It is Tuesday. Look around. There is nothing particularly special here. I wake up, as usual, at five, while Elaine, another volunteer who was passing through and needed a place to crash, dozes till seven.

A day in the life. I wake up, fall out of bed, drag a book across my head. Murakami’s 1Q84, page 553.

That night, Aomame stepped out onto the balcony in her slippers and gray jersey workout clothes to look at the moon. She was holding a cup of cocoa. It was the first time in a very long time that she felt like drinking cocoa but the sight of a can of Van Houten cocoa in a kitchen cabinet had suddenly inspired her. Two moons–a big one and a little one–hung in the perfectly clear southwestern sky. Instead of sighing, she produced a tiny moan. A dohta had been born from an air chrysalis, and now there were two moons. 1984 had changed to 1Q84. The old world had vanished, and she could never get back to it.

Elaine wakes. I take my coffee, Elaine takes her tea. We eat cinnamon roll and a pineapple roll and I confess that my usual breakfast is tomato paste mixed with oatmeal. Elaine wrinkles her nose. I explain that, in comparison to most, I don’t care much about taste. I have fully functional tastebuds, sure. But I eat to eat. “I hate to compare myself to Mohammad Atta, the mastermind behind the 9/11 bombings,” I start–

Elaine stares at me.

“But. Well apparently he didn’t care about food taste either. He would get a bunch of potatoes. I forget where I heard this. He would get a bunch of potatoes and make a huge thing of mashed potatoes and put it in the fridge and when he got hungry just take spoonfuls of the stuff, like that.”

Elaine and I leave for downtown a little after eight. She has to stop by the bank, then go to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources where she works on developing eco-tourism. I have my Mythology and Folk Literature class.

In the trike Elaine says this: “Oh. I forgot my towel at your place.”

“See, you should have taken me up on that offer for the free spare towel.”

We part ways.

In Mythology & Folk Literature we discuss Odysseus in the land of the Cyclops. I nudge my students toward forming some contrast between Eastern and Western myth. I show videos: Polyphemus eating Ulysses’ men, Grendel eating Hrothgar’s men. I stop the frame on Grendel’s fearful face as Beowulf turns the tide and confess that part of me begins to pity the poor monsters who always must lose to the mythical heros.

My students stare at me with half smiles.

At lunchtime I download test questions my co-teacher made for our first periodical exam for fourth-year English. The test starts at 2pm and it is my self-imposed task to compile her items and mine, and make an answer sheet for quick grading. This is purely my suggestion, since grading 94 tests with 115 items each takes so much longer when the items are splayed anywhere and everywhere over a six-page exam. So much quicker, so much less paper, when there is a one-page sheet with bubble-in multiple choice, blanks for fill-in questions, and space for the essays. There is no time for lunch. I’ll grab lunch after I give the exams to the secretary for photocopying.

I give the exams to the secretary for photocopying. A second-year student comes up to me. Asks me if I have my laptop today.

I do.

Asks me if she can borrow it for her science presentation on diffusion.

Why not. Give her the laptop. Help her set up. Go get some food. But moments later student fetches me. There’s a problem. Student can’t open her Microsoft Office Powerpoint 2010 presentation on my laptop.

I open LibreOffice, the open source compatible software. The student begins reading about diffusion. Random molecular motion. Solutes settling to a place of greatest maximum distribution. I sit in the back of class, listening. I’ll eat lunch at 3, when my co-teacher is set to teach.

Moments later Science class is disrupted when the teacher is called to minister to a student who has seen a ghost. In the balay kubo behind the Science Building there is a mannequin. The student apparently watched this mannequin turn from white to black. Now the student has gone white, stiff.

I stand in the back of class, facilitating my first ever high school science lesson. We discuss phagocytosis, or cell feeding. I ponder whether predilection toward eating is akin to phagocytosis.

At two, the English exams are photocopied and 47 students spread out 47 desks to the maximum distance in a small room. I stand in the corner by the door, the best position to guard students from cheating. I ponder molecular diffusion.

I get a text from my co-teacher ten minutes to 3. She has a meeting. Could I please teach the class today?

I recall Hesse’s Siddhartha. He could do three things well. He could wait, he could fast, and he could think. I go to the canteen, get a coke to hold me over, and teach a class on Pindar’s Ode XII-10. It’s about celebrating victory. I ask students how they would celebrate a victory. I teach them about trochees and dactyls and iambs. We clap out the beats. I ask students what it literally means to be an Olympian. To be like the gods on high. I tell students to write a collaborative poem, about victory. One group has just topped the entrance examination into Ateneo University. Another group has just won World War IV. Another has successfully proposed to his/her girlfriend/boyfriend. The last group has won the gold medal in banig-making.

Students count dactyls and iambs.

At four it is English periodical exam again. 47 more students arrange 47 more desks. Molecular diffusion. I sit in the back of class because I still have to prepare a script for our Theatre Club workshop at five. The topic is “timing and emphasis”. I have a video from Amir Khan’s 3 Idiots, and I type the dialogue out. Students will practice the dialogue using various timings and pauses.

