In the evening, all the kids from the village come to play on the basketball court. Roselyn and I sit by our window and watch them. It’s sort of like TV for us. Their games are pretty complex though and sometimes it takes us a while to figure out the rules. They like playing this game that is something like leap frog. I also once saw some kids chasing a motorbike tire with a stick. Most of the time the girls will be playing there and then the boys show up with their bamboo tubes that they use to shoot spit balls and ruin everything. There is this one little girl (I don’t really like her because she always makes rude faces at me) that gets so mad at the boys that she is always chasing them down, holding big rocks, threatening to throw them and yelling what I think must be very mean things.
Leap Frog
The girls being shy about getting their picture taken
She looks sweet and innocent but she is not very nice at all
On Sunday, out of curiousity, I made Roselyn take me to church. The church in the village is open to outside. It has a cement half wall and then a roof made of wooden beams and corrugated steel roofing. There are wooden benches and a wooden altar. In one corner there is a collection of statues and photos of religious icons (which are popular everywhere in the Philippines and have an entire section in department stores). Here, “Sunday Best” means something. All the ladies wore skirts and some of the men even had collars. Mostly their clothes didn’t match but were a combination of all the nicest, cleanest things they own. Some of the little girls had out of style dresses, none of which were exactly the right size; like they got them out of the dress up box in a kindergarten classroom. The kids played and walked around throughout the mass, a stray dog who had just gotten its ass kicked by the other dogs was sitting in the aisle scratching his bleeding ears and making me cringe, and a little boy, sitting in the row behind us, pulled his pants down and peed in the corner just after the communion. Very interesting.
We had pets. Pigeons, rats, mice, cockroaches and rabbits. Roselyn called them our pets, I called them our pests. The pigeons live in a birdhouse in the tree outside which would be fine except they always fly across to our roof. The roof is made of corrugated steel and is pretty steep so they try to land on it (usually very early in the morning) but end up sliding down, scraping their claws along the steel. When a whole bunch land there at once they claw and push each other around and it gets really noisy inside the house. Pigeon claws on steel = nails on a chalkboard = I want to kill the pigeons almost as much as the rooster who walks under the house crowing at 4:30am.
Our front yard
The rats live upstairs in the house and come downstairs as soon as the lights are out. Because of them (and the bugs) we slept in a tent set up inside the house. When they first come down we can hear them poking around a bit. They usually knock over some dishes or something and then I think they go outside for the rest of the night. They also liked the taste of my soap because when I would go to use it in the morning there were always bites taken out of it. I thought if I didn’t actually see one I could kind of pretend they didn’t exist. Then one night I got up to go to the bathroom and with my headlamp on, scared a rat out from behind one of the boxes of food. It ran up the wall to safety on the second floor. Eventually I just got used to their roaming though. The mice and cockroaches could be caught stealing bits of food sometimes but generally weren’t a problem. Then there were also the rabbits we kept to feed to Tinuy-an. So... we had pets.
Our kitchen which we had to defend against the "pets" every night
The people in the village were really welcoming. While I was there I started to learn some words in Visaya, which is the dialect spoken in the Davao region. In the village they speak a slightly different dialect but they mostly understand Visaya so Roselyn forced me to greet the villagers good morning and good afternoon all the time. They thought it was pretty funny that I was always waving to get my point across. One of the ladies told Roselyn that if I stayed there any longer she was going to teach me their dialect so that I could greet everyone properly.
One night Roselyn bought a chicken so we could have Adobo (a Filipino dish made with chicken or pork, vinegar, onions, garlic and soy). Jesse killed it and they poured all the blood out onto a plate of salt. Roselyn cooked. The result was delicious but I didn't have the stomach to ask if they had added the blood, or to try the feet.
The before and after of our Adobo dinner
Playin cards
Taking a "shower". We were lucky and had running water which came up through a hose in the floor. It was freezing cold and taking a shower required bucketing it onto myself. A thouroughly unenjoyable experience.
The day we were heading back to Davao we had to take a motorcycle from the village to Manolo to catch the bus. This was to be my first experience as a participant in the minivan-motorcycle method. On our motorbike: my and Roselyn's hiking packs, our backpacks, me, Roselyn, driver. We managed to only fall off once, on a particularly steep incline of the incredibly bumpy dirt "road" that leads to Manolo. No problem.
I got to sit right between them (for safety's sake of course).
Cute little old lady that I met on the bus to Malaybalay
