conversation with a soldier

This isn’t an actual conversation I had, although it’s inspired by a lot of things I’ve been thinking about, the conversations some volunteers have found themselves in and includes pieces from a few different conversations I’ve shared with other people. 

Consumed with alcohol he slurs to me, “you’re all the same—all you good-hearted people. You’re only good because you can afford to be good.”

I look at him contemplating his words without any response

He continues.  “you rich kids.  You grow up in your suburban homes and daddy pays for college then you get to say, ‘I’m going to do something good for the world.  I’m going to move to another country for a few years and save the world with all my knowledge and skill.’  Why do you do this?”

Without time for my interjection, not that I had an interjection to contribute, he answers his question.

“it’s because you don’t live in the real world.  You’re not indebted to the banks and medical bills.  Your trust funds cover those.  You aren’t good because you’re good, you’re good because you have the luxury to be good.  You’re just a bunch of privileged kids who will never know reality.  You want some praise for your good deeds? Try living life, then I’ll give you some praise.  Oh what a good person you are, sacrificing a few years to live on an island.  You’re life is soooooo hard.  You gave up sooooooo much. What a saint you are.”

Not sure what to say, but feeling I should recognize his words were heard and his words will be replayed over and over as my mind tries to reconcile my position in the societal ladder of race, class, and nationality, I just looked at him as sincerely as I knew how.  Trying to read his story, his life, I looked at him in the hopes I would see him.

He sat down seemingly perplexed by my silence and confused as to why I didn’t storm away in anger.

“Well?” he said as if he was a fisherman dangling a worm in front of a fish, just waiting for it to bite.

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to tell me I’m a drunken asshole who knows nothing about you?  aren’t you going to try to prove me wrong? Aren’t you going to defend yourself? Put up a fight of any sort?  What do you have to say about me and the military? I bet you protest. You probably are one of those protesters who marches against guys like me and the lives we sacrifice for people like you.”

“I have nothing to argue. You know part of me, and that part is true.  Why argue truth?” I said as a solemn humility fell over me. 

He was right. I lived my life, he lived his life.  they were two different lives.  They’d always be two different lives.  I’d never know his life, or anyone else’s life for that matter. I can read books about other people and live beside people different than me, but at the end of the day I’m a privileged white American girl.  Already struggling in my attempt to figure out what I have to offer anyone, or who I think I am to offer “help” to anyone, all I could do was accept the truth. But, I can’t just sit still. I never can.

“You’re right I’ll never know. What do you want form me? Do you want me to do nothing? Stay where I was born?”

“I don’t want anything from you. I don’t want anything from anyone,” he confidently shares with a tinge of pride.

“ok”

There are a few seconds of silence.  We both are able to drown out the loud voices of the drunken men and the high-pitched giggles from the young girls sitting on their laps.  The band’s music is tuned out.  All I see is the ocean in the distance.  All I hear is confusion. 

“What do you want?” he gruffly but somewhat curiously asks.

“I want a lot.”

“Of course you do.  Your kind of people always do.”

“I want poverty, disease, racism, war, sexism, and fear to disappear.  I want to feel alive.  I want to dance with the pygmies in the middle of a protected jungle…just us and the rain…and I want to run with the wind.  I want to learn from the medicine men of the desert who are able to speak with fate and I want to laugh with children who know no neglect.  I want hope. I want freedom. I want truth.  I want to feel life and I want to be blend and be every person.  Every person.  From every lifestyle, skin color, religion and place.”

He smirked and replied, “Good luck. It’s never going to happen.” His face suggested he was glad he didn’t waste thousands of dollars on a college education if that’s all you get from it.  Some fantasy talk about things that will never be.

“I know, but we can dream,” I desperately pleaded. I wanted to believe my statement, but I’m not sure I was convinced. 

“Wrong.  You can dream.”

“Why can’t you dream?”

“Because it will only taunt me.  I’m never going to be rich.  There is no American dream and I’m no genius even if there was.  I’m always going to have a crack addicted mother, a dad behind bars, a dead brother, and a sister who won’t be able to go to college.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want your pity.”

“I don’t want your pity.”

“I don’t give pity.”

“That’s what you think.  Are you here because you love people, or because you feel guilty for the state of the world?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.  Maybe.”

Everything blurs back to silence. 

Probably picking up on the wave of sadness that had now consumed me he broke the silence.  “So the typhoon is going to be brutal.”

“Yebo.”

“What’s yebo?”

“Yeah. Nevermind.”

Semi-jokingly he asked, “Are you going to save some people after the storm.” 

“No. I can’t think of anyway I could.  Are you?”

