Welcome! I'm Brad, a retired American high school teacher who has been living in Cabanatuan City, the Philippines for more than six years. My adoptive/adopted Filipino family, theTorreses, the Javier-Aldonza-Guevarra-Academia clan, the kind staff at the hotel across the street where I used to live, and the Raguindin family, under whose roof I now live, have been friends and helpmates to me during this time. The postings below describe the experiences of my girlfriend Glenda Torres and me foremost, I guess; I'm also apt to peer into the experiences of those who are close to the two of us -- with their permission, of course. On a larger scale, I'd like to give my non-Filipino readers glimpses into the culture here, the rich history I've been imbibing for several years, and the challenges faced by a developing tropical nation in which more than a hundred languages are spoken. Cheers!


You can reach Brad Smith at boan.song@gmail.com.

Bathtime for Joy-Joy!

3.28.24


Bad Baluts


Jheng's sister Mariel (remember that family over on the Aurora road?) keeps in touch with me regularly to remind me when her tuition is due, to send grade reports, etc. -- she's near the end of her second year in a four-year undergraduate program in hospitality management at Aurelio University, and I'm footing her tuition. An unplanned pregnancy with her boyfriend and the birth of little Shonie haven't deterred her in her quest to be the first in her family to attain a college degree. Anyway, she texted yesterday with some sad news: her mother Luz, grandmother Dana, and Jheng's son Aaron had tried some baluts, and had all come down with                          

bad cases of food poisoning -- so bad that they all spent time at Good Sam                       Mariel, Shonie, Luz, and Aaron

Hospital.


Baluts are a popular if fairly expensive street food in most southeast Asian countries. They are fertilized duck eggs: yes, one eats the boiled or steamed embryo of the bird, directly from the shell. American reader, sounds unappetizing to you? Seemed unappetizing to me too, but of course there came a time when I had to try one. The taste is strong and redolent of fowl, really not bad; I found the texture to be disagreeable, though, and I haven't gone back to baluts. I just read in Wiki that the processing conditions for the eggs are also ideal growth conditions for bacterial pathogens such as salmonella; will pass this information on to the Aurora road family when I see them next. In the meantime, I doubt they'll be buying baluts.


On a tangential note, Teresita brought with her from London some real camembert, a very, how shall I put it, aromatic French fromage, and she offered me a round of it, which I gratefully accepted. Other members of the family, Glenda as well, couldn't understand how Teresita and I could consume this cheese with gusto: they found it disgusting! And their acculturation to this fine product will no doubt be slow: "stinky French cheese" cannot be found in this country outside of Manila, I'm willing to bet, and it's probably not easy to find within that teeming metropolis.

3.15.24


In Passing . . . .


*GDP in the Philippines grew by 7.6% in 2022 and by 5.6% in 2023 (dof.goc.ph).


*According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, the projected life expectancy for Filipinos was 71 years for males and 78 years for 

females in 2022.


*The Philippines is made up of 7,461 islands. Only about 2,000 of these are inhabited (Travel Tramp).


*The estimated 2024 population of the country is 114,163,719, making the Philippines the 12th most populous country in the world (Wiki).


*One hundred eighty-two distinct languages are used by Filipinos. The top languages generally spoken at home are Tagalog, Binisaya,

Hiligaynon, Ilocano, Cebuano, and Bikol. Tagalog is taught in all public schools and serves as the nation's lingua franca (Wiki). 


*The only place in the Philippines ever to have received measurable snow was the summit of Mt. Pulag, Luzon's tallest mountain at

9.606 feet. . . more than 100 tears ago. 








                                                                                                                                      Pulag's summit. (Unsplash)





*The SM Mall of Asia in Manila, with almost 600,000 sq. meters of floor space, has more than 3,500 shops (Wiki).


*The country is named after Phillip II, king of Spain when the islands were colonized  by that country in the 15th century. There is

a movement afoot, a movement that is gaining traction in cultural and political circles, to change the name. One of the frontrunners

for the nation's new moniker: "Maharlika."


*The Philippines currently has a highly centralized form of democratic government. Its

twenty-four senators do not represent different parts of the country; rather, the Senate

candidates who receive the most votes in a long list of candidates, no matter where they

reside in the country, take the powerful Senate seats that are open in a given election.

This governmental setup creates a number of inequities that have become more and more

noticeable as the country modernizes -- for example, because so many candidates come

from Metro Manila, funding for infrastructure is skewed toward that one region.


