#malbato

[gariksadovy]

Night at the Church. Malbato

[gariksadovy]

Tips on Waiting Out a Monsoon

The thing about the Philippines during the rainy season (There are two seasons; rainy and dry. I was balked at when I said the USA has four. Damn; four seasons? Never expected to feel proud of the diversity of the weather in the States) is that it rains; a lot. Back in Raleigh, constant rain would usually mean that after about the second day, one would get moody and depressed, desiring only sunshine and a break from having to run to and from your car so that the laptop in your bag, the cell phone in your pocket, the iPod in your ears, and whatever other electronic paraphernalia you usually have on your body at all times is protected from disabling damp and the surely fatal scission of your connection to the rest of society. Here, it just kind of happens too much to ever pack any kind of electronics (unless you came prepared like me with a drybag, or are stupid enough, again like me, to completely disregard the poor combination that the collecting water in your pocket and the electronics of a cell phone make and carry it out any way). And the smell of and feel of rain in the jungle, with the bright green really coming out their best and the earth disgorging all kinds of rotting wood fragrances that mask your own BO. It's just something you either have to be into or suffer through. And while I've been into that ever since listening to McCartney's "Wings" album (I think that's the one with Mamamunia; it's hard to remember. I've got like half of all of the vinyls he put out), sometimes a ton of rain can be debilitating to the advancement of any kind of professional goals. That's what I was told before I left and it has been confirmed just about every three mornings when something has flooded or the muddy paths up the mountains are saturated enough to cave under my feet and we simply cannot go out to our destination. Being the resourceful individual that I am, I found my own ways to accomplish things in the down time, because I spend too much time lounging anyway when its sunny to forgo the opportunity to do something when you can get inspired by the pitter-patter of drip-drops on bamboo, and the sloosh of your bathroom filling with water. It occurred to me that others might find themselves in the jungle under these kinds of conditions in the future (Especially if my recruitment efforts work as well as I have planned for them to work; between this post and Moments of Weakness, I'd say I'm off to a banging start!), and that they might benefit from hearing a bit about what I tend to put away for rainy days

Learn a new Language - While this might usually mean learning the language of the place where you are, but not all of the time; maybe just part of the time. In my case, I receive daily lessons in Tagalog*1 from Lorenzo in the mornings of these rainy days, when he will come by to tell me that we can't go out, also while teaching him English as well. He says that in school, his teachers called him a "truant", though now he seems more than eager to learn*2. The hardest lesson was a hell of my own design, attempting to teach him the meaning of the words "nuance" and "subtle", which by definition are hard concepts to grasp even for people with 12 years of Wordly Wise under their belt. But then, on these rainy days, I am also attempting the smash and grab job of slamming Bahasa Indonesia (Literally, "The Language of Indonesia") into my brain via Rosetta Stone so that I will be able to survive in my advanced resource management classes that I'm signing up for upon arrival in Yogya this August. I've got about a month, no dictionary, no teacher, and no one here who speaks it (Though I did find today, to my surprise, that the Tagalong for mac, or raincoat if you have never faced rain in the UK, is the same as in Indonesian), and my progress, as measured by me, is phenomenal. Rosetta Stone is the bomb. One way to know if you are doing well is to do everything with the sound turned on first, until you are comfortable, and then to turn the sound off and do the typing exercises. An image will flash up on the screen, and you will have to type what it is, to the exact specifications of what is being said silently into your non-functioning earphones. It makes you struggle to remember grammar nuances (Ah, so the word is useful!) and really makes you learn so that you don't get embarrassed by using "itu sedang" when you could have just said "sedang".

You have rafters? Do Pull Ups - I'm not in the best shape of my life right now as I left my dear lover*3 at home behind me, and I have been mourning the loss of her small black body and the feel of her weight, in addition to the fact that no one around here exercises at all (I think they either eat less than Anti Dinah prepares for each of my meals, or they are no afraid of being rude and simply throwing out some of their food; probably the former. I doubt that anyone else here fixes more than they want to eat) and as I learned from Poland, some times it is a disadvantage to be the only one running around (Under no circumstances run at night in the jungle without an extreme amount of experience and sizeable balls; remember those spitting cobras I mentioned? For real d00d). So find alternates. Monkeys like to swing on trees, and they enjoy my room for some reason, so I decided to jump up on one of the rafters, and it turns out that it is extremely fun to swing from the beams like they were branches and you were Tarzan. I've forgiven the monkeys their trespasses into my bathroom. Push Ups also work, and never underestimate the joys of punching yourself in the stomach like you are a one man fight club.