At five we collect exams and I search for my Theatre Club students, who are nowhere to be found. Everyone is busy preparing for Friday’s Aquaintance Party. I silently postpone the Theatre Club workshop.

It is past five and I should eat lunch by now but I have little desire. I can wait, I can fast, I can think.

I wander out to the back of the Science Building, near the balay kubo with the ghost mannequin, and supervise the handball team’s practice. We now have both a boys team and a girls team. There is supposed to be a tournament this Saturday but tomorrow I will be informed that it will be postponed one week. I stand on the sidelines and chat with John Kim. I ask him about the English periodical exam. It was long, he says. But it was a little bit easier since I’d let him borrow my book and review figures of speech. John Kim has poor attendance but he wants to do well in class. You can feel it.

At six I wander toward my jeep stop home. For the first time in a very long time I eat Bicol express and one serving of rice in the canteen at the corner and then I board my jeep.

Aomame closed her eyes and continued to think: I have probably been drawn into the passageway of the “force opposed to Little People” created by Fuka-Eri and Tengo. That force carried me into this side. What other explanation could there be? And the role I am playing in this story is by no means small. I may even be one of the central characters. I am in the story that Tengo set in motion. In a sense, I am inside him–inside his body. I am inside that shrine, so to speak.

The role one plays depends on the story one reads. For me, the author of the story is quite umambiguously the Philippines. I am not a central character. But I am inside her, inside her body, drawn through a passageway two years ago, reading about my role day by day.

I saw an old science fiction movie on television long ago. It was the story of a small group of scientists who shrank their bodies down to microscopic size, boarded a submarine-like vehicle (which had also been shrunk down), and entered their patient’s blood vessels through which they gained entry to his brain in order to performa complex operation that would have been impossible under ordinary circumstances. Maybe my situation is like that. I’m in Tengo’s blood, and circulating through his body. I battled the white blood cells that attacked the invading foreign body (Me as I headed for the root cause of the disease, and I must have succeeded in “deleting” that cause when I killed Leader at the Hotel Okura.

Now, the Philippines is written on my heart, a jumble of geometric veins on my chest. I am simply the transcriber, taking poetic license here and there.

To continue with the blood analogy, I should soon be drawn into a vein, spent, having served my purpose. Before long, I will be expelled from the body. That is the rule by which the body’s system works–an inescapable destiny.

It is Tuesday, 2Q12. Instead of sighing, I produce a tiny moan.

What is the cost, in U.S. dollars, of the pedicab? What is the relative purchasing power of this amount in America? Could one buy, for instance, a Darth Vader wall clock as might be installed in a doctors’ office, capable of spouting Star Wars quotes on the hour and half-hour much to the amusement of patients and receptionists alike?

What is the cost, in U.S. dollars, of repairing a broken pedicab chassis? Is the welding for the chassis under any kind of warranty?

Where might a pedicab driver obtain such a cowboy hat? Has the pedicab driver seen a John Wayne flick, and if so, did he consider the proverbial American cowboy to be some kind of fancy pompous jerk? If he has not seen a John Wayne flick, what is the connotation of a cowboy hat in the mind of the pedicab driver? Or is it simply pragmatic given the tropical sun?

How many times has the pedicab driver entered the grocery “Wilmars” where he waits for passengers from dawn till dusk? Does the pedicab driver feel a healthy competition toward other pedicab drivers?

Among pedicab drivers, is there a socially mediated hierarchy akin to caste stratification dictated by a system of mutually agreed upon aesthetics manifested in one’s pedicab, as in the Buick right on down to the Pinto?

If a pedicab driver were to save part of his daily earnings for a year, say 3 pesos a day, how many years would it take to own his pedicab instead of renting it at 40 pesos a day?

In a geographic location in which the average yearly rainfall exceeds X or Y or Z millimetres, can one realistically save money for a rainy day?

When the pedicab driver comes home from work, does he greet his wife–assuming for the moment that she is a stay-at-home type–with affection?

Has anyone ever written a love story about a pedicab driver and if so, did the pedicab driver in the story profess his love on bended knee with ebullient gestures and learned phrases, and did his damsel blush and swoon, and would it have been more true-to-life and cinema-verite if the story had not ended happily or tragically but in some gray middle ground where life plods along, day by day?

What might make a pedicab driver abandon his pedicab to sit on the corner in the early dusk, watching the people go this way and that? What might make a foreigner sit down next to him, also in the early dusk? What percentage of the pedicab driver’s passengers make conversation with him en route to their destinations? What is the usual tone of voice taken toward the pedicab driver? Has the pedicab driver ever enjoyed a serious political discussion with one of his passengers? Has the pedicab driver ever heard the phrase, “Luke, I am your father”?

At what level of education did the pedicab driver leave school? Do Filipino boys dream–as American boys do of becoming garbage collectors and/or dump truck operators and/or forklift operators–of becoming pedicab drivers?

What would the pedicab driver think of someone who tried to write about him by imitating the highly idiosyncratic style of a famous writer, namely Donald Barthelme? If the pedicab driver knew the word “derivative”, would he consider it apt in such an instance?

How many times has the pedicab driver forgotten to rub between his fingers the well-worn rosary dangling from the handlebars?

How can one tell if a foreign passenger knows the appropriate fare? Is it immoral to ask for more than the going rate from a foreigner? After all, isn’t there no fixed rate for a trip?

If a human being sleeps within the space of a rectangular prism of welded steel which is at its broadest point approximately half the length of an average human body fully extended, what is the condition of said human’s twelve thoraic vertebrae after 365 days? After 5,234 days?

If a foreigner in the neighborhood rents a room in a boarding house, is he by definition wealthy? Has he ever slept all night in a pedicab? Has the foreigner ever felt what is like to beg for money?

My darling Maria Fatima Jane Bulalao de Ascuncion, your father thinks me a mindless human wheel-turner, but imagine the possibilities: the open road, driving into the sunset, a pedicab driver cutting a sharp profile in his genuine rawhide cowboy hat, a little lace fringe decorating the roof of his “Amigo” pedicab, and his girl, wearing her finest Sunday jeans…what do you think?

What would be the nature of a collision that could cause the axle of a pedicab to separate from the wheel? Would there have to be a passenger or passengers in the pedicab at the moment of impact?

Was the pedicab driver already a pedicab driver when his first child was born? His fifth? Does his family really eat nothing but rice and dried fish?

Even if one has made bad choices in the past, even if one has neglected his studies, even if one has no motivation or self-determination, should such a one get the proverbial what is coming to one?

If the pedicab driver were to get back on his pedicab the following day and the foreigner saw him, would the foreigner think the pedicab driver had been lying and harbor contempt? If so, would it have still been worth it?

A week ago you learned the local word for abortion. Punyit. More precisely: “intentional miscarriage”. It is not in your dictionary but it is firmly planted in your mind. You learned it over lunch, co-workers talking chatting gossiping rumoring about a 2nd year high school student (i.e., fourteen years old) who got pregnant and then performed an intentional miscarriage. How did they know? Kuno. The wonderfully flexible catch-all word, so perfect for gossip. Kuno. “It was said by someone.”

It is already dark. A December Saturday, six-thirty, not exactly cool but empty of the yellow daytime heat that is the Philippines. Young people wander along the bay at Astro, another Saturday night in a long string of Saturday nights in a town in a place on the edge of Bliss that most of humanity will never know.

It takes someone who has sat in a whorehouse, participated in the conversation of transaction, the transaction of a body–someone familiar with the bravado of the whore, the self-possession in her shoulders, her eyes–to know if it is real confidence. Only a painter sees the spectrum of green. Only a Lazarus can really know his Jesus. Am I the prodigal son?

You are at Astro. Waiting for a friend. Heading to a party. You sit at the rim of a bridge, a strip of concrete that is the closest thing to a seat you’ll find. You aren’t smoking but for some reason you have a lighter in your pocket. Behind you the water of Tacloban Bay laps quiet, black.

What is the word for poison?

You’d seen her walking back and forth across the street as jeeps and multicabs and motorized tricycles whizzed by, all lights and engine roar, zigging through the moving maze. Distinctively thin. Short black hair, searching eyes, gangly legs. Jeans. Some kind of knit top exposing the shoulders.

When she approaches, dangling her long menthol cigarette in careless fingers, her eyes are bold. But her shoulder is hesistant.

“Excuse me. Do you have a light?” Her English is good.

“May-ada.” You are amazed to feel yourself reaching into your pocket for the lighter. Why do you have a lighter? You never carry a lighter.

You don’t smell her until she sits down next to you, cigarette lit. It is the common smell of a human body unwashed in days, but with the less familiar edge of feminine. The three-days’ body odor of a woman.

She is surprised to hear you speak the dialect.

She asks you what you are doing at Astro. At night.

You are waiting for a friend. There is a party.
A girl?
Yes.
American?
Yes, American. You cross your legs.

She crosses her legs. Takes a drag. Mocks your funny pronunciation of the word. Amerikano. The all-important bravado.

Do you have a wife.
No.
Girlfriend.
No.
Why.

You don’t immediately realize why she sat next to you. After all, you’re used to strangers paying attention. But in time the details build.

You ask where she’s from. “Sogod,” she says. You know that’s five hours south. They speak a different dialect there.

You ask where she lives. A vague gesture in the direction of Astro. Does she have any work currently? No, usually she works downtown but there are no customers in downtown. So she comes here, to Astro, looking for customers. She takes quick drags on her cigarette. Turns her head now and then to spit out the taste into the river.

It is only when she asks you if you know what ‘customers’ mean that it all clicks. Immediate, ugly.

Yes. You stammer. Immediate, ugly. “Maaram ako.” I know.

What does it mean, customers. She doesn’t believe you.

“Maaram ako ano it karuyag sigdnon ‘customers’.” I know what ‘customers’ means.

What is it. She wants you to say it. Put it into words. Make it real by saying it. She is leaning forward. Her eyes are taunting, daring you to turn her into a whore.

