Sweeping the Dirt Road
It’s raining today. It’s in the middle of the hottest part of the year right now so when it rains the temperature starts to feel a little bit normal. It’s about 33°C but 100% humidity. Let’s just hope the sun doesn’t come back out and back everything, then it just sucks. In the interior of the island the land is dry and the sugarcane is dying but I guess this par for the course. I was told that they actively try to seed the clouds here to produce rain. I don’t know how successful they are but I do know its raining now.
My Host Family:
In Peace Corps, we have to stay with a host family during our first three months at site. It is to introduce us to the community and help us learn a little more about the culture. I would say most volunteers have moved out but I stayed. Rasa and I feel very much part of the family and we are treated like royalty. It’s hard not to feel spoiled sometimes. There is the mom (Mercy) and dad (Nester), two boys (Jonjon and Vincent), and three helpers (Ruzel, Happy Happy Joy Joy, and Ellen).
The three helpers recently went back home to Mindanao but they will be back next month. The two younger ones finished school and wanted to go home to visit their parents for awhile. Ruzel just took a break. Jonjon and Vincent are the best. Jon is 5 and Vincent 11 years old. It’s so nice to have them around even though they are both monkeys sometimes. Mercy works at City Hall in the city planning department and Nester works for the electric company reading meters. I would say they are a middle class family.
The two younger helpers live in the same house as us while going to school during the day and helping Mercy with her catering side business during the evening and weekends. They are sisters who just turned 17 years old. If they didn’t work for mercy they wouldn’t have finished high school. People work hard here. For example, I would never have the patience to sift through a sack of hulled rice picking out the stones. They do it regularly. Or hand washing laundry! That is a monumental task for 9 people.
The Burning:
They also sweep. They sweep the floor, the walls, the roof, the driveway and even the dirt road leading to our house; everything, every day. You would be amazed how many leaves fall on the ground. All of it swept up in a nice big pile and burned. This is a huge problem here. How do you get people to stop burning everything when there is nothing else to do with the trash? This is a sensitive subject for me because of all the problems I have been having with my landfill project.
I have spent the last year trying to get the city to implement a proper landfill, recycling and collection program. Nothing has happened so far. The property for the landfill was bought before I arrived and the trash has been dumped there uncontrollably ever since. The open dump burns during the dry season and floods during the wet. At least this is an improvement over dumping it in the river. The only reason this stopped is because 1999 was one of the worst flood seasons on record. The river surge broke the banks and fittingly disgorged all of its trash in the city center. Now I guess something similar needs to happen with the landfill to convince them of the need to continue implementing their solid waste management plan.
