Supervisor's Conference August 26-29th

                                                              I finally see Manila

The time came for us to leave Sabang and go to the four day supervisors’ conference where we finally found out where our permanent sites are and met our supervisors or counterparts, whichever came, who we will be working with for the next two years. This was the time we had all been waiting for with much anticipation. We stayed in the very nice Lima Park Hotel in Malver, Batangas. www.limaparkhotel.com.  It was a six hour bus ride from Sabang and I finally got a good look at Manila as we passed through it on the way to Malver. Yes it sure was nice to have flushing toilets, toilet paper, hot showers, to swim in the very nice swimming pool and be together with the whole batch, batch 271, of Peace Corps Trainees. We’ve lost four since staging in San Francisco but there are still 68 of us. It was so nice and refreshing to room with Sue and Mary, both education volunteers and both 50+, not that I don’t love all my fellow CRM volunteers, but hey, they’re all the ages of my children or even many years younger than my youngest.

green yarn indicates CRM sector, blue and yellow are Education and CYF

 My permanent site is in Inopacan, Leyte, which is in the southern region of the Visayas and close to the forbidden island of Mindanao. We’re forbidden to go there because of unrest. The person who will be my boss/supervisor came to the conference and went through the four days of training with me. We hit it off great and did a lot of laughing. I used all the Tagalog I know and he spoke some English. I guess I’ll be learning another language when I get there, Cebuano. Great, I’m barely at a basic level of Tagalog.  His name is Anecito B. Asencion. He says I can call him Chito. He is the Municipal Agriculturist in the Local Government Unit (LGU) of the municipality of Inopacan. He’s 54. We’re both parents. He has a 13year old daughter who loves math and wants to be an accountant. He likes to cook, swim and ride his bike, and neither of us can sing (laughter). Videokee is insanely popular here. You can pretty much hear people singing with videokee machines 24/7. People who seem to have very little but the bare necessities have big fancy videokee machines with hundreds of songs programmed on them. Chito says he plays guitar at his church.

I’m excited to start working at my job. Chito showed me pictures of the guy who will be my counterpart who is a fish examiner diver and will be training me to scuba dive (stoked). He also showed me pictures of the office I’ll be working out of and pictures of the new municipal office building that will be completed next year that we’ll be moving in to.

we had a little timed team competition to see who could build the best watch tower

 I’ll be participating in Coastal Resource Assessments, (including sea grass, mangroves, corals and fish), updating the Municipal Coastal Environment Profile, updating the Municipal CRM Plan, working on Marine Protected Area planning, assisting in the municipal fisheries registration, working to establish a fish catch monitoring system, networking within my LGU and with NGOs, schools, other LGUs, politicians, fisherfolk and their organizations, and facilitating Information, Education and Communication (IEC) for both youth and fisherfolk.