Friends, Fiestas, and Fangs

The night before I left for Manila, my friends and I met some guys hunting fruit bats in the street. While their massive prey are feeding on banana trees, the young men use air rifles to stun them, then string their loot together on a stick ready to cook the following day.

Karaoke is huge here. Nary an event goes by without it, and most every house has their own karaoke unit through a DVD player in their house. This picture is from the 50th birthday party of Bebeth (singing), who works in the budget office at the municipality. Held at a nearby beach, we enjoyed a buffet featuring ‘lechon’ (rotisserie pig), the traditional holiday food before the party got started in earnest.

Biri with the Baraks, Round II

On Monday, April 28th, I took my second trip to Biri Island with my friends. As with the first, we had a great time amongst absolutely breathtaking scenery.

Most of our group within a sort of natural amphitheatre carved into the rocks at Biri.

The trip was quite different from the last. We again stayed at Jazel’s home in Bagong Silang, where she teaches at the local school. But this trip was planned around their community’s fiesta. It was a very low-key affair, but it did mean that we had countless invitations to eat with families in the village, and had no need to cook for ourselves.

So we enjoyed the company of each other and friends in the community all day Monday over plenty of food and drink and swam in the calm seas nearby at night. On Tuesday, we set off early to the rock formations at Bel-At. We had several more hours at the rocks this time, which allowed us to spend more time exploring.

Below are some of my favorite scenes from this trip:

Bounding through rocks and waters alike, we spent much of our time exploring this beautifully jagged coastline. 

When it rains, it pours...

This ferry took me and my bus from Luzon, the main island in the Philippines, to my island of Northern Samar. The 23 hour bus ride is a far cry from the quick 1 hour plane ride I had taken to site originally, but now everything is on my own dime.

Since I returned to Rosario sans Peace Corps, my daily life has changed significantly. Unfortunately, this mainly stems from a string of personal adversity. As the rain fell outside daily, despite this being the ‘dry season’ or ‘summer’ in the Philippines, my luck continued to fail me.

Less than a week after I returned from my resignation, I was the victim of a theft from my home. Sleeping on the second floor of my duplex apartment, I cracked the window due to the heat thinking that no one would scale a wall to enter in my sleep. I was wrong.

I had suspected theft three times within my first month here, each time a few 1,000 pesos would be missing from my wallet. I had assumed that the perpetrator entered through a vaulted entry into the adjacent family’s apartment not properly closed off, so I was trying to handle it internally with the landlord. But then, as I went to pay for transportation to the airport while heading into Manila as mandated by Peace Corps, I noticed that 5,000 pesos, the biggest hit yet, was missing from my wallet; money I absolutely needed just to get to Manila. Fortunately, my counterpart was able to assist me at the time.

Rosariohanon's Passion of the Christ

The cast and crew of Rosariohanon’s production of the Stations of the Cross.

The most entertaining part of Holy Week in Rosario, for me, had to be the choir group’s reenactment of the Stations of the Cross, popularly known even here as the “Passion of the Christ” thanks to Mel Gibson.

The group had been preparing costumes and practicing daily for several weeks, and the end result was indicative of that effort. The procession began 4AM Saturday at the church, winding throughout town before ending a couple of miles away at Rosario National High School.

Each station involved readings, with the youth acting out what was being said. The event lasted through sunrise, until about 6:30AM.

Below are pictures from their performance:

Holy Week Rosario

I am not particularly religious, nor do I identify with any particular religion. But I have been interested in how the different cultures I have visited celebrate their faith. And the fact that here in Rosario most of my best friends are intimately involved in the church has led me to become active in the Easter proceedings.

All in all, during Holy Week, I spent over 25 hours at formal church masses or events, notwithstanding the many hours chatting with friends as they made preparations for the week at the church. I also sang hymns in waray-waray, the local language, in the choir during the Saturday Easter Vigil (only possible due to the lyrics being shown through PowerPoint).

It is not an exaggeration to say that this one-week represented more church than I have attended in my past 10 years of life. But the fact that I was raised Catholic gives me a point of comparison between Easter celebrations in America and in the Philippines. To say the least, Catholicism in the Philippines is much more devout, as you can see below:

Father Roni blesses palms brought by the parishioners during Palm Sunday mass.

Going Rogue...

This has been one trying week. A week that changed everything about my time in the Philippines, and threatened to remove me from my new community for good.

I felt great about my time in Rosario when, Friday morning, I was at a hospital in Catarman, the provincial capital, for a lab test to finally determine whether I have any lingering parasites from my visit to Mali. After just one month, I was already well-integrated into the community, and Bobi and I were in the midst of planning a disaster risk reduction and management workshop with local government officials.

But as I was waiting for the results from the lab, I got a text message from our country director notifying me that they had obtained 'compelling and overwhelming evidence' that I have been riding a motorcycle, which is in violation of Peace Corps policy, and that I would be immediately sent home.

My friends and I enjoy an octopus and fish feast Friday night at the church after learning that these might be my last moments in Rosario. Father Roni (right), the priest of our local Catholic Church and a great friend, has offered that I can join them for their meals everyday if I return.

Biri Island with the Baraks

This past Sunday, I joined a group of friends from Rosario on an outing to Biri Island. We had a group of 14 people, all of whom are active in the local Catholic Church. 10 of those people are young men from the Baraks Boys, a group that I often join to chat during my free time. The other 4 are young women whom I have also gotten to know over the past month. Jazel, one such woman, lives in Rosario, but is posted to Bagong Silang, in the municipality of Biri Island, as an elementary school teacher. She served as our host during the trip.

Our entire group pictured on Hinablan Rock.

The municipality of Biri Island, made up of several small islands, is the premier tourist attraction in Northern Samar province due to its astounding natural beauty. While it certainly did not disappoint, the bigger part of the trip was actually the food. Whereas we as Americans are used to food taking center stage on vacation, we generally see vacation as a reprieve from cooking and an opportunity to sample the local fare. In this case, the guys made use of most of our available time to cook every meal, each of which was completely fresh and delicious.

The following are select pictures from our outing, and thanks to the Filipino affinity for picture taking, there were a lot to go through: