Back From the Bukid: Buntis, Motorbikes, and Bon Jovi

I'm back from my 4 day prenatal/immunization outreach to the beautiful bukid (mountains) ministering to the Manobo people. This is gonna be a rather long post because I really hope to give you a taste of what I experienced and learned from the Filippinos living in the bukid. Life is different there in many ways from Davao, and surprisingly the same in many ways. But so different from the states! And I wonder how I'll try to take the things I love about life in the Phils and apply the to life at home when I move back? (For instance: Will I walk around New Seasons saying, "Hello! Good Afternoon! How are you?!" to everyone? They would think I was a nut in uber-cool/guarded Portland).
But I'll explain these and other impressions as we go along...

Day 1: There is an ancient Manobo legend which tells of how a god created man to be immortal. The legend says that immortality was lost when a bird exchanged man's "life breath" for a mere piece of kemp string. I love this story. How often do we as humans trade our "life breath" for meaningless things that we endow with meaning? Spending the week with Ate Mary Jean and her husband, and watching how they serve their people totally inspired me. They are definitely people who spend their "life breath" spreading love and care for the people around them at all times, and it shows.
Let me tell you a bit about who they are:
Ate (pronounced AH-tay, a term meaning "big sister") Mary Jean is part of the Manobo tribe here in the Phils. She is a nurse and midwife who is backed by the government in her work to serve her people. Weekly she works tirelessly traveling around by motorbike over the crazy mountain roads, going village to village doing prenatals, giving immunizations, doing health teachings, etc. The life of a midwife calls you to many roles. This week I saw her act not only as a midwife but as a teacher, a caregiver, a counselor, a pastor. She blesses her people in so many ways and is truly a wise-woman. She is vivacious, has the most infectious BIG laugh and is such a little joy-bubble ready to burst on all occasions!
Her husband, Kuya (pronounced KOO-ya, a term meaning "big brother") Joon is also Manobo and he is the principle/teacher of the elementary school that is a 2 minute walk from their house. He speaks excellent English so I learned a ton from talking to him this week and he told me alot about the struggles of his people. He is also full of Joy and hilarious. But, I learned this week, that loving to laugh, sing, play games and just really have uninhibited FUN is really a Filippino thing. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
moving on!..

We left the house in Davao at 6am with Ate Mary Jean and Lumen (a midwife on staff here at Mercy Maternity Cetner) and took a bus, then a jeepney to a main city in the mountains. We stopped at the health cetner there where Ate works throughout the week. Then we walked over to the mayors office where we paid a "courtesy call" to him. He basically looked at our passports, asked us where we were from, what we were doing, etc. Then we waited around for our motorbike drivers (a couple of Kuya Joon's cousins family members) to come and pick us up. We rode motorbikes for the remainder of the time. 4-5 to a bike. That's how we roll in the Philippines!
(Below L to R: Genevieve, Ate Mary Jean, and Lumen. Genevieve and Lumen are both Manobo women who became midwives sponsored by Mercy Maternity Center (part of what my tuition goes to!) in order to go back to the mountains and serve their people groups)
Check out that "Filariasis" sign! I had never heard of that disease before! Apparently it is a virus that mosquitoes carry here and, as you can see from the pics on the sign, the result is...uh, not fun.

So here we are getting ready to roll to Ate Mary Jean's house. Filipinos wear all these clothes when they ride bikes because it's dusty. But lord, it's hot. I braved the dust. Don't you love how Genevieve rides on the gas tank? She's 8 months pregnant right now! It's totally not uncommon to see whole families piled high on these motorbikes. I'm holding the cooler that holds all the immunizations for the week: polio drops, Hep B, RBC, and MMR.
So off we go!...The hot air thick whipping past my face carrying smells of burning coconut shells, sweet rotting bananas, bread baking, dust...

Oops, and then we get a flat tire in the middle of this banana field. This happens a few times over the week.

So we explore a bit as we wait for him to come back to get us. Ever wonder how the workers gather bananas? Neither did I, but they use this pully system (the blue bags are bunches of bananas).

And then we arrive at Ate Mary Jean's village and her cute little house. Of course we are quite the sight, these tall white women piled on the motorbikes and, as is the custom here in the Phils, you wave and yell "Hello!" to everyone, all the time, as people yell out "Hello ma'am! Where are you going? Where are you from?"

Tropical garden-ness. They looked confused when I said "I use to have my hair the color of that flower!"



Inside of the house. Our bedrooms were upstairs.

My first time sleeping in mosquito nets (we don't have to use them in Davao). Thank GOD for mosquito nets.
As we laid in our bed resting for a bit, we heard the precious videoke blaring from a house next door. Air Supply, Journey (of course)...
Cultural lesson: I found out that in the Phils people BLAST music because it is polite! You see, they are trying to share their stereo with the neighbor who can't afford there own. No, I'm not kidding. It's so funny how "politeness" is culturally relative. Here it is polite to ask many personal questions, sit super close, blast your music so your neighbor can share it with you. In the states it is polite to give people as much silence, space, and privacy as possible. Could you imagine your neighbor blaring the Dire Straits classic "Money For Nothing" at 6am?! But they are just being polite!!

We were all hot and dusty so we walked through the village to bathe in the river. It was wonderful.

Afterward, Ate Mary Jean took us on a tour of her and Kuya's village. We hiked up this big hill to see the view (and I think so she could check her text messages cause it's the only place to get a signal!). The sun was low and casting a golden light over everything. It was breathtaking.

Filipino cow. She was asking about the cows in the states and we told here they have no hump, they are white with black spots, and have no folds of skin. She thought that sounded strange.

We walked around and she pointed out all of the flora and fauna: banana and coconut trees, ginger plants, guava trees, avocado, lemongrass, pineapple...I told her how lucky they are to have such an abundance of amazing food growing wild, everywhere.

View from on top of the biggest hill in their village.

Rice fields below

Then we hiked back down the hill and walked over to this little stand selling fish and spices to buy our dinner. When the sun starts to go down everyone comes outside and sits around talking, playing basketball, and just to suroy-suroy (wander around). At this point I was already having a great time acting like a total goofball (something you really have the freedom to do in the Phils) and attempting to use my very minimal Cebuano talking to the village ladies. They loved to laugh and ham-it-up for the camera, as you can see

Our dinner

This woman who was hanging out is the mom of another midwifery student who is sponsored by, and lives at, MMC studying to become a midwife.

So we went home and had our fish and ate cocoa fruit for dessert. I had NO idea that inside this giant pod are seeds, covered in this sweet white fruit that you suck off, and the seeds are what is dried and pounded down to make chocolate! This is one of the huge exports here in the mountains as you will see in later pics.

Just have to interject with a cultural lesson: This is whitening lotion. Almost all of the Filipinas here use this stuff! I always tell them "I use lotion to try to make my skin tan, not white!" The grass is always greener, eh?

Day 2: We wake up around 6am and after a breakfast of rice, ampalaya with eggs, and fish we watch the guys try to figure out how to best strap our bags onto the motors.

And we're off! It's about a 2 hour motor ride up through these mountains. We are going to hit 3 villages. First up is a village with a tiny health center that Ate started.

From L to R: my motor-mates for the trip. Genevieve, her bana (pronounced BAH-na, "husband") Ronnie who is hilarious and always singing and full of energy. He is what I imagine King David would have been like if he was a Filipino! He was a worship leader in Davao, is a musician, loves nature and talks about how he rides is motorbike slowly through the mountains so he can "enjoy God's creation," me, and Lumen. Thank GOD Lumen came on this trip with us. She translated almost the whole time and was a life-saver.

So we arrived at the first village and immediately set up and started working at the health center doing prenatals and immunizations.
This little girl looks like she knew what was coming. Either that or she's totally freaked out that this tall white lady is standing over her!

Mamas weighing their babies.



The lady to the right is one of Ate Mary Jean's health workers who lives in the village.

And time for a siesta. This is where I slept and I'm pretty sure that this is the mat in which I got the crap bitten out of me by bedbugs. For the remainder of the trip (and even now) my whole abdomen and back was (is) covered with bites.



