[L, diary, ephēmeris] 1) BLOG

Recently, while whinging about lack of energy to write posts, a good friend suggested I simply share what I’d written to him about living in rural Philippines. I might not have considered it if, the very next day, during a surprise visit from friends I’d not seen for a while,  I was asked again what I liked so much about living here.  It was a casual question, posed as they were about to leave;  it felt somewhat like closure, but I should have remembered they were newspaper reporters, owners of Dumaguete’s MetroPost.

There are three parts to this blog post, each in different contexts but all centered around what gives me joy living an ex-pat’s life in the Philippines. 

First, the email to Mark, living in rural California:

“Clear Lake State Park!  I LOVE the videos and identify completely with you about the special relationship you feel for where you live.  Reminded me of my gratitude for where I live, with the same disappointing experience of others’ reluctance to deal with heat and less-affluent communities.  Poverty, yes, and all that means, but there's a balancing side to that, too.

Here, for me, that is. Can't say for where you are because the culture is different. 

 

Life is simply 'simpler' in rural Tambobo.  Every evening I sit in my boat’s companionway, watching the sun set and listening to the children's voices on shore, laughing and yelling, playing tag games, swimming/splashing, aware also of  fishing boats either returning or leaving, their voices either shouting as they unload their catch or noisily hauling up anchor (if commercial) while the local's narrow bankas silently slip past in shallow waters behind me, paying out small nets, a wife or child in bow, male adult paddling in stern.  There's almost always music, somewhere, too--the dreaded Karaoke (am tolerant but not so keen for it) as well as an endless cycle of popular singers at varying volumes but mostly loud enough for all.  The culture says that if you have the equipment for music and don't share it you are stingy; NOT a good neighbor. 

Then, of course, there's the 'wild life' roaming about--the other morning I had to not only chase a determined hen out of the house TWICE (the second time it took ten minutes with a broom to dislodge her), I then had to chase TWO feral cats (seeking anything left on countertop) from the kitchen. Over the years several female cats have secretly delivered kittens inside the house; that morning I'd found three newborns under the sink. Then a bit later there were also four goats that kept returning through the front gate to eat garden shrubs before I could chase THEM away! Almost every day at least two or three cows with offspring plod the dirt road past the house, sometimes wandering in before being retrieved by owner.  And all day long the roosters scream their prowess with the lady chickens (while I scream at the ones scratching in my garden)."

Addendum: Two pigeons have recently decided to make my yard their new home, even braving the debris of re-roofing beautiful-but-leaky bamboo roof tiles with ugly-but-practical sheet metal. They wait expectantly on the backdoor step everyday, for dine-in service as if born here.

Part Two, links to articles published in Dumaguete's METRO POST & Manila’s INQUIRER,  (by Irma Pal, MetroPost.)

https://dumaguetemetropost.com/home-is-tambobo-bay-p12404-739.htm

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1308842/at-home-in-tambobo-bay

Part Three:

In the meantime, seemingly unrelated, a love letter from my husband written September 18, 2004 was ‘re-discovered’ in an old journal. Though the letter had been written five years before his death (September 1, 2009), I only found it AFTER his death. Pasting it into the current journal was the only place I could think of to keep it safe; to keep it with the poignancy of reading his handwritten words of love, so strong from so long ago; so painfully alive and fresh in the reading.

It has now been almost eleven years since Bill died, and though the letter could never be forgotten, forgetting which journal it was in, happened. Many times I've wanted to re-read it but searching through a large trunk filled with old journals was daunting. Then a miracle happened: while exhibiting several randomly picked, hand-bound journals to inspire a student, a 2011 journal opened readily to the letter itself!

The purpose in relating that story is NOT to preface posting the letter itself, but to detail the how this recent encounter led to the decision to post WHY living here so long continues to enchant.

The date on the recovered letter led to quickly finding the specific journal. I'd been wondering what was happening in our lives then that might have inspired Bill to list, in his graceful old-world script the way Elizabeth Barrett Browning must have penned her sonnet, the sixteen ways he loved me. (One, twice.)

Wish I could say I found what I was looking for, but I didn’t.

Instead, the relevant pages were filled with boisterous snafus and celebrations of setting up four aging computers. Rotary Club donations, for the local high school. Their first computers. Or maybe it was because of that, maybe the shared joy of contributing, of participating, in a foreign community, that filled him, too. He didn’t feel exiled or irritated with cultural differences, the poverty or humid weather. His letter was full of gratitude for our daily life.

But, whatever feelings might have inspired his letter, it was mine that were recorded. So, below is what I found in the pages of 2004 days that followed September 18th:

“…waiting for Bill at the post office, I watched a tricycle filled with blocks of ice bring his cargo to his customers. The ice gleamed and glistened, glinting in the sun; defiant and heroic as it sweated icy tears.—the simple mode of transporting ice; a not-young man in a battered tricycle, sidecar dusty, dirty, jouncing its solid weight along a rude avenue.

The sight brought joy to my heart—the hot, dusty street with its peddlers of flavored drinks, working in sleeveless tee-shirts, chipping translucent shards from the blocks, filling and packing their Styrofoam chests with refreshments to hawk while roaming on foot.

