Katjan blog

This is the year when the roads are repaired.For sure there are strips that need renovation, but it is not uncommon to see also the entirely good old roads torn up and replaced with the entirely good new roads. -What is the purpose of this? The roads are open everywhere, main roads and town roads. After season of asphalt roads it is again time to change to the cemented roads, these are more durable and now again preferred, light in the dark night too.

-This is the time before the elections.

It is also the time when foreign loans are readily available to boost the shrinking economy and provide more jobs in the country where so many are used to receive the meager means for living from overseas relatives.  Now it is possible and very useful to employ as many as possible citizens, voters. But while there is only certain number of skillful labor, not enough people are there to work in each open strip of the road, and work is proceeding slowly…. So people are living in the middle of construction dust and noise, uncomfortable and for sure not healthy. People are waiting….waiting…. in their cars, on their motorbikes, in the colorful pedicaps, tricycles….this is the time when the roads are repaired.

The rain is not so predictable anymore, these global changes. It has been raining already months ago….but now it is raining more regularly. The rainy season is here, it is also not so hot anymore. When the wind blows through the open windows of the bedroom of children in the night, it gets almost chilly. It is not necessary to sit under the ceiling fan even now and it is Sunday noon time! It is a pleasant time. Sunshine in the morning, rain in the afternoon, clearing up and glance of sun in the evening, more mosquitoes, but still in times it is nice to just sit behind the house and sip a cup of coffee listening the birds and bamboo bending in the wind.

We have been less at the beach lately, and  more at home. Olga’s ears are healing, but cough and running nose persist. The usual first half a year in a new country for children, you may say, this is it again, all the new bugs. We are getting to know well the services of Silliman hospital… Having a cellphone number of a doctor helps in going over the long que of waiting patients. Still not quite sure how that works, but it might have something to do with the paying customers and customers with the state health care insurance….I just wonder.

The girls happily started the school in the Silliman University grounds, but because of “the orientation period” they can go only every second day….if not less, now because of the couch and running nose. So we are at home. They play, now that we changed the sleeping room, there is this one tiny toy room in our house like a mini house inside our house. From there the play is spreading to the other rooms….taking its place in corners, forming the cupboards and washing basins. And the girls play a doctor game (of course now that it is so common to go to the doctor in our family), form a falling London bridge, they bath with the bubbles in the white washing basins, they cook food on the plastic pans and pots, go play shopping with play money, watch cartoons and play again. The imaginary girly world, it is in this house, it is in the air. The girls are everywhere and they are playing.

In the middle of all this Olga got five last week, and you might admire her cake in some of the pictures (I must put on the site). The party was organized on Friday, Independence day here. It was a lively and loud event, many games a lot of laughing and music, party hats were forgotten on the shelf so much more was there to do. It means that we have many more toys in the house and this is making the life easier, while still waiting for the load to arrive from Hanoi…

We also got two new members in the family last week, but last time I saw the wilder one it was up in the jackfruit tree, and that was already two nights ago. So, I am not sure if she/he is still coming back. The more tamed one has already entertained us inside the house few evenings, then when it gets quiet and calm he disappears in the darkness again (for him we know it is him, while the other one wild and angry has been impossible to get close enough to determine…). In the morning we hear the familiar miaou and there he is again, looking for food, preferably something richer in protein than the white rice left of the bowl last night. Girls are fascinated, Olga named him Alisa, and maybe there is no problem although we now know the sex…Olga is careful and grown up not the scare him while Venla is mostly chasing him away with all the running and attention…But there he comes back again, next evening or next morning, after the adventures in the wide wild world, in our neighborhood filled with barking dogs.

Little by little we are building a real home, it is still stressful not to have own things from Hanoi (good news is that our personal belongings are finally on the way somewhere between Hanoi and Manila!), but somehow we have managed to buy already so many things that a big white house does not feel so empty anymore.

So it is still a lot circling around the family and home, but I am quite content with the eight nine hours spent outside the home also. It is starting, some day good and someday I still wonder if there was any sense in what I was doing the whole day. I have two offices, quiet, comfortable and sterile and other one crowded, messy and lively, and I am circling around them, athough spending more and more time in the later one: the office of Provincial Environment and Natrural Resources, where the work but also the gossip is done. I have been in the outdoor day of the office, playing volleyball in the PENRO women’s team, poorly though. Probably that’s why they only assigned me as “the subs”. -“Mme Kat you are the substitute, OK?” And I was happy about that choise. In the events like this I am still finding it hard not to fall asleep after overdose of Cebuano, with few passing sentences in English. But I suppose it is important to socialize, to mix, to be there also when nothing is done, and a lot is eaten. Probably I already told how I am amazed about the amount of food that is consumed in these gatherings, and food is not fruits and vegetables but mainly meat and sugar…

Anyhow my colleagues are good, and I am happy to have that team. Therefore to finish this there is a picture that I want to draw for you: After driving seven hours in the car (delayed by all that unfinished roadwork on the way), in the darkening night from Bacolod in the North of the Negros island to Dumaguete in the South of the Negros island. Somewhere in Bais,  we stop on the small street stall and buy an evening snack: ….sausages, hamburger, beer or peanuts, you are asking then?….-No, none of those, but one liter of blueberry ice-cream! So sweet that teeth are falling and it is divided in the ceramic coffee cups and served with the waffle, and imagine this all happens around 9.00PM in the dark road on the way home from the workshop. Me and three middle age men, (not me and my two little girls whom I could imagine wanting ice-cream after a long car drive, but who at that moment are already sleeping in their own bed with the nanny). No it is me with my two colleagues and driver eating blueberry ice-cream, so sweet that teeth fall 9.00PM on the way home from the workshop. In that moment I can not, but smile quietly for the picture it makes, aren’t these guys are just wonderful?