Life in the barangay (say: bah-run-GUY) is very different from what we’ve experienced so far. Peace Corps has been stepping down the level of accommodation since staging, likely to make the process of transitioning to a host family as smooth as possible. We will periodically return to our hub site, but for the next two months the majority of our time will be spent at our respective cluster sites in the barangay.
The term barangay is basically a small town that is “officially” part of a bigger municipality, but is a government unit in itself. Each barangay has an elected barangay captain and council who govern. Most volunteers do the majority of their projects in their own barangay, which results in a truly grass-roots program making progress from the bottom up.
Life here is very different that it was in the protected environment of the hotels where we’d been staying so far. There’s pretty much one road in town that’s paved and the houses and farms are accessed via this road. While the baranguy is part of a larger city, it is really quite rural. My familys main income (I think) comes from farming. The all land surrounding the house is rice paddies, there’s a yard on the side where they raise a vast assortment of poultry and out back is the hut where the pigs live. In addition to the livestock and paddies, there is also a good sized garden where they grow various vegetables and there are papaya and jackfruit trees all around the house. For the most part, everything that we eats is fresh picked/killed and only a few vegetables come from the market in town.
The house is always full of children who, while eager to say hello and goodbye, have been quite shy up until now. Today, though, they started calling me ate (which roughly means “sister” but you call most women by it) puti (which is the bicol word for “white”) and amused themselves by playing with my hair and inspecting/counting my many mosquito bites. Right now it’s pretty rough talking with the kids because I haven’t really got much vocabulary and we’re just now learning basic sentence structure and verb conjugations.
My host parents ate Shirley and kuyo Fred are very kind and want very much to help me learn bicol, unfortunately their method of naming off random things that we see in bicol and then looking at me expectantly doesn’t jive with my learning style. In the early stages of language learning, I don’t retain vocabulary that I hear very well. In the beginning, I really need to see the word and be able to read it to learn and commit to memory. Most of the people here are very eager to help me learn, but their approach is exactly the same and I’m forgetting pretty much everything that people try and teach me.
Our classes are held in the house where our language teacher is staying. She comes from bicol, but her town is about an hour away so she stays with a host family as well. My house is the farthest from our classes and I have gotten the OK to get reimbursed for the cost of taking a trike or pedicab to class. I’ve just started doing that when I go to and from home for lunch because walking leaves me with almost no time to eat, but otherwise I walk. It’s probably a mile walk and I don’t mind doing it, but it seems that pretty much the entire barangay thinks I’m crazy because I like the walk. For as hard as many people work here, filipinos seem to have a serious aversion to walking down the road for more than a few minutes.
I like my walks, though. It gives me a chance to see the town and say hello to people. Every day it seems like more and more people greet me and stop to say hello or ask me a few questions. It also means I’m getting more shouts of “Hey Joe!” from the kids (mostly) and “good morning ma’am’s” from the soldiers from the nearby training camp who are out for their morning PT runs. It does get a bit irritating after a while for people to stare or call me Joe (as in G.I.- how pretty much any white person will be greeted by random strangers) but I’m working on learning to ignore it all.
Every day it seems like I know a few more people, or at least they know me. I’ve been introduced to many people and I rarely remember their names. Today on my walk home, I was stopped three times by people whom I remember, but don’t know by name. They’re a friendly bunch, this barangay, but it’s a bit of information overload right now. Even though I go to bed early (’cause I get up at the crack of dawn to go running before class) I usually retire to my room shortly after dinner to give myself a chance to chill out and recharge from the day. It often feels like there is constant stimulus and my brain is quickly saturated, making any additional “language lessons” over the dinner table quite pointless.
All in all, though, life is pretty nice. I chat with other volunteers pretty regularly via SMS and get to hear about all the strange things they get served (I’m VERY lucky in the food department) and what their families are up to. There seems to be good chemistry between the four of us in our cluster, and so far we haven’t tired of one another- though who knows what I’ll say in two months. I can’t believe that I’ve not even been here a week- it seems like ages. I can’t even imagine what it will be like when it comes time to leave at the end of training…
I found kids to be the best language teachers while I was abroad. They never tired of helping me sound out words and try to write them down. Songs were also really useful because I could learn to sing them and then later learn what the lyrics meant and realize I already “knew” the vocabulary.