It is when you, you… You stammer, searching for words. You know the word for whore–pok pok–but you refuse to say it. They will pay you…They will pay you for…

Alright. “Maaram ka.” She leans back. Takes a drag. You know. Spits into the ocean.

You ask her how old she is.

“Eighteen.” She says it in English. She could be eighteen. Then again.

She looks at you. Now she realizes you’re not a customer. Something changes. She begins to talk.

She tells you about her customers, foreigners, about how they promise her money, maybe 1,000 pesos ($25), but then after they are in the motel they deduct costs. The motel is 500 pesos. There is the alcohol. If she’s lucky she’ll get 200. About $5. She tells you about how she has been beaten. You don’t understand enough to be sure if she means the customers beat her or if she had a husband back in Sogod who beat her. Maybe both. But you know the word, ginkastigo. She knows you are not a customer. Something has changed.

You ask her: Do you have any children.
No. She spits into the ocean.

She spits into the ocean. She looks at you, taunting. She says–the passive-voice construction of the language has never lent itself more perfectly–she says, “Ginpunyit.” They are self-aborted. They are intentionally miscarried.

You uncross your legs. Teenagers walk by, staring at the two of you. Everyone knows you. You wonder if there will be rumors about you, next lunchtime.

All you can do is ask. There is something terribly honest between you now.
How. How do you do it.

She uses a word you do not know. It could be “poison”. It could be “hanger”.

You think of the risky business of pretty women. You think of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, and all the stories–true and not–like it. You think of Florence Nightingale. You think of the ugly side of pity.

Why don’t you look for someother kind of work.
She spits into the ocean.
This work, this work is dangerous.
I don’t even use condoms.
You should. You should. That’s dangerous. You could get very sick. There are diseases.
Spits into the ocean.
Do you know how wash clothes. Maybe you can work in a laundry. What about being a yaya.
Yuck. I don’t want to be a yaya.
House help is good work. Safe work.
Yuck. Spits into the ocean.

Your friend shows up. You make introductions. Jenna, this is Rachelle. Rachelle, this is Jenna. There is nothing more to say. You stand up. You walk away.

This got me thinking, seeing as I’m also a volunteer assigned to a university (in the Philippines). I think Coffman’s outrage may have been due, in part, to a mythologized vision of what Peace Corps should be. When most people think Peace Corps, they think volunteers working in remote rural areas in developing countries, no electricity, no running water, etc.

But nothing in the Peace Corps vision includes this, um, vision. Instead, Peace Corps is about helping “interested countries and areas meet their goals for trained men and women.”

In my opinion, the best way to do this, in the 21st century, is at the tertiary level. Based on anecdote, it seems that my fellow volunteers working at universities are more productive and feel they make a greater impact than their elementary or secondary volunteer peers. Here’s a video of a recent faculty workshop at the university where I teach. The topics we covered are listed below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5yL_z7vmrw

August 26th: Effective Syllabus Design
Americanisms, Filipinisms, and International English
Syllabus Statement of Objectives & Activities
Review of Proper Noun & Verb Formation

September 9th: Designing Effective Assessments
Higher Order Thinking Skills
Table of Specifications: A Review
Multiple Choice Exam Design
Practical Exams: Testing HOTS
The Art of Questioning & Leading Good Discussions

September 16th: Effective Rubrics & Evaluation
Analytic, Holistic, Qualitative, Quantitative, and Weighted Rubrics
Student-Friendly Rubrics
Review of Technical Terminology Used in Various Disciplines

Jon Hunter, lean, young, with a geek-chic skinny tie and retro glasses and three days’ worth of beard, stood in front of 25 social workers and teachers who clustered around square plastic tables, sipping coffee and basking in the luxury of air-conditioning, listening to him present his proposal for a teacher training.

Ate Maria leaned over to me and whispered, “I really commend them for that. It’s so very much needed. We really should do something like that.”

It was Day 3 of the Project Design & Management conference, a workshop run by Peace Corps volunteers, for Peace Corps volunteers, explaining the ins and outs of grant proposal writing. Besides Jon Hunter’s proposal, there was an idea for a renovated library space, a remedial reading program, a speech laboratory, book acquisitions, and livelihood projects of all sorts.

The conference was being held at the university where I worked, and help had come from all corners of the campus. The air-conditioned room was given by the Office of Research, Planning, and Extension Services. LCD projector: College of Education. Tables: Main Library. Plates, teacups, saucers, and teaspoons: College of Technology. We were using the Secondary Laboratory School to wash the dishes. And the teakettle for hot water? That was my contribution.

By Day 3 I was exhausted. The previous night I’d traversed the campus to check-in the projector and wash the dishes and lock up the room and refill the water container only to find that the key for the room was in the hands of a teacher whose name I didn’t know and who was teaching somewhere on campus until 8:15. I finally found her and locked the room and returned the key, only to arrive at the water filling station just as they were closing. Yes. Exhausted.

So was my co-teacher. Ate Maria was attending despite being sick, despite the fact that it was exams week and she would have to postpone her students’ first periodical test, despite her myriad other obligations in the community.