“We might be called to help with some rescues up north depending on how bad she gets.”

curtains

I’ve always been a procrastinator.  If I really think about it I think it’s because I’m afraid of doing something that’s inadequate. I’m afraid it will a disappoint someone or prove my inability to do what I would like to accomplish.  So, I sit and think and doodle and do nothing.  The other day I had two hours with nothing to do.  My failed plan was to study Tagalog since I have my language proficiency interview in two weeks and am beyond far behind.  Languages are just hard for me.  Always have been.  Maybe it goes back to my fear of failure. 

So, there I am sitting in this delicious bakery right against a window.  A big window.  The kind of window that takes up a whole wall, and on the other side of the window is the street.  The busy lively street where people are working and walking and talking and laughing and living.  The busy lively loud street where jeepneys are stopping and trikes are honking and cars are swooshing through the soon to be flooded streets.  It was raining, but not intensely.  Not like the night before or like it would be a few hours later.  Just raining.  A moment of peace amidst the chaos of Megi. 

I was inside.  Dry.  Taking this all in.  Watching it all.  Trying to figure it out.  Where were these vehicles going? Who was in them? What were those kids talking about? Why is that woman sad? Why is that man laughing?  How much business did that vendor get today?  Will their vegetable supplier be wiped out of crop because of Megi’s furry?

Then it dawned on me.  How amazing are windows?!?!  If this had been a solid wall I was sitting next to, I’d be sitting with no one but myself, but it was a window and I was sitting with the street.  So many buildings have windows.  People seem to love windows.  In gloomy hospitals it seems worn out patients will offer a smile if they get the chance to look out a window.  In our homes we love windows that reveal the world outside the physical structure of our houses.   Even busy multi national corporation offices have windows.  Sometimes they are entirely windows for that matter. 

Windows connect us to other people, to a world beyond ourselves.  It’s easy to see why someone invented a clear glass window.  We want to see the world. We want to be involved in the world.  It’s a beautiful world beyond the window and we want to share in that beauty.  Something about the life moving on the other side of the glass energizes and inspires us.  We want to feel the presence of life beyond us.

They solitary confinement makes a person go insane, even if they weren’t mentally ill before entering isolation.  Prisoners say the worst prison cells are those without windows.  Without access to the outside world.  We need that connection to the other side, whatever that side may be.  We need it.  It keeps us sane and gives us hope. 

It’s interesting then that as I’m fantasizing about a home of my own the first thing I’m going to invest in are curtains.  I love this massive window and the connection I feel from it, but that connection isn’t whole.  There is still a piece of glass dividing me from the noise and rain and smog and shouting.  I’m still entirely in my head.  I can imagine what all those people are doing and thinking and where they are going and why they are going there, but I’m distanced from them.  Safe from the exhaustion required to try to converse in a language I don’t speak, safe from the pollution, safe from the sadness I would feel if I heard a persons story and knew for sure that they had nowhere to go when Megi again picks up speed. 

I want curtains for privacy.  Privacy from curious neighbors who like to chika chika.  Privacy so I can retreat to my house and isolate myself if I’ve had a long day of miscommunication and cultural confusion.  We have curtains which further separate us from everything and everyone outside.  We close them so we don’t see the bad, the sad and the painful…so that we have an escape from the parts of life that are too hard for us to deal with.  The ugly things.  Curtains guard us from the world, disconnecting us from a community.

We, humans, are strange creatures.  We want connection but only at a safe distance.  One that doesn’t challenge us too much or make us too uncomfortable.  We are willing to cover our windows and voluntarily create spaces of isolation.  It’s all very strange to me.  I look forward to curtains I can close to the world or open to let in the sun. 

motion

Sitting next to a stranger my soul calls brother, the world passes me by.  Or maybe it’s me that’s passing through the world.  Daan Daan.  Too fast but never fast enough.  Trying to inhale every ounce of culture and absorb what has been, what is, and what will be through the pores of my skin so they are known to me as my heart knows no boundaries.  Disconnected from all communication my spirit dances with the carabao to the tops of the mountains, while simultaneously falling back to earth kasama the graceful jungle rains.  Delicately balanced between a detachment from all emotion and thought, and fighting to know and feel everything that could ever be, my mind keeps me present while rewinding the hands of time so the past becomes the future and the future becomes the present.  Like a carousal madly spinning, peace showers over me cradling me in a blanket I call home.

With the tires still spinning a woman jumps on.  Quail eggs, pasalubong, and hot dogs.  The heat engulfs even the typhoon rains, evaporating them before they soak through my pants.  The woman, a tattered history book struggling to stand against typhoon after typhoon, passes some eggs to the back while the bayad moves forward.  Just as she was on she is off, waiting for the next bus, praying for the next customer.

And just like that, “CHI WAAAALLLLLA!”  People shoving and pushing…India flying by.  The tracks and trees and saris paint my dreams to life.  Not sure where I’m going, but sure I am moving and certain that movement is home, I cling on to this vortex of time and place, finding comfort in the stench of worked bodies.

