TRAINING
We packed up our apartment, visited our families and left for training in Saxons River, Vermont! This small New England village was very different from the Philippines in climate but similar to a barrio or town in the Philippines in make-up. After spending over 300 hours learning Cebuano, the language of the central islands, and almost as much learning how use modern teaching methods and cross-cultural studies, we were declared ready to leave the chilly East coast and go to the warm tropical Far East. We got on a 747 in New York in September and after traveling 36 hours (an overnight stop over in Japan) we got off the plane in Manila. It was like walking into a wet sponge. The air seemed very heavy and damp. A few days in Manila then back on a plane to go to Dumagette for some in-country training. More language training, some classroom training and a visit to some volunteers living in a nipa hut further prepared us for our assignments.
TORIL, DAVAO CITY
We were assigned to Toril, Davao City. There are two school districts in Toril. David would be working with science teachers in Dalao district and I was working with math teachers in Piedad district. We were introduced to a family that had a small house to rent and we settled in to life in Toril. Toril is like a suburb to the main city of Davao, but still part of the city. It is 18 kilometers south of the center of the city. (how many miles is that? I never really think about the conversions - I just know it was 30 minutes by jeepney). Toril had a daily market with fresh meat, fish and chicken as well as fruits, vegetables and rice. 20,000 people were considered residents of the district of Toril. The various barrios (now they are called barangays) ranged from sea front villages to villages up near the top of Mt. Apo which is the tallest mountain in the country and a dormant volcano (not dead, just hasn’t erupted in 800 years). Our school districts went from the central schools to small primary schools on the mountain. We soon became close to our “family” of Juanito, a banker his wife Christita (we called her Nang-Tita, a Cebuano title for an honored woman) a school teacher and their 7 sons and daughters. Nang-Tita called us her “American son and daughter”! Juanito's extended family included a total of 15 siblings and their families. We were included in social activities by them and many other new friends from our schools. We soon added a helper to our household, a high school girl who did laundry, marketing and house cleaning. Patring ended up living with us the whole time we were in the country. A couple of dogs and cats completed our house.
The first Christmas we stayed in Toril. All of the teachers from my school received a bag of flour from the US charity, CARE. We felt a little guilty about receiving one of the bags so we made cookies. On of our neighbors brought over a record player and a case of soft drinks and we had a Christmas party for all the kids in the neighborhood!
The second December we had a science conference in Manila, then we went north to Baguio City and on to Bontoc. We then journeyed up to Tuguegarao for the wedding of another Peace Corps volunteer and one of the language instructors. We joked that while other PCV’s were having a circle trip of SouthEast Asia, we had a circle tour of Northern Luzon. We also visited the famed Banaue rice terraces and had several exciting rides on the local buses.
TAGBILARAN CITY, BOHOL
After our first two years, we extended our Peace Corps tour by accepting a new assignment in the province of Bohol. We moved to Tagbilaran City with Patring, as well as our dog and one of our cats. We made quite a picture traveling deck class on a boat that rounded Eastern Mindanao and landed in Cebu. Then another boat ride took us to Tagbilaran. We made many new friends there and were accepted into several local families. There we worked with the math-science supervisor for the school division that made up the entire island. We ended up doing a training project that gave every one of the elementary school teachers (5000 of them) a week long seminar in methods of teaching modern math and another one in process approach science. During this year and a half process we traveled to most of the towns on the island. (Bohol is 12 hours in circumference by provincial bus!) Several of the towns involved traveling by “pump-boat”. Cebu city was just a 5 hour boat ride away, so many weekends we took the Friday night boat, arriving there early in the morning. We would visit the Peace Corps regional office, run errands which might include making stencils for running off materials on the Gestenter printer we had back in Bohol. We would usually see some of the other volunteers there or go to a movie before taking the Saturday evening or Sunday morning boat back. We were on one of these jaunts to Cebu when President Marcos overthrew his own government and declared martial law. We stayed at the home of the US Consul for several days before being able to return to Bohol. Martial law did not change our lives very much. Our friend the Philippine Constabulary commander offered us curfew passes but really, what was there to do in Tagbilaran between midnight and 4 AM anyway?
GOING HOME ON EMERGENCY LEAVE
While living in Bohol we learned that David’s father had terminal cancer. So, after a conference call between David at the regional office in Cebu; the Peace Corps office in Manila; the Peace Corps Philippines desk in Washington, D.C.; and David’s mother who was called at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where Pop was being treated; it was decided that we would go home on “emergency leave” while he was still alive rather than waiting to go to the funeral. We left less than a week later. Looking back on it, I don’t feel like I had “culture shock” when I went to the Philippines, but I had it coming back to the States on that trip. We had both been sick the month before and David had lost a lot of weight after his bout with Dengue fever. He had been in the hospital in Cebu for a week. I had had an attack of Amoebic dysentery at the same time, so we were both a little rocky. We flew over to Cebu on the DC-3 that went on the Tagbilaran to Cebu trip. Then we the dinner flight to Manila had a hot dog and a glass of pineapple juice for the meal. We were put on a Philippine Airlines flight from there. Of course the food was Filipino and the plane was full of brown, shorter Filipinos. Going thru customs in Honolulu at 2 AM was a trip. We landed in San Francisco towards evening. I remember David saying, "None of the women are wearing bras." and then he said, “Look at all the white people!” And I added, “and all the black people.” We then saw a group of very tall black men wearing heeled boots with large hair and hats. I remember thinking that they were either a group of pimps or a basketball team! (remember that this was in 1972) After overnighting in a motel near the airport, we got onto a Western Airlines plane to Denver. Before taking off the flight attendant asked us if we wanted a Bloody Mary or Screwdriver before breakfast! Then they served real eggs. After breakfast they served champagne while flying over the Rockies (their slogan on their champagne flights was “the only way to fly”). We landed in Denver where we were met by David’s sister, Jeanne. She had gotten a divorce the year before. Accompanying her was her ex-husband. It was very strange. Then we took off for Sheridan, also on Western airlines. We went Denver - champagne - Cheyenne; Cheyenne - champagne -Casper; Casper - champagne - Sheridan! Meeting us as we staggered off the plane in Sheridan was David’s dad who looked better than David did by that time. I discovered that the price of my favorite LifeSavers had gone from 5¢ to 25¢ during the two years we had been gone! I saw the waste that every family produced here in America. In the Philippines we had seen some extreme recycling. One day our fish was wrapped in our neighbors child’s math test! Children in our neighborhood would pick up shards of glass and sell them by the kilo to the glass recycler who sent barrels over to the glass plant to be made into new bottles. It was very strange to interact with my sick father-in-law and then to go to Minneapolis to meet my new baby niece. It reminded me of the start of the “Ben Casey” TV show - “birth - death - male - female - eternity”. David and his Dad decided that we would return to the Philippines and finish our project. He also told us to “take the trip” that we were planning, to see more of the world on our way home when we left the Peace Corps.
HOME LEAVE
We returned to Bohol and our seminars. That Christmas we went home again for our “home leave” that had been planned when we extended our Peace Corps service. We got stuck in a blizzard in New York while seeing my parents. We stopped off to see my sister and family and then went back to Wyoming for New Year’s eve with David’s family. Luckily his Dad was still around so we had a nice last visit with him. We had hoped to ski while home but the weather was unseasonably cold - below zero the whole time we were there. Then back to Bohol to continue with the training. Each week we would each travel to 4 or 5 of the towns in the province where the seminars were being led by our “core teachers” that we had trained.
