Bohol Bucket List & Revalations

Josh and Scotti, my really awesome volunteer-mates, and I have decided to make a Bohol bucket list – the things that we need to do while we’re here. We inaugurated our list by going hiking behind the Tarsier Sanctuary in Corella, just a few km outside of Tagbilaran. Since Circus went to Thailand a week and a half ago, I could have felt like the 3^rd wheel. Before we were both “couple friends” but now it’s me and them. Fortunately, instead of falling into 3^rd wheel friend category, we’ve actually taken a lot of time to deepen our friendship, talk about things that nourish and fulfill us, explore spirituality, become more vulnerable and whole hearted together, and do something uniquely Filipino.

There’s an expression here which is a little peculiar. It is “hobble-hobble” and it means to ride with 2+ people on a motorbike. If you’ve explored 3^rd world countries, you’re probably familiar with this economic and environmentally friendly way to travel. I experienced it for the first time in India with my friend Erin and our music instructor back in 2010. The peculiar thing is that “hobble-hobble” means pigs having sex. Perhaps it refers to what 3 or more people on a motorbike look like or how awkward you can feel. Whatever the reason, the term is colloquial and just means motorbike carpooling, not the pig thing. Circus had an IDEA motorbike while he was here and helped me get to work and wherever else I needed to be. Now that Circus has traveled to Bangkok, Josh and I go to work together most mornings and he generously gives me a ride most other places as well. Sometimes, though, all 3 of us are going to the same place and they just tell me to hop on. So we’ve gotten into the habit of “hobble-hobbling” together. Josh is the only one of us who can drive a motorbike so he’s DD. Scotti sits in the middle as she is, well, tiny, and I sit in the back. Often with my heavy backpack full of groceries or driving over the less-than-paved roads I feel like I’m about to slip off, but we’ve been safe so far (knock on something for us please!) On Sunday after a late morning home-cooked tofu and potato brunch and a lazy game of pinochle, we grabbed some snacks and sunscreen and drove up to Corella for our hike. We got a lot of strange looks and loud greetings on the way as we must have been quite a sight, three white people smashed onto a 125cc motorbike. Josh is a very careful driver, fortunately, and even the biggest of Bohol potholes doesn’t faze him or us. I would be happy to grab a multi-cab, bike, or trike to get around, but they kindly offer and I happily accept. We’ve fully admitted our ridiculousness and fully embrace it.

Next on the Bohol bucket list is something truly unique…

ICM or the Island City Mall is just a few minutes from the IDEA Office and the Dao Diamond Hotel, where Josh and I work and Scotti teaches Filipino Sign Language (FSL) class to the new employees 3 days a week. We regularly patronize the supermarket and restaurants in the mall. Just inside the basement entrance is a stage which has nightly entertainment such as talent shows, singing contests, a Mr. and Miss Teen Bohol Contest, and even…exercise classes. On Tuesday and Friday evenings, a local entertainment company sponsors a Zumba class taught by a beautiful Filipino woman who shakes it with pride to inspire the large crowds of people who both participate in the free classes and stand by watching. It never fails that I find myself at the mall for food on Tuesday or Friday evenings and am always amazed by the brave folks who participate in a public exercise class for all to see. This Tuesday was no exception as I left work early to go use the internet at the Buzz Café since the electricity at the office was out most of the afternoon. As I ran downstairs to grab some peanut butter from the supermarket, I passed the enthusiastic Zumba participants and decided what would be the next item on our bucket list: Mall Zumba. This morning we stopped for petrol on our hobbling way to work (and had an impromptu dance party to the Filipino pop music playing at the petrol station) and I mentioned to Josh and Scotti that we would all be doing Zumba at the mall this coming Friday. Their faces lit up and we dove into an emphatic conversation about putting together fantastic outfits, strapping on a “go-pro” camera to film the whole thing, and how we might well be the center of attention in the mall. Josh, by the way, is 6’5” which makes him the center of attention all the time, no matter what he’s doing.

To answer the question you’re probably wondering, I don’t know how long I’ll be in the Philippines. The administrative and organizational work I’m doing is still supporting IDEA’s relief work on Bohol and the typhoon relief we’re doing for our deaf schools and families on Leyte, and I’m happy to be filling that need. I’m considering some options for the next 2-6 months which will most likely start in Thailand meeting back up with Circus. (He is in Bangkok reporting on the Thai political unrest firsthand. Check out his facebook page for inspiring updates and photos.)  I’m also intentionally staying open as things do continue to unfold beautifully when I relax my habitual grip of planning. Spontaneous and exciting emails keep appearing in my inbox and helping me to remember to just be in the present. Again and again.