But despite all that, she had traversed the campus that morning, filming interviews with teachers and staff to evidence the need for a mini faculty library, and she had presented our proposal, speaking in her measured, poised way. The proposal had been well received.

The conference ended at noon but Ate Maria and I still had class. As five o’clock neared and our students gathered their belongings, Ate Maria leaned toward me.

“Sometimes I’m a little ashamed. Ashamed for our people…for our country. I wonder why it is that people must come from abroad to make these fish sanctuaries…to do these things for our country. I wonder why can’t Filipinos take the responsibility themselves?”

I was moved. My co-teacher was directly stating a source of embarrassment. No small matter in a shame society.

I recognized that saying it to me was a sign she trusted me. Could confide in me. But what to say back? I mumbled something about how most people abroad don’t take responsibility either, and that there were people in the Philippines taking responsibility. Like her.

Ate Maria sighed. “I suppose it may be that so many people here are firstly concerned with survival. They don’t have the time or energy…the ability…to think about those matters.”

She was right, of course.

But that night I went home thinking less about what she said and more about the logistics of our proposal. Until the following day when I signed onto Facebook and saw this:

The jeep began to move, rumbling down Avenida Veteranos in Tacloban City in the Philippines. Horns honked and exhaust belched and the hot sun seared and sapped all drive.

A passenger next to the woman leaned in. Looked at the bundle. “Natawo ba?” she said. Just born?

“Seven days,” the beaming mother beamed. I leaned in. The baby’s small fist struggled to push against its half open eye. Its mouth hung open, damp, forming invisible words.

…

I remember, clearly, the day I was born. It was raining, gently. All and everything was a whiteblue kind of haze in my newborn eyes but I recall a dependable beep, beep, beep from somewhere above the thing that was my body my newly separated self my earthly vessel, and the sound of shufflingfeet and of voicewhispers and the touch of big, soft hand-things lifting me heavenward and then setting me down upon the firmament, smell-things tickling my nose, defining for the first time what words like “sterile” and “antiseptic” would mean long later on. My first day of existence.

Actually not. Can’t recall a thing (incidentally, Ray Bradbury claimed he could). But if I could remember, it might be something like that.

Because even though I wouldn’t have had the ability to process any of the sensory junk bombarding my small body, that sensory junk would have to have had an effect. Right? Nature v. Nurture?

Bring it back to baby in a jeep: how much different would it have been if I too had, from day one, been surrounded by honking horns and the smell of exhaust and the jiggle-jerking of public utility vehicles and the hot hot hot sun?

…

Months before Baby in a Jeep, I accompanied my coworkers to the Mother of Mary Birthing Clinic in downtown. One of our fellow teachers had given birth the day before. So we were visiting.

The Mother of Mary Birthing Clinic was a lonely, abandoned place. Two nurses, not older than twenty, waited at the second floor call desk. Ma’am Liezel was in Room 2, the only occupant. The concrete walls were painted white. Some of the walls were just bare plywood. But it was clean and I smelled antiseptic. It kind of felt like the apocalypse.

Ma’am Liezel sat holding her baby, Kelvin James, breastfeeding now and then. Her mother sat on the adjacent bed and said nothing and her husband, who was in the army [head pictured above, lower-right], sat nearby playing Snakes on his cellphone.

We had brought mangoes to Ma’am Liezel. We set them down on the nightstand and sat down on another vacant bed. My coworkers–all of them women–took turns holding the baby, taking pictures, discussing pregnancy. Two other teachers in the department were pregnant, and the substitute teacher that would cover during maternity leave was, too. Back home, my best friend and his wife were counting the days till their first child, Parker, arrived.

Babies were everywhere and wonderful as they could be, and so I was frequently asked when I, me, Mark would be having a baby of my own.

…

I’m not sure I ever want to have children. Which makes me incompatible for many potential partners.

I’m not sure I ever want to have children partly because the world’s resources are already stressed, partly because I fear I’d be a father-failure, but mostly because I fear I wouldn’t be a father-failure, that I’d be the best father I could be. And that would mean changing so much about my life. Putting time and energy into a child would mean foregoing time and energy for my own personal development. Scaling back all the things that currently bring me true joy. That make me feel alive. The same reason makes me anxious about the whole marriage thing.

Quandary.

Advice?

I knew it was late. Ariel and I had left our boarding house around dusk to play basketball at the Mormon Church (Ariel had been converted by missionaries a few years back, and anyway, the Mormons had the best court in Tacloban City. We’d played four games, and even though I towered over most of the players–I was frequently asked if I could dunk–I’d been humbled by Filipino basketball prowess. But it had been good fun).

After basketball, we’d wandered to a barbeque joint downtown. The girl had wandered in moments after us and Ariel had become transfixed. She was tall for a Filipina, smartly dressed, had a beauty mark where her chin met her neck. I winced at the obviousness of Ariel’s stare. Surely the girl saw it, or at least felt it. But she said nothing.

Yes, it was late now. What would we do? I assumed we would go home and sleep. But how late?

“Ano nga oras?” What time is it?

Ariel tore his glance from the girl and gazed at his watch. A gold watch, or so it looked to me–not that I knew the difference between paint and plate. My boardinghouse-mate smiled, weakly, as if to acknowledge the irony. “Actually, I do not know the exact time.”

