Leapin' Lizards Livonia! What's goin' on here?!

It's been raining off and on, all day today. The sea is restless, slamming against the seawall and exploding into a salt spray. Stephanie's brother, Clyde, and I, spent a long hour silently watching the wave action from the shelter of the porch on the guard shack of the fish sanctuary. The shack sits on stilts over the beach that forms the land boundary of the ocean sanctuary.

Once in a while I would say a few words and Clyde would smile or nod, conserving energy for the more-important business of being hypnotized by the moving ocean. We simply watched the powerful waves churn themselves into foam, while tumbling rocks, shells and sand in the deep rumble of the surf.

Earlier this morning, Clyde helped me shovel rocks and shells into an empty feed sack and carry loads of it across the street to the house, where they were dumped in the grassy space between the corn field and the fence around the yard, creating a parking space for the tricycle. In the hour and half we worked at it, I wore my sweaty self out and my lungs and ticker were calling for a reprieve.

As we stood at the railing of the guard shack, looking out to sea and at the beach below us, I noticed that each wave, in its second or two of washing over the shore, moved more rocks than we moved in the hour and half of toting the heavy sacks across the street. The waves quickly changed the arrangement of rocks back to the way it was before we meddled in nature's affairs with our shovel.

I am sitting at the kitchen table, writing with a ball pen, on a school tablet. No spacebar. No Enter key. Man, this old-fashion! I love it! I can hear the steady rain on the roof and street and the waves pounding out a beat on the shore. The light is subdued. A quiet light. A hint of twilight and the coming darkness. A glance at the watch tells me it's 4:30PM. The sun is retiring early because of rain.

Wow! What in tarnation?! A 2 1/2 foot-long lizard - black and with a mile-long, pink tongue that darted in and out, tasting the air - just slithered under the space between the bottom of the back door and the floor. He jumped and clawed and wiggled here and there, around the house, trying to get back out. (I can sympathize. I get into things all the time without an exit plan.) Knocking bottles down, moving boxes, his commotion stirred us into a lethargy bordering on sleep.

Not hardly! Clyde grabbed a club. I grabbed a broom. Stephanie grabbed the baby - a useless tool against a giant lizard, but there was no time for argument. After we helped Mr. Lizard find the front door and our adrenaline rush was given vent in the form of chatter, Emelie told me that that kind of lizard is harmless unless it bites you. Hmmmm.....

Tykes and Trikes

Shane posing as a sleeping child

Shane was released from the hospital nine days ago. She left with a wheelbarrow load of medicines – double her measly 5 kilograms of body weight - and a regimen that included vitamins three times a day, antibiotics four times daily starting at 6AM, and an aerosolized medication for opening the airways, thrice daily.

Tricyle - The Philippine taxi.

Shane and her mom, Stephanie, moved in with us. It was our idea. They are both very thin. Maybe we can help put some meat on their bones.

 It’s nice having them there. Shane is cute and loveable, stumbling her little self around the rooms; practicing her version of walking: a wide-stance, sumo-like, diaper-straddling forward ambulation, with the staggering gate of an over-indulged inebriant. Her mom  is easy-going and pleasant, singing her way through the hours of the day. She laughs easily and is a great help around the house.

 The little tyke is still getting used to Uncle Mark. I have three strikes against me, from her point of view. I'm a foreigner. "Alien" is a better word. A human being, to a one year-old Filipino, has black hair, brown skin, a short nose and Asian eyes.  A bald, blue-eyed white dude is too far outside the bell curve of what constitutes homo sapiens. I also use a strange language - more proof of my alien status. And my glasses are just plain strange. People she knows don't wear 'em.

Family size

We had our motor scooter converted to a tricycle. Making it big enough for the four of us, the sidecar is attached to the bike with bolts and welds. The third wheel is a 13" car wheel. I had the headlights installed but they aren't hooked up yet. I thought about a sound system, but most of our travel is by the sea, and the sound of the ocean is the best background music for vistas of white-capped, aquamarine waves and swaying palm trees. 

A trip to the hospital

January 12,  2010

Yesterday, I went for an early bike ride. When I came home, Emelie and I got ready to scooter down to Besa’s carenderia for breakfast. Before we left, Emelie’s sister Jane, Jane’s daughter Stephanie, and grand daughter Shane pulled up in front of the house in a tricycle-taxi.

Shane had been sick for the past few days, with vomiting and diarrhea. The three of them were on their way to the hospital in Malabuyoc, 8 kilometers north of us. After they left, Emelie and I went to the shop to take care of some business. Then we headed for the hospital but stopped in a carenderia in Malabuyoc for breakfast first.

