Peace Corps at 50

"Peace Corps" on Facebook recently posted this link of a YouTube clip of an interview ea

Peace Corps will be 50 on my birthday next year! We just came home from visiting the Philippines 40 years after we first arrived there as green PCV's! With us on our trip was our daughter Becca who has just finished her time as a PCV in Albania. Our Philippine "family" welcomed her as a "granddaughter, niece, cousin". It was very special.

Rice

I remember once when I was a kid and didn't want to eat rice for dinner, my dad made me stay at the table until I finished it. It took 4 hours! How he laughed when I was selected to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines! (rice for breakfast, rice for lunch, rice for dinner - even the word for eat is rice!)

We learned a song in training called "Inday balay ta" sung to the tune of of a WWII song.

Inday balay ta. Girl, let's dance

Di ko kay kapoy I don't want to because I'm tired

Among panahaw balanghoy Our breakfast was rice

Among paniudto balanghoy na puto Our lunch was rice cakes

Among panihapon balanghoy gihapon! Our dinner was rice also

Inday balay ta Girl, let's dance

Di ko kay kapoy Not me, I'm tired

Among panahaw balanghoy. Our breakfast was rice!

Fourth of July

The National Peace Corps Association on FaceBook asked this question: Happy Independence Day weekend everyone! What are your memories of celebrating the 4th as a Peace Corps volunteer far from home?

I don't remember celebrating many 4ths when we were in the Peace Corps but our 2nd one was memorable.

We tried to climb Mt. Apo on Mindanao but got rained out by rains near a typhoon. When we returned to town we went to the 4th of July picnic thrown by the USIS officer there.

My story in support of 10,000 volunteers

I received an appeal from a lobbying organization called Push for Peace Corps. They are raising awareness with the members of the House committee who are debating legislation to increase the Peace Corps budget to $65 million. This is the story I sent to them:

Forty years ago, I became a Peace Corps Volunteer. My husband and I spent 3 1/2 years in two different cities of the Philippines. Now, all these years later, we are active members of the Filipino community here and have continued as volunteers in many other organizations. Our daughter has just finished her own term of service as a PCV in Albania. A few years ago 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 over 30 years later! We feel that the Peace Corps was one of the most important times of our lives. The international experiences and connections we made affect every aspect of our lives. The investment that the US Government has made in the Peace Corps over the years is the best example of people-to-people diplomacy. Arlene Lipman PCV - Davao and Bohol, Philippines 1970-1974

Earthquakes

There have been a lot of earthquakes in the news lately. This year seems particularly bad with the devastating quakes in Haiti and Chili and even one reported in the Philippines. When we lived in Davao on the southern island of Mindanao, we experienced an earthquake. We had just gone to bed when our dog, Pochahontas started scratching at the door to the bedroom. We told her to go lie down and closed our eyes again. Then David said, "listen." I said that I didn't hear anything. He said, "that's the point, I don't hear anything." It was true, there were none of the usual night sounds of bugs, frogs or birds, just silence and Pokey (the dog) whining. Then the bed started sliding across the floor (and no we weren't doing it!) Realizing that it was an earthquake, we jumped out of bed and quickly ran outside. We looked towards the top of the mountain. We lived at the base of Mt. Apo, the tallest mountain in the country at over 9,600 ft., which is a dormant volcano. We also lived within a couple of kilometers from the shore of Davao gulf. Off shore to the east is the Mindanao deep, the second deepest place in the world. So we stood there wondering whether we should run to the shore to get away from the volcano's eruption or to run to the mountain to get away from a tsunami wave because of an off shore quake funneling water up the gulf. So we did neither, just staying there in the yard with the neighbors until we heard the sound of traffic on the street. The next day we heard that the epicenter of the quake was hundreds of miles to the south near the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and several miles deep. That quake didn't cause any damage, just shook us up.
Our second earthquake took place on a visit to Cebu, the second largest city in the country. Since we were just visiting for a day we decided to go eat lunch in a revolving restaurant on the top of a 14 story building in downtown Cebu. We wanted to get photos from the top and also have a treat of a meal in a nice restaurant. As the waiter came to our table and was pouring glasses of water for us, we heard a pounding sound. The waiter started to cross himself (remember this is a Catholic nation). The water in the glasses was on a definite tilt. We realized the pounding was from the disc of the restaurant hitting the center post of the building as it was shaken. We wondered if the motor was breaking down or what. It stopped after a few minutes and we continued with our meal. Later we read that it had been a 3.something quake and hadn't even been felt by the man on the street. It was only because we were up there on top of 14 stories that we felt it at all. Pretty benign, but memorable anyway.

Close of Service

This is in reply to my daughter Becca's post on her blog last week.