I looked at his watch. It showed five-thirty. It was dark and it was late and it was nowhere near five-thirty.

I had no watch. I’d brought one with me to the Philippines but as soon as I got a cellphone, the watch had disappeared into the drawer. But now I had no cellphone either. I’d lost it earlier while riding a pedicab. It had slipped out of my pocket and when I realized and ran back to find the pedicab driver, the phone was long gone.

“Ambot,” the driver had said, shrugging. “Who knows?”

I had trudged back home, planning buy a new phone the next day. I’d read for a while, and then, some time later, found myself instinctively reaching to check the time. No cellphone. I considered digging the wristwatch out of my drawer. But then I stopped. When was the last time I’d got out of bed without checking the time? Or eaten lunch without knowing whether it was lunchtime? I resolved to drift through the rest of my day with no clock, no crutch.

“Women these days,” said Ariel. Now that the barbeque was done he stared at the girl full-time. “They are too proud, and they think they are the equals of men.”

“Can you…can you give me an example of how women think they are equal to men? And, uh, shall we just go home? I’m tired.”

Ariel rose from his seat. “They think they should be able to earn as much, or more money, than a man.”

I thought about all the unemployed Filipino men I knew, their wives working at department stores or fastfood joints or schools. It seemed women were bearing everything to support the family. But to Ariel it seemed that for these men who had few options for work, it was emasculating, unfair, wrong.

“Even if she did like me,” Ariel said, waving at the table behind us, “nothing would happen. Because I want to marry someone from my church.”

“Maybe if you two got to know each other you could encourage her to try Mormonism.” My hand went into my pocket. Oh, right. No cellphone.

Ariel said nothing as we got into his car. He started the engine and I watched the dashboard clock flicker on. One-thirty. It was nowhere near one-thirty.

The experts call it Polychronic Time. The Filipinos call it Filipino Time. Whatever the name, it was one of the first cultural nuances we volunteers noticed, and for some of us, one of the hardest to assimilate. Heck, I knew I’d never assimilate. I was enough to try to begin to understand all those details that seemed so foreign–the fact that clock-hands in classrooms didn’t move, that internet cafe computers lived in time zones halfway across the world, that Ariel’s gold watch was nothing more than jewelry.

That day did little to stifle my nagging internal chronometer: when I bought a replacement cellphone the next afternoon, the first thing I did was set the date and time. It wasn’t fun, but that day did allow me to feel the freefall absence of measured time, to glide through time set only by the sun and your friends and what you happen to be doing, right then, right there, that moment.

]]> http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/21st-c-pcv/2011/05/12/day-without-time/feed/ http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/21st-c-pcv/2011/05/04/summer-reading/ http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/21st-c-pcv/2011/05/04/summer-reading/#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 11:47:32 +0000 Mark Fullmer http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/21st-c-pcv/?p=135 Every morning on my way to the jeepney stop I would pass the Royalle Bakeshop. Every morning while shaving I could look out my bathroom window and watch the bakery storefront opening. Every morning, there, arranging bread or sweeping the floor or, more frequently, just standing idle, would be Nary.

From 5:30 dawn till 7:30 dark she was there. For 3 months I passed the bakeshop and passed Nary. Sometimes I would smile and wave and blush and she would smile and wave and blush right back. Sometimes I would buy “slice bread” and practice my Waray-Waray: her name was Nary, she was from Dulag, she was eighteen. She claimed to have some college. But now she was here at the Royalle Bakeshop to help her mother. I didn’t ask about her father.

It was all too common a story in the Philippines. Children stopping school to help the family survive.

There was no TV in the bakeshop. No magazines. Few customers. Friends didn’t seem to visit. Most the time Nary just stood there. It seemed like some kind of punishment. Solitary confinement smack dab in a teeming sea of people. Older, wiser cultures might contest the worthlessness of idle hours but to my American eyes it was a waste of human potential.

A clarification: I’d always cherished moments when I had nothing to do. But in those moments I could never not do nothing, as my first April as a Peace Corps volunteer proved. The month allowed me to indulge a long lost hobby. Reading.

Long Lost.

I’d been a gluttonous reader as a kid. I kicked the habit in high school in favor of computer games and marching band. Then, halfway through college I reinvented myself on a steady diet of 1960s sci-fi pulp, poststructuralist philosophy and 19th century bourgeouis novels. I kept a list. The first recorded title, August 2000, was Sons and Lovers. Four years later, the last book before I entered grad school–at which point I doubled my reading pace but halved my freedom to choose–was Laszlo Mero’s Moral Calculations: Game Theory, Logic and Human Frailty. I still remember reading Sons and Lovers at the pond of the Fullerton Arboretum and Moral Calculations in the spooky 6th floor bookstacks of the CSUF library.

After grad school I had bills to pay and filled my Saturdays reading student essays and my avocation turned education turned vocation went into hibernation.

