Finishing out 2010

This blog is coming way late as you will see. I am finishing it from Kathmandu, Nepal. You will understand the reason why soon.

Dateline: Neuva Era, Norte, Luzon, Philippine Islands; October 23, 2010—Now, this is a different place. I am sitting here in a crowded city in northern Luzon, battling something I have never before faced on my computer. Some people fight viruses, some do battle with spyware, pop-ups and the like. Oh, not me here in the Philippines; my computer has ants; how many, I have no idea. Took my battery out a bit ago and killed three right away. As I type, one will pop up out of the pit of L, make a mad dash across the labyrinth to the W while another will make a dash from the semicolon, trying to make it over the edge onto my trousers and back to wherever its 10-20 is. What will happen if one of the critters steps in the wrong place deep in the bowels of my computer? Short out a motherboard? That will be what I call being in deep kimchee. On my old Apple I could pop the keyboard out; this one offers no such deal. Do ants pee…or spit? Thoughts like this go through my mind when so far from home and with my backup disk up on the mountain.

A bit of my journey getting here. I had a great flight from Oita to Hanada. I was relaxed, no one shared the seat next to me so I could spread out just a bit. Once we landed, I wanted to hustle because the bus to Narita would be leaving soon and I needed to catch the earliest one possible. Gathering my carryon possessions, I entered the flow to the exit and on to baggage claim. It was there I discovered my classes were missing. Back on the seat next to mine. Using simple words and grand gestures, I was able to communicate my loss and soon an attendant came rushing up with them. And still I was able to catch my early bus to Narita. It was a good flight to Beijing and there I spent the night.

In the Beijing Airport, each of the three terminals have hourly lounges which are really motel-like rooms. I obtained the last on in Terminal 2 for about $60 and had a good night’s rest and a shower in the morning, probably the last official one I will have till I spend my next night in Beijing on November 14.

My flight to Hong Kong was to leave out of Terminal 3 which was quite some distance away so I left as early as possible to make sure all was in order. Arriving at the shuttle bus, I had just piled everything aboard when I remembered I had left my sheaf of e-tickets back in the room. Unpile, drag in, along the corridors and down and retrieve the tickets and then retrace my steps to the bus to the 3^rd Terminal. Two strikes.

The flight to Hong Kong was uneventful and the flight on to Manila, whereas over, under and through almost solid clouds, brought us down safe and sound in a post-typhoon city. I am sure there were areas with lots of damage, but I saw no more than some downed banana trees and large puddles in the streets.

Outside the Manila airport was vaguely reminiscent of the outside of the airports in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai, all cities of India. Crowded, cluttered, noisy, busy; a cacophony of humanity and machinery, just no sacred cows. My new friend, Alain Batista, the educational director of the medical missionary school to which I was heading, met me and began the search for a honest cab. Most want to squeeze every peso possible out of a person and so will refuse to go on the meter, offering rather to give you a set price which will always be much higher than the meter. Finding an honest man, we took the long ride to the bus depot.

Bus depots in most parts of the world are much different than those in America and other developed countries. Granted, most bus stations in America are situated in unsavory parts of town and lined with pinball machines and bleary-eyed denizens apparently seeking shelter rather than transport. In Manila the station to which we repaired was an open air affair with a covered area hosting rows of plastic chairs and Filipino people. There was a bathroom one could use for the nominal charge of 5 pesos but be sure to bring your own cleaning material and toilet paper. The busses are very nice, nothing at all like their crammed and careening cousins in southern Africa.

We were to take a sleeper bus which was a totally new experience to me. There were rows of bunk beds down both sides and a row down the middle. They were very narrow and not quite long enough for my frame, but it was still better than sitting up all night in an equally narrow seat. The trip lasted almost nine hours and we were deposited in a town a few miles from the school. The school operates two jeepneys for the dual purpose of generating funds and to transport their baked goods to towns and cities lying much further away. Soon we were trudging up the side of a mountain to my home for a month.

For those of you unknown to the Philippines, a jeepney is basically modeled out of an old Army jeep but stretched long enough to carry many people. They are often gaudily decked with religious icons, famous idols and frivolous incidentals. You sit on long benches stretching down each side and as each passenger boards, money is passed up the line to the driver. It s really quite an experience, one I first encountered in 1974 when I served here as a member of the Marine Amphibious Unit.