MORE BOHOL
That year in Bohol we attended two more weddings with PCV females and their Filipino husbands. We had a group of health volunteers and another education volunteer assigned to Bohol then so we were able to visit some of them when we went around the island. One month there were some US Army rangers who were doing a training exercise in Bohol. We organized a volleyball game between some of the soldiers and PCV’s. We called it “War and Peace”! David’s father did die that May and we did not go home then. David’s Aunt came to visit us that fall so we used some of our vacation time and took a circle tour of South East Asia with her. After one last Christmas in the Philippines we packed up our household things that we wanted to take home. We shipped two large crates back to Wyoming and checked out of the Peace Corps in Manila. After a final visit “home” to Toril we flew to Hong Kong to start our trip the rest of the way around the world with our back packs and our cameras.
FILIPINOS IN DENVER
Looking back on the 3 1/2 years we lived in the Philippines, I know that it has shaped the rest of my life. I feel like Toril and Tagbilaran are as much my “home towns” as Laramie, Bountiful and Hickman Mills are, where I lived when I was younger. I have Filipino things decorating my house. During the job that I found when we first arrived in Denver, I met a man who had brown skin and talked with a “Filipino-English” accent. I said something to him in Cebuano and he answered me! So I found Ralph Acosta and he introduced us to the Filipino American Community of Colorado. FACC has become our Filipino family here in Denver. I love going to club meetings where I can still talk Cebuano and eat some of my favorite foods like lumpia and pancit. The ladies gave me my baby shower before my daughter Rachael was born and both my girls have grown up in the community. Rach thought that she was a Filipina when she was little and Becca is proud of her connections to the group. Some of our friends joke that we are reverse coconuts, white on the outside and brown on the inside. I sing in the FACC- Mano Po choir and have learned to play the banduria to be part of the Rondalla. I am proud that David and I are now Life Members of the FACC.
VISITING AFTER MANY YEARS
Sometimes it seems like Peace Corps was another wholelife. We live life in stages and that was one, a very important one, but a 5 year interlude between my college life and my married life with children. I look back on my time in-country as a mostly wonderful time. There were some difficulties but for most of them I can look back and laugh. In 2002 we joined the Uplift Internationale medical mission and returned to the Philippines after 28 years. We were able to go “home” to Bohol on that trip and found some of our friends there. It was bittersweet to see a close friend dying of kidney failure and to see other friends celebrating their 50th anniversary. The next year we went on the mission a second time and this time visited our Toril home. Taking a jeepney from the city out to Toril I asked a tricycle driver if he knew our Nang-Tita. He dropped us off in front of the alley that goes back to her house. Some women were coming out of a store next to it so I asked (in my best Cebuano) where the her house was. One of the women said, “Arlene is that you?!” It was one of our little sisters, Joyce, all grown up. She had been a teenager when we left. We then all piled into a tricycle to go to her sister’s house where we found Nang-Tita sitting in the front yard. Joyce went thru the gate and said, “Ma, we got company.” Nang-Tita dropped her crochet and gave us both a huge hug. After she finally let go, she said to the children and men who were playing mahjong under a tree in the yard, “Kids, come and say hello to your Uncle David and Aunt Arlene!” (I know they were thinking, “Who are these people?”) We also were able to reconnect with several other friends in Toril including Patring who had lived with us. She had become a midwife after we left. I sometimes wondered if we really had made any difference.
Last year when a group came to Denver from Cebu I met the superintendent of the Mandaue schools. She asked if I was the Arlene Lipman who had been the Peace Corps Volunteer in Bohol. I found a photo of the seminar she had attended as a young teacher with me as the PCV in the front row and her among all the teachers. I asked her if it had been useful. She said it had been good. It was nice getting validation 30 years later! DAUGHTERS
Another indication that we have done something right is the fact that both our daughters studied International Relations in college after completing High School in the Center for International Studies magnet program. Rachael met her husband during her sophomore year studies in Jerusalem and Rebecca received her Master's Degree from DU. Rebecca is leaving in 2 weeks for her own service as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
I summary: We spent 3 1/2 years in the Philippines as a Peace Corps Volunteer. When we came to live here in Denver, we found and became members of a wonderful Filipino community. This is my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment