First are some things that I wrote at the very beginnnig of training. I forgot that I wrote them, but they are very emotional, and still very true. After that, a fun story about our site visit to San Jose. We get sworn in next week and are excited and scared. Here they are, read away!
March 23, 2006
Right now it is 12:44 in the morning. Erin and I are staying in the Crown Plaza in less-than-picturesque Romulus, Michigan. Today, our lives are fairly normal. We are young and we are married, not unlike a majority of our friends from high school and college. Tomorrow morning, all traces and hints of normalcy will be thrown out the window as we step onto the airplane that will bring us to the place that we have been talking, thinking and dreaming about for the past year. All of the paperwork, phone calls, trips to the doctor’s office, stacks of forms and endless questions have been working towards the one, single moment we step off the jet-way and onto the Northwest flight number 71. That microsecond of transition between when our foot leaves the solid ground of our old, familiar friend “Michigan” and steps onto the airplane will be the moment when we begin to live the life we have envisioned for ourselves. We have talked Peace Corps. We have tried to explain Peace Corps. We have tried to understand Peace Corps. Tomorrow, for all intents and purposes, we will experience Peace Corps.
Frankie Marietta came to see us at the hotel tonight. It was a very sweet gesture, as he had to come all the way from Oxford to Romulus and we didn’t get out of our meetings until after 10 p.m., so he knew from the get-go that there wasn’t going to be a lot of time. We sat down, Frank, Erin and I and had one of the most relevant and real conversations that I have had in a very long time. It’s funny the scenario, the way that it played out. It was almost like a movie: Big Boy was empty except a waitress working the late shift, a burly, disgruntled looking cook peering out from behind the stainless steel counter and the three of us huddled into a non-smoking booth. As the milkshakes were drained, and the onion rings slowly turned soggy, Frankie told me exactly what had been on my mind for quite some time now. I thought that I was the only one who was having trouble with the way the modern American church operates, but I never knew how to say what I felt. Our conversation was long, and the whole time I wished that I had a tape recorder, so that I could replay exactly what Frank was saying. My mind was reeling, trying to grasp everything that he was telling us, but then realizing that it was the exact same thing that had been on my heart for some time now. I can’t remember all that he said, but the thing that stuck out the most for me was twofold: First, that we as a church in America seem to be too busy with our hands in the air praising instead of having our hands being down on the ground getting dirty doing the work of God. I’ll elaborate on that later. Second, he gave us a Bart Camplo quote, something to the effect of, “I’ve read the Bible a lot, and the red part, the part Jesus says, I get that. The rest of it doesn’t make sense.” As we go to bed and prepare for tomorrow’s journey to the Philippines, I know that I am getting my hands dirty. For all of the talk about doing the work of God and going out and helping the poor, the widowed, the orphaned, this is the real deal. There is no turning back now. The second part about the red words, the ones that Jesus spoke, those words seem to be the words that made the most sense. Jesus was not just talking. His talk was partnered with action, action that positively impacted the people around Him. I don’t think that the rest of the Bible doesn’t make sense, but I do see how much sense the words of Jesus make. Lord, help me to love in real ways. Help me to be your hands and to love like you did Jesus. That’s it. That is my prayer for these two years. Help me to love.
March 30, 2006
Today is our last day at the resort outside of Manila before we travel to our respective hub sites. It has been a very interesting being here—I joined the Peace Corps so that I could offer help to people that I might be able to help. I want to love people. As we got off the bus after the incredibly long plane ride, I was ready to get down and get dirty. Instead, I carried my bags into my hotel room near the pool, cranked up the air-conditioning, sat down on my newly made bed with clean sheets and pillows, flipped on the television and watched ESPN on the satellite before taking a hot shower. Needless to say, this was not what I envisioned when I signed up for Peace Corps! Where were the huts? Where were the people carrying water from miles away? My expectations of Peace Corps service were getting erased very quickly. We learn the theories of Community Development while sipping our iced drinks, listen to ways in which we can to connect to our counterparts while munching on cookies, and talk about how we as volunteers need to assimilate into our surroundings while Filipinos clear our dishes at dinner. I am not sure how our current Pre Service Training could be handled differently—I realize that we need to be trained and that we cannot just be dropped into a village on our own without this time of learning and the logistics of our 77 person group mandate a facility such as this. That being said, the reality of my Americanism, Peace Corps volunteer or not, was brought home hard to me on my first morning here at the Island Cove Resort. As Erin and I were walking around the compound (a term not used loosely—our resort is, in fact, an island, separated form the rest of the area by no less than 200 feet of dirty river water), we could see the other side of the river. Now, the word “river” in my mind normally conjures up images of swiftly moving, clean mountain