Learning How to Eat Rice...

My plate was piled high with all of the necessary items which could be found at every party—various forms of chicken, beef, pork, goat (yes, goat), vegetables in mystery sauces, blood soup (made from a not-so-delightful mixture of pig intestines and blood) and of course, rice. There is always rice. Every meal. Every day. Rice. We had been in the country for over a year at this point. We had eaten a lot of rice. I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to the deep fried and fatty assortment of meat and bones that a party such as this inevitably produces, but my palate, for lack of much variation in the food choices the past year, had adjusted to the cuisine. It’s not that the food is bad per se—it’s just not, memorable I guess.

As I stood there rapidly shoveling the blood soup down the hatch so I wouldn’t have to taste it, another partygoer wandered over to me. I almost knew what he was going to say before it came out of his mouth. I’d heard it so many times since being here. He looked at my plate, looked at me then looked at my plate again, shaking his head and smiling in apparent disbelief. It seemed as if he had never seen anything as spectacular as the scene in front of him. His smile grew bigger. He looked as if he was happier than he had ever been before in his whole life.

“So…” he said, not able to hold back the huge grin on his face. “You’ve learned already how to eat rice?”

Maybe for him, this was a perfectly logical question. He must have thought immediately of our physical differences. My shaggy, blond hair, mixed with my blue eyes and pale white skin on 6 feet of American-ness stood in stark contrast to his 5 foot-nothing frame, dark hair, dark eyes and dark skin. We were dissimilar in so many ways. I had arrived from inner-city Oakland to this remote, rural province in the Visayan region of the Philippines. From here, it was a 20 hour boat ride to Manila, but it may as well have been 2 million hours. Many of the people from our province, especially those who lived in the mountainous interior, had not ventured very far out of their hometown, let alone to an urban center. Racial diversity was non-existent. The spectacle of a tall, light-haired, fair-skinned foreigner was probably too much for most to handle. And if that foreigner was eating rice…even more bizarre.

“You are, ahhh…learning how to eat rice?” he asked again, doubtless confident that the pile of small, cooked white grains were totally foreign substances to this gangly ‘Kano.’
In my head, I contemplated various answers to his question that I would love to give, but would never think of actually uttering aloud.

“Rice? Am I eating Rice? Is THAT what this is??”
or
“Yes. It is hard for me to learn how to eat rice. It must take years to master. How do you do it?”
or
“No, you idiot! We have rice in the US, too! The whole world eats rice! Are you a freaking moron? Get out of here!”

I held back on the sarcasm and rudeness and grinned that big, goofy grin that I give every time I’m asked this question. I grin a lot.

Then I thought a second longer about my answer. Should I use this time to gently correct him? One of the 3 goals of Peace Corps is to help foster understanding of American culture to the Host Country Nationals with whom we work. I should tell him, “Yes sir, we do have rice in the United States. Yes, I’ve eaten rice before. No, we don’t eat it every meal. No, we don’t eat it every day.”

But then I realized, what if he wasn’t asking me if I was literally learning how to eat rice. Maybe his question was filled with deeper meaning, masked only by his broken grasp of English. Maybe his real question was more like this:

“Since moving here to the Philippines and finding our culture embraces the virtues of rice at every meal, and since you, in your culture, do not have the same eating habits as we do, are you adjusting well to the changes you have to make in order to properly fit into our culture, not just in dining but in daily life altogether?”

I couldn’t be sure of his real intent. What was he asking? Am I learning to eat or am I learning to adjust? Was he really that shrewd?

So not sure of his intent, I merely continued to grin, shrugged my shoulders and patted his arm.

“Yes sir. I am still learning.”

He smiled an all-knowing smile at me, either confident in his pre(mis)conception that I had never before touched rice in my life, or that I was still struggling to adapt to a culture in which I had suddenly found myself immersed.

Either way, he shook his head, apparently satisfied by my answer, and walked away. In my head, he would have this story to tell his friends and family for years to come:

“You should have seen him—tall as a house and white as a ghost with blue daggers for eyes. And you know what? He was eating rice. Rice!! Do you believe it? I swear, I saw it with my own eyes. Just like us Filipinos! He wasn’t doing it very well, mind you, but he was trying.”

And so my story goes.

I may not have been doing it very well, but I was trying.

Long December...

"A long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last..."
--"Long December" by Counting Crows

Actually, it's been a short December--one that is sure to disappear quickly from our view due to busyness this month. The song is pretty sad and melancholy (I'm not exactly sure what 'melancholy' means, but it seems an appropriate label for this tune), but my good friend Kevin, who was assigned a few hours away from us here and has since completed his service and returned home, would often text me those lyrics whenever he was having a tough day (or vice versa). However, these past few weeks have actually been pretty good, so if 'next year is better than the last', that would be tremendous.
:-)

An update for anyone who is wondering "What is going on with the library?"
Well, it's coming along. Slowly. But. Surely. We've almost raised all of the community counterpart funds. Students have worked fervently during their lunch period and after school to move nearly all of the old books and shelves out of the room. If only our camera hadn't decided that she didn't want to do Peace Corps with us anymore, I would show you pictures. While she's being repaired, let us now imagine a totally empty room with pristine white paint and windows that look out over a sparkling blue ocean. Now for this image to be accurate, scatter a whole bunch of books on the floor still waiting to be moved out, peel some paint off the walls from faded posters that surely were plastered there with super glue, taking huge gobs of paint with it when they were removed, block the view of the ocean with some decrepit buildings and cover it all with a layer of dust half and inch thick and that is what we have right now. It's very exciting! We plan to start repainting sometime next week and would love to have the flooring done before Christmas break. One thing may be difficult, though. It's December. Not much gets done in schools in December.