Watch the first 38 seconds of 300 - That's the problem with downloading 1.8 GB over a SmartBro USB modem; download time is estimated at 51 hours.

Learn a new sport! - I brought a bunch of books with me against my better judgment (Most of them were good calls at least, particularly Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and State of Fear as well as 2010 Best American Travel Writing), and though they were all small they still caused a p500 over weight fee going to Busuanga. However, it is apparent to me now that, at least in the case of most of the books, they are going to prove extremely valuable out here. One of my books, The Manual of Freediving, which contrary to the picture on the front of the book proves that you need more than a speedo and an Italian last name to be able to descend to 100m on one breath, has been leading me through some of my rainy day sessions of physical action. Breathing exercises on the floor that had kids screaming in the next room; throwing out my gut to increase O2 saturation in my lower alveoli while hiking around the birding trails to Lorenzo's confusion; wondering if there is some special key to self hypnosis and persuading the diaphragm to sit still for just two minutes, damn! It's all good. And even though hoards of box jellies mean that I can't swim right now, maybe in a couple of weeks, when I make it back from Singapore, I can rent a boat, a map, and go out to Coron (The island this time, not the town) and spend all day amongst lobsters and seahorses, and if I get lucky, dolphins. Freediving's a cool sport, I guess.

Clean your camera lenses - My gopro has suffered a lot at the hands (Wait, if something has no hands, are you still allowed to use that phrase? Eh, piddle) of the spilled remains of the 5kg of rice that I bought a day after I arrived here at the insistence of Dinah, even through my pleas that I could not possibly consume that much rice. Little grains somehow found their way into the crannies of the waterproof housing, and once they got wet form the rain, they left that crappy rice paste all over the shell, and the lens as well. Water, soap, and a good eyeglass oil cloth will do the trick, and I was serious enough about my equipment to ensure that I had all three. Also, you can charge your camera's batteries. Always a good idea.

Pet the cat - Ummm…

Try to figure out what the f*** that thing is that you got on film - is it a caterpillar? Is it a worm? Is it some kind of enchanted kush ball? Is it a small living Oral B dental care device? Wind-up art deco? Or, as I suspect, sasquatch. Brian, get on it.

Read Some Fiction - As I mentioned before, one of the saving graces of my packing decisions was to put two of Michael Crichton's best in my bag, as well as the travel essays (Though at the time, having only gotten to essay three, I thought it was a flop, and I would only be reading it to encourage myself that if this drivel could get published, then so will I. I am now much more impressed, having made it to the essay about the Hadza, a tribe of Baboon Killing hunter-gatherers in North Tanzania). I started and finished Jurassic Park on the plane ride from NY to Tokyo, and the heavy message the book has about the lack of responsibility that taints a fair amount of scientific discovery as well as the poorly conceived notion that somehow humans are destroying the Earth, messages that I first came across when I read the book as a 7-year-old, and understood probably when I turned 9 or 10, were probably the best way possible to start a month long excursion to the Philippines to make environmental evaluations. The only better way that I can think of would have been to also read Crichton's State of Fear, a book that makes a scathing and beautifully lucid comment on the environmentalism movement. Oh yeah, that's right; I did. On the second day. The books set the tone for my thinking processes here, as they have been setting the tone of my life since The Lost World made it's debut in my bed at the age of six, and remains the only book that I read in its entirety, without stopping once (True, I did stay up all night reading Harry Potter 6, but I put the book away to make myself some oatmeal with peaches). You want to know how I got the way that I am? Well, it was a lot of things, but if you read some Crichton, you'll understand a big piece of it. His death in 2008 was one of the saddest days I have ever been through, because while those of my family that I have lost were people that I knew, cared for, and will have a growing understanding of even in death, Michael Crichton will never write another book for me, and I will never get to meet him. I once wondered what meeting Crichton would be like, since, from his personality in his non fiction, we seem to share a lot of the same ideals and ideas. I always imagined that we might catch each other's eye form a distance, and I would give him a respectful nod and a knowing look, and then he would come over to me and we'd have a drink and laugh a lot. But that will never happen. My mom recently described me to a friend as Crichton's successor. It was one of the best compliments I could have possibly been given, and maybe someone will endeavor to ensure that it makes it on to the dust jacket of my first book.

