This past weekend I celebrated my 26^th birthday in high Filipino style. It was definitely one of the best birthdays I have ever had, possibly top 3. That being said, let me explain a little of why it was one of the best:

First, before we get into that, our host family is great. Our host mother is almost 70 years old, so one of her daughters who works in Taiwan at the moment, has a house behind our host mother’s house. We are staying in the empty house right now. It is not furnished and is not fully finished (picture a lot of gray cement) besides a bed, nightstand and couch, but it gives us a considerable amount of privacy and we have our own indoor bathroom (complete with a flush toilet!). We eat and hang out with the family in the main house, but at nights we get shooshed to our room pretty early, which gives us time to study and journal. The language we are learning is called Kinary-a, which about 300,000 people in the whole world speak, almost every single one of them living on the island of Panay in the Western Visayas region of the Philippines. The language lessons are going well—we have 3 other people learning with us, and we are a good team at pushing each other every day. We have class from 8-12 Mon-Sat, with the afternoons reserved for us to go out in our community to practice what we learned and to help us to foster relationships with the people in our village. That is a short synopsis of what we do, back to Saturday (my birthday).

So, the town that we are near is named Guimbal, which is an old word meaning “drum.” Basically, hundreds of years ago the local people were happy and productive, living their coastal life with no worries. Suddenly, Moor pirates came, tore through the area and left, destroying the village, killing most of the men and taking a lot of the women with them. So the villagers got wise, erected a series of towers on the coast to look out for intruders, and when the saw any, they would beat a special drum (called a “Guimbal”) to alert the villagers, and because of their preparation they successfully fought off any would-be attackers. The celebration in the town of this event is called “Bantayan” and the whole festival revolves around this event.

There is a special drum and dance competition during the Bantayan festival where villages compete against each other to portray the history of the town in as loud and dramatic fashion as possible. Fortunately for Erin and I, our village (the reigning champions from last year) let us get a preview of this year’s show. Unfortunately for us, the practice was literally 25 feet from our bedroom window and our first night here lasted well past 1:30 in the morning. It was LOUD! But, we got to see the final product on Saturday, and it was fantastic! 11 villages competed (so we got pretty good at knowing the history of the town, having seen it reenacted 11 times over the course of 3 hours) and we had sweet seats. The mayor of the town was kind enough to invite all of the Peace Corps Trainees to sit in the VIP area (under the shade!), and we all got front row seats to the terrific performance. Afterwards, we celebrated with our village and the other Americans in our language group, dancing and singing and just having a good time. Since none of this island attracts any tourists (ever), the fact that we are all Caucasians living in a small town has given us rock-star-like status. We attract gawks and stares nearly everywhere we go, and the fact that we were joining our village celebrating their performance just made everyone go bonkers for us! It was great! We had so much fun, and people were so welcoming and gracious to us.

So now, we are working hard at learning the language every day. Here is a sentence for anyone who is interested:

Nagakaon ang gami nga lalaki kang panit nga kanding sa baybay.

(Translation: “The small boy eats goat skin at the beach.”)

You can see that we are doing very well and are learning practical things to say.

-Scott