When we woke up Ronnie and a couple of the other guys were climbing the trees outside to get us one of my most favorite Filippino foods: fresh buko (young coconut!) I will miss buko SO much.
He was gonna let me chop it with the machete but I was too wimpy.



You are suppose to just drink it from the hole in the top but I was spilling it everywhere like the clumsy white person that I am. So I just poured it in the baso (glass).

We had groups of children watching us at all times.

I think I ended up eating 1 1/2 bukos



Full. Of. Buko.
Sooo good though.
p.s: my tattoos were quite controversial in the villages. Apparently if you have tattoos it means you are a criminal and "belong in prison." Even when I tried to explain that each one of my tattoos were a story of God's faithfulness in my life, they just couldn't make the leap that they were positive and not negative. I brought sweaters just in case this happened, so I quietly covered them for the rest of the time. People were alot more relaxed around me after that. I was HOT, but it was worth it. Ate didn't mind my tattoos at all, but she came up to me later and whispered "that was probably a wise thing to do."

It was getting dark so we decided to suroy-suroy through the village and down to the river.
Some guys playing basketball. Apparently they thought I could play cause I was tall? Not so much. Diane Chan, if you are reading this, I thought of you and WISHED you could have been there to kick some butt in basketball. I think you would have gotten like 10 marriage proposals.

We walked through banana fields and past water buffalo to come to the river where people were moving lumber.

We were sitting on the shore and we could hear this guy over there going on and on about how he wanted to speak to the "Americanos" and wouldn't someone please help him with his English. Too funny.
I took this time to ask Lumen and Genevieve more about the tattoo taboo, cause alot of the time you will see older women in their 80's with full sleeve tattoos. I saw quite a few when I went up to Tabuk in the northern Phils the year before last. But they told me that here older people got tattoos based on superstition that stated that "a big fat man with sharp teeth would eat them if they left their villages, so they got the markings to protect them so they could travel to other villages." Apparently a spirit would attack them unless they got markings to protect them. This superstition has died out with the older generation in this area. Up in Tabuk though tribal tattoos were a sign of beauty and the woman had a special dance they did to show off their tattoos. But that's the north. This is the South.

Walking back to the village. It's dinner time. And what do I hear even out in the bukid? Videoke and this crazy dance music that we call the "hamster song" cause it blares from the Videoke place behind our house in Davao and sounds like hamsters screeching on beat, "Whee-whee-wheeeeee-we-we-whee-whee-whee..." Even out in the bukid.

These guys really wanted me to take their picture. But they wanted a picture with the flash only ;)

Ronnie and Lumen joking around. Lumen was in charge of rice, I got put in charge of the gulay (pronounced GOOL-ay, "vegetables), the men were in charge of the meat of course. This was my first time cooking dinner over fire. We bonded over food as we cooked. Love how cross-cultural that is.