The school here on the side of a mountain is a truly unique experience. Challenges are met on a daily basis by the staff and students with casual good humor, challenges that would send most people in more developed lands packing for home before they had even unpacked. It doesn’t take long to separate the committed from the curious. A few of the challenges faced here.

1. Housing. This would be the first big separator for most people. Bamboo huts with thatch roofs and walls. No windows, no screens, no doors. The floors are either bamboo strips affixed to spindly trees harvested from the scrub or rough-hewn planks laid unevenly over whatever joists could be crafted from native materials. All of this constructed on stilts to lessen the unwanted and added discomfort of flowing ground water when it rains, the easy access of serpents that slither everywhere, and to provide constant ventilation from all sides. At night rats burrow through the thatch and scamper across the internal infrastructure, making more noise than is conducive to a good night’s sleep. And it is just one large room. Beds are mats on the floor or hammocks. Closets are bamboo poles suspended from various cross members or the cross members themselves. Dressers? Well, if you have a suitcase, that is it. If you have a cardboard box, that will do. Chairs? The floor will do.

2. Power. At 4:30 each morning a generator just up the trail comes on for just one hour. In the dwelling in which I live, a single 45 centimeter fluorescent bulb flickers to life and floods our dark domain. It is a wake-up call for most people on campus. I am normally awake earlier for one reason or another. The anticipation of the generator has conditioned me to wake a bit early. Sometimes the rats are particularly restless in the pre-dawn hours, as they were yesterday, and I lie there wishing for the dawn’s early light. This morning I woke up before 4 am to some strange sound. Strange sounds in the darkness can rouse me out of the deepest sleep. Turns out one of my fellow inmates decided to do his laundry early so he was outside sudsing and scrubbing his clothing to the constant splash of the eternally running water. Yes, laundry is done by hand in a plastic tub. After the hour of power, we are done with anything artificial until the evening meeting when two wires are hooked to a car battery and two mercury vapor lights push back the darkness and allow us to have our evening meeting in the main building.

3. Water. As mentioned, it flows eternal, or at least as long as the long black pipe continues to carry the water down from a lake high in the mountain above us. It is clear and cool which is nice on the hot days, which most are. The initial pipe is quite large, about 2 inches in diameter. Once it arrives at campus level, it is split into various smaller pipes to serve the needs of the numerous huts that house students, staff and visitors. One day the water stopped flowing down the smaller pipes. The young men went to work trying to fix the problem. Turns out it was nothing more than a six foot green snake that had taken the long and dark ride from the lake to the fork in the road. Another day in the Philippines.

4. Bathrooms. This depends on your home. Where I am staying it is state of the art, compared to some of the other places. It is on the same level as the sleeping floor and concrete. I shutter to think of what will happen when the ubiquitous termites have so undermined the integrity of the poles holding up that heavy slab that it can no longer support the weight of it and the last person answering the urge of nature. Not nice. One of the women’s residences has its bathroom on the ground floor, literally. This means they have to take the three or four steps down from their hut, walk around the corner and enter this very dark and very small relieving station. The other day one of the girls ran up to the classroom just before my class and said there was a snake in their bathroom. Fortunately it had made its escape before the posse arrived. The toilets themselves are porcelain apparatuses sans seats. What happened to the seats I have no idea. And flushing consists of dumping a bucket of ever-flowing water into the maw of the white throne.

5. Meals. Quite simple. One day there will be beans and rice; next day, rice and beans. Sometimes there are some weedy-looking greens or blossoms of squash added to the menu. The greens look as if they have been wildcrafted from the undergrowth or rescued from the garden. But they are always good, very good. One of my favorites has to be the sweet potato vines. I have eaten them in Africa and am surprised we don’t eat them on a regular basis in the States. They are great. People here eat many different greens and I have yet to be disappointed. The moringa (or whatever) is another green, actually a leaf from a tree, that is not only good tasting but very healthy. I was introduced to it in Africa and it is called the miracle tree. Purportedly it contains all the vitamins and minerals needed by man and can reverse many diseases.