Lastly, Write - I don't know what it is about being out of the USA for me, but I've written more for my blog over the past week than I have for any of my blogs since Poland, probably in combination. And the quality of my writing has gone back to acceptable levels as well! Quantity and quality; that's hard to come by. And I suspected this would happen. I never had a blog before Poland, and then, all of a sudden I was cast into a situation where I truly was flying by the seat of my pants (as if they had little tiny wings), and I couldn't keep the pencil down. My lab notebook slowly filled up with descriptions of the laser, spectroscopy, and anisotropy equipment that my graduate mentor, Dustin (bless his soul) described as overly enthusiastic with a his smile that was half incredulous half surprisedly amused. My journal was a lot slower; from day one of college, when I got the black Moleskein on the Park retreat, I had it reserved for only special entries. But they were coming in greater abundance as I learned to work on less sleep in the busy streets of Poznan, so I decided that there would have to be another outlet. Blah, blah, blah… started my blog, wrote about everyday stuff, found my voice in sarcasm and self depreciating descriptions of things I felt were truly beautiful. And then a strange thing happened. I got back from Auschwitz, knowing that I had to write about it, but all of a sudden, I was pushed to make something that both would hit people with something they had never seen before and come across as something a professional would publish. And I did it with the title Dragon's Teeth. It got published a year later, and a rep from a foundation for Jewish Studies sent me an appreciative letter and a free book. I keep it on a shelf. But ever since I returned from the continent, I never could write something like that again. I'm not saying that any of this is outstanding, or even in standing, with anything, but nothing I wrote since made me feel the same way. Like I had just laid out the tragedy of the world on paper, and found a way to poetically convince people that life was not so bad after all, and that I had made it stick. But now that I'm here, back in a new place, facing challenges unforeseen and with barely more than a shadow of a plan to dictate my actions, the lone nut once again, I feel this creative power coming back to me. It hasn't happened yet; of that there is no doubt, but it will. Soon I think. I've written some real s*** in the past, but the gems that I do have really are gems, and the reason that I will encourage you to write on rainy days is that you have time to slow down, to think and plan out something you want to say. The best stories have been on the cutting bench for thousands of years, and you are trying to polish your premise up in the blink of an eye. The rain will slow you down. Make your words glisten. Not for other people, for yourself.

So that's a rainy day in the Philippines, though I expect that, in the cities, where there is internet and power, the itinerary is quite different. You probably don't even hear the soft beat of drops over the bustle of the growing population in nearly every region of this place. Mmmmm, the rain. Most of the time, it's either too little or too much. It oppresses us or we miss it long after it has left our lands. Kind of like God. Or Jaguars. Or certain people. Or magic. Or our sanity. Or pretty much anything. Maybe I should just sit back and listen. Silly westerner.

Footnotes

*1 Note here: Yes, I have discovered that my previous spellings of the national language of the Philippines were inaccurate. Between having no computer to fact check, not having Lorenzo handy to proofread, no dictionary, and the fact that, in his accent, it sounds like "tigalug", it would be impossible to get everything right on the first attempt. And I'm not going to go back and change it; I want to remember the experience of opening up a kids book of Philippino history in Tagalog and finding my error next to a picture of a girl who has spilled her milk all over the table. 'Oh no!'

*2 His explanation is interesting, and bears consideration, though he also admits freely that he was lazy. Here, if a teacher hopeful fails to pass the exams required to become a teacher, then they cannot take a post, unless it is that of an English teacher; there is some kind of buy for anyone willing to wade their way through our ridiculous language. Even if Lorenzo's failure of mastery is more his fault, I can't imagine that English teachers here are of the kind of quality to inspire most students to put up with a language that needs context to heal a wound, or to make sure your kayak's rope is wound. I'm starting to see more and more how important programs like the Fulbright, Peace Corp and so on are for developing and underserved communities, where learning English is a gateway to a better future.

