Friday, June 3, 2011

Two Delicious Recipies for Peace Corps Workers (Try Them At Home!)

Hey, to break my long silence on this blog, I will share with the rest of you two, easy, relatively cheap, delicious, adjective stacked meals that I invented myself here in San Remigio, Cebu. One is vegetarian (though it uses bullion cubes, but I'm sure you plant-slaughtering lunatics can figure out some sort of substitute,) the other is most definitely not, though it keeps you away from the fly infested death camp that is the meat market. So, in my mind, it's a win.

Gage's Barrio Fried Rice 
Cooking time: 12-15 min


2 cups rice (which you cook up first)
Oil
1 can of your favorite brand Corned Beef
1 can Salted Black Beans
2 eggs
Sweet Chili Sauce

(2 servings, or one if you are really hungry- fatty)


Get your favorite type of rice cooked up, I usually make 2 cups for myself, as I can save the left overs for breakfast. Once the rice is DONE, allow is to sit while you heat up a large frying pan or wok. Add in enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan. You're going to want enough to at least touch most of the rice when you put it in, though you can go with less if you are some kind of health nut.


Once the oil is sizzling, add in the can of corned beef and the two eggs. Let them cook enough for the egg to begin looking white, and then toss in your rice. Throw it all on there, stir it up a bit, and then add the can of black beans on top. Add Sweet Chili Sauce to flavor as desired (or just keep it to put on the side so you can dip your spoonfuls into.) Fry until you think its fried. Serve hot on plate with generous pool of Sweet Chili Sauce nearby.

All of these ingredients should be easy to find in your local small grocery. I use UFC Sweet Chili Sauce, as it is only 27 pesos.  The rest can be found at your local sari-sari. You know, the one that is probably one house down from where you are sitting at this very moment.

Gage's Camotie Stew
Cooking time: 3-5 hours

3/4 kilo camotie (potatoes also work, but camoties are 7x cheaper)
3-4 carrots
1-2 white onions -or- 4-5 red onions
1 long green spicy pepper
2 broth bullion cubes (I think beef is best for this)
pinch of salt

(2-3 servings)

This one takes a bit more effort. You actually have to PREPARE stuff. Jeez. Lame. But it is incredibly delicious.

First get your pot and put water in it. You want all of your chopped vegetables to be submerged. Once you guestimate the right amount, put it on the burner and put the lid on. While you wait for it to get hot, chop up all your veggies. You'll want to scrub the camoties with an abrasive sponge to get all the dirt off, and perhaps skin them if you are into that sort of thing. I leave the skin on all my veggies because it thickens the broth, enhances the flavor, and I'm lazy.

Anyway, you want all your veggies in small pieces, I generally cut everything into thin circles, and then chop up the onions. Leave the pepper intact, but cut five incisions across the pepper to allow its flavors to escape during the cooking.

Your water is probably hot by now. If it is, throw in the two bullion cubes and a bit of salt to taste. Taste the broth, if it is beefy and tasty enough for you, throw in all the vegetables, all at once- pour em in. Put the lid on the pot, and leave to simmer for two hours, stirring from time to time, making sure the stuff on the bottom becomes the stuff on the top. After two hours, put the lid back on askew, so the steam can come out of the pot. You want to evaporate the extra water out of the stew. Continue to simmer until most of the water is gone and you have what looks like a thick, purple, goulash.

Serve in bowl. Eat. Can be enjoyed with rice, but great on its own or with bread.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Reality

In the library, students cluster,
On a mission from their teacher.
Get an encyclopedia!
Copy that print media!
Not an oz. of comprehension can they muster.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Trials, Trials, Trials. Asa akong tribulation?

Before Christmas, my time in San Remigio passed smoothly. After Christmas, I made a slight error of hubris: I volunteered to teach the remedial reading classes for struggling first year students. Being easily successful in the classrooms of average and above third and fourth years (and only struggling a little in bottom section 3rd year classes,) I thought I could pull off the 1st year classes without a problem.

Wrong.

I am used to high schoolers. Freshman are familiar. But 1st year students here are 12 years old, and I have 55 of them. Their English skills are very close to nil. This hampers the teaching process a great deal.

For example, it is exceedingly difficult to provide reading materials to my students. The entire first year textbook is so far outside their zones of proximal development, I might as well be assigning them Edgar Allen Poe. There are no resources outside those books. (Hopefully, some book donations I am looking into can solve that.)

So after various failures working with local resources, I began writing my own stories. This is rather expensive, as if I wish to disseminate them to my entire class, it will cost over 50 pesos a day, and if I let the students share, half the class won't even look at the sheet. But I decided to try it, and I gained new sympathy for textbook creators. I tried to write in our vocabulary words into them, so after two weeks of daily reinforcement, ten of my students in each class learned the meaning of abrupt. The other 40 copied from their papers. Why was this not working?

I decided to do some role plays, and I wrote this ridiculous story about a magical king of squids. In the process of designing their presentations, multiple students came up to me and asked, "What is the meaning of "happened"?" My mind suffered a sort of earthquake as it tried to facilitate that question.