Our three relatives were sitting on a cot in the hallway, in front of the nurses’ station, when we entered the hospital. Shane already had an I.V. port in her hand. A bottle of sugar water, hanging from a pole, fed the vein where the needle entered her hand. The three of them were waiting for the doctor and an empty hospital bed so Shane could be admitted.

The human body is a living skin-sack of watery fluids. When the water leaks out faster than it is being replaced – as with the double-whammy of diarrhea and vomiting – all sorts of things go awry, and in short order, the person who is dehydrating can be on the dividing line between life and death. And Shane was especially vulnerable, having lost two and a half pounds of her meager body weight of 13.5 pounds, in the last two days. At 11 pounds, she was less than half the normal weight of a girl her age.

The hospital was full of children. Every one of them had an I.V. going. There were a dozen boxes of liquid Ampicillin, for injection, sitting on the counter at the nurses’ station. After the doctor examined Shane, I asked him why the hospital was full of children and why they all had I.V.s. He said they were all suffering from diarrhea and vomiting, caused by the bacteria Salmonella typhi and contracted through contamination with human feces. It was Typhoid fever! In Alegria, the next town north, the public water supply was contaminated and the hospital was overflowing with infected children. The contamination came on the heels of flooding from very heavy rains a week ago. The flooding waters must have come in contact with human feces and then entered the public water supply.

In our town, Ginatilan, the water was heavily chlorinated after the rains. But it wasn’t enough. Over the course of the next couple of days, we would discover that Emelie’s God-son, another niece and a nephew were all at the Malabuyoc hospital being treated for the same symptoms. All came from Ginatilan. A compounding factor, in the spread of contagious disease, is the eating habits of many Filipinos. Fingers were made before forks, and many families use them, in lieu of forks, knives and spoons, to eat their meals. In combination with inadequate or non-existent hand-washing and sharing food from a common bowl, infectious agents are also shared and disease is spread throughout the family.

Shane was admitted. She would sleep a while, wake up, nurse or drink water, then lay and stare, wide-eyed. Her heart was beating fast. She cried sometimes, but it was a weak and tearless cry. I was afraid for her. She was so small and skinny and very, very sick. The doctor started her on Ampicillin, vitamins and something for her fever and cough.

We were sitting in the pediatric ward of the hospital. Jane, Stephanie and Shane were on the bed. In the hall outside the doorway to the ward, there was a group of people sitting before a candle-lit altar, singing religious songs - slow and sad, but beautiful - in Cebuano. A big man with a guitar accompanied them.

I looked around the room we were in. A sleepy ceiling fan twirled. Light coming through the jalousie windows filtered through green curtains, giving a sickly caste to life in the ward and accentuating the cold loneliness of the melancholy music.

Emelie, Jane and Stephanie were all singing. The baby slept peacefully on Grandma Jane’s lap. The other four families in the ward – women and their young daughters – were quiet. Maybe they were listening. Maybe they were keeping company with their private thoughts. Everyone looked far away, but intense in their self-absorption, as if performing a silent soliloquy. It was like a Tennessee Williams play: subtly surreal.

 The music was everything. In contrast to the wistful tune, there was a palpable message of hope, or maybe a longing for hope, in the strong and clear voices of the believers. It filled the silent crevices of unspoken fears - about sickness, about poverty, hunger and the future.

Another Year to Breathe

January 05, 2011

It has rained since December 31. We are in our fifth day of no sun, only downpours, interspersed with light rain or mist. According to Filipino belief, if it rains on January second, the rainy season will continue through February. If it rains on the third of January, the rainy season will extend through March. If it continues to rain throughout the month, I suppose we can expect the rainy season to last well into July of 2012.

Very difficult to comprehend that ten years of this century and millennium are already water under the bridge. In another ten years, Emelie will be 43 and I will be heading toward 71, if I continue to wake up every morning, which, by the way, is my New Year’s resolution. What’s that you say? You think that’s a silly resolution? Not at all! ‘Silly’ is setting goals you either can’t achieve or you achieve at such a price that it tires you out and leaves you wishing for the comfort of a few bad habits.

Give me life! That’s all I ask! Another day to wake up and breathe! In, out, through the nose. And if life stinks I can appreciate that too. I often awake to the smell of pig shit. It’s all around. Everybody raises pigs. No one comments on the smell. The same way they don’t comment on bad luck, lack of money – a serious lack for most – aches and pains, long, hard working hours or even the death of a loved one.

