From Manila...

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

People waiting for relief supplies, Bagong Silang, Caloocan City, September 2009

It is nearly impossible to fathom -- let alone put into words -- the weight of all that has happened here in the Philippines since my last post in early September. Time and again, I'd find myself sitting down to collect my thoughts, ready to write. And, time and again, I wasn't ready to. Apparently I'm not so good at attaching words to overwhelming, traumatic experiences. It amazes me that many writers (including some of my favorite journalists) spend their entire careers doing just that: diving head-first into war, genocide, disaster, disease and other unthinkable human experiences, and writing about them...on a deadline. My own puny fumblings leave me in awe of these people (and remind me why I chose another profession). Indeed the past few weeks have often seemed like a demonstration of the modern Filipino experience, equal parts heart-wrenching and triumphant.

At the end of September, Manila and much of the northern Philippines received the full force mauling of Ondoy, the worst storm to hit this area in at least a half century (typically, most storms would roll through further to the South).  Water rose, dams burst, storm drains and canals were quickly overwhelmed, the vast sections of Metro Manila that sit below sea-level (and, in that sense, lend it a surprising similarity to New Orleans) found themselves under several meters of water -- water that would remain in those low-lying communities for literally weeks, having nowhere to go.  Most here call Ondoy a "typhoon" though, in reality, it never advanced beyond "tropical depression" status.  It's devastating impact came from the sheer volume of water it let loose, and the slowness of its track over land.  Add to all this the fact that local water levels were already high due to previous rains, and "perfect storm" conditions began to align.  Manila is a metropolitan area with a population somewhere far in excess of 11-million people.  No one will ever really know the true figure, due to the enormous communities of undocumented squatters and otherwise poor that comprise its expansive edges.  Communities that are constantly fed by an influx of people from the provinces, and who have nowhere to settle down but on the margins, huddling in cracks between buildings, living atop refuse heaps and marshes of human waste, balancing on neighbors' roofs, subsisting quite literally "on the brink".  Such unmentionable places generally happen to sit in the lowest-lying areas, in flood-plains, hard by rivers and canals, available simply by virtue of their undesirability to anyone with a choice.  As in NoLa, likewise in Manila.  To make a long story very short, but no less painful, it was Manila's poorest who found themselves suddenly without a home or any possessions, fighting for their lives against raging currents and toxic conditions.  Children and elderly relatives sometimes swept away.

Amidst this litany of human suffering, all of us in my NGO (Gawad Kalinga) found ourselves deep into post-disaster relief efforts, 24-hours a day, for over 2 weeks -- delivering desperately-needed food, clothing, medical supplies, shelters and emotional support (what little we could offer) to disaster victims.  During that time, I was always either helping to make supply drop-offs or helping to set up disaster-preparedness systems for future such storms (Typhoon Pepeng arrived the following weekend).  As physically and emotionally draining as that type of work is, it's naturally difficult to forget how much worse the recipients of your work have it than yourself.   Indeed even now, 2-plus months later, many thousands are still without homes, and with no real hope in sight.  As I had written in my previous post, Filipinos waste little time with grief or complaints.  This is life, they tell you.  You move on.

In mid-October, exhausted by relief work and the emotional roller-coaster of Ondoy, I found myself in very different circumstances: sitting on a mountain-top in the city of Baguio, on property owned by the family of my good friend Steve from PC Romania.  I remember sitting there as the sun set, gazing at a gigantic bank of fog that ebbed and flowed over the ridge-line on which I was sitting.   The fog seemed very much a living organism, breathing in and out, eddying and flowing in random but precise geometries, alternately revealing and obscuring the next, distant mountain-top.  Weaving the last rays of dying sunlight in beautiful, curvilinear tendrils.  Then, suddenly, extinguishing them, severing the limb from the body.  Soupy darkness.