Until Peace Corps. With school at summer standstill and a stack of books from the Peace Corps mush pot and even more downloaded from Project Gutenberg, the beast awakened. In a week I was reading a collection of Peace Corps memoirs, the autobiography of Gandhi, a political wonk’s take on Kennedy and Martin Luther King, zombie fiction, and Don Quixote.

And that only in my spare time. The summer had conspired to be a confluence of reading-related projects. In the mornings I helped Jeannie, a fellow volunteer, teach reading remediation at her high school. Afternoons I emailed friends for book donations.

The reading remediation class was a lesson in resource deployment. Jeannie had got 30 kids to sign up for the summer program. On the first day only six showed up. One day we were down to two, a kind of glorious teacher-student ratio of 1:1. But it also felt like a waste: Peace Corps volunteers who’d travelled halfway across the world to do good spending their summer mornings with two students. What chance did Jaymark or Wency have at breaking out of the cycle of poverty? would these one-on-one reading sessions make any tangible difference in their lives?

Of course what you are supposed to tell yourself is you never know what difference you might make in a child’s life. That’s the good answer, the comforting answer. And it certainly has truth.

But the answer I came to accept was somewhere in the middle. Sometime during that reading remediation program I stopped thinking about the ends, the outcome, the product and instead embraced the means, the moment, the process. I loved reading with Karljim about shark attacks. We read about circle-and-bite attacks and hit-and-run attacks and then acted them out. I was the swimmer. Karljim was the shark. Jeannie was tickled pink the following day when Karljim wandered around the classroom, hands clasped in a fin above his head, circling.

The book donation project was a success. My university’s fiction collection had previously consisted of 152 titles. For 14,000 students. One month into the donation project, friends and family had rounded up 291 donations. The first shipment came from my mum. She’d spent the last 10 years writing a young adult novel and had oodles of books at just the right reading level for my students. Artemis Fowl. James and the Giant Peach. Peter and the Starcatchers.

Thus, one morning, happily heading to reading remediation, I smiled and waved and blushed at the girl in the bakeshop. And halted. “Hulat,” I said to Nary. Wait.

I jogged back to my boarding house. Opened the box my mum had sent. Grabbed the only logical title.

“Adi, Nary,” I said, back at the bakeshop. “Karuyag mo humuram ini?” Do you want to borrow this?

She looked at the book in my hands. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. She took it, clearly confused and surprised and touched.

I will return it to you tomorrow?

No, you can borrow it for…for a month.

She contemplated this. After a moment, she stuck out her hand. And we shook. It was a deal. I wandered off to read about shark attacks, having no idea if she would crack the cover.

But she did. That afternoon I passed the Royalle Bakeshop on my way home and saw Nary. Standing there as usual. But reading.

“Oo. mamatay hiya,” I nodded. Yes. He will die.

We two stood at the top of Calvary Hill, waiting for Jesus to be crucified.

Every year on Good Friday, Filipinos reenact the death of Jesus. In some cities there are crucifixion plays of the stations of the cross. In others men walk the streets flagellating themselves with whips, their backs a bloody mess by the end. In a few places, people volunteer to be crucified: they are nailed through their hands to a cross, raised up to feel what Jesus felt, then let back down and tended to.

On my first Good Friday as a Peace Corps volunteer, I’d walked smack dab into the Tacloban City crucifixion parade. A couple hundred people proceeding through deserted streets. At the front were a cluster of men dressed in red capes with white crosses and red cardboard helmets. Roman soldiers. In the middle of the cluster, leashed to a rope and dragging a cross, Jesus.

I walked and watched. A Roman soldier yelled curses. Another took his whip and flogged the King of the Jews, the blows coming with real force. After a time, a soldier jumped in the air and kicked Jesus, who fell to his knees. The soldiers manhandled him back onto his feet and Jesus dragged on through the streets of Tacloban.

Behind him were two more Jesuses enduring the same treatment at the hands of more Romans. I’d heard about the reenactments. For some reason I’d imagined the people that volunteered would be the very pious. These men did not look pious. Many of them had tattoos. One had a mohawk.

My imagination ran. I wondered if participation was fully voluntary or if the men who did this were perhaps convicts, cajoled by priests to expunge their guilt by going through this ordeal. But then, what does pious look like?

“Excuse me, are you a tourist?” A well dressed man in the crowd extended his hand. Around his neck was a big camera.

“Diri. Naukoy ako dinhi ha Tacloban,” I said, trying my best not to seem like a gawking tourist. “Magturutdo ako ha Eastern Visayas State University.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, you are a foreigner. You are seeing this,” his hand waved at the parade. “Do you have any objection?” In his other hand I saw a notepad.

“No. I have no objection.” I watched him transcribe my words. “This just shows the…the dedication…and piety…of the Filipino people for…for their religion. All over the world people do things to show penance to God, so I do not judge this.”

“Okay. Thank you.” The journalist extended his hand again. I couldn’t tell whether my response pleased or disappointed him.

We walked on, down Imelda Avenue and through the Quarry District to the base of Calvary Hill. From time to time the flagellants–fifteen or so in total–would stop, bend down on one knee, and assistants would take razors and cut small slits along their shoulders to facilitate bleeding.