I’ve had a realization about disaster relief work the past few weeks as well. I keep asking myself why I often feel exhausted and stressed when I’m just sitting at a desk most of the day doing administrative work. I have severely loosened the criteria with which I assess my daily productivity and am much more at peace with the little pieces of the puzzle that move along slowly, in Filipino time as they say. And the answer I have come up with is that by nature, relief work is always 10+ steps behind. The starting line of this work is so far in the red that even on a calm day it’s hard to come up for air. Even with the relaxed Filipino attitude, the figures of families that need assistance that we talk about in meetings are daunting and it is hard to imagine enough work happening to fulfill it. Ever. It becomes hard not to get cynical, something I try to be very aware of. While I do feel passionate about disaster/trauma relief work, I know that I need to do it in moderation, like a limit of a few months and only once a year.

To counter all that, here are some things that make me smile: I’ll happily report that I’ve been laughing a lot, smiling and joking with the IDEA administrators at work, staying positive about what IDEA can accomplish and not taking ownership of a larger contribution than I can realistically make. I left work at 4:15pm today to take part in a world-wide meditation led by my yoga teacher in Thailand and didn’t feel an ounce of guilt for it. And I’m excited to have a play-date with a 5 year old whom I get to babysit on Saturday morning. I also get to teach 70 deaf high school students every other Saturday with Scotti. We’re tackling trust-building activities, creative play and focus games, self-awareness, group appreciation, self-worth and confidence, drama, courageous action, and positive communication. Plus, I’ll throw in some yoga asana and relaxation techniques after the students come to trust me a little more thanks to Karli, a deaf yoga teacher in Australia who sent me a deaf yoga DVD.

Happy Lunar New Year! May your intentions for this year be clear and lucid, bringing you manifestations of truth, beauty and a more vast and deep consciousness. And warmest congratulations to those entering or finishing their Yoga Teacher Training or who have committed to deepening their practice in other ways this year.

Glad you decided to jump into the rabbit hole with us.

Staying Focused

This last week we’ve been blessed with a low pressure system in the central Philippines which has brought nearly continuous rainfall and very mild temperatures. We’re expecting thundershowers and winds for at least the next 3 days. Some people decided it would be fun to hype up a typhoon coming this week and people in Leyte and Bohol got very scared. Rumors and gossip spread like wildfire (which it always does) and the government had to officially announce that there is no typhoon on the way, just rain. Tropical monsoon rain which floods the streets and makes puddles into lakes – which pose a new obstacle to Filipino driving – but no devastating winds or flooding to report.

We’ve been here nearly 2 months and the last 2 weeks have gone by the fastest for me. Rhonda, the full-time IDEA volunteer who I was assisting, decided to go home for a few weeks just after Christmas to support her family and their newest addition born around New Years. Over the holidays, things really slowed to a crawl in terms of disaster support, both for our organization and the various gov’t and non-gov’t organizations on Bohol. But January 2^nd we all walked into the office and 2014 lit a fire under our collective spirits. With Rhonda gone, that left me to become the housing liaison. Add to that the projects I’ve been trying to move along for the past 6 weeks and I’m a busy girl all of a sudden! It was a quick shift from doing very little to very busy days and long to do lists, often more than I can accomplish in a day. My rajasic, workaholic nature is greatly pleased with this, and with feeling like I can really contribute to the houses and home repairs that IDEA is offering the long list of families in need. My more balanced, enjoy-life nature reminds me that I can only do so much and that life is not actually measured by how many things you do in a day. As many years as I’ve worked to re-route that samskāra (pattern), I’m still working on that. I still find myself becoming quickly overwhelmed, playing the martyr card (“Oh, I have so much to do!”) and even experiencing an inflated sense of ego and “my accomplishments.” Fortunately, I also get a regular dose, via personal or outside reminders, that I am not the doer of any of this. My morning meditations include a prayer of recognizing my emptiness, not being personally attached to outcome, and offering any “success” or “accomplishment” back to the source from which it came.

It’d be great to write a blog all about my yogic successes and how well I am doing at the Universal values (yamas and niyamas), but I think there is more value – for myself and my readers – in laying out the mistakes and continuous lessons learned. And remembering that, like the successes, I also have to let go of the fruits of my embarrassments and failures and not grasp at or claim personal attachment in them.

Working in the IDEA office has become more enjoyable as I develop a personal relationship with many of the Filipino employees. For the first month, I felt very alienated as I really didn’t understand how to work with Filipino women. I started to read a book called Culture Shock Philippines that our housemate, Josh, has, but Circus picked it up and really digesting the poignant information on adjusting to the personal and professional idiosyncrasies of this dculture. He wrote a great blog on it a few weeks ago. One important thing we’ve learned is that direct communication between people is not tolerated here. I mean, really not tolerated. If someone needs to receive feedback, either positive or negative, it is NEVER delivered directly from the one giving the feedback. Instead, it’s spread like a gossip wheel, with person A telling person B, person B telling person C and person C eventually passing on the information to the right beneficiary.