water rushing by, loosely sending spray off of the rocks while fish and waterfowl frolic in the crisp blue waters. I do not want to make a false impression—this was in fact a river that we were standing in front of, however, it more resembled a stagnant swath of water meekly meandering through a garbage dump than the majestic flowing Rocky Mountain River in my mind. Old, discarded tires seemed to be the trash of choice of this area of the water, along with thousands of plastic items of every imaginable design. We could see rows of ramshackle bamboo huts dangling precariously on the riverbank across this wasteland, seemingly defying the laws of physics by merely not falling into the murky water below. Children were laughing and playing, women were hanging laundry and men were busy tinkering with their boats as Erin and I stood there, not sure what to say. Here we were, coming literally across the world to love and to help the people around us. I think that the river was more than just a dirty body of water, but a metaphor for what may be to come—we stood there as Americans, despite being in a poor country, still residing in relative comfort, looking at these people with nothing, and were not able to do anything to help them. We were separated by this river—this expanse that none of our best intentions could cross. The only way that I could have gone over there to help them was to leave the compound behind and go to them. There is no way that I am going to be able to help anyone in the country, no way that I am going to be able to love and learn from these beautiful people if I am not willing to leave my American-ness behind. I say that I want to help, but I secretly want an Ipod. I tell people that I come here to love, but wouldn’t it be cool to have a Land Rover? There is this war raging in me, one that has been for a long time. I desperately want to help people, but my desperation seems to be on paper and in theory, because I am still shackled to my previous way of life. That is one thing that I want to shed during my time here, but I know right now that it is going to be extremely difficult to do that.
5.20.2006
It has been awhile since we last posted and quite a few things happened we may need to mention. A few weeks ago, Erin and I visited the site where we will be assigned, a small city on the western coast of Panay Island called San Jose de Buenavista. Our stay was funny in a few ways. For some reason, everything that we do here seems to be funny in retrospect.
We traveled to San Jose by bus, which was actually a very comfortable ride. We had to travel through some perilous (but very beautiful) mountains to get over to the coast, but out driver was excellent. With sheer drop-offs whizzing by, switchbacks coming and going with regularity and 100 yard chunks of asphalt missing in various places, it had the potential to be a harrowing ride. Fortunately our driver was extremely proficient, and Erin didn’t even get sick once. That was the good part. The bad part was that the girl in front of us did. For those of you that have taken physics, this may be a light refresher in some of the laws of motion. I never got a chance to take physics in high school (my best friend’s dad, who happened to be our golf coach was the advanced biology teacher, but that’s a digression we won’t explore right now), so I wasn’t really aware of the potential hazard that was this girl’s breakfast. Apparently she did not experience the same smooth ride that we did—the switchbacks and rumbling gravel were a little too much for her. Without anywhere else to go, she stuck her head out the window and released her inner demons. Because of the speed in which the bus was traveling, coupled with the fact that all the windows in the bus were open, the poor young girl’s vomit had nowhere else to travel once it left her, except back through the window directly behind her—onto the waiting face and arm of Erin—twice. Welcome to San Jose.
After Erin wiped the rest of the puke off in my principal’s office, we were ready to move our bags from the school into the apartment they had prepared for us. There was a family that the principal knew who had an empty apartment directly behind the school that they were going to rent for us at a reasonable rate. We were excited as we walked, trying to envision what our next three months would entail. Now, Erin and I are used to living pretty simply. We were able to move almost all of our possessions across the country in a 4-door Ford Focus, so living in tight quarters was not all that new to us. However, this apartment pushed the limits of our intimacy. I don’t think that anyone had told the family that a married couple would be using the apartment, because in what they called the bedroom (an exaggeration by any standard—it was the size of a bathroom on an airplane with a window in it), there lay a single, 2-foot wide green army cot. The funny thing was that as small as it was, it took up nearly the entire room. The only other thing besides mildew in the apartment was a rickety table—that was it. No cupboards, no stove, just walls and a door. Our principal was not impressed, and neither were we. “You will not stay here” she told us, so we tramped back to the school and set up our home for the week in the most logical of all places—the Home Economics classroom. In the Philippines, they take their Home EC serious, so this classroom had a demonstration bedroom where diligent students can practice dusting, sweeping and making the bamboo bed. Excellent. We can make it here for 6 days, no problem. Spoken too early, perhaps?
If you are tired of reading, a quick synopsis of what is to come is: Scott got electrocuted, Erin fell in a hole and our boredom began us on a journey with the card game Rummy to 13,000 points. If not, sit back and read on my friend.
