Some pictures...

A philosophical moment on the deck of a boat

Lilli in action


Frithjof, colleague volunteer

Teachers and fellow students at the school.

Lilli, Antonio and me

Che Guevara: alive and kicking in Davao!

The king of fruits

Some time ago someone asked me to send some recepies of Filipino dishes home. However, if I had to make an extensive list of - how shall I put it - 'unusual' food served in the Philippines, I would hardly know where to begin. Therefore, let me just introduce you to what is considered to be 'the king of fruits' by Filipinos: durian. Durian is a fruit that only grows in very specific climatic conditions close to the equator (if the temperature drops below 22 degrees during daytime, the fruit stops growing). You can only find it in a few places in the world and some people are so well trained in tasting durian that they can point out the exact location where a specific durian was grown (pretty much like people taste wine).

There are many peculiar things about the durian. To start with, it has a very hard spiky husk. If you think of quietly reading a book in the shade of a tree, better not make it durian tree cause you probably won't live to tell if one drops on your head. Secondly, durian has a very penetrating scent you can smell from 20 metres away. Apparently, durian is forbidden in some places because bystanders would be bothered too much by the smell. The most difficult thing to describe is of course the taste. I tasted a fresh durian for the first time at the local fruit market a few weeks ago and I must say it tastes like nothing I ever tasted before. It's not as repulsive as I feared it would be, but you definitely have to get used to it. Once you do, it is said that it becomes a kind of an addiction. I'm not quite there yet, but in the meantime I've tasted durian coffee (with bits of durian floating in it) and durian icecream.

My New Place

Wednesday evening I moved to a new place not too far from the missionary house and the language school. My new neighbourhood is called doña asuncion and the house is located in Santa Ana Avenue. As you can see on the Google Earth map, it is very close to the Davao airport so I guess I'll have to cling on to my earplugs :) It's really a nice neighbourhood and there's always a pleasant ambiance in the streets with their many shops and playgrounds.


I'm living with the Cuizon family constisting of nanay (mother) Marlene, tatay (father) Rudy and their children Junjun and Tata. It is a warm and kind family and they go out of their ways to make me feel at home. I really admire their hospitality, certainly because I often have the impression that they are concerned that their house may not be up to western standards. That said, I think it is a lovely home and I feel well at ease here.

My new family also introduced me to a favourite Filipino passtime: Karaoke! I was warned beforehand that Filipinos are fond of karaoke, but up till now we somehow managed to steer clear of having a microphone pushed in our hands. However, moving to a family whose price possession is a state-of-the-art karaoke machine may have been pushing my luck just a little bit too far, so yesterday evening I found myself browsing through a 4000-songs catalogue to pick a song that would not inflict any permanent ear damage on my hosts :) I picked a suitable song for the occasion: No woman, no cry :)

Moving...

This afternoon I'll be moving to a new place. I had a great time here in the missionary house and the people have been very hospitable and kind to us, but as the Cebuano course is quite short I think it is necessary to have more day-to-day practise in Cebuano. Living with a local family will allow me to hear people talk Cebuano all the time and force me to get over the threshold of speaking it myself. It's also a good way to integrate in the community and pick up Philippine culture. After all, there's only a few weeks left before I start my work at Kapwa. On the downside, it might become more difficult for me to get on the internet, but I'm sure I'll manage to post a message every once in a while...

Talikud Island

The last couple of days have been very hot and humid in Davao. So last Saturday, Lilli and I decided to take a boat trip to Talikud Island for a refreshing swim in the ocean. Armed with suncream and swimming goggles we left for Talikud Island in the morning on a boat packed with Filipino families and what appeared to be half of their belongings. Talikud has nice beaches where the water colours different shades of blue. Our mission for the day: finding starfish in as many different colours as possible. I also discovered that rubbing suncream on every part of your body EXCEPT your back is not a very wise thing to do... Since the boat was crowded and hot, we decided to climb on the roof on the way back and enjoy the breeze on the upper deck. Nindot kaayo!

Words, words, words

Learning a completely new language unfortunately means having to cram an awful lot of words into a modestly sized brain. Luckily, language often gives you wonderful clues about cultural patterns of thought. While studying my vocabulary list today I came across the adjective 'walay kalibutan'. 'Walay' means 'no' or 'without' and 'kalibutan' means 'world'. Put together, however, 'walay kalibutan' means 'innocent'. Isn't that wonderful? If you say 'walay kalibutan ang bata', that means 'the child is innocent', but literally it says 'the child has no world'. Somehow, Cebuano connects the loss of innocence to a child's emergence into the world. A whole filosophy in just two words. But then again, when I mentioned this at the dinner table in the missionary house, Father Ben pointed out that to be 'walay kalibutan' is not really a compliment as it has the connotation of being naive. The ambiguous virtue of being 'innocent', no? Being 'unwordly' is being naive...

