des photos...

fiesta:

Our baranguay (neighbourhood or the smallest administrative unit in Philippine cities) hosted a fiesta for four nights. It involved partying, dancing, eating and drinking well into the night. We stopped by on the last night to have a quick dance.

my beautiful apartment

Guimaras Island, just south of Iloilo City - spent a night here in absolute awe!




One woman let me take over her loom to take a go at weaving, Indag-an coop in Miag-ao. The community members some years ago moved all of their looms into one building to form a weaving cooperative. I bought some amazing shawls and napkins.

Miag-ao Church, built 1786 of coral stone, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site -Photographer: Nereo Lujan





One day as I was washing dishes I accidentally grabbed a lizard that was hiding under the rim of a bowl

Canadian Urban Institute Philippines Internship

I am interning at the Canadian Urban Institute - Philippines (CUI-P) office, working primarily under the Urban and Regional Planning Program (URPP), assisting in developing seven topical modules that will serve as introductory workbooks for local government units throughout the region. Jed, my illustrious and well-read co-intern, and I are tasked with assisting, supporting and encouraging working professionals, who have been assigned to specific modules, to complete all seven workbooks by a quickly approaching deadline, July 31. In addition to that, I am to write three articles that correspond to three of the module topics for internal publication in the CUI-P Leadership Series. The great part about this project is that we get to meet and work with local planners and from them learn about regional best practices and planning processes.

Office lunch at Break Through, a seafood restaurant

A concept map to aid in developing the knowledge management module

Guimaras Agri-tourism project launch

Metro Iloilo Guimaras Economic Development Council (MIGEDC) website publishing workshop - I'm in the back, faaaaar right!

Cocks

Since arriving here, I have necessarily gotten used to the cockadoodledo of the roosters. I can’t exactly sleep through the frequent crows which start at 4am and continue until dusk, but I can now passively acknowledge them while staying restful. It took me 2 weeks to achieve this.

As I’m getting ready in the morning, I can’t help but imagine the roosters are saying things. Imagine “Go to the bathroooooom” to the tune of cockadoodledo. I mean, it would have to be in the voice my younger brother would put on, when we were kids, to imitate a scratchy but syrupy, old-lady voice and I’m not sure why they would be saying, ‘go to the bathroom’ when everyone else here says ‘comfort room’. But one thing is for sure, ‘comfort room’ does not fit.

I feel like what they most often say is (and again, imagine it to the cockadoodledo tune) ‘I don’t want to’. Now, these declarations could be referring to any number of things: ‘I don’t want to (eat this)’, ‘I don’t want to (listen to you others cawing anymore)’…. There are several cocks just below my window who take turns crowing. They are attached to trunks of trees or sticks in the ground with strings tied to one of their chicken-like ankles. They can’t reach each other or the hen house (the hens roam free). These are big, boisterous cocks with puffed up breasts and, I imagine, bred for fighting. So, when I hear them declare to the world, ‘I don’t want to’, I think their fate is mistaken. Like the child whose parents forced her into practicing piano through cramped fingers and a stiff back, and she will never be the famous pianist that they imagine. She might, for example, after many unsuccessful applications to professional orchestras, end up working as a server or bus driver; her manual and dorsal problems persisting. The mistaken fate of these cocks, however, is a bit more gruesome.

I Shook my Towel and a Lizard Fell Out

It’s hard to think about my culture without holding it up against another. I suppose, being immersed in difference, then, is an opportune time to do so. So, here I begin, albeit within a development context and with the awareness that I am currently part of a trajectory based model of time and progress within which ‘undeveloped’ countries are lagging behind those that are ‘developed’. I don't mean to be negative here, just constructively critical of myself, my privileged intentions and the way that I understand development systems.

When I think about my culture, I often wonder how securely attached it is to place. My value systems, my nuanced sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, do I have traveling versions of these so that I can let confrontations with difference pass? Being here, and not wanting to react to difference by making judgment calls, thus placing systems within a hierarchy of best practices, I am reminded of what my ashtanga yoga teacher said at the start of chavasana (corpse pose): “let your mind relax, when a thought enters your mind – whether it be about unpaid bills, dinner plans – acknowledge it and then send it on a train out of there.” I want this to be my answer to the problem of immediately making judgments, though because it is something we invariably do all the time whether we like it or not, I am doubtful I will reach inter-cultural enlightenment (does this even exist?) by sending my judgments away on trains. But the thought of a slow, multiple-boxcar train chugging off into the distance, loaded up with all of my biases is really a soothing, hopeful thought! So, what would this look like? I suppose it would be along the lines of recognizing difference, acknowledging it, even learning from it, but before making that unnecessary comparison, where this foreign something must be positioned as inferior or superior to familiar somethings, it gets a one way ticket out of here.

I realize I’ve been doing a lot of talking about how I position my culture and others, not so much about what my culture is. This is tough, but you know that, having done it all yourselves. Thinking about why it is so difficult, makes me question the actual state of culture. So far I’ve already decided that my culture is indubitably affected by being immersed in another culture, so it’s not static. Aside from that, I believe individual and group culture does change, but very slowly. This very fact makes the act of writing culture down challenging; it proposes permanence to something that is constantly changing. I am reminded of looking back at my old journals from high school. Reading them, is at first terrifying, but eventually, the horror in my old self subsides when I begin to be grateful for the change; I am no longer that self-righteous, tortured, selfish woman I once was.

That said, I am constantly negotiating my ‘surface’ culture in my new environment. These things are hard-wired into me. An example of this is my irrational fear of critters and my even more irrational, grater fear of critters that are foreign to me, more and greater because they are different. Here in Iloilo City, Philippines, I am grudging living with a whole extended family of lizards – grandma, auntie, ma and baby lizards are the movement in the corners of my eyes – who click to each other from hidden nooks all through the day and night. My coping mechanism is to talk about them; I do so constantly (Poor Jed – “this morning I saw a moth emerging from its cocoon by dragging it along the rough floor surface to eventually emerge…,” “I trapped a millipede in my water bottle and it’s turning the water red…”).

But I’m really not sure if fear is a good way to talk about my culture, even if it is surface culture, because it manifests itself into something negative when faced with difference. And this brings me back to where I started: difference, judgments and the hierarchy of 'best' culture...