Yesterday evening I went to my Lions Club meeting but could not get onto the internet. WiFi was down. This is not unusual. Its 715 am here and I normally have reliable but slow internet at home until 9 am. So here is a looong post.
I am pleasantly surprised in your interest in my adventure. As an Australian, I went to the USA for a year on a whim. That was 1989 and essentially I have lived there ever since. After meeting my wife, a fellow nurse at a hospital in Los Angeles we were married in 1995. Our quest to have kids is a whole other story but it ended with us renovating an old run down beach house that we bought with a hectare of land in the Philippines, then moving over here to adopt. The two year process has turned into a five year process so I had to go back to the USA to work while my wife stays in the Philippines as we claw our way through the court process to make Antonia and Lorenzo legally ours.
The Philippines is an amazing place that I truly love. Despite corruption and poverty, the people are happy, friendly and industrious. They make great sacrifices for their families by heading off alone to work for often lower-than-market salaries in order to remit money home. If housekeeping and construction would stop in the USA without the Mexican, then shipping, home care and healthcare worldwide would grind to a halt without the Filipino. In Spain, the upper echelon doesn’t brag that they , have a maid; they brag that they have a Filipina.
The Philippines has modern cities with modern malls that put those in the west to shame – but that’s not where we live. Our place is very provincial. The landscape of the province of Negros Oriental is dominated by the sugar industry. Hacienderos own the land. Obreros work the land. The disparity is unfathomable to an outsider but this almost feudal system works. The workers live in barrios on the land of the owner. Most hacienderos take responsibility for their employees from womb to tomb with generations of obreros working for generations of hacienderos. They will sponsor the obrero’s child through school, and once they have a college degree and an overseas job, the child then provides for the younger siblings education. Our area is slowly being dotted with new houses for families provided through this mechanism. My father-in-law’s family started a small school many years ago that has grown into a college. The family foundation has taken a life of its own a with scores of scholarships provided by the family and hundreds more by the alma mata scholarship recipients. When cane prices are high, the province flourishes. Construction brings jobs while vehicle and commodity sales increase the flow of money in the towns and cities.
Those outside the sugar farm system eek out a living working in markets, farming small rice plots and fishing. Unemployment is in excess of 25%. With poverty comes issues. Day work dries up in July and does not resume until September. It is during this time that I lose, among other things, chickens. People are hungry. I am not going to begrudge somebody for making chicken soup from a wandering chicken. Like those of you that lose poultry from other reasons, I have to prevent losses where I can and factor into production, those I can’t.
So now I have written a prologue that is way too long I will try to load some pics.