The sight refreshed me. Simply looking at the lovely ice melting in the heat, I wondered at it, marveled at how wholesome and connected I felt at the sight…then realized I WAS connected to it! I was not ‘cut off’ from the natural sensations of heat and ice! These outdoor stalls did not have air-conditioning to maintain a constant, cool climate; no electrical refrigeration to maintain pristine, frosty ice for their drinks.

The local men running their businesses--the peddlers’ of drinks, the deliveryman of ice in his battered tricycle--they were not isolated from me by the restaurant walls or refrigerated vans I’d grown up with. Here, in rural Philippines, I was free to vicariously immerse myself in a moment of their lives that was unique to my cultural history. Not just their lives personally but in the NATURE of it, the realities of just being alive: heat, dirt, thirst, and the exquisiteness of melting ice in a quenching drink on a hot day, al fresco,

I ended that entry by rejoicing in my luck that I could,

‘...live in the Philippines, on a rural island where being part of its humanity was still possible.”

I am still rejoicing.  And as I write these last words, my neighbor has just turned up the volume on Put Your Head On My Shoulder, and is belting out the refrain with ear-splitting gusto.

It has been two months of continuing quarantine since Resty Joy had her thirteenth birthday.

Two months of a confusing writer's block for me, about sharing the insights gained from an experience of what seemed (as posted in the latest newsletter):

"Almost like a Flash Mob, in retrospect.

Or the beauty of an original street performance created on the spot."

Now, finally, inspired by this quote by Ann Hamilton, the post for her begins:

"Every act of making matters. How we make matters. I like to remember, and remark with regularity, that the word “making” occupies seventeen pages in the Oxford English Dictionary, so there are multiple possibilities for a lifetime of making: make a cup, a conversation, a building, an institution, make memory, make peace, make a poem, a song, a drawing, a play; make a metaphor that changes, enlarges, or inverts the way we understand or see something. Make something to change your mind — acts that amplify.

A life of making isn’t a series of shows, or projects, or productions, or things: it is an everyday practice."

Quarantine during Covid19 means no party, no friends gathering to help celebrate. The birthdays in rural Negros Oriental aren't big affairs but families are usually large, so naturally there are immediate, happy acknowledgements with a sense of celebration, even in lockdown. 

Though Resty Joy's family is also large, she's essentially an only child. Since she was three, she's lived in Negros with relatives; her parents live in Manila, Luzon; her brothers and sisters also scattered elsewhere. Resty Joy's life moves between two households stationed at each end of a five-house road.  In the first, she is a niece and a cousin; her Tito's own children are three- and two years old; their mother reclusively shy.  In the second, she is a granddaughter. Her Lolo is in his late seventies, unwell.  Her Lola is a few years younger, a loving but sometimes an exacting personalty. 

Previously, birthdays for the now disbanded & quarantined group of Saturday Art students had consisted of the celebrant selecting recipes (the week prior), the birthday week's lunch & afternoon 'snack'--usually chicken or prawns with (often, but not always), something decadently chocolate. The morning of the party we'd tape large, colorful HAPPY BIRTHDAY letters we'd made several years ago, which would end with the individual's name on a huge exclamation point. No gifts, but inevitably some hand-crafted cards or posters created spontaneously by classmates. Sometimes balloons, too. The tradition made everyone feel special. 

For me to NOT be able to provide that experience for my little group of kids was unbearable. 

It was complicated how to NOT violate the stay-at-home mandate, yet still provide the much-needed companionship of others for her entry into teenage years.  Equally difficult to write about, afterward, was the solution I'd finally come up with. I confess: I broke quarantine for myself when I became the bridge for Resty Joy and her friends to (virtually) celebrate the day with her. 

Initially, I'd wanted to simply scoop them all up in my car, make them scooch down in back so as to not be seen, and we'd celebrate as usual at the house.  But I'm a foreigner here, a guest, and from the locals there is a natural irritation and resentment towards the too many foreigners who feel they are excluded from observing cultural expectations.  Not wanting to be lumped in with them--and particularly if I were to dismiss the children's quarantine rules--I decided to orchestrate a virtual party. Without benefit of Zoom or any other cyber medium. Just the old-fashioned way..well, almost:

A week before Resty Joy's birthday a bag of art supplies, papers, markers, scissors and glue were given to Joy's friends to make cards:

On Friday morning, May 8th, 2020, the folder of HAPPY BIRTHDAY letters, masking tape, two cameras, ten balloons, my gift of art supplies, candles, and a still-warm banana cake were packed into the jeep, and brought to the home of Resty Joy's classmates, Jacen, Jessa, and Monica.  Jacen was given one of the cameras, her brother, Jocris, began blowing up the balloons while the others taped birthday letters to the bamboo walls of their house:

Social distance and a mask, on my part, was observed but in the (OMG, too numerous) photos that emerged, the others are of the families, so those precautions aren't in the photos. After the activities were captured in my camera as well as Jacen's, the clusters of balloons, the disassembled HAPPY BIRTHDAY letters, handcrafted cards and cameras, were reloaded into my jeep and taken to Resty Joy's house. 

Here is my very favorite photo, a portrait of her and shy Annabelle, scrolling through Jacen's photos of our morning activities to help celebrate the day with her:

...and these are the photos Resty Joy chose to have printed, some by Jacen or myself, but the others by her with the camera left for her to use all day:

"Every act of making matters. How we make matters...A life of making...is an everyday practice."

(the flower photograph at top was also one taken by Resty Joy)