Playing in the Rain

Week 6
09/27/09 - 10/04/09

All is well here.

It has been rather wet, though.

I case you don't watch the news (which I don't since I am TV-less), there was a massive typhoon named Penpeng that swept across the Philippines. If you looked at at weather map, it appeared as if the entire country was engulfed by it. Fortunately that was not the case. The really bad parts went up the Eastern coast of the country.

Our training region, La Union, is on the West side of the main island of Luzon. No major flooding. No major wind damage. We got lucky. I was told by someone that La Union gets lucky a lot because we have the mountains to the East and the South China Sea to the West (which supposedly is never the source of typhoons). We still get typhoons, but the super ones don't plow over us like other parts of the country. Not sure how true any of that is, but I'll take it for now and allow myself to be reassured. ;-)

We did get a heck of a lot of rain and wind, though...which leads me to another great Peace Corps experience. One of the volunteers in our cluster is having a birthday in a couple weeks. We are all supposed to be out of town that day, so her host family decided to have an early birthday party for her on Saturday (10/03). Now, Saturday night was the night that we had our worst weather from the typhoon: Signal 2 level winds and rain. I guess the birthday has to get cancelled. Wrong!

Jessie and I (accompanied by our host dad) drove over to our training site, parked the truck, and then trudged through rice fields to this other volunteers host family's house. It was awesome. Imagine Jessie and I all geared up with raincoats, headlamps (gotta see the path through the rice) and completely ineffective umbrellas, walking through a dark rice field in the wind and rain. Imagine us arriving and then shortly after that, all the other volunteers in our cluster arriving with their respective host families. It rocked. No fucking typhoon was going to cancel that birthday.

Leaving the party was even more fun because we all left together (see below picture). Raincoats, headlamps, flashlights, plastic bag ponchos. Lots of rain and wind. Did I already mention that it was awesome? Hahaha.

Stacking up experiences like this one is such a great part of this adventure.

Sadly, the typhoon caused the postponement of our supervisor's conference until next week. Still don't know our permanent site. Boo.

I should have those details the next time I blog, which may not be a couple of weeks since I will be offsite from 10/07 until 10/18.

Make sure you miss me!

Pis Out