The time for my site visit is slowly creeping up on me. We leave our cluster sites and travel to what will eventually be our permanent sites this coming Tuesday. We thought that we were supposed to go on Monday, but it’s Labor Day here and that means holiday for us. The thought that I’m going to my site is a little scary, since I don’t feel terribly confident with my language skills. I know it’s been less than a month of language instruction, but it’s still scary- we just had our mid-training evaluation. We are mid training and I barely feel confident enough with my skills to answer simple questions.
As usual, I am getting the grammar and structure rather quickly, but the vocabulary is lacking. I know how to say things but I don’t know the words. My language teacher keeps telling me to just fill in the English word if I don’t know it in Bicol, but I haven’t managed to make that work for me yet. It’s funny, years of language study and that was one thing that my teachers never let us get away with and here I am being encouraged to do it. Funnier thing is, here people will probably understand what you mean or you might even use the right word if you sub in an English word. It’s very difficult to get used to, as is the feeling that your average 3 year old has a better command of the local language than I do.
Tonight I went to my second Filipino birthday party. The first was a party thrown for a classmate by his host family. Tonight’s party was for the host mother of another trainee at my cluster site. Tomorrow there will be a birthday party at my house for the youngest of the girls in the house. She’s turning 11 and everyone is invited.
As with most social events, there is always a lot of food and you are encouraged to eat, eat, eat! In addition to birthday cake (or in tonight’s case, cakes) spaghetti seems to be traditional birthday party fare. It’s a bit exciting to have a meal without rice, but the spaghetti leaves something to be desired. As with the local pizza, the tomato sauce is really sweet. Really sweet. It takes some of the fun out of the novelty of having spaghetti, but not too much. I have found food here to be fairly sweet in general. And if it’s not sweet, it’s probably salty. My host mother often comments on different vegetables (I keep mentioning how much I like vegetables, cause meat at 3 meals a day is way more than I can digest) and she keeps running through a mental checklist of vegetables and asking me if I like them. I keep telling her that I like all vegetables (except this bitter squash that I tried a couple of weeks ago- it’s vile) and she still keeps asking if I like specific things like maybe I don’t really like them that much.
It’s funny, though, because she keeps commenting on vegetables, and some fruits, that the kids like them. Then she goes into detail about how she prepares them and, I kid you not, it is the same thing every time. “Oh, we just slice them up and sautee/fry them. Then we add a little sugar/salt and butter, and they just love it.” Of course the kids love it, I think you could fry up just about anything and cover it with butter and sugar and kids would eat it. Last night we had some really sour fruit, they called them plums but they weren’t plums. They were about the size of grapes and looked like blueberries, but more purple in color. In the middle was a small stone and the fruit not only made your face pucker, but also stained your mouth and fingers violet. These were, of course, served salted. Apparently, this fruit is a favourite with pregnant women…