I experienced this yesterday morning from the teachers at the deaf high school where we live. I was assisting Scotti, the American volunteer teacher, with a new Saturday program and was also asked to share a few tips on creating Project-Based and Out-of-the-Box lessons. I had a short meeting with the principle at 8am where I was told that I was not really being asked to teach the teachers. An hour and a half later, while I was leading an activity to the deaf high school students, I was told by someone who told someone who told someone else that I was being asked to teach the teachers and could I please come, now. I was in the middle of teaching the students, however, so the students had to wait. No hard feelings, no problem, just a misunderstanding. Later in the afternoon I was informed by that same 3^rd party “go-between,” as they are called, that the principle had misunderstood me (she is partially deaf and had misinterpreted a gesture I made) as saying that I was not going to teach the teachers. So, in Filipino style, all was worked out, no one was offended and the information eventually made it to the right person.

Here’s the rub: I have been working for nearly a decade to embody direct communication. Every fiber of my being wants to be given direct feedback and to equally communicate with others. I’ve experienced that direct communication is really the best way to work through hurt feelings, vulnerabilities, share a work environment and personal relationship, and to not let things fester or turn into complaining, politics or drama. If you are a westerner, and especially a person for whom awareness and consciousness are values, you probably appreciate direct communication just as much as me. So I’ve found myself wondering how to fit in so as to be able to contribute the best I can to the local environment but also not play in to office politics and gossip. Here is where not speaking Bisayan, the local language, is actually a plus because I don’t have to hear the gossip that others talk about most of the day. And they are free to say whatever they want about me without me understanding or having the chance to be embarrassed or take it personally.  Even seemingly little things like whether or not to accept food you are offered and to make small talk before diving into a work issue can really upset people if you don’t follow social protocol. And if you do many a mistake, which I do every day, no one will tell. The same is true, btw, for locals or foreigners. They’ll just talk amongst themselves and deny there is every a problem. Sigh. Perhaps the hardest part is watching my own judgments about how detrimental that is to a society and not just being able to say, “that’s just the way it is.” I think there can be a happy medium of not playing into what I perceive as destructive behavior, even if it is the cultural norm, while trying to stay away from judgments or thinking my way is better. To exaggerate the point, even if everyone around me were burning people at the stake, I wouldn’t do it just to fit in. I hope. Certainly, walking the self-seeking path has taught me that fitting in is not really important, but respecting people’s choices and values and supporting wherever people are on their own path/culture/personal expectations/faith/etc is important. It’s harder to change the world if you’ve alienated yourself beyond redemption and no one wants to support you.

And now an uplifting story: A few weeks ago Circus mentioned wanting to play Monopoly. We live in a little cottage with Josh, an American volunteer, and Scotti his girlfriend who lives in the school spends but most of her daylight hours at the cottage. So the four of us hang out in the mornings and evenings with not much to distract us. And sometimes distractions are nice. Circus started looking around online and found a downloadable & printable Monopoly game. He printed the game board and Chance/Community Chest cards, downloaded the property values, and we borrowed dice from Dennis, IDEA’s founder and our “boss.” We all found something around the house for a game piece. Circus used a Davey Crocket keychain that the Mother Superior of Bellefonte Parish gave him. I used a small Buddha figurine. Josh used a Centavo coin, and Scotti used the cap to a perfume bottle. We hand-wrote the real estate cards as we bought them and kept a running bank statement instead of printing paper money. And it was down home, American fun! This morning we played for the 3^rd time and it has given us about 12 hours of enjoyment. We appreciate it more as we had to make it ourselves. Nothing comes easy here, which perhaps makes it easier to laugh together.

I’m really trying to separate work from home, but that is difficult when everyone you live with you also work with.  Circus and I find ourselves talking about work every evening, even when we try to create a boundary. We share about our day, which inevitably leads to a discussion about the events and people, which leads to conversations about other work events and people, which leads to talk about building shelter, meetings, progress at work, the great need and how slowly it’s being met, colleagues, politics, etc, etc. Creating those firm boundaries is important for me, and that is on my new list of goals, especially as I decided to stay here for another month. The organizational team for IDEA’s disaster relief shelter building is quite small, 6 people including us, and I personally feel like my contribution is beneficial and in line with my personal mission and that of IDEA. Josh and Scotti were really sweet in encouraging us to stay, and Dennis and Brian let us know last week that we would be appreciated if we wanted to stay, but that we were of course free to move on to our next destination. I can’t begin to go into detail about the challenges, trials, learning curve, moments of connection, frustration, appreciation, laughter and tears that I’ve experienced on Bohol, but I’ll just say that I’m in for at least another few weeks. It’s been an emotional roller coaster and, as I was reflecting during my morning practice today, as long as I can return to my center regularly, I can handle what life throws my way. Even in those moments when I say to myself, as I’m sure you do, “I cannot handle this,” there’s that little voice that whispers, “Yes, you can.”