*3 I'm in an open relationship with a massive 2 pod (55lb for non Ruskies) ball of iron with a handle on it; here name is Huge Kettlebell, and it's facebook official. I can snatch her 90 times in about 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Due to the fact that I would get taken down for trying to pass her through security at any airport in the world, I left her with my former roommate, co instructor, and eventual architect of my demise, Jeff Huber, singing The Who's "The Kids are Alright" as I left the room, trying to erase the image of her cheating on me with him while I'm away. Jeff, I'd better not see any bruised forearms in your pictures.

[gariksadovy]

Marco Polo in Malbato

In the dim mist of the recently passed rains, a heavy, nearly black storm cloud pregnant with the true torrential downpour of a tropical monsoon that is now making its way ponderously over the bay, to the south and out over the faint, forested mountains of Coron Island, I can see the dull red umbrella shaped dome of a giant flowering tree maybe a quarter of a mile down the mountainside that stands out against the brilliant green in the sinking sun. I'm sitting on the railing of an open gap in the wall of the chapel that sits high above the small village of Malbato; the white steps that lead up winding path to the entrance are lit with a partial glow, giving the scene an almost holy look, and I can see the arcing shadow of the cross above me playing across the giant fronds that begin about three feet after the chapel ends. Far below me, along the main highway, an intermittent ribbon of shining concrete, that, at times can become little more than a treacherous bridge with two sets of warped planks keeping huge trucks and motorbikes alike from plunging into swiftly flowing rivers below, the lights of a late night moped run, probably to the town of Coron, about 17km to the southeast, and its accompanying machine gun patter drift up to my ears and I ease back against the cool stones in a state of almost perfect peace. And then,  just as the sun passes behind the last of the clouds that ring the tops of the misty mountains behind me and as I decide that this scene could not become more beautiful, the twinkling of a multitude of fireflies begins to fill the branches of the surrounding trees, hanging for long moments in the air, making it appear as if the trees have stars hanging from their branches in some otherworldly vision of Yggdrasil, the World Tree from Norse myth. I am overcome and cannot even muster a sigh. It is right at this moment that a bat passes within 2 inches of my face, no doubt hunting one of the last mosquitos left after the purging floods from the sky, and I surprise myself by having no reaction whatsoever. It was just too ideal to even respond.

This is where I am living, and where I will be for, give or take about 10 days here and there, the next month, and where I am willing to bet I will be spending quality time over the course of my life. Life here is both quiet and busy, peaceful and always moving; at least that is how the time of this particular foreigner is passing in Malbato. A small village, consisting, according to one of my guides who is probably the best English speaker here, of about 1000 people, including the children (500 adults), Malbato lies on the southern most portion of Busuanga Island, just north of Coron Island and west of Coron, probably the nearest significant dot on big maps which, next year, will upgrade from town status to full blow city, in the Caliaman island group of Palawan, the western arm of islands that constitutes the China Sea border of the Philippines. Busuanga is right at the top of Palawan, making it a prime hit for the typhoons that often blow in from the sea to the West (I managed to show up on the island only hours after a typhoon had hit, flooding homes, uprooting massive palms, and washing the river clear of a lot of rare wildlife, including the elusive freshwater seahorse that I spent an entire day looking for). Thus, sea faring structures tend to be simple and unadorned, thin, elongated canoe like boats with a wide spread of wooden struts that gives the boats unanswerable balance, while homes built out on the ocean, like the Kubo Sa Daggat have thick concrete supports built directly into sea bedrock, with low roofs and clustered structures. All throughout the day, you can see people fishing off of the coast of Malbato, in the bay, where you can sink a line about 5 meters to the muddy bottom below and catch small orange snapper as well as puffer fish (of course, you can't eat these, but their tough meat, when sliced off of the living fish, makes excellent bait for the snapper, as the fish can rarely take the bait without taking the hook as well). Towards the end of the day, when low tide has caused the water's edge to recede about 50 meters off of the sandy shore, old women in shawls, accompanied by barefoot children, and gruff, wiry men casually clutching the curved machete like blade that is the common tool here, take their buckets and plumb the waters for muscles or clams (It's either one or the other; I forgot the word for the object of their searches in Tigalug, but it begins with a "P". Perhaps I will remember later). You can buy fish, clams, and crabs from the fishermen at the waters edge during the day for relatively cheap prices and then grill, fry, or boil them in the fashion of the local cuisine, which, for the Malbatans that I have interacted with, only strays outside of sea food to include large quantities of rice, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as cassava, a few vegetables, and perhaps eggs every now and then.