One of the many activities that that helps limit the amount of substantial academic (or library renovating) progress in December is Speechfest. It's a, well, festival of English in spoken (and written) form. Speechfest competed with various sports tryouts, academic competitions, cultural contests, party planning, party attending and--lest we forget, class--for the students attention so far in December. Yes, it is December 6. Yes, all of these things are going on simultaneously. Except for class that is...
Speechfest was an impressive array of competitions. It was the District Level Speechfest, which comes after the School Level, which helped to limit progress in November. Speechfest consisted of Storytelling, Character Interpretation, On the Spot Poetry and Essay Writing and finally, a Spelling Contest. Our school, the SPED Center, with its proliferation of FL (Fast Learner) Students, won every category at the District Level. It was a little embarrassing to win every award, but it amazed me how much brighter the FL students are compared to the "regular" students. There's a socio-economic factor in there for sure, but I'm too tired to extrapolate on that topic tonight (wait..did I just use 'extrapolate' in a sentence?? Goodness, I don't think I know what that means either. Silly thesaurus...)
The whole point of this isn't to brag about some of the amazing students that go to my school or to reason as to why they perform at abnormally high levels in comparison to their peers, but to describe the Spelling Contest.

Spelling Contests (or 'Bees'), in my mind, are amazing displays of adolescent nerds performing at their best in front of large audiences. Why do you think I love them so much? It makes me nostalgic for my pre-pubescent youth. Big glasses, squeaky voices, side spiked hair and "antediluvian" (the winning word for the 1994 Scripts Howard Spelling Bee won by Ned Andrews. I was 14 that year. Sadly, I still wouldn't be able to spell it). Ahh, academia...
So our American image of a Spelling Bee (thanks in large part to ESPN2 and their coverage of the live action) involves these nerds, standing on stage, asking for alternate definitions, roots of words, and use in a sentence before they spell "serrefine" (2007's winning word by Evan M. O’Dorney). The Spelling contest here is a bit different.

First off, nobody stands. Everyone is sitting at their desks. At the District Speechfest, 54 students qualified for the Spelling contest. All 54 had a desk in the large auditorium. The students need their desks because they do not spell the words out loud, but rather on a piece of paper. This is how the process goes--
There are 3 levels--Easy, Average and, of course, Difficult. Each round consists of 5 words that are randomly drawn from an envelope corresponding to the appropriate level. The Quizmaster (how much did I want that job after I first heard the title...) reminds everyone to hold their markers aloft, reads the word, gives a definition of the word, uses the word in a sentence, says the word again and then says "Go". The students have 10 seconds to write the word legibly on a strip of paper with their corresponding number on it. After 10 seconds, a bell is rang, the Quizmaster gives the correct spelling of the word, and the students either cheer or bemoan their written interpretation of the given word. Correct spelling of a word in the Easy category receive 1 point, Average 2 points and Difficult 3 points. Proctors collect the strips of paper from the students and read whether that student was correct or not. For example, "Number 1, wrong, Number 2, wrong, Number 3, wrong" and so on and so forth until number 54. The first word of the contest was "mete"--as in "to distribute or allot". Every single contestant spelled it "meet". It was a little depressing hearing every number between 1 and 54 be wrong, but at least their were 5 different proctors so there was a different voice every once in a while.
The whole time the proctors are bellowing the results of the students best efforts, another proctor is meticulously recording the points on a chalkboard for everyone to see. It's an interesting process to watch, this Spelling Contest. The furious writing, the proctors granting points or no points (much like the Caesar in 'Gladiator' with his thumbs up or thumbs down), the disturbing number of 0's that appeared on the board and of course the Quizmaster. Out of a possible 30 points, the winning student (who hails from our school) scored.......drum roll please....12 points. She was followed closely by 2 other students (also from our school) who topped out at 9 points. I was excited that our students had won but sad that 0 was the most popular score. Many students from some of the far flung barangay schools, who had to win their Spelling Contest to qualify for the District Contest, spelled 0 out of 15 words correct. Mete. Depot. Fateful. Truth be told, though, 54 students did correctly spell 'faithful' while trying to spell 'fateful'. The Department of Education is pushing the teaching of English very hard right now. Science, Math and English are all supposed to be taught in English, which is hard when most teachers don't have a good grasp on English. (Extrapolation on that subject to come later as well...)

Maybe scores would have been higher if I had been Quizmaster...

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