The Belgian Way

Sommige dingen zijn veel interessanter als je ze vanuit het standpunt van iemand anders kan bekijken. Maandag werd ik door mijn toekomstige werkgeefster, Alma de la Paz, uitgenodigd voor de officële opening van een fototentoonstelling in het Davao Museum. Ik ontmoette er een zekere Rey Magno Teves, de 'secretary general' van de Kusog Mindanaw. Kusog Mindanaw - letterlijk 'strong Mindanao' - is een soort socio-politiek forum voor vredesopbouw in Mindanao. Toen ik hem vertelde dat ik uit België kwam fonkelden zijn ogen plotseling enthousiast: "In Mindanao, we want to do it the Belgian way!" Ik dacht meteen: "enkele maanden zonder regering zitten? Eindeloos kibbelen over akkefietjes? Communautaire relletjes over de hoofden van de mensen heen? Super-Yves for President?" Ik werd er me snel van bewust hoe cynisch wij in België geworden zijn als het over onze verleden verworvenheden gaat. Het Belgische model mag dan al complex en omslachtig lijken, voor heel wat unitaire staten met een sterke regionale diversiteit is het een droom. Rey Magno Teves is enkele jaren geleden zelfs op 'excursie' geweest naar Brussel om er te leren hoe België regionale tegenstellingen oplost in een federaal model. Het is een zeer relevante problematiek in Mindanao, want Manila is veraf en dicteert de wetten in alle regio's. De roep om regionale bevoegdheden en inspraak is groot en veel groepen voelen zich niet vertegenwoordigd in het centrale gezag. Het is best grappig te worden bewonderd om een systeem waar we zelf zo graag lacherig over doen. Ik werd zelfs gevraagd een gastcollege te komen geven over het Belgische model, maar ik vrees dat ik dan zelf eens goed in de boeken ga moeten duiken. Hoe zit België ook alweer in elkaar?

Sabonghan Aquino Coliseum

For some, Sunday is church day. For others, however, Sunday is above all Sabong day. 'Sabong' is the Philippine variant of cockfighting, a sport that is mainly practised in parts of South East Asia, Latin America and also a few countries in Europe. Today we went to the Aquino Coliseum, one of many sabonghans in the Philippines where men (and some women) spent their Sunday afternoons betting on cockfights. Men who breed and train roosters for such fights are called 'sabongeros' and it is almost endearing to see how dedicated they are to their prize-winning roosters (it is sometimes said that a sabongero whose house catches fire will let his entire belongings go up in flames if that means being able to save his roosters). There is a lively ambiance in the sabonghan. If you want to place a bet you have to look for someone who is betting on the other rooster for an equal amount of money. For a few minutes, everyone is making gestures and looking around to find a match with another gambler. When two people agree they makes signs to the bettakers who are known to have incredible skills for remembering faces and the amount of money at stake. Because of this almost supernatural talent, they are called 'Kristos'.

After the betting, the duel begins. For the animal activists among my friends, I must confess that this is quite cruel and bloody (at least from our point of view). A sharp, pointy piece of metal is attached to the rooster's leg and some fights are over in just a few seconds if one roosters deals out a deadly blow immediately. If you lost your bet, you simply throw your money to your betting partner (this is one of the reasons why peso notes are almost always frumbled pieces of paper). The winning sabongero takes the opponent's dead rooster home where the lady of the house will turn it into a celebratory meal.

Funny detail: there are even some commercial 'doping' products available to make roosters perform better in the sabong. One of the brands - I'm not joking - is called 'Thunderbird'. Less funny detail: some of our neighbours are sabongeros, so every morning around five o'clock we are treated to a royal concert of roosters crowing as loud as they can. Mom, I can't thank you enough for buying those ear plugs...