6. The garden is the center of attraction most of the time. Most of the students spend their work period, and all students take part in work period, carving out gardens in the former jungle growth. The head gardener has a goal that in three years they will be totally self-sufficient. They have many banana trees planted, as well as papaya and the papaya hand heavy on many of them. On rare occasions we are treated to a slice at mealtime. The students work with heavy hoes, not the dainty things we are used to in the states. With them, and some similar shovels, they turn the thick soil, pulverize it, and leave neat raised rows behind them, ready to grow sweet potatoes, beans, tomatoes, or whatever the gardener decides. They also have pineapple growing. Yes, it will be a delicious place in a couple of years.

7. Equipment. I have mentioned the generator which roars to life one hour a day. There is also a motorcycle with a side car they use sometimes to haul supplies up the mountain on one of the roughest roads I have traveled down. Someone offered the school a tractor but the gardener refused, asking for a cow and a carabao instead. A carabao is a water buffalo. No gas, no oil, no tires; just let them keep the grass trimmed for energy and pull the plow and carts for free. One drawback is they make a big mess when it rains with their heavy hooves churning up the ground.

8. Students. The students are an eclectic group ranging in age from teens to grandparents. And yes, they all live in the huts in the bush. One is a young man taking six months out of medical school to attend the course. One has a masters degree in public health. Some speak excellent English, some seem as hopeless with my tongue as I would be with the 107 of theirs. That’s right, in the neighborhood of 107 languages spread across the 7,000 islands comprising the Philippine archipelago.

At this point I had to cease writing this blog because a mortally wounded ant I had been smashing at all across the home row dove down into the pit of L and there apparently died but not before wiping out the 8, I, K and comma. It became so frustrating trying to type and understand what I had written without those keys I just gave up. I was not able to fix the thing until my return to the USA near the end of November.

The stay in the Philippines was very rewarding. Each weekend I was in a different city when the student team I was with and I gave lectures and generally helped the people as we found chance. Soon my time was over and I headed back to Manila with Alain. It was again an all night bus ride and we arrived at the airport in time for me to catch an early flight to Hong Kong and then on to Beijing. I was then to spend the night in Beijing before flying out the next afternoon to Tokyo and then on to Honolulu and from their to Hilo.

It had been arranged for a person to meet me in Beijing with some of the things I had left there, not the least of which was my big, brand new winter coat. Understand, I was flying from the tropics to Beijing in late November where it was very cold already. I was wearing a light short-sleeved polo shirt which was the uniform at the mountain school but KNEW I would be met with the warm embrace of my new coat in he Beijing airport. Expecting to see Mr. Lee, our driver at the school, I scanned the faces of the curious and the anticipating as I departed the secure area. I also read the signs, at least the ones I could read. “Military Historical Tour,” “Mr. Bloderdash,” “Ms. Farfromhome,” “Adam.” That last one caught my fancy, just Adam. I smiled at the young man holding it and shook my head; I’m not Adam. It never occurred to me that the main man behind our school in Beijing, a Paul, for some reason had taken to calling me Adam. And so when he dispatched this young man to the airport to meet me, he prepared this nice sign announcing ADAM. For two hours I waited, nearly frozen, for Mr. Lee, or one of my former students, to come to my rescue. Finally I rummaged around in my suitcase and pulled out my suit jacket. How good it felt. But it was getting late and so I decided to go to the terminal I would be leaving from the next day. Beijing has three main terminals located some distance apart. I took a bus to the one serving Delta, acquired a free internet password (Beijing is great for this service) and checked into the hourly lounge, buying just one hour for I felt compelled to check my emails first. Sure enough, Mark from Hong Kong was searching for me, telling me there was a man waiting for me back at the other terminal. He also sent me a cell phone number and the women at the desk were kind enough to dial it up and soon the man with the ADAM sign was on his way to meet me.

When he arrived, he had the suitcase I had left there, my winter coat and a pile of other things. Arrangements had also been made for me to stay at a different hotel. Well, I could go on and on but the short of it is, I gave him about everything but the coat, had a good night of sleep, flew on to Tokyo the next day, got bumped up to Business Class to Hawaii and had a great time on the Big Island of Hawaii with friends Ryan and Marina and former student Desiree. Only downside of that whole visit was, thanks to TSA and their not allowing us to lock our suitcases, by Bose QCII headphones were stolen out of my suitcase. They were in the suitcase in Japan, gone in Hilo. Thank you TSA, who only give an allusion of safety.

Farewell and God bless,

Don