The principal did not have anything for us to do on this our first visit for the moment, and Erin’s supervisor was not going to be in town until the next day, so we were given a chance to relax for a few hours. Lounging around our home/classroom the first day, we realized how incredibly HOT it is in San Jose. Fortunately the principal was kind enough to leave a few electric fans for us to use, so, being the loving husband that I am, I decided to move one of the fans down into the kitchen/lecture room that we were sitting in. The electrical system in the United States runs at 120 volts while the power here is 220 volts, a full 100 volts more than back home. The only reason that would be important would be if you wanted to plug an item designed for use in America into a socket in the Philippines. One would need to know the proper voltage so that one could purchase a converter and not fry whatever it was that one plugged in (like a battery charger, but that’s a different story for a different time). One might also need to know about the voltage difference if all 220 volts are coursing through one’s entire body. When I reached for the fan, I had no idea that the wires leading to the fan itself were actually bare. I mean, come on—who thinks of that? I do now. I look at every wire I touch now, because I got a friendly reminder from the friends at Panay Island Electric Cooperative about how fun 220 volts are—zero. So Erin got threw-up on, we’re living in the Home EC room and I get electrocuted. Yes! Welcome to Peace Corps.
Our welcome was further extended to us as we walked down the busy streets of San Jose 2 days later. Erin and I were going to fetch something, I can’t really remember what, but it was important at the time. The main mode of transportation in San Jose is by “tryke”—a 100 cc motorcycle with an attached sidecar that carries up to 12 people and emits 36 HCS per kilometer (HCS stands for “Huge Clouds of Smoke”). The city is full of trykes careening around corners and beeping for what seems like the sake of hearing themselves beep. As we were standing at the corner of one street waiting to cross, I saw a Peace Corps volunteer whom we had met the day before riding his bike home from the store. I turned to talk to him for a second and when I turned back, Erin was about a foot shorter than before. Giving more attention to the busy street and seeing our new friend, neither of us were watching too carefully where we were stepping. Why would we? What could we possibly step on or into…maybe a hole? Bingo! Distracted by the sights and sounds of the city, Erin had stepped into a small hole in the sidewalk that led down to the sewer, and found her leg trapped all the way up to her knee in the hole. I quickly pulled her out and she was more embarrassed than hurt—at first. We continued on our way to the store when she looked down and saw blood flowing freely from the multiple holes in her left leg. We changed directions and made for the Home EC room as quick as she could limp. We sat her down, I check the wires on the fan before turning it on and, not wanting infection to set in on her cuts, which would turn into gangrene and eventually lead to amputation of her leg, I thought it would be a good idea to clean the wounds with rubbing alcohol. Ouch! (that is a very clean, very edited version of what Erin said to me as I applied the flesh-searing alcohol to her leg) After cleaning her leg, Erin stood up, the blood drained out of her head and she almost passed out. Yikes. This was getting more fun by the day.
The good thing about our placements is that both Erin and I have excellent counterparts with whom to work. One negative thing is that both of our counterparts were extremely busy the week of site visit. Erin’s supervisor doesn’t even work in San Jose on Fridays and my principal was up to her neck in paperwork preparing for the upcoming school year (which begins in June). So…not wanting to get in her hair and not having any place to really go outside the Home EC room because of the intense heat, Erin and I decided to begin our journey into the cosmos of the game that is Rummy. A usual game of Rummy lasts until 500 points or whenever Erin is tired of playing cards (usually around the 75-80 point range). Maybe because of the intense heat and humidity, maybe because of Erin’s brush with death on the mean streets of San Jose, or maybe because of our intense boredom—whatever the reason, we made the mutual goal of trying to play Rummy up to 13,000 points. To describe our boredom in as succinct way as possible, Erin-5690, Scott-6145. That’s all Erin will let me say about that.
We made it through the week in one piece (more or less), have a host family lined up for when we return in June and are sort of looking forward to going back after swearing in. The best part of our whole trip, though, was coming back to our original barangay. There was a time when we thought that this place could never feel like home. We felt like strange white people in a strange land (wait…that’s exactly what we are). All of that was thrown out the proverbial window the moment we stepped out of the tryke in front of our house. Our 75+ year old guest mother sprinted out to meet us, tears in her eyes as she enveloped Erin in an array of toothless kisses, muttering “Bata ko, bata ko” which means “My child, my child.” Talk about feeling loved! It was good to be home! After all the fuss over Erin, they even said “Hello” to me (later the next day).
For those of you that know us well, you will be happy to know that it was not our extreme proficiency with this difficult language nor our endearing charm or stunning good looks that finally won us over to our host family. No, we don’t really have any of those things, but we do like to play games, and so does our family. The initial shyness is way past gone. Before, no one in our family would talk to us. Now, every evening after dinner we play various card games or Yahtzee for at least an hour, laughing and teasing and loving life. Erin can shuffle like a pro now (complete with bridge for those of you who are dorky enough to know what that is) and she’s a card shark ready to take on the Farver family in Euchre upon their arrival to the Philippines sometime next year (right?) We love you all!
Scott and Erin
posted by Scott Farver at 2:21 AM
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