I wrote in Romania about my recurring sense that the world we live in -- or at least the world I live in -- is often revealed in such brief, intense bursts of color and feeling.  As though suddenly and without presage, the curtain is pulled back, and in that instant we see the workings of the universe, and our own lives within it.  Maybe there is beauty in that moment, maybe something far less palatable -- but there is always truth, and always purpose.  In that glimpse, we can see where we stand and where we are (perhaps) going...before the curtain drops once again.  I have felt this way at various times in my life, and as unbearable as the relief work so often was for me and for everyone else involved, I knew I needed to be there, at that moment, doing that work.  I knew the ground my feet stood upon, and I knew the task at hand.  How strange it is that we can have two so vastly different responses to the same event.  As both are so utterly inexpressible, I'll give up.

And the titanic ups and downs of life in the Philippines continued unabated in November: The ecstasy of seeing a native son, Manny Pacquiao, win his 7th world boxing title (a record not likely to be broken any time soon...and, in Manny, a public hero of whom Filipinos admit this country is desperately in need at the moment); And the barbarity of politically-motivated mass killings in Mindanao.  As predictable as we may find such contrasts to be in our modern world, it needn't stop us from imagining that things could be different, better.  Neither should it stop us from doing what we can to make it so.

Typhoons and Pedicabs

As I write this, an enormous typhoon is sweeping through the northern Philippines and the South China Sea, unloading torrential rains, hurricane winds, heavy seas, mudflows, flooding, uprooting trees, destroying homes, washing away livelihoods (and in some cases, lives) and making an all-around mess for those unfortunate enough to be in its path. This is the rainy season in Southeast Asia. This is par for the course between roughly June and October of every year. And for people with seemingly so little control over a world that visits these biblical tempests upon them with vicious regularity, Filipinos themselves are almost supernaturally resilient, positive people. This storm may flood the low-lying village where my fellow volunteer Drew lives (as happens almost weekly), it may peel the roofs off of the plywood squatter shanties surrounding my own house -- it may ultimately change thousands, or millions, of Filipino lives forever. And yet Filipinos themselves will simply seek protection under a nearby eave, shrug, share a joke and a cigarette with their neighbors, and wait for the rain to pass. Tomorrow, the mirthful gleam in their eyes masking a steely resolve, they will go about the task of rebuilding and moving forward. Even now, with the deluge beating against my windows, I can see children doing cartwheels in the street. Tricycle-taxi drivers are firing up their engines and heading off for a fare. Somewhere in this tightly-packed "barangay" (barrio, or borough), someone is crooning a Julio Iglesias tune on karaoke. Based on the tell-tale aromas, someone else is cooking fish and rice for lunch. Indeed, most of my neighbors here in Bagong Silang (extreme northeastern Metro Manila) are abjectly poor. No health or home insurance. No running water. And for most, no public or private agencies (FEMA or otherwise) will be swooping in with aid, should the flood-waters rise, should the levy burst, should the winds rest from them their homes and few possessions. For them, this is life. You move forward.

To simply say, however, that Filipinos "move forward" is to wildly understate the reality: these are some of the happiest, most gregarious, most naturally optimistic people I have ever met (and I've met a lot of people)! They are poor, they have withstood centuries of foreign occupation, they live in a climate that is either Eden-esque or a divine science-experiment (Searing heat? Typhoons? Active volcanoes? Rising sea-levels? Sure, try it out!) Yet Pinoys are always quick with a song, or a joke, or a smile, or a San Miguel (local beer) and wonderful food. They are fiercely proud of their country and heritage, they are out-going and ebullient with foreigners and guests, they believe in the prosperity and growth that the future will bring...and heck, even if it doesn't, the current situation isn't all that bad, no? We Americans typically like to believe we are extroverted and positive. Trust me, we have nothing on these people!

Perhaps I should qualify what I'm telling you here: I live in a squatter settlement on the far outer-periphery of what is known as "Metro Manila" (a collection of large cities). The high-density urban environment that I experience every day is, I might guess, no more (and no less) a representative view of "The Philippines" than New York City is of the US. I have volunteer friends who literally live in grass "nipa" huts off the beach in the outer island provinces. I live in a neighborhood -- yes, neighborhood -- of 1-million people, the vast majority of whom are squatters living in shanties, and who were relocated from central Manila by the government in past decades to clear land for peanut farms. I know volunteers who go weeks without getting in a motorized vehicle or seeing a building taller than a single-story.

On the other hand, I and my fellow Peace Corps Response volunteers in Manila -- Charlie, Drew and Sharon (with two more arriving this week) -- spend every day immersed in the heady, intoxicating soup of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and experiences, big and little, that make up life in this city. We are anomalies here, not just because we are foreigners, but because typically Peace Corps does not place volunteers within Metro Manila -- opting rather to place them in rural areas and provincial towns and small cities around the Philippine islands. The fact that we are all PC "Response" volunteers, and here on shorter-term, more technically-focused projects, puts us in a somewhat different category of PC rules and procedures. Three of us work with a Filipino community development NGO called Gawad-Kalinga (roughly "Care-giving" in Tagalog), in many ways comparable to Habitat for Humanity. Our backgrounds are in architecture, engineering and construction management, and until late January, we are going to be helping them codify a Business Plan and Standard Operating Procedures, as well as developing standardized manuals that guide the entire Site Development and Construction process for any given project. We'll be busy, but it should be a fun and illuminating process for everyone.

I'll go into more depth in future posts about individual elements of my new life here, and as in Romania, I'm always open to fielding questions and topic requests from my loyal readers! But let me just give you a few short strokes of the experiential paintbrush to get this canvas started:

• Sitting in horrendous (and non-stop) Manila traffic, packed into a Jeepney with 20 other passengers, in the sweltering heat of the mid-day sun. No mad-dogs or Englishmen about -- just a highway jammed with hapless commuters. You're breathing in nothing but exhaust fumes and human body-odor. You're shoe-horned between an old lady and her groceries and a guy with a TV, and can't move. And if you're over 5'6" you're also crouched over, since Jeepney passenger-cabins have criminally low rooflines. The seats have no padding, the Jeepney has no shocks, and the Jeepney-driver has no subtlety when it comes to accelerating or braking. Or turning. Oh, and then it starts raining torrentially, so the driver's assistant gets out and unfurls clear plastic window coverings -- so now you have no air-movement either, and are sitting in a moving human crockpot. Why is it I love Jeepneys so much?
• Walking through the farmers' market up the street from my house. As in Eastern Europe (and probably everywhere else in the developing world), you can find everything from fresh meat to construction tools to car batteries here. Unlike much of Eastern Europe, the sheer variety of local produce you can find at any market-stand in the Philippines is astonishing. This is a country where bananas, coconuts, pineapples, mangoes, guavas, papayas, giant grapefruits, oranges, lemons, limes, mini-limes (calamansi fruits) and a host of other wonderful exotic fruits literally grow wild on the trees (or other plants), to say nothing of the vegetables and other produce. Even for those of us who live in the city, fresh produce is always readily available from the nearby farms and groves. I am not used to this. My brain isn't wired this way. I grew up in the American Northeast, where garden plants have to be coaxed and prodded and coddled from the rocky soil like shy children, in those short months of warmth. The guardedness and resentment the plants feel towards us is palpable. Here, it's a different relationship altogether. Fruit springs from the earth with abandon, with enthusiasm, gleefully entrusting itself to your outstretched hand. In this Garden of Eden, only the apple itself has to be imported from China.

Ok, that's it for now. I trust everyone is healthy and fulfilled and skipping down the road. Check out my PHOTOS, please drop me a note sometime, and COME VISIT! I'm only here until January.

Camp is very entertaining
And they say we'll have some fun if it stops raining...

La început din nou... (At the beginning once again...)

Rocky Mountain Nat'l Park, Colorado, October 2008

One year ago, almost to the day, I was planting trees and laying new paving stones in a small town park in western Romania. Not long after that, I wrote what would prove to be my last blog post for almost a year -- before seemingly dropping off the face of the earth. There are myriad reasons for this, or so I tell myself. Most don't hold much water, I admit. After all, there has been no shortage of things going on in my life in the past 9 months or so. But in summation, I'm back in cyberspace, and my postings will (theoretically) resume. And for those who haven't been updated recently, here's a brief, crib-notes version of my life since Romania. My apologies for the brevity. As you read, I encourage you to browse the PHOTOS as well:

My Peace Corps service officially ended at the end of last July, and after signing some final documents and annoying everyone in the head office one last time, I boarded my first flight in over 2 years and headed to Vienna. There I spent a few days with my Romanian host-mom's brother and his wife, who have lived and worked there for years. Then it was off into the rolling Bohemian countryside for a short tour of various famous Czech beer-brewing towns (Plzen, home of Pilsener Urquell; Cesky Budejovice, home of Budvar, the "original Budweiser"). After preparing my system with wonderful Bohemian suds, I took the train west to Munich, where I met up with my old friends Eric and Will from grad school. The three of us would ultimately visit 6 countries together and taste much beer, European street-food, wine, and otherwise: South to Genoa (with a sleepless night in Milan's train-station), then to Paris, Brugge, Amsterdam and finally London, where we spent a few last days together before they flew out. I stayed on a few more days in the UK, revisiting Oxford for the first time since my junior year abroad, and then spending one last, wonderful weekend with some Scottish friends in Edinburgh right in the middle of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. What a terrific way to say goodbye to Europe!

At the very end of August I flew back to the US, and my father and I then took another flight down to Florida to visit my grandfather -- wherein I was greeted with the first of many surprises over the following months: my grandfather, in a wild bit of downsizing, gave me his Chrysler convertible. I think his (very sound) reasoning was that having a car would help me in my upcoming job-search. My reasoning was a little different...and a lot less sound: My return to the US + beautiful Fall weather + convertible = ROADTRIP!!! I wasted no time getting going. From late September to the November presidential election, I covered something like 9,500 miles, visited 30 states, and reconnected with at least as many friends (I won't even tell you how many gallons of gas and dollars of gas-money I burned through).: Virginia, DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticutt, Massachusetts, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia. Whew! Gorgeous weather. The top down. Open road. Old friends. I can't think of a better way to reacquaint myself with my country.

Well, voting for the next president. That's another way. In early November, I found myself back in Virginia and deep into a job-search in the worst economy in several generations. After returning from Romania, my focus had shifted to architecture firms doing work in community development, low-cost housing, disaster relief, mixed-development, etc., and my geographical focus was firmly on places like the upper Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic and the Gulf Coast. As I would continue to find out over the next several months, the industry (like every other) was contracting, hiring was slowing down, and I was forced to deal -- essentially for the first time in my life -- with the physical and emotional challenges of being without a full-time job, which are manifold. Anxiety, self-doubt, depression, aimlessness, loss of motivation -- It's difficult to appreciate how immediate, and how overwhelming, the effects of unemployment generally are until one is right smack in the middle of it. Even after two years of struggle, improvisation and confidence-building in the Peace Corps, I found myself battling what was, in some ways, an even more difficult situation at home. There is always more that we can learn about ourselves, I suppose, and the world we inhabit. I have learned much in the past few months. And it certainly hasn't been all negatives either. For instance, during my search I've been working part-time at a coffee-shop in Charlottesville with some terrific people, learning how to make quad-shot mochas, extra-dry cappuccinos and chai lattes. Valuable skills, all. And I've continued to interview with a variety of interesting and exciting architecture firms: I was passed-over by several, I was offered a job by one, and several have asked for follow-up interviews over the coming weeks. All of which leads me to the next predictably risky decision...

The crowning event to all this is the news that I will be heading to the Philippines in mid-June for a 6-month assignment with Peace Corps Response (the shorter-term, technical wing of the Peace Corps, typically for returned volunteers). The word so far is that I'll be among a small group helping a local non-profit to design low-cost housing for residents of Manila's vast slums. And though it means another few months of relative poverty, I couldn't be more excited! Going against all better judgment, I am turning down job offers here in the States (in a bad economy) to pursue this opportunity, so only time will tell whether my decision was a good one. I've learned to trust my instincts, and I'm feeling pretty good about this one.

Well, in a nutshell, that's my life over the past 10 months. I have no overarching words of wisdom, no lessons to be gleaned -- other than the constant reality that life is unpredictable. I would love to hear from anyone I haven't talked to in a while, and I promise to keep everyone abreast of life and work in the Philippines (and after). I feel like my writing skills aren't where they should be -- perhaps I'm out of practice. I'll get over it, as I hope you will.

Keep putting one foot in front of the other...