Day to Day in Davao

Now that I’ve been here a while I’m pretty settled. I live with a Filipino family in the GSIS subdivision, to the west of the city. We live on a fairly steep hill in a single storey house, it has three bedrooms, a lounge, a bathroom (here it’s called a C.R - Comfort Room) and a kitchen. In the garden is a small bamboo house where our helpers live. The daughter of the landlady also lives in the house in a room that is accessible from the back of the house and not from the inside. For ages I thought the door next to the outside toilet and shower was just a cupboard and then one day, a lady came out to use the shower!

The house is simple, it has painted concrete floors and the walls are mostly made of ply board. The roof is made of corrugated iron sheeting and it’s noisy when it rains! Much of the wiring is looped across the walls or ceiling and all the bulbs are bare. By Filipino standards our house is pretty good. I love the simplicity of it, everything is functional, there’s no excess and everything is scrupulously cleaned. We have no hot water and all our washing is done by hand in the back garden. We did have an really old basic washing machine (a top-loader one made of plastic) but it broke so now everything is soaked in big buckets and scrubbed by hand. We have a gas cooker/oven in the kitchen (this is a luxury item, most homes just have cooking stoves) All the knobs are missing so there’s a pair of pliers on the side to turn the gas on and there’s no mains gas so it’s connected to a big gas bottle. Food is either cooked on the stove or grilled on the barbeque in the back garden.

Every day I walk down the road and catch a trikisad (a bmx bike with a sidecar welded on) down to the main road, it costs p5 and it takes about 2 minutes. From the main road I can take a jeep to any part of the city, it’s just a case of getting the right one! If I go to the community where I help with the pre-school and teach English it takes about 35 minutes to cross town, it costs p10 (there are around 80 pesos to the £) To stop the jeep you can knock the ceiling or shout ‘ngar lang’ and they’ll drop you off. I usually go alone into the communities, everyone in the team has different schedules and projects and we’re in charge of managing our own time. We meet as a team on a Tuesday afternoon to discuss any issues and to talk over our weeks. Saturday is my day off and I usually catch up on emails, do some shopping, maybe go to the beach or see a film. In the afternoons I go to the community centre for the drop-in with the rehab boys, we’ve opened it up now so that any of the community youth can come along, mostly we hang out and watch dvd’s. We bought a kettle a few weeks back so that the boys can make cup noodles or instant oats, as often they haven’t eaten, sometimes they just sleep on the floor as it’s cool in the centre. It has two floors and upstairs gets the sea breeze so it can be pretty windy, this week we started making curtains from carrier bags to keep the rain out. We’re trying to be resourceful and not always buy everything but use what we have. It’s been fun experimenting with vents in them as it’s so windy that they just inflate like a giant windsock! But you can do a lot with some tape and some string so we’ll get there.

This afternoon Paddy and I are off to Aldevincquo, it’s a small, very densely packed shopping area full of tourist shops. It located opposite the best hotel in town, the Marco Polo, and it’s notorious for slapping ‘skin tax’ on everything (charging you extra because you have white skin) We’re a bit more savvy now and we know the reasonable prices for things so we’re going prepared to haggle, all the same, I don’t really like going there but it’s a necessary evil if we want to get the best value souvenir goods, it’s cheaper than the shops in the malls. I’m going to buy a new malong as I left mine on the boat in Australia. It’s a big tube of material that is pretty much all purpose item, it can be used as clothing, a sleeping bag, a towel, a privacy screen for going to the bathroom. I find it’s very handy instead of a towel as they dry really quickly. And they have really bright patterns too. Some are simple but some, for special occasions or weddings, can be woven with gold and silver threads and are really ornate.

But first some lunch, I’m hungry. I think fish soup and rice…