After dinner we had to pay a courtesy call to the barangay (pronounced BUR-on-GUY, "neighborhood") captain and the council members of the village. It was the typical Filippino way of having a meeting and this is how is goes:
We enter the house and sit exchanging pleasantries. Someone brings in refreshments (even out in the bukid it is GIANT glass bottles of soda, RC or Orange, and crackers). You eat. They ask you: 1.) How old are you? 2.) Are you single? If you are (we all were), they introduce the other single male in the room as everyone laughs...and they are only half joking. 3.) Where are you from? 4.) Why are you here? Then they ask tons of questions about America. Tons. And are shocked when you tell them:
"Yes, yes we have much poverty. No actually many people have drinking problems. No, people actually live on the street with no family. No, not everyone owns a farm and in fact it is very expensive with lots of taxes and regulations to own a farm. No, you have to pay to catch fish and hunt animals and in fact you have to have a special license to do it!"
Shock and awe sweeps the room.
It becomes embarassingly apparent that they have this idea that America is, in effect, "Heaven." And you realize that "poverty" is relative. Here the Barangay captain, who is probably the most wealthy man there, but by U.S standards is living in a shack in poverty, is asking us if WE have poverty. It's kind of hard to explain, but I try to tell him that poverty in America is different. Poverty in America is the poverty of loneliness, spiritual and familial poverty, along with material poverty. "Poor" people in the Philippines have very close-knit families and social networks. People living on the streets in the U.S are often alone and mentally ill.
At some point the pastor of the village came in and started asking Ate many questions in Cebuano. She translated and told us he was asking biblical questions because people in his congregation have been asking him things he doesn't know how to answer. Come to find out these are very basic foundational Christan questions like: is God a man or is God a spirit? If you believe in Jesus what does it mean when you die?..no joke. Ate basically turned into the pastor for the night and counseled him on many things for the next 20 minutes or so. They have a woman with a mental illness in their village that he didn't know how to deal with. He is being asked things he didn't know how to answer. It broke my heart. He is the Shepherd of his people and there is no one there to shepherd him. Can he read the bible? I don't know. Anyway, Ate didn't think he had gone to school and she hoped that somehow someone could come and teach him how to shepherd the people there. That's one of the things that frustrates me about "missions"...people believe in Jesus, they get "saved," but there is no discipleship and then the missionaries move on and leave them there with no further teaching.
Anyway, it was a very educational evening, but left me with a heavy feeling. Especially when the Barangay captain was saying good-bye and told us that he was very happy that we were serving the women in his village and that he "wished he were white." ....comments like that make it really difficult to lay down my "white guilt," as it were. I can't imbue identity and pride in someone else. And I can't convince them that being white is not the answer, because truth be told, my white privilege opens many, many doors for me that will never be opened for him. It's a complicated issue that I wrestle with alot.
We said goodnight and I went to sleep with a heavy heart.
Day 3: We got up at 6am and after a breakfast of fish, rice, and vegetables we hit the road with plans to travel about an hour more into the mountains and go to 2 villages to do prenatals, immunizations, and health teachings on measles, nutrition, and diarrhea. On the way we passed a videoke joint where an 80's video of Bon Jovi was playing. Ronnie and I yell back and forth on the motorbike discussing the merits of Bon Jovi, who is very popular in the Phils, and I tell him that Bon Jovi is on Oprah alot lately. He didn't know who Oprah was. I say she's a very famous talk show host and if you are on Oprah, it means you are very famous. He seemed to understand.

We were getting further and further into the mountains, almost as far as you could go it seemed, and we came to the next village. What did I hear when I got off the motor?..a Filippino singing "Keep On Loving You" by REO Speedwagon very off-key. Yes, even WAAAY out in the bukid there is videoke. Here it is rigged up and run off of a car battery. Everyone has got to have some entertainment I suppose.

Word went out that we were there so all these women and babies started coming to the "meeting place." They brought is water and boiled yams for marienda (snack). Yes!

Lovely mamas. Beautiful babies.

We stood in front of them and they all asked us the "4 basic questions" we get asked everywhere. Giggles abounded and they wondered why we weren't married.

Ate set up and ready to begin immunizations.

We took all the prenatals with Lumen doing interviews, us doing the check-ups.

Lumes and Genevieve.

Health teaching time! My topic was measles. Lumen translated.

Teaching about proper nutrition while buntis (pronounced BOON-tis, "pregnancy or pregnant"). We did a skit. I was the "good buntis" who ate lots of gulay, isda (fish), manok (chicken), prutas (fruit), tubig (water). Ruth was the "bad" buntis who ate "junk food" and "dieted" because she didn't want a big baby. This is common. They all know what junk food is (all the cookies, candies, crackers, weird processed foods sold at sari-sari stores, soda, etc.) and "dieting" is common practice. They thought this was hoooolarious. (We do these same kind of skits in health teachings at MMC).



Apparently Ate and Genevieve were having fun with my camera.

Little girls waiting for their mamas to get prenatals behind that door behind them. We did prenatals in this little shed-type thing.



And took LOTS of blood pressure readings. A ton.

Even the white girls wanted their blood pressure read.

Then we went to one of Kuya Joon's cousins houses. I think almost everyone is related somehow by marriage or somewhere along the lines. In Ate's village, about 3 hours further down the mountain, there are like 600 people in the area and a bazillion cousins.

