Barely settling in...

“Oh shit, I’m in the Philippines,” those are the words I whispered to myself while looking out the window as my plane descended bringing Manila’s landscape into view. This is my second day here, and it still is settling in. I got all my things unpacked and woke up to a brand new room this morning, but I still can’t fully grasp that I will be living here. Sure, I’ve been here a couple of times before, sure I’ve traveled before, but this time it’s different. It’s a whole new discovery and mentality…. I am used to traveling with a group, other students, or friends, but this time it’s just me for an extended about of time. The first of many lone adventures…Granted I am staying with family, it’s an environment that is different, and FAR AWAY from home. Although, I have to come to think of the Philippines as a second home. A home I’m still discovering…



Before I left my dad told me that in one of the drawers in his room I will find old letters from mom to him. Low and behold, I found birthday, valentine, anniversary, and Christmas cards addressed to dad. Some letters had my foraged signature- as I was only one or two- and Elmer’s scribbles… one of the cards was written when I was in my mom’s tummy kicking and making it hard for her to sleep. Restless since before i was born. Reading those cards definitely gave be insight on the love between my mom and dad, and the struggles my mom must have went through being a single mom in America while my Dad was overseas working for years- not able to see my mom or his kids for a year at a time.

Those cards are just a snippet of what I expect to learn about the lives of my parents, my family, and all that comes with living in the “motherland” for the next six months. Six months?!? Still can’t believe it.

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I’m in between books right now. Still reading “All About Love,” by Bell Hooks, just started “Screaming Monkeys,” and in the middle of reading again, my own traveler’s manual, “The Alchemist.”

I usually underline really good quotes that stick out to me, and it seems that I’m underlining everything in Bell Hooks’ book. She quotes Parker Palmer in The Active Life: Wisdom for Work, Creativity, and Caring:
“To be fully alive is to act… I understand action to be any way that we can co-create reality with other beings and the Spirit…Action, like a sacrament, is the visible form of an invisible spirit, an outward manifestation of an inward power. But as we act, we no only express what is in