Forms of federalism have been envisioned for the country since the days of the revolution

against Spanish colonizers. The revolutionary leader Aguinaldo wanted three separate

administrative regions in an independent Philippines: Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao.

A 25-member consultative committee has much more recently proposed the creation of

eleven regions that would have two senators from each region, plus two senators from the

central administrative region of Metro Manila. The mechanics of instituting this plan are

currently being worked out: stay tuned. 


*Generally, the temperature of the ocean in the Philippines is that of bathwater. May sound enticing to you, but I prefer the cooler

pools and rivers here for swimming.




3.7.24


The Tropical Sun


"Guess! Guess!"


"Guess what?" I turned to Glenda, who was standing at the door of the bedroom in her PJs. Still prone on the bed, I was physically trying to remove cobwebs of sleep by rubbing my eyes and scratching my scalp.


"We're out of guess!" Well, Glenda's native Ilocano gets in the way of her English vowel and consonant sounds; she almost always murders the small "a."


"Ga-a-as," I intoned.


"Right. We're out."


I asked if Tenjong was in the compound and she, after ducking her head out the kitchen door, answered in the affirmative. Tenjong (Don-Don's eldest, and formerly referred to here as Langjohn -- he found a nickname) is my gas guy, and I told Glenda to give him a 1K note and tell him to keep 50 pesos for himself. Tenjong would carry the empty kitchen stove fuel tank a short distance to a place where he could exchange it for a full tank for about P800. He would carry back the full one, hook it up, and hand over the change. Each tank is good for about four months of cooking.


It's an hour later and I've finished my second cup of coffee. And I'm congratulating myself over having had a good sleep after three difficult nights. You see, the night before Glenda and I were going to Pangasinan for a river splash with other Torreses, the bathroom saw me almost as much as the bed. My luck, a gut bug, maybe a norovirus. Glenda had spent most of the previous afternoon preparing dishes for the trip -- this trip would go on, but not with the drooping one who had little chance of having a good time, and who would probably put a damper on the whole affair. The driving, which I had envisioned splitting with Glenda, would all fall to Glenda now -- about 5 hours' worth. Her performance on the road in the weeks since she got her license had impressed me; I knew she was ready for something like this. And she did a fine job driving to Rizal to pick up family, then heading west to her sister's place in Pangasinan, then driving to the river there. She spent the night in Rizal after driving family members back to the farm.


There was definitely enough water in that mountain-fed Pangasinan river, by the way. Here is one of Glenda's snaps.













I kept the cats company; they were fine with my own guess. Read the kind of book I tend to read when not feeling well: in this case a Clive Cussler cliff-hanger-packed adventure yarn of no literary merit at all (sorry, Clive, but you do entertain).


Now, the three months before the rains arrive in mid-June are regarded in the Philippines as summer; we are on the cusp of said event. In the afternoons during this time, if you're near sea-level you can expect afternoons with oppressive, occasionally "mad-dogs-and-Englishmen" weather. Fahrenheit thermometers regularly register afternoon temps in the 90's; summer heat waves here are declared when there is a stretch of 100+ afternoons (or over 38 C). And this is not the Phoenix, AZ type of heat, Americano. Summer heat here, as in India and the rest of southeast Asia, comes with high humidity. Early mornings and evenings can be pleasant during a Cabanatuan summer, but watch out for that sun! The intertropical convergence zone -- that wet, north-south-north-south traveler -- reaches the Philippines in June and stays for a few months. One may not see the sun for days on end during the Philippine rainy season, particularly when the wet convergence zone is augmented by a southwest monsoon, as often happens during these months. When the rains come they will be most welcome; but they are at least three months away.


Before the summer solstice, and for several weeks, we experience in the Philippines something I had never witnessed before coming here: the sun directly overhead. Had never before experienced this due to the fact that I had never before lived south of the Tropic of Cancer. And it was weird, the first time I noticed this, let me tell you. My home for the vast majority of my days was at latitude 42, where the sun at "high noon" only for a handful of days achieves an altitude angle of 70 degrees, and here it was at 90 degrees!


Hence the disagreeableness of Philippine summer, I guess.