Kalooy sa Dyos

Last Sunday Father Elias took us to a mess in one of the baryos just outside Davao City. A 'baryo' or 'barangay' is the smallest unit of local government in the Philippines. One might compare it to a village, although I have the impression that the term 'baryo' has a specific connotation. In essence, everyone lives in a baryo - the one we live in is called 'Pampanga' - but when people say they are going to 'a baryo', that usually refers to villages that are farther removed from urban centres. It was the very first time for us to go to a baryo so we were really excited about that. Most of our time will be spent in baryos in Mount Apo so it was certainly interesting to visit one near Davao City. Father Elias spreached mess in Cebuano to some 50 members of the community gathered in and outside a small chapel in the centre of the village. Although our Cebunao course still had to start at that time, my christian upbringing helped me to understand some parts of the service. The structure of the mess was very familiar to me and I more or less knew what was being said at hinging moments of the service. As the songs were written on blackboards in the chapel we could figure out some words. God is referred to either as 'Ginoong' (the lord) or as 'Dyos' (God). As in many languages, references to God have found their way into everyday language in expression such as 'Salamat sa Dyos kay Byernes karon' ('thank God it's Friday') or in the particle 'pohon' which is sometims added to statements about the future: 'hangtud ugma pohon' ('see you tomorrow if God is willing'). Religion is strongly present in everyday life with patron saints being celebrated in each baryo or people making a small cross across their chest while passing a church in a jeepney. I enjoyed witnessing the mess in the baryo because church services are important moments in community life. It is a time to greet each other and - due to our presence - also greet strangers :) I cannot really explain why, but although I wouldn't call myself religious I always feel strangely at ease after a church service even if don't understand much of it. I am sometimes even tempted to think that the content of a service is not even that important - wishful thinking, I know :). To me, the most important moment of a church service is the communion, sharing the bread. Sometimes I even regret not being religious, mainly because is it such a basic experience for so many people which I have a feeling I will never truly understand. Well, who knows...

Whose Mission?

If someone would have told me some years ago that I'd be living in a missionary house today, I probably would have kindly but firmly suggested them to seek psychiatric counseling :) My opinion about religion has changed a lot over the years. Whereas I used to disavow religion as a form of 'mauvaise foi' - tricking yourself into believing human existence has a special value in this world - I have learned to appreciate religion for its ability to connect and inspire communities and add symbolic meaning to crude realities. That said, it is still strange for me to be among missionaries. Religion may contain important values, in my opinion it never contains 'truth' (as far as I'm concerned, nothing does). The history of missionary zeal is so closely connected to colonialism that it is hard not to dismiss present-day missionary work as old-fashioned imperialism in disguise. My position and prejudice, however, are being challenged to the extreme as I am not only living in a missionary house, but also going to a missionary language school where I am being mistaken for being an apprentice missionary :) Talk about an identity crisis!

Luckily, reality is a lot more complex than my prejudice would have it. The missionaries of Jesus are in fact an offshoot of the movement of Scheut (CICM) and came into being because of a local need to have more involvement of local people and focus more on community building than on spreading the word of Jesus. An intern struggle between a more conservative elite based in the West and a more progressive wing in the Philippines led to the formation of the MJ Movement. Consequently, most missionaries here are Filipinos and not missionaries from abroad. Moreover, the library in the house is full of works on Islam, Judaism, Filipino psychology and Philippine tradition and history, which makes this an interesting place for study. On the other hand, I am sometimes somewhat embarrassed to live in such a comfortable house (although that is only temporary).

I still find missonary work - even in its present-day appearance - a very tricky business, but in a sense it is of course as questionable as development work. Development workers are often called the new missionaries and there is certainly some truth in that comparison (after all, development workers will also refer to their work as 'a misson'). One might even wonder if the motives of missonaries and development workers are really that different. It is one of the reasons why I feel as uncomfortable being called a development worker as I am being called a missionary. For all I'm concerned, I'll be an employee in a Philippine organization engaged in ecological and social support for the mount Apo region, and that is about as far as I am willing to go. but perhaps that is just some 'mauvaise foi' on my part...

Filipino humor

Maandag zijn Frithjof en ik met volle moed (en jeugdige overmoed?) aan onze cursus Cebuano begonnen. Een taal leer je met vallen en opstaan. Voorlopig vallen we sneller dan we weer overeind krabbelen, wat voor onze docenten dikwijls grappige blunders oplevert. Zo betekent het woord 'amo' zowel 'baas' als 'aap', afhankelijk van waar je de klemtoon legt (en geloof mij, het verschil is flinterdun). Gelukkig voor ons is het Engels van Filipino's ook niet helemaal comme il faut, dus we strijden met gelijke wapens :) Over het typische Filipino-Engels doen veel grapjes de ronde, en omdat humor ook cultuur is, wil ik jullie deze niet onthouden: Een leerkracht geeft een leerling de opdracht een Engelse zin te vormen met de woorden 'defence', 'defeat' en 'detail'. Na enig nadenken zegt de leerling trots: "A chicken jumped over defence, first defeat and then detail".