This is the menu for those who eat simply, but prominently featured at regular intervals along the highway, right outside of Kingfisher Park, and in vast multitudes in Coron, are small shops that have wire windows heavily adorned with colorful sweets and crisps (That's chips in America; I just felt like being UK there for aesthetics. Don't ask me why.) where you can buy bags of small rolls and hot dog buns, as well as more practical things, like bottles of water and petrol for your motor scooter (OK; I'm done now.). It would be the kind of thing that would prompt me to thing "Food Desert" at first thought, and without knowing how the community works, with fresh foods and kilo upon kilo of rice moving silently into homes by means that are, only with painstaking investigation, becoming apparent to me, you couldn't be blamed for thinking this. The equivalent of these shops in the US, the "quick shoppe" and "stop and go", and I suppose vending machines (though more complicated, because here you have to learn another language to order something), and their position across areas of the country where they represent the only accessible source of food for residents is one of the targets of an national outcry, the "food revolution", and the subject of many undergraduate research reports, as well it should be. But here I am not so sure. People sell candy bars everywhere, but I've actually yet to see a kid eating one.

And here, there are children galore. During the day, I return to my small house by the road that takes me past a number of houses with covered benches were men and women will sometimes sit for what seems like all day, moving slowly in the shade, every now and then saying something to each other and laughing softly, always turning to look at me as I pass and returning my wave with the familiar, leer-like, smile that I have come to expect (And understand as friendly), sometimes watching me until I am out of sight. This scene is inevitably accompanied by gaggles of children, small boys and girls, often with nothing on but dirty undershirts, running down the path, chasing each other, playing with the house monkey that is tied up at one of the homes, staring at my white skin with wide eyes in the same way that I know I've often stared at things like jaguars and eagles, and generally being the object of what sound like remonstrances from their parents. There are so many of them, and they are so densely packed; every time I encounter one small child, I unconsciously expect to see several more soon following, and I am rarely disappointed. The older children attend the grade school that lies at the foot of the same mountain where the chapel perches, and as one walks the path up towards the school, the scene becomes dominated by kids who mostly look ten to twelve, though it is hard for me to judge age with Philippinos; I am often underguessing the age, and I blame it on reasonably healthy lifestyles as well as the population trend to stop growing at around 5'6" or 5'7". I've seen plenty of residents here that I thought were my age, who later were revealed as thirty and forty year olds, and I might have pegged Lorenzo, my primary guide, as still in his teens, before I found out that he had two years on me.

The opposite side of the spectrum, the older residents of Malbato are plentiful as well. I have taken the custom of referring to them as Maam or Maan, always giving a smile when I pass through the steamy rice fields next to a dark, wizened, wry man, carrying wicker and supplies on his back. My travels into more remote regions of Kingfisher Park, going far into the jungle trails, often puts me in the small dirt yards of the thatch homes that scatter the land (A result of agri-reform land portioning says Yayo), where chicken will run underfoot as I try to avoid stepping on tomatoes and cassava while Lorenzo calls out, "Dupas?!" to the dark interiors of the house, asking off hand if the two of us can pass through. Getting closer to the house, dim figures materialize in the windows and poke wrinkled heads out of the open ends of the bamboo and palm woven walls, calling out something else in slow and soft voices, to which Lorenzo will give a quick, usually one word, response, and I will hear the soft laughter form the house following us as we move on down the trail. And this is a place of laughter, in the best sense. The older generations that we interact with, walking into houses and asking for permission to go somewhere, to rent a boat to go out to the hot springs hot tub, or one of the many other tasks that are handled by extended chat sessions in foyers and in the shade, are always quite pleased to see us, sometimes even going so far as to give me free cassava when I said that the little six  peso melon strips that I bought from one grandmother were some of the best things that I had ever tasted. Walking around the village, catching the eyes of kids as you pass them at a leisurely pace down the main highway, waving to people cutting things with their machetes while riding by on one of the cannondales that Kingfisher owns, you catch smiles, twinkling eyes, laughter, and wide grins. And if you can utter a word or phrase in Tigalug every now and then, the inhabitants of Malbato will go crazy.