2.27.24


Commemoration


A year ago I was passing a body in a casket in order to  get to the kitchen to make meals. Don-Don's older brother Edmund had died suddenly (heart attack) and, as is the custom in the Philippines, his embalmed body was laid out in fine dress in the ancestral home for relatives and friends to visit, in order to pay final respects and discuss the life of the departed one. This occurred over just three days; the body was then taken over the river to be viewed in his own home in Barangay Masyapyap for three days, before the burial ceremony at a cemetery in Masyapyap. Yesterday, on the first anniversary of the man's death, friends and family members convened at that cemetery to eat a catered meal and remember Edmund. In addition to birthdays, anniversaries of death are observed in the Philippines and sometimes form the basis of social occasions.


Glenda and I had not known the man, but we were kindly invited to the get-together by Dona Teresita, the man's mother, who, so soon after landing at Clark Airport and still dealing with jet lag, planned and presided at the event. Fifty or sixty people attended; it was overcast, in the 80's (F), and there was a comfortable breeze. This was a good opportunity for me to learn more about Don-Don's family and to get to know Dona Teresita better. "Gracious" was the word I used to describe her on the phone, and she's that in person too! Also humorous and vibrant.



























As you can see, the cemetery is quite parched due to the lack of rain. The rice crop on Lubang Island, off the coast of Mindoro, is a total loss due to drought, says the news today, and there are reports of widely scattered crop failures on the big island of Luzon. Outside of a few mountain showers in the central cordillera, there is no rain in the forecast for Luzon over the next two weeks. Typhoons can continue to steer clear, but some good, saturating rains would be most welcome here.

2.20.24


More Fool Me


Call it a hiatus. Actually it was the ugliest bronchitis I have memory of. Brought on by smoking, of course. Yes, I did the thing I said I wouldn't do: backslid. And paid the price. Now I'm in the middle of my third week sans puffs, chewing the occasional square of nicotine gum. Read somewhere that smokers rarely make a clean breast of the habit on the first try. May the Force be with me on the second.


I'm walking comfortably for the first time in a long time; thank you, Dr. Alcuer. Glenda has achieved an even greater freedom of movement, bagging her standard driver's license on the first try. She's been back to Rizal twice, over to Gabaldon, tearing up the road with the Avanza when she wasn't caring for me. The car's air conditioning gave out on her on the first Rizal trip, which made the drive home for her an uncomfortable one. We had been expecting this inconvenience. Six months ago we were driving in Bongabon when the aircon gave out, and came upon a car aircon shop before the sweating became intense. The guy there replaced a magnetic coil, then told us he thought the compressor had maybe six months left of life in it -- and he could not have been more accurate, with regard to the timing! Our aircon is now as good as new, though we're about $300 out of pocket.



The Raguindins are working hard -- cleaning, painting, decorating -- to put the big house "to rights" for the arrival of Dona Teresita, now just three days away. Here you see them taking a break with Glen and me: Adonis, Aiza, Aiza's sister Clara Mae, and Donaiza. A pediwagon selling siomai is stationed most afternoons outside Don-Don's water business, and we all sampled that delicacy yesterday. Afternoons are noticeably warmer than they were last month, and there is still no rain. Glenda's older sister Libya and Libya's partner Pinkie have invited the two of us to go river-splashing with them near their home in Pangasinan Province the Sunday after next. But the great Pampanga here in Nueva Ecija is a kneecap-high stream in most places; surely in their smaller river to the northwest little splashing can be done. Perhaps we should offer to take them to a Pangasinan resort . . . .

A few days ago in Manila, the Catholic Church held its annual Walk for Life, which was begun in 2017 in response to extrajudicial killings of those involved in the drug trade and to calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty by the Duterte Administration. It drew more than 3,000 participants. Manila Archbishop Cardinal Jose Advincula, in the mass preceding the walk, had some interesting words which seemed to pertain to the unavailability of divorce to a vast majority of the population: “How do we deal with the dilemmas and complexities of modern families, irregular situations in the home, the diversity and understanding of identity and personhood, the wounds caused and inflicted because of polarization even in the home?” he asked. He encouraged dialogue rather than unswerving adherence to doctrine. In this country, where so many couples are "separated" and have started new families with spouses whom they are not allowed to wed, these words attracted notice. The Philippines is the only country in the world, outside of the Vatican, where divorce is outlawed; a lengthy and very expensive process of "annulment" is available only to the rich. One senses that change regarding marriage laws is on the horizon; one wonders, though, how long it will take to get to that horizon.


Manila Archbishop Advincula to flock: Rethink pro-life strategy (inquirer.net)