How indeed? Happened. Happen. Happening. How DO you describe that to someone who knows very little English?

"It means that something is going on."

No. No, that answer is constructed entirely of vague-ness. They won't understand that, either.

"It means you saw an event."

No, they either don't know "event", or only know the definition that means parties or parades and stuff.  That would just confuse them more.

In desperation, I just said "It means an action is taking place. It's happening." Blank stares. "I'm sorry, I really don't know how to explain it. If you ate a banana, then it happened. If you did not eat a banana, it did not happen."

No wonder two weeks had passed with almost nothing to show for it. If students didn't know "happen," then how many other times have my students not comprehended a single word I said? How can I teach that abrupt means "suddenly," when they don't understand sudden. And when I act out suddenly by screaming abruptly and making all the little girls scream, the next three days are filled with students saying sudden means "to scream." My words are forgotten in favor of my acting.

How exactly do you find the zone of proximal development when learning a foreign language? As I recall from my failed attempts at learning other languages, the average class consisted of pushing you into the deep end and waiting till you can swim, and then pushing you into deeper water after that. And so on. My students have been drowning for years now.

I tried my Cebuano dictionary, thinking that I could try basic translation to put understandable meanings behind the word. This also did not work. Each word can potentially have 2-5 different equivalents in Cebuano. Often I would pick a word to share with the class, and no one in the room would understand it. Even my generations of teachers do not know this word. Finally, one of the elder teachers would recognize it and say they hadn't heard that word used in a long time.

Cebuano is dying. Students grow up learning Tagalog and English. Academics do not study the language. Authors do not write in the language. Business uses Tagalog, and politics uses English. It has become purely a conversational dialect in the boonies, only surviving because 60% of children do not attend school.

Then, if despite the odds, the students do recognize the word, I can't be sure if the translation is accurate. There might be other connotations I do not understand, meaning I could be teaching the wrong word altogether. And then on tests, I receive answers in Cebuano, and I don't know if its actually correct or not. I can only look at the dictionary and wonder if "maayo kaayo" (very good) is really an accurate definition of "amazing."

Then, to top off the challenges, my students finally figured out that they don't actually need to attend my class. It is an extra class, and I am not a liscenced teacher, so I cannot give grades. All I can do is record attendence. But my reports of absesnces are ignored by the actual teachers of the students, so there is not accountability. I spend have the classtime chasing students down, or I don't have enough students to complete my lesson plans. The class takes place during the student's break time, so naturally they do not want to be there in the first place.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

A Limerick

Practicing for the Junior-Senior Prom

The students are lined up for dance,
Nothing is left to chance,
"Here's your timing!"
"No improvising!"
And they all move about in a trance.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Making a Table

Ever wondered how to make a table out of bamboo and some bits of wood? No? Not ever? Well, obviously you've been living somewhere without a sense of personal industry. Someplace with a Wal-Mart within a ten min. drive and where twenty bucks isn't around two weeks wages, if not more. Anyway, you lazy ass, here is how you make a table.

First, get yourself some bamboo, a saw, a woman who’s been a Girl Scout leader for upwards of twenty years, and two children to actually do the work. You really only need the bamboo and saw, though, because I’ll be telling you what to do from now on.



Get a slat of bamboo, decide how long you want your table to be, and then saw it off. Then using that slat as the model, measure out the rest of your slats until you have enough to make the table as wide as you desire. Lay them all out on the ground like so.






Next, get some strong twine, or some kind of durable plastic material. Put the twine under the edge of your first slat, and tie a basic cross-over (1st step when tying your shoes) and then place the next slat atop the remaining twine and repeat the process until all of your slats are tied together. When you reach the end, tie it off with some kind of knot, and cut off the extra.



Finally, get some sticks and shove them in the dirt, or some flat-bottomed boards if you’re planning on using these inside a house or on otherwise hard, flat ground. Then tie or nail on some cross-beams, and then throw your mat of bamboo atop it. Boom. You got yourself a table. It’s a little bouncy, but its cheap, durable, and possibly highly flammable. Not bad for an hour or two of work, eh?





NOTE: For beverage containers with low centers of gravity only.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

My New Home: My Students

Last month, I introduced my school. Today, I will relate what I learned about the lives of my students. They completed a writing assignment requiring them to talk about their families, their routines, and their dreams for the future. Supplemented with conversations with various local leaders, I pieced together a vague view of the community of my new home.



A student in the Philippines experiences a routine that would be familiar to any school-going youth throughout the world:  They wake up early in the morning, they go to school, they stay there most of the day, they go home, do homework, and then go to bed. However, American school children have countless luxuries, and the advantage of school busses is the most noticeable.

In my municipality of San Remigio, there are 27 barangays, which are essentially like large neighborhoods consisting of somewhere around 100 families. My high school in the municipal center barnagay of Poblacion has 1,800 students and it is one of seven high schools in the municipality. It is also the largest. Local estimation concludes that only about 40% of San Remigio's school-age children are enrolled in school. Surprisingly, the problem is in transportation. The municipality is so spread out, that parents cannot afford to pay for the tricycle or jeepny ride to school. And that is a sort of catch-22 because even if these parents could somehow afford to get their kids to one of the seven schools, they are already over-capacity anyway.