In Malbato, almost everyone is Christian, most being Catholic and attending the chapel in which I've now spent a significant amount of time staring down at this place that I'm slowly beginning to know. One of the older couples that I encountered very far out of the way, close to the Kaluluwang area which is about 10km back into the jungle along the river trail where I searched for the seahorse, was spotted on a Saturday morning, moving about 20 meters in front of me, far from their home. I was told that they were of the Back To Christ Church, making the long trek into the village each Saturday, their holy day. Throughout the rest of the Philippines, there are a number of other religions, many of them Christian denominations, but also a large Muslim contingent in Mindanao and the followers of what Lorenzo translated for me as "The Old Way," which, as things like that usually go, caused me to perk up in excitement with the prospect of learning a new mythos of the islands. It is unclear whether or not anyone here in Malbato is of the Old Way, but presence of "local peoples", the indigenous population of the area, has now been mentioned more than once and has made its way to my docket for the next month.

The night is now an inky blackness, and I can see the lights of several fires burning below, and I'm reminded that whatever picturesque scenes I am experiencing here at the top of my mountain, there are real problems here that lie beneath the surface and are not entirely clear to me because of my positive experience here; those flickering flames are a tell tale sign. The second day I was here, I smelled something terrible just as I was laying down for a late afternoon nap, and I walked out to see Dinah burning the day's trash in a pile outside my door, which included a bunch of melting plastic bags. I was about to call out to her not to do that; I mean, didn't she know the harm form burning plastics? But then I stopped, realizing that the plan of action I was considering proposing to her was to take the waste to the proper waste removal area, and it was most likely that this village didn't have any kind of sanitation whatsoever. So I just stood there, with my sleeve over my nose and mouth as a filter, and watched the bottles and bags burn, thinking to myself that, as someone who is here to observe I can't demand things I know nothing about, even if my room does smell like crap now. I'm an active participant here, consuming, connecting, and enjoying life and company with the residents of Malbato, but always turning are the cranks of evaluation, seeking to find the nuances that make this village what it is, both the good and the bad, considering how I, with my environmentally inclined ideals, might be able to improve conditions here in Malbato, and address the needs of a community where poverty is evident and education, for those who want it, is hard to come by. The underlying problems, primarily poverty from what my initial information can gather, however are not as evident here as other places I have been, and it is difficult, when seeing people that sound content with their lives, to tell what can be done. The poverty here is not as evident as it is in communities in Africa, where streets can turn to war zones, or even in the places I have worked in Belize; at one point, I was attempting to balance while walking quickly across the London Bridges in San Mateo (Belize) that held me precariously above septic and lethal waters below, some locals passed quickly behind me, laughing at my efforts and telling me, "This is our life." The outspoken poverty is not here, or at least not in the short time that I have been here thus far. Who knows? As the community and my guides become more used to me, it might reveal itself more blatantly, but for now, it is only what I can see in the material wealth, and not in the people. I'm keeping my ear to the wall in any case.

Bats are all around me now, and I decide to head back, pulling the little broken headlamp out of my satchel and walking down the steps without turning it on at first, navigating the white path by the star and firefly light above, then switching the light on as soon as I reach the ground. The spitting cobras that live here come out at night and sometimes lay across the path. It's only safe to have a light with you when you think you might be coming back in the dark. I pass the decaying stump of a coconut palm as I near my house, its center hollowed out by water and termites, and in the darkness, I see something that catches my eye on the outside of the rotting wood. I turn my light on the stump and see nothing, waiting for a few seconds to be sure and then turning away, only to snap back to the stump and shut off my light. The stump is still illuminated; phosphorescent fungi, bright white in the daylight, are glowing dully on the outside and the inside of the stump, and as I look into the center, the fungi's faint radiance makes is seem like I am peering into a hole stretching down for miles into the gloom. And that does it. I let out a whoop, thinking that this truly is Pandora now, and turn the final corner to my house, where the power is out, but where candles burn with bright orange flames in the windows.

At least I won't be able to do much tonight. Maybe I'll calm down and get some sleep.

 GCS