Somewhere up the mountain, I found Joanne-May. Or rather, she found me, the lone Amerikano. We chatted in Waray-Waray as we climbed. I asked her how old she was. Nine. Where she lived. Back there. Where her parents were. At home.

“Papa Jesus?” she said, pointing to the man dragging the cross.

“Oo. Papa Jesus.”

This Papa Jesus would not be crucified that day. But I only realized he wouldn’t when he started descending the mountain. As I waited in unsure anticipation at the top of the mountain, all I could think of was this nine year-old girl, Joanne-May, watching Jesus get nailed to a cross.

I’ll be honest. Part of me wanted to see it, see the man crucified. But when that man descended that mountain in the hot afternoon, hands intact, no, I had no objection.

Barefoot.Big, acquiescent eyes. His hair a beach-bum-tinted-grunge look for which sometrustafarian hipster might happily and generously pay a stylist. The boy sat sorting through a stack of pseudo magick-tarot-pokemon baseball cards, his attention fully focused, hard at work at nothing.

It was Holy Week and I was in Manila on Peace Corps business. About 20 volunteers were preparing for a project aimed at improving the teaching and language skills of educators from Mindanao, a large island in the Philippines that was off-limits to volunteers (there had been kidnappings, yes, but the decision sounded more political than security-related). In two weeks Peace Corps would fly 150 Mindanao teachers to Manila for the intense 10-day seminar.

I didn’t particularly like Manila. It was intimidatingly massive, smoggy, and crowded. And on a previous trip I’d had my wallet stolen. But the worst of it was the blatant sad side of urban life: outside, a big tarpaulin read “WANTED: CGA/GRO 18 TO 25 YEARS OLD WITH PLEASING PERSONALITY. BRING BIODATA OR RESUME WITH 2X2 PICTURE.” GRO. Guest Relations Officer.The war-time era euphemism for prostitute. I assumed the “LOVE HAND FOOT SPA” across the street was similarly euphemistic.

And of course there were the street kids. On nearly every corner. Each night I walked back from the Peace Corps office to my boarding room I had to pass establishments guarded by bevies of young women dressed in matching miniskirt-haltertop uniforms.

“Hey Joe!” They would coo to me. “Looking for a beautiful woman?”

“Nope!” I would coo back.

The next block over, in a dark corner, women of the same age lay sleeping on cardboard, in matching streetdirty t-shirts, their children huddled around them. The irony was heavy.

When Peace Corps volunteers find themselves together–a luxury when you are often assigned to a town where the closest volunteer is hours away–they inevitably start gossiping. And sure enough, the first night of that week, gossip trended toward the recent drop in volunteers. The latest batch of 145 volunteers had arrived six months before. Now, the official number was 123. Peace Corps policy kept confidential the reasons that volunteers went home, but everyone knew there were 3 possibilities: you went home out of medical necessity, out of personal choice, or because Peace Corps made the choice for you. This time, speculation was that a handful of male volunteers had had the choice made for them. The rumor was that they’d been suspected of consorting with GROs.

“Even if there’s no evidence,” said one volunteer, “if that kind of thing gets around in your community it ruins your relationships, your ability to work.” She shrugged. “So Peace Corps sends you home.”

“I find it just sad,” said another. “I mean, some of us are working with these abused women. Prostitutes, human traficking. That some of us, knowing this, can do that…”

It was a just rumor. I decided it was simply volunteers’ overactive imagination. It was the kind of thing that made for good gossip. A Peace Corps volunteer wouldn’t do that. Couldn’t do that.

People join Peace Corps for different reasons. It had always been that way. David Riesman, one of the advisors of the nascent Peace Corps, warned against hoping to enlist an army of saints in the service, pointing out that saints didn’t need the Peace Corps and wouldn’t fit into its structure. “You want healthy, representative, Americans,” he said, “whose motives will be mixed, like most peoples’.”

In the 1961 Peace Corps manual, a section enitled “Living in a Goldfish Bowl” included the following:

“…your every action will be watched, weighed and considered representative of the entire Peace Corps….You must learn–and respect–the local customs, manners, taboos, religions and traditions, remembering that always that the slighest “goof” will quickly be seen and talked of by many persons.”

This was the drift of my thoughts that morning in the Mini Mart as I watched the business man watch the street kid. Not knowing I was about to see a real-life saint.
The businessman got up. Tossed his empty instant noodle container in the trash. But then he handed the box-breakfast fried chicken to the Mini Mart security guard and pointed at the street kid outside. The security guard, as naturally as if it was part of his job description, went out and handed the half-finished chicken to the kid. Who also accepted it as naturally as if it was part of the schedule.

The businessman sat for a moment, finishing his coffee. Watching the kid eat the chicken bone. A couple other street kids had gathered near the boy, watching him eat. After a long time, the boy turned over the chicken bone to another kid.

The businessman went back to the counter and bought a second serving of rice. Handed it to the security guard.

As he walked out of the Mini Mart that Holy Week morning, the man nodded to the kid, who nodded back a gesture of simple thanks. And that was it.

That morning I liked Manila a little better.