Ok, so once again, I know it’s been a while since I posted anything here. Sorry. It’s been a busy month, including 3 weeks away from site. Eventually I will get better at this… or maybe I won’t. We’ll see what happens!

The month of February was spent mostly away from site. After finalizing details of the house Rebecca and I were waiting to move in to (more on that later), I headed up to Manila to do a little work and to visit with my first visitor to the Philippines!

My friend Kerra, who lived across the hall from me in the dorms, works in Singapore off and on throughout the year. Well, timing worked out well for us and so she flew to Manila for a little weekend reunion. It was so great to see a familiar face! Someone I’ve known longer than 6 months. Plus, it was great to have a friend from home meet Peace Corps friends. One of my favorite parts was watching the faces of people when I said “This is Kerra, my friend from college. She’s here visiting for the weekend.” Jaws would drop as shock took over until I added in “from Singapore. Not from the U.S.” We didn’t really do much since I haven’t had a chance to explore around Manila and had no idea where we should go. Kerra actually has a sponsor child in the Philippines so she spent the day on Friday meeting her and visiting a few spots around Manila while I got a little work done. That weekend was also the first time I had seen friends from training so the whole weekend ended up being a giant reunion. It was great. I think the best part for me, aside from just seeing everyone, was to chat with Kerra about things that I’ve been missing at home and then also to vent a little bit about things here; Someone to be an objective listener, but who knows me and how I react to things. It was a great visit. Hopefully Kerra will be back again and I’ll have a chance to show her my site and a little more of the Philippines.

After Kerra left, I had one day left to run errands in Manila before we all headed off to Cavite (about 45 minutes outside of Manila) for three back-to-back-to-back trainings. The first was a two-day Language Camp that was meant to be a refresher/enhancement for those of us sticking with the same language we learned during training or as a crash course in a new language for those choosing to switch to Tagalog. I didn’t learn a lot of new things but it did give me more of an opportunity to practice speaking the language. And it really did serve as a refresher course for a lot of vocabulary that I know but don’t use much. The next two days were dedicated to our In-Service Training which gave us the opportunity to attend cross-sector sessions on topics such as human trafficking, solid waste management, starting a functional (key word!) school library and HIV/AIDS awareness.

Finally, after one day off to breathe, we attended the Project Design and Management workshop with a counterpart from our HCA (Host Country Agency). One of my co-teachers made the 12-hour trek to Cavite to work with me to start the planning for our remedial reading program we hope to start up at the school for the next school year. It was a very productive, exhausting, three days that ended with a presentation of our plan to a panel of Peace Corps staff and other PCVs from my region. We still have a lot of work to do before we’re ready to begin the program, but it was great to get our ideas out on paper and start planning. Now I will be spending time over the summer doing research about how exactly to run a successful remedial reading program. My eventual goal with this is to have the remedial reading program with the high school students in need, but then also to take the advanced readers down to the local elementary schools to do a buddy reading program with them. Maybe this can help lower the number of students needing remedial reading when they get to the high school level. We’ll see. Fingers crossed. If you have any suggestions (those of you who are or have been teachers) I’d love to hear them. Also, any books you’d like to send my way (elementary and high school reading levels) would be welcome. I’ll also be working with national and international book donation organizations to build up a useful library for the project.

I’ve been back at site for almost three weeks now. It was a bit of an adjustment back into school/classes, walking through town and getting stares again and eating rice three times a day. But after a week and a half of being here it was time to move out of my host family’s house and into my new house! I’ll give you more of the details of the house in my next post (it won’t be in 3 months, I PROMISE!). It’s so nice to be in control of what and when I eat, when I come home, how late I sleep on the weekends (I still can’t sleep in past 6am! It’s awful!), and all the other joys of living on my own again I haven’t even realized yet. I do miss having breakfast prepared for me in the morning so that I didn’t have to get up super early to do that, but overall I’ve loved the first week of living here! Now I just have one week left in the school year before I’m off for the summer. Although that doesn’t mean I won’t be working, a concept some of my teachers find hard to comprehend.

Like I said before, I will be spending time over the summer researching for my remedial reading program. I will also be researching ways to make teaching grammar fun (again, suggestions are welcome!) as I will be participating in a two-week teacher training on the island of Panay at the end of May. I’m looking forward to the experience of doing a teacher training instead of teaching high school students. The training will span two weeks, cover four sites and reach 2,000 teachers. I’ll have a chance to learn from other volunteers and hopefully we will be putting together a similar teacher training in Oriental Mindoro sometime next year. Things are finally starting to come together. I’m really excited about being busy and working with so many other volunteers. I’ll be getting some travel and relaxation time in as well (can’t wait to try out my new mask and snorkel, plus get SCUBA certified!) It’s gonna be a good summer.

Let’s see, what else? Oh! I have recently been selected to serve on two PC committees. The first is the Volunteer Advisory Committee (VAC). It is made up of one volunteer from each of the three sectors and one volunteer from each of the three regional managers from each batch, so there are 12 of us on the committee. VAC meets with PC staff 4 times a year to voice questions, concerns and suggestions from volunteers and then to hear the same from the staff. So I now represent 15 volunteers from my region. I was in Manila during the most recent meeting (the last one without the newly elected members from my batch) so I was able to sit in on the meeting and see how things run. I think it’s going to be a very interesting part of my Peace Corps experience. It will also give me a chance to get to know the staff and other volunteers better than I would otherwise. The second committee I will be serving on is the Information Resource Center (IRC) committee. This one I just found out about on Saturday. The IRC is our library here in the Philippines (leave it to me to find a library job in the Peace Corps.) The committee works with Shelia, the resource coordinator and overall information guru, to keep the IRC organized and to work to improve it and make sure that it is utilized by as many volunteers as necessary. I’m looking forward to finding out more about what I’ll be doing as a part of this committee. And, the bonus to being on these committees is that my travel to and from Manila for these meetings is covered by PC. From my site I have to go to Manila to get just about anywhere else in the country so these meetings will give me the opportunity to get to these other places just a little bit easier (and cheaper, since I won’t be paying my own way to Manila!)

Well I think that’s all for now. I really will write another update soon with the details of the new house and anything new I can come up with. If you have questions about what I’m doing here or my life in general, ASK! Ha ha I have a hard time coming up with things to write which is why it takes me so long in between posts. So ask me questions and I’ll give you my best answers!

Ok, that’s it. I’m off to school! Love you!