How ironic that the medical officer was absent because of a medical condition and that the safety officer was absent because of food poisoning!
I look back on my PCV years with amazement and a little time shift strangeness. Sometimes it seems like I went directly from Laramie to Denver and that those (almost) 5 years (3 1/2 years as a volunteer and 1 more year in travel) in between were just a dream.
You are lucky in this internet age to be able to keep in touch with the members of your group so easily. Since we got home we only have seen 2 others from our group and one of them lives here.
As for plans for the future - I still don't have them!

Fans and Umbrellas

This is a comment that I posted on the blog of a current PCV, Kate, who is serving near Manila in the Philippines.

I was a PCV in the Visayas in the 70's and I always carried a paipai (folding fan) and payon (umbrella). The umbrella was because it was either raining or very sunny and hot! During training (which we had in Vermont) we laughed at our Filipino language teachers who walked around with their umbrellas but I was glad I had my little folding one when I got to my site in Toril, Davao City. I was glad that our house had electricity because my electric fan was one of my most treasured belongings. Good luck with the election thing. We were volunteers when Marcos overthrew his own government. I still say that if you have 3 Filipinos together, you will have 4 political parties.

Language confusion

I just read a current PCV blog "Eleven Degrees North" by Philippines volunteer Ryan Murphy who is living near where I was stationed there. This is a comment that I wrote in response to his post yesterday:

In training (RP-Group 39) I was in the Cebuano language group. Ron was another volunteer in our group. Then he was assigned to a town near SanCarlos in Negros. Now, San Carlos was on the edge of the Cebuano/Ilonggo divide. They are related languages so it usually didn't cause any problems but one day he was ordering lunch or something and when he was asked when he wanted his meal he said, "karon". So the waitress was Ilonggo and didn't bring it. So he then said, "karon dayon". (dayon just emphasized the "now" that Ron was saying.) She still didn't bring the meal. Eventually, the misunderstanding was cleared up and Ron did get his meal. I wonder how these two related languages came up with such opposite meanings for the same word?

"Take the Trip"

On of Becca's friends is trying to decide on extending her Peace Corps service by going to another country or to go home. This is what I told her.

My Father-in-law gave us this advice when he was dying of cancer (while we had just started on our second assignment) and David had to choose whether to return to our assignment in Bohol and then our planned trip home or go home to help him out and take over the store: He said, "go back to Peace Corps and take the trip".

I know that it is not the same situation but my advice is, "do what you want to do"!

I have given this advice to a number of young friends over the years. I can still remember several times that we didn't take the advice: Once in Zamboanga, we were invited to go over to Basilan to a Yakan wedding. We chose to return home to Davao. I'm sure we had things to do but I don't remember now. Basilan is now off-limits to tourists because of the AboSayaf (Filipino branch of AlQueda) I wonder how the Yakan are faring with the militants hiding out there on their island?

The trip home - Venice

My daughter Becca just had a short vacation in Italy When we were in Venice (and still on a PCV budget on our way home) we were camping for a week just outside the city at Mestre. We wandered the streets during the day buying our lunch from the pizza shops or other street vendors. I don't think that we sat down in a restaurant for a meal the whole time we were there. I do remember the day that we came upon a shop that had fresh chickens hanging in the window. We decided to have fried chicken for dinner. The other campers thought that we were truly crazy when we brought it back to the campground. There we sat in front of our tent making dinner one dish at a time. We only had one small pot and were cooking on a one-burner camp stove. First we heated up some tea, then made some vegetables the we started to fry that chicken. We breaded it with some semolina we had gotten in a grocery and fried it in some oil that we had gotten also. We could only cook 2 or 3 pieces at a time in the little 6 inch pot. It took hours to cook the whole thing! We had it for breakfast and lunch the next day too, because traveling like we were, we didn't have any cooler either. I think that was one of the most unusual meals that we made while we were on our own at the European end of our trip.

The trip home - Afganistan

This is a comment I posted on the blog of a friend, David Searles, who was our country director during part of our PCV stay in the Philippines.

My husband David and I COS’ed (Close of Service) from the Philippines in January of 1974. We did the “long trip home” for most of the year in 1974. We picked up an English tour bus in Kathmandu called “Swagman Overland Tours”. Needless to say, it was full of Ausies taking their “Walk-abouts”! It was definitely a “budget tourist” way to go. We camped most places, sometimes with the tents that were carried on top of the bus, but often just on our ground pads and sleeping bags out in the open. We went overland from there through India, into Pakistan and into Afganistan. We must have gotten our Afghan visas in India or Pakistan because we didn’t have any problems at the border. Our small problem was at the gate to the pass. We arrived too late in the day to cross all the way to Kabul before dark so were turned back to start again the next day. The border guards said that they couldn’t “protect your women”! We found a hi-way construction camp on the road back to Rawilpindi and the workers allowed us to camp there. We drove through the pass the next day, stopping at a town in the middle for tea. We could have bought all sorts of smuggled goods there from “pen” guns (holding one bullet in a fountain pen) to coke (and not cola). We arrived safely in Kabul in the late afternoon and stayed in a budget hotel there. We celebrated the 4th of July in Bandiamir, camped near the beautiful lake there.