This is a problem because families are big here. My students average five siblings. The smallest family is two children, and the largest has an impressive 15 children. So every two graduates of high school produce three times that many future students.  I think these impressive figures can be laid at the feet of the prevalent conservative Christianity present in the country. Most notably, the Roman Catholic Church and their preference for abstinence over contraceptives. In other words, a devotion to the ideal that married couples should not share their love physically unless they are planning on giving birth.

Talking about the way it "should be" is the common tool for ignoring reality. And while it is unclear to me whether parents have children because of a lack of contraceptives or if it is because they do not consider money to be an important reason to not have more children (the "don't worry, God will provide" attitude), these large families come with a heavy financial burden. Later, I will discuss these.

But religion effects more than reproductive practices. Most of my students pray upon waking up, most everyone prays before every meal, the school day starts with a prayer, and every class starts with a prayer, too. If you throw in a before-bed prayer, most of my students average 14 prayers a day. Many students mentioned God or their relationship with Him or Jesus in their papers, but only one mentioned potentially joining the clergy. It is a spiritual life I am incapable of understanding, so I cannot say much as to the effect of all this; however, many seem to feel that they are blessed with their families.

Most students carry a heavier burden at home than the average American student. More chores, or even participating in one the trades of the parents to increase family income. 1950's America gender roles are common, and many of my female students are required to awaken early to cook the entire family breakfast. None of my male students are required to do this. A good number of my female students answered my question about their dreams for the future by saying they want to be great mothers. Many others said they want to become teachers, and teachers are probably the only female professionals they come into contact with.

Mothers are most commonly housewives, even in families where the father's income is not enough to provide. Some of the more industrious find money in export crafts, but most could not find a job even if they wanted it. There is little work in the local area, and most young people with a decent chance at a future move to Cebu City as soon as possible. Though half of my students who mentioned a desire to attend college say that their parents cannot afford to send them. And in the Philippines, that's generally the end of it.

"Father had only a small wage being a security guard and it's not enough for our big family. even though mother had a livelihood in making a basket but still it isn't enough for us."

Some students have one of their parents working abroad to provide for their family. This is a result of the weak Philippine economy. One of the highest paying jobs for most college graduates is to work at a tech-support call center. In a standard example of neo-colonialism, western businesses, mostly American, hire out Philippine companies to man their hotlines because people here speak English and they are generally satisfied with a wage of 6,000-10,000 pesos a month. At current exchange rates, that comes out to 133$-222$ a month, or in other words, about half what I used to make washing dishes at a breakfast joint in nowhere Washington every two weeks. You know, a job a moderately competent high school dropout can be hired to do.

The lack of economic opportunity for well-educated people in the Philippines is bad enough, but there is even greater adversity waiting for all the children the education system fails. In San Remigio, there is quite literally nothing to do. Many survive off the grid well-enough through fishing or farming, though most of the farmers are share-croppers who receive only a minor fraction of their harvest. Some are not so fortunate:

"My day starts with the word GOOD MORNING and a prayer from me together with my family. And next, I am going to cook some food for breakfast if I have something to cook, but if I have nothing to cook, I am going to borrow some corn from our neighbor so that we can eat."

"I have one sister and shes graduated here last year and I'am the youngest daughter. My sister working in Cebu to help my parents. She can't studying college because my parents cannot afford her studies. As of now my parents have no work. My fathers sicking [seeking] a job. But he can't find a job because hes an old. I'm just hoping that my father have job so that we have a food to eat every day. Even if my sister find a job her salary cannot give to my parents."

And even families who do not go hungry lack the funds for other important things:

"I have 5 brothers. I'm the only girl in our family. Supposed to be, my brothers are 6 in all but sad to say, my younger brother died last Dec. 19, 2008 because of Apendesitis. We were not able to bring him to the hospital because of financial problem."

I don't know how a parent can handle watching a child die when all that would save his life is a few scraps of paper. Now this is only assumption, but I tend to think that these parents would have an easier time affording daily food and saving enough money for emergency medical care if they did not have to feed and transport five or more children at a time. That's just me. I don't know for sure.

Despite the challenging childhoods, most of my students dream of helping people.

"I really have a very big dream in my life and that is to help those street children. I wanna help them. I wanna change their miserable life into a nicer life. I will be going to build a school for them in which only those miserable and poor street children could benefit. I want to take up a good kind of course in college someday. I wanna study harder for the sake of those street children. After graduating in college, work harder and saves money for them. And by this, my wish will be finally granted!"

In terms of future plans, the boys mostly mentioned engineering, and the girls mostly wanted to be teachers. Altogether out of 400 students, only 5 different careers were mentioned: engineer, doctor/nurse, teacher, merchant marine, and mother.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Octupus Hunting Link

One of my stories about the Philippines was published by a small literary journal. You can find it here.