A young woman and her husband lost their only child a few months ago. They came to Emelie’s mountain home a couple of weeks ago, to help us celebrate the Combalbag Fiesta. I asked about her and her husband and started to ask about the child. It was a blunder, automatic, without forethought. I cut myself short but it only served to accentuate the sad situation. With tears in her eyes, she told me how hard it was. She said it matter-of-fact, and in a way that left a vast emptiness in the moments after her statement: a black hole of sadness that clouded, for that moment, my own vision.

She broke the silence on a note of genuine hope: they had each other. I looked at her red-eyed husband. He smiled. I was grateful for their bravery. I felt a connection to both of them, through this shared sadness and hope. Maybe it wasn’t a blunder, after all.

So, let me wake up tomorrow, and continue to do so for many tomorrows to come. I can handle the rest of the day, once I’m conscious and recapture that sincere appreciation for the ability to breathe and move, one more time. I can handle any kind of day when I keep that broader perspective of appreciation for just being alive.

That’s my prayer. So be it.

Dancin' Fool

 December 19, 2010

At 2AM the moon was high, spilling blue-silver light between the coconut palms. The few clouds were edged in it; the ground, the participants, including the dancers, tinted with it. It was the annual fiesta of Combalbag, the mountain citio that Emelie calls home. It started Saturday evening, with prayers and singing in the chapel. Titi Ali played his guitar. When the service was over, there were pastries and soft drinks in the rear, and beer on a table just before the chapel’s altar. This marked the beginning of seven days of chapel services, ending on Christmas.

A hundred yards away, giant speakers came to life, pounding out a disco beat that would continue for the next 6 hours. Beer and rum – 36 pisos per bottle – lubricated tongues and limbs as the dancing began. We smiled, talked, laughed, joked and danced. And we drank: fighter wine and beer mixed together; Tanduay Rhum and Sprite.

Mixed couples, groups of men, groups of women, individuals, kids, even Boboy’s 77 year-old father, cut the rug on the rocky dirt floor under the canopy of the tropical forest.

My wife, Emelie, is Secretary of the group that sponsors the event every year. She was busy all night, supervising the collection of ballots for the three young women contesting for queen of Combalbag. At the end of the night, she took the ballot money and the donations from those who paid to dance with the contestants, back to the chapel to be counted.

My job was to drink, dance and have fun, and keep an eye on our two nephews, Frederick and Gabriel. It never occurred to me that these objectives might be mutually exclusive. But the boys made it easy for me. They stuck to me like glue until they passed out in the early morning hours, sleeping on a wooden platform just outside the circle of revelers.

I drank a bit more than Emelie had in mind for me to drink and considerably less than I intended. I suppose it was a good compromise. We were staying the night at her mountain home. It was just a short walk, or roll if your legs are a bit wobbly, along a down-hill path from where the disco was being held. Gravity would pull a man there, no matter his condition. Mighty convenient, I was thinking.

What consternated my drinking muscle was the dancing. My ass never had a chance to find a comfortable niche on the bench behind Emelie and my feet and legs never stopped moving as I was dragged from the end of one song into the beginning of the next. My ticker pounded away like a jackhammer, but apparently didn’t bring enough oxygen to the part of my brain that accounts for sensibility. I was dead on my feet.

When the chance to sit down finally came, it was with a flush and in a pool of sweat. I didn’t mind. I was thinking I must be pretty cool to be so popular on the dance floor. I reminisced about dance moves from 40 years ago, when swooning was just one of the imagined affects my coolness had on the girls of that time.

Later, as we walked the path home, I was telling Emelie how all the dancing left me exhausted. “That’s because you jump around like a cow that’s just broke free of its chains” she said. Then she laughed. I laughed so damn hard, I thought I was going to roll down that hill. Leave it to my wife’s descriptive honesty to keep me grounded! English is her second language. Sometimes she hesitates and stammers to find the right the words. Sometimes they burst out in a flurry of staggering genius! It’s sure nice to have her around, even when it prickles just a little.

It was 3:30AM when we crawled into our makeshift bed on the bamboo floor of her house. The foam we slept on was just wide enough for one person, and occupied by three of us: Emelie on one side; me on the other, and Frederick between us.

At 4:30AM our pig, Cecelia, started bawling for water. She woke up all the roosters around, who set up a crowing in a chain reaction, starting with Big Red who was tied up directly under our floor. Fortunately, the cows, goats and carabaw slept through it, and didn’t add their voices to the cacophony (or melody, depending upon your ears). The dogs and cats had the good sense to keep quiet.

I must have fallen back to sleep and I woke up a second time around 6:30. I was grateful for Frederick’s stillness in the night. He sleeps very seriously, as if death has a temporary grip on him.

After rousing, we lounged around for a little while. Then the three of us hopped on the scooter and headed down the mountain road to town and south along the highway that borders the ocean, stopping at Besa’s Café on the water, in Suba, where Emelie and I ate a breakfast of fish soup and corn grits and Derick had a fried fish cake with rice.

Life is good.

Smells Like Life

December 09, 2010

It rained most of the day today. Some of the laundry we did yesterday is still wet. My towel, for instance. It hung on the line that we have strung between the post and the window bars, on the front the porch, since yesterday morning and it’s still about half way between sopping and damp. So am I.

Cecilia

This morning, we left our rental house by the sea and headed 2 kilometers up the mountain road to Emelie's house. The sky was gray, turning to black, when we started out on our scooter. We were at the house about 45 minutes when the rain started. It began just when we finished feeding Cecelia, our pig. The pig’s food dish is a half tire, cut the way you would cut a bagel for toasting. As I was cleaning it out, the raindrops wet the back of my shirt. My crocs and feet were wet and muddy for the rest of the day.

Cooking Grits (maize)

While the grits were cooking, I washed some dishes and went to her uncle’s house to buy two cans of sardines. Her aunt and uncle, Placido and Chris, have a small bamboo hut Placido built to use as a store. Placido, or Tiocidi as Emelie affectionately calls him, is a few years younger than me. He’s short and on the chubby side. Like many of the mountain farmers in the Philippines, he tills the soil with a pick and a knife, by hand. He gets up very early each morning and starts working, and he continues throughout the day. In addition to his farm work, he always has projects. He built a small house along the road near his corn so he could watch it and protect it from thieves. His little bamboo house was erected in days, with only a few tools. (Tiocidi can do amazing things with a bolo, a short, thick machete, and a sickle.) Then he put a bamboo fence around it in short order. Everything was made from the bamboo and trees that grow right there near his hut. He works constantly, never complains, and always has a smile and pleasant word. He and Chris have 10 children, some married and some still in grade school.

 I bought my sardines and walked back to the house. Emelie has never owned a can opener. She is proficient at opening cans with a knife. I am not. I had my Swiss army knife with the handy-dandy can opener on it. It worked great.

The grits were made from the corn that Jane, Emelie’s sister, and her husband Floriano grew. They took sacks of the shelled corn to the mill and had it ground. Two years ago, I watched Jane grind the corn herself, between two large wheels of stone made for the purpose. They were the stones that Emelie’s grandparents used many years ago. The top stone has a hole in it, near the center, and a handle for turning. The bottom stone is immobile. Corn kernels are dropped in the hole; the top stone is turned and ground corn grits spill out from between the stones, in all directions. The floor under the stones, and around it, is covered with feed sacks to catch the corn grits. Maize is the staple of Jane’s family and many times the only food they have to eat, along with the vegetables they grow.

When the grits were ready, we each ate a bowl of them, topped with the sardines in tomato sauce. After doing the dishes, I went to visit Emelie’s aunt, Hemen, at her house next to Emelie’s. Hemen’s house is built up high, on stilts. It was originally the family home of Emelie’s grandparents. It’s a large bamboo house with a wood frame. The framework of the bamboo houses is made from coconut wood, Philippine mahogany, or germolina. Coconut wood is soft and is a favorite food of termites. Mahogany and Germolina are hardwoods and fairly resistant to termites. But most of the mountain farmers can’t afford the expensive, termite-resistant woods. And coconut wood is free, as everyone has trees on their property.

Jane Grinding Corn

As I am writing this, I smelled something that is not quite right. I put my nose closer to my watch. The band smells like a mixture of sour sweat and pig poop. I took a bath just before coming here to the internet café, but I didn’t think about my watch band. Need to wash it, soon.

Since I swerved into the topic of stinky stuff, I’ll just expand on that a little. It’s a thing worth mentioning. Mountain people live with stink all around, every day, all day and night. It’s an integral part of living. With goats, pigs, chickens, cows and carabaw all living within close proximity to the house, sounds and smell abound. In the rainy season, the droppings are mixed in with the mud, which is everywhere. You walk on mud; you walk on shit. Doesn’t matter. They’re the same color and texture.

What I noticed, since my first visit to the area, is that my nose adjusted to the stink. I love the mountain areas and especially the area around Emelie’s house. The people and places are familiar to me. So is the stink. Now, it’s a special stink and when I smell it: I think of happy homes, wonderful family, funny pigs, romping kid goats and the experiences I’ve had with them all.