All those seeds drying on the mats are cocoa beans! They are cocoa farmers (among other things) in this area. They export them to factories in Davao where they get processed there and sold in supermarkets.

I found a little friend.
Here is a baby taking a nap on the porch of one of the houses.



The kitchen of Kuya Joon's cousins house where we ate lunch.



As lunch was cooking I really had to use the CR (Comfort Room aka: bathroom). So I took a little stroll down this hill...

my first time using a REAL squatty potty. In Davao they are at least a little bit off the ground. I was praying there were no spiders in there.

C'mon, you know you were curious :)

Us white people use tissue. FYI: never say "napkin" in the Phils when at a restaurant. A napkin is a feminie hygeine product. Always, "tissue."

Hanging out. Eating lunch. It was delicious pork adobo, rice, vegetables.

Off to the next village for more immunizations, prenatals, etc. Tons of cocoa beans drying in this village. By the time we left they were all gone.

See that broken table in the background. That was what we were going to do prentals on, before it broke. We had to make due with the women just sort of leaning back on it! One of the ladies, the one in the black dress below, was all "I don't feel comfortable with this!" (in Cebuano) and marched over to her house and brought back blankets and pillows so we could do it on the floor instead. I did her prenatal and she was so funny and sassy! This was her 10th baby.

The mama on the far right in the brown dress had me SO worried. She was really sick. Malnourished, anemic, and her baby had super high resps and wouldn't breast feed longer than a few minutes at a time. I felt bad for her because she wasn't from that barangay and the other women seemed a bit embarrassed her. So in turn SHE seemed embarrassed. I gave her all my Ferrous Sulfate (iron pills) and a copy of an info sheet that I use at MMC during prenatals that tell what to eat for proper nutrition and how much (in Cebuano). Lumen and Ate talked to her alot. To be honest with you I don't think her baby is going to make it. I hope she and her baby both do.
We rode about 2 hours back to Ate's house just as it was getting dark.

Day 4: The next day was Lumen's birthday so Ate decided we would celebrate all day! We got up early and packed a HUGE picnic and they took us to "the pools." Filippinos love to celebrate with food, "parlor games," and videoke of course.

We ate and ate and ATE (made me miss all of you at Imago!!), and Ate Mary Jean had the whole day all planned out. She herded us around all day, and this is how a Filippino birthday celebrations goes: "First we will each say blessings and wishes for Lumen. Then we will eat. Then we will play parlor games. Then we will sing. Then more parlor games. Then we will relax and swim!" As we ate we could hear someone singing the most off-key, awesome, hilarious version of AC/DC's "Highway to Hell."
So here I am picking out my videoke tunes.

Check out their set-up! Amazing.
I busted out a little "Umbrella" by Rhianna, and "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilara.



Videoke master! Perfect score!
"Duha 5.00": 2 songs, 5 pesos.
45 pesos=$1. So yeah, pretty cheap.

Next up: parlor games (and more eating). We played limbo, pool relay races, etc.
It hit me how uninhibited Filippinos are when it comes to stuff like this. Even the men were SO into these games. It was so much fun! Rarely, if ever, are people this un-self-conscious in the NW. They ae too busy trying to be "ironic." Filipinos really just enjoy life.





We partied some more and went back home. We sat at the kitchen table and Ate and Kuya asked us what we wanted to do when we are finished at MMC. I told them my plans to start a birth center that serves women living in the margins of society back home. They laughed and joked and said we needed to stay and help them! I think they were half-joking. There is indeed MUCH need. 20 villages in the area don't have any health workers at all. Kids walk 14 miles each day to school BOTH ways. They leave at 4am. Alot of them drop out cause they are needed at home to help out and it's too much of a strain. I am considering sponsoring a girl from the village to train to be a midwife.
The next day we rode motors, a bus, and a jeepney to get back to MMC. Even after only 4 days away the city seemed so crowded and dirty. People leave the bukid in pursuit of a "better life" in the city. It's still up for debate if life is indeed "better" in the city.

As I sit here and finish this account of my time in the bukid, I can hear Guns n' Roses "Knocking On Heaven's Door" blaring from our neighbors house.
How nice of them to share :)