Spider Fighting (not for the faint-hearted)

Just a funny story Father Ben told us during supper last night. Many Filipinos are fond of cockfights and there is usually quite some money at stake during these duels. Lately, also children seem to have picked up an appetite for gambling and have developed their very own 'blood sport' using different species of spiders to combat in one-on-one spider fights. It works as follows: two spiders are put at opposite ends of a stick. They are then made to approach each other until they 'wrestle'. The first spider to fall off the stick or to 'throw the towel' loses the duel. Spider fighting has become so popular in rural areas that it has even triggered serious concern among education authorities. A ban has been imposed in at least one of the southern provinces of the Philippines. Education authorities are not only concerned about the ethics of spider fighting and gambling, but also about its effects on children's school performance. Apparently, quite a few children find hunting and training fighting spiders a much more interesting occupation than being in school. I wonder why...

First Impressions

Maayong adlaw! Eerste indrukken zijn vaak het minst betrouwbaar, maar daarom niet minder interessant, dus hier gaan we dan. Eerst het decor, dan de mensen? Ik zit dit berichtje te typen op mijn kamertje in het huis van de Missionaries of Jesus, een soort verblijfshuis van lokale en internationale predikanten in een wijk van Davao City, waar Frithjof en ik zullen verblijven gedurende onze cursus Cebuano in de taalschool hier vlakbij. Vanmorgen voor het eerst de stad verkend, een kort eindje in een tricycle (een soort brommertje waar een busje omheen is gebouwd) en daarna in een typische Filipijnse Jeepney (openbaar vervoer naar het model van Amerikaanse legervoertuigen tijdens de 2^de Wereldoorlog). Eerste missie: onze resterende dollars en euro’s omwisselen en een lokale sim-kaart kopen, want de Filippijnen zijn wereldkampioen sms-en en zonder GSM ben je nergens. Meteen ook even contact opgenomen met Alma, de ‘executive director’ van Kapwa. Deze namiddag wilden we een stuk van de stad te voet verkennen, maar een plensbui van enkele uren bracht ons doorweekt terug thuis. Regen brengt hier twee maal zonneschijn, want door zo’n regenbui koelt het meteen een paar graden af. Het is hier gemiddeld zo’n 30 graden, en dat merk je al meteen wanneer je bepakt en bezakt de luchthaven uitwandelt en op een paar seconden tijd je hemd aan je rug voelt plakken (verder ga ik hier niet in detail).

Het doet echt heel veel deugd hier te zijn na maanden aftellen. En dat brengt me meteen ook bij de mensen. Eerst en vooral natuurlijk Frithjof, een collega-vrijwilliger die als bio-ingenier zal werken voor Farmcoop en in wiens aangename gezelschap ik een iets minder aangename en vooral vermoeiende reis Brussel-Amsterdam-Manila-Davao maakte (verdacht veel baby’s met hoge huilfrequentie op de vlucht trouwens :). We werden van de luchthaven afgehaald door Maya, de dochter van Arnold, het regionale steunpunt van Broederlijk Delen in Zuidoost-Azië. Ze bracht ons met een taxi naar de Missionaries of Jesus en Father Ben, een West-Vlaamse pater-scheutist die hier al tientallen jaren woont. Grappig detail: Father Ben spreekt enkel Engels met ons, want hij lijkt zijn moedertaal wat te zijn verleerd (of voelt zich niet helemaal op zijn gemak in wat ondertussen een vreemde taal moet zijn geworden). De andere gasten zijn vooral studenten theologie in opleiding die hier zijn voor seminaries of die hun familie komen bezoeken. Het huis heeft een aangename gezelligheid en we leren er onze eerste woordjes Cebuano met vallen en opstaan. De taalcursus begint pas maandag, dus we hebben enkele dagen tijd om te wennen aan het ritme van de stad, de hitte van de zon en de klank van de taal. Wie zich ongerust maakte is bij deze gerust gesteld, wie houdt van tropische zon kan alvast jaloers worden en zelfs liefhebbers van zomerse regenbuien kunnen even vanop afstand meegenieten. Om maar te zeggen: met mij alles in orde.