking Pokie with us. We moved on a boat, packing up our stuff into a shipping crate that was made for us. We had Patring, Pokie, and Aswan with us. Tabian, after all, owned the house so she stayed with it. The boat was 18 hours to the next port of call. Pokie wouldn’t use the newspaper we had put on the deck for her, so we were the first down the gang plank when it went down. We had to stay in a hotel for several days in Cebu city before going to Bohol so we found some canned dog food in a grocery store. She wouldn’t eat it. We had to bring back “doggie bags” from eating out for her. We took another boat across to Bohol with everyone and settled into our new home, the second floor of a wooden house near the pier. We even got the landlord to put up a fence around our small yard so that we could leave the doors open for Pokie while Patring was home.
Pokie liked to show people that she was the “watch dog”. She would bark at visitors and nip at their feet until we told her to stop. One day we had several PCV friends who came calling. Pokie started her routine but Bryan stomped at her and she fled into the kitchen. After a while she ventured back into the living room when a second PCV arrived. He was of Filipino heritage so didn’t look white to her (I don’t know if that made a difference anyway) so she started her routine again and Mike stomped at her too! She ran thru the kitchen and down the back stairs. She didn’t come back in for quite a while.

The Rat and the Tom cat
One day I went into the kitchen where I found a large rat on the sink. It was eating the cat’s food that we put up there so that Pokie wouldn’t eat it all. I went back into the living room where I picked up the sleeping cat and put her into the kitchen. I said, “see the rat, cat!” She looked at me and meowed, “That rat is bigger than me, sorry!” and ran back into the living room. So then I grabbed Pokie by the collor and pushed her into the kitchen. She growled but said to me, “I don’t do rats!” and went back into the living room. I then woke up David who was napping on the couch. He looked into the kitchen and said, “What do you want me to do?” and threw a tsinella (flip-flop) at it. The rat just looked at us and laughed! We got the landlord to put up a screen around the sink area (it was open to the roof of the stairs with just slats around it) but the rat would come in under the door. Remember this is the tropics so houses aren’t built to keep out the cold. There was a gap between the bottom of the door and the floor. We then saw that Aswan had a Tom Cat calling on her. David encouraged him with bits of chicken he would leave on the step. One afternoon, soon after, the rat was in the kitchen, the Tom was creeping up the stairs, we heard a yowl and a scuffle. No more rat. Yeah, Tom Cat!!

Leaving
We stayed in Bohol for 18 months till our project was done. We had given one-week seminars to all of the elementary teachers in the province. Patring would stay at home with Pokie while we would go to visit each of the towns where the seminars were being given. When we got ready to go home, Patring told us that she wanted to take Pokie home to her barrio in Davao but “Is there birth control for dogs?” she asked. She knew that barrio dogs would have litter after litter and would end up skinny with dragging tits, not a pretty picture. She knew that we were using birth control because people would ask us why we didn’t have kids yet and that is the answer we would give. We took Pokie on a boat back to Cebu to a vet who could spay her. It cost us 100 pesos but was worth it. Going home to Davao, Patring and Pokie flew. The cat stayed in Bohol. Patring had become not just a helper but a friend, almost like a younger sister.
Patring finished her high school and took a course in tailoring. She decided that that wasn’t what she wanted so she went to a two year college in agriculture. Then she decided to study some more and became a midwife. Pokie lived out her life in the barrio with Patring’s family. Visiting Toril after 28 years, we took a tricycle to the barrio and found Patring living with her husband and child, a shingle hanging out in front, “Laying In - Patricia Igono - Midwife” A photo of the three of us was in her front room! She said, “Mam Arlene, you didn’t forget me” as we hugged.