Day care camping and other things...

So, we've been here a week and we've managed to accomplish a good amount of stuff. We met a ton of Anna's friends at a barbecue (more like a pot-luck) in San Jose and had a ton of fun there. It was nice to see all the different personalities of the volunteers and hear what everybody is up to. My mango salsa was prize winning, we played complicated charades of death (or everyone else did while I attempted to sleep), made smores and headed to the beach where a volunteer rounded up a group of local kids to teach us the "slipper game" and sing the national anthem for us. Just another day in the Peace Corps, I guess...



After all that fun we headed up to visit some more of Anna's friends, Abby and her boyfriend Brian up in Aklan. That day was the feast of John the Baptist, where everyone in the country is supposed to swim as a baptism of sorts. However, it turns out you can also be "baptised" by random people throwing water on you as you pass through town. So, we were sitting innocently in our bus, and were "baptised" maybe about four times before the other passengers demanded that we put our window up. So, we continued on our journey with all windows up and the doors shut and every single seat occupied by soaking wet people. No air conditioning. So we steamed ourselves the whole rest of the way there; our bus was baptized about another 25 times and every time some kid through water at us everyone on board would get really excited and the middle school girls sitting next to Jeff would sort of squeal with delight. When we finally made it to where we were going to stay, we were quite quickly wisked away to meet the local mayor, who was swimming across the street. We did manage a proper John the Baptist swim in the sea later that night after the sun set--very nice amongst the bioluminesence.

And then comes our "camping." We set off the next morning to go backpacking, but as it turns out, it is extremely HOT and WET during the rainy season here. So we're off lugging all our gear through beautiful mountains, and then I sort of start to get heat stroke or something. We decide it might be a good idea to not go so far as we had planned at that point. More walking, beautiful country, I'm still sweating liters and liters of fluids, and then the storm clouds roll in. No big deal, our local guide (Dodoy, a very fun 22-year old who has a medical condition which prevented him from going through puberty and looks like he is 8 years old) says we can stay in his neighborhood and cook our lunch until the rain passes. We get there, it starts to rain, and they send us to the day care where we can cook our lunch and stay dry for a while. We cook our lunch of ramen noodles and eggs, sit on the tiny toddler chairs that were maybe five inches off the ground, and laugh at the play house--a small toddler sized nipa hut inside the day care, complete with a front porch and a bed in the bedroom. Then, Dodoy insists we go swimming, which we do in a river down the path. Very beautiful spot, very cool water which I more than welcomed. Anna actually started moving downstream to swim in another spot, also very beautiful, but then Brian pointed out the pig waste flowing into the river there. We decided we had done quite enough swimming, thank you and headed back to base camp, the day care center.



Once we got back there, a huge storm was looming, and Dodoy tells us we are welcome to camp in there if we need to. We laugh and say, who camps in a day care center? But then we wait and wait, and it rains and rains, we play cards and read books and it rains and rains. It starts to get dark and we say, perfect, lets camp here for the night. We cook rice and use our hands to eat it with canned tuna on a huge banana leaf on one of the tiny tables. Then we have coffee and tea and sing a long as Anna and Jeffrey play the guitar. We then attempt to introduce smores to Brian and Dodoy, but we only had a candle and a kerosene lamp to melt the marshmallows and they were strawberry flavored at that. But the chocolate was imported Hershey's (very expensive) and we wanted smores, so we roasted the tiny marshmallows on the end of various pieces of silverware and taught our Filipino friends about a classic American camping treat. Brian was skeptical at first, but Dodoy dove right in, eating tons of smores and eventually graduating to triple deckers before the night was done.

After dessert, we rolled out the big woven palm mat meant for the toddlers nap time, and settled in for the night. Dodoy slept quit well in the bedroom of the playhouse. The next morning, we pack up, it starts raining, we wait for it to stop, we head back, and barely make it to a sari-sari store in a neighboring barangay before it starts really pissing it down. So, we wait there, all huddled together by some out of order video game machines, reading, and waiting, and watching kids play in the street in the pouring rain.

We took the rest of the day easy, washed all our sweat off in the shower, read a little, slept a little, drank a little tuba (coconut wine) collected from the trees in our front yard. We then hopped across the street to the videoke bar where Jeff attempted to sing "Act naturally" by Ringo Starr and "Always look on the bright side of life" from the Life of Brian. Anna excelled with Madonna's "La Isla Bonita", TLC's "Scrubs", and a song in Tagalog which won her many cheers and applause.

We've been on the road all day today, are in Roxas right now, and are about to head off to President Roxas (Anna's hometown, very small, about 1 hour east of here).

By the way, in case anything happens and we need to be evacuated or anything, Anna lives in President Roxas, not at the Airmail Distribution Center of the Nino Aquino International Airport, as the US State Department, the Phillipine Consulate, and every customs agent who asked for our address currently believes. Joke only.