Burning garbage unites with the moist air holding my lungs hostage. A putrid smell, but so beautiful it is.  Bamboo huts. The backdrop for the fires that create constellations planted in the soil.  Mmmm, it looks so familiar it looks like home.

A bota bota under the pure African sky, illuminated with every astrological gift from God, zig zags me through swamps and war zones.  The world spins chaotically round, spitting me out at the mercy of fate.  Grounded and unpredictable, home welcomes a future of hope.

A new song comes on. I’m back.  And just leaving.  My heart is ahead of my mind.  Both are still, and both are moving.  Moving with the wheels and the quail egg sellers I revisit the places I have yet to go, dreaming of the places I’ve already been.  Faster and faster we move, but slower and slower the world is.  The colors blurred together forming indistinguishable shades of hope I know this is where I am

barangay elections and pamilya ko

So as the U.S. is preparing for elections that will surely result in some torn feelings and potential policy change, the Pilipinas are also gearing up for some election.  However, the elections here are for the Barangays, the smallest form of government here (think almost  neighborhood elections).  The elections are scheduled to take place on the 25^th and candidates are given two weeks to campaign, starting today.  You have never seen campaigning like this, unless of course you have been in the Philippines for election season.  It’s a blast.  Trucks roam the streets blaring mixed songs (think reggaetone meets American hip hop and Korean pop) from giant speakers tied to the roof with ropes as people wearing color coordinated shirts chase and jump onto the trucks to parade the streets.  Bubbles and flags are involved.  Lots of happy children shoot off some sort of noise making device that sounds like cap gun shots and groups of people begin their drinking circles hours before they normally do.  This all begins at 5:30 am and I’ll soon find out if it ever stops.  My guess is it doesn’t.  And then there are the celebrations for the victors that will take place after the elections.  It’s a good time.  However, I don’t get to wear anyone’s shirts or parade their flags or ride in the back of the trucks because the peace corps doesn’t want us to get mixed up in politics, which is probably a pretty good idea.

Also, Zaira is sitting here next to me and she is wonderful. We’re listening to some mason Jennings (“Fighter Girl”) and she’s playing games on my cellphone while listening to the ocean in a sea shell I brought back from my site visit in Anda.  We also took a little break to do some beat boxing.  And now hse is drawing “our” family in my tagalog notebook.  She also just named my smart bro Kayla (pronounced Ki-la).

I don’t know if I’ve described my host family here in Olongapo yet.  Actually I’m pretty sure I haven’t because I don’t know where to begin and I don’t feel I have accurate words or time to describe them.  Either way I’m going to attempt right now to give you a brief introduction. 

I’m very fortunate because I have a family that isn’t divided by a father with many families or girlfriends.  My host parents have a sari sari shop as well as anoodle stall that just today started also selling hot dogs and chicken sandwhiches. 

The girls have nick-named my host mom “tawa na tawa” which roughly translates “to be very glad all the time.”  She is.  Always smiling and laughing she cares for the entire neighborhood.  She speaks of a mother’s sacrifice often as she works in the shop from before sunrise to the late hours of the night to save php 100 (roughly two dollars) a day so my sisters can go to college. 

My host dad is a master chef, as he likes to call himself and true business entrepreneur.  He is proud of his three daughters and treats his family with great love and respect, also working non-stop to provide a future for his daughters. 

Zaira is the oldest daughter.  She is 9 years old and has been my biggest help in learning Tagalog (not that I’ve learned it but I would be even more lost without her).  She loves to dance, and definitely possesses the characteristics of an oldest sister always keeping the other two in line.  She has an artistic mind and never ceases coming up with things to create using any and every resource she finds.  Zaira is a true perfectionist and dreams of being a flight attendant so she can see the world.  She loves to look at my pictures and hear everyone’s stories.  Her mind never slows down as she is curious about everything and always has a question about something she wants to understand.

Francine is 7 (I think…maybe 8) and she has a great sense of humor.  She loves to laugh and will often laugh at her mistakes.  She is the girly girl of the bunch always dressed in her best with a pair of hello kitty plastic high heels on her feet.  She possess the happy go lucky personality that matches her bouncy pig tails.  She is also the most religious of the girls.  Respectful of her faith she will always cross her body and say a quick prayer anytime we pass a church.

Kikay (pronounced Key-ki) is the youngest of the girls 6 years old) and her personality is displayed as she is constantly caring for those around her.  The first person on her mind is never herself.  She is the one who wants to help her parents with chores, or asks to ake marienda (snack) to school for the kids who are hungry.  She bops through life hugging everyone she sees finding school work a waste of her time and energy when there are pictures to color, games to play, and friends to visit.

They are a great family and have been a true blessing to me since I’ve been here.  I can’t even describe how much I’ll miss them when I move to my permanent site but luckily I’m only a 9 hour bus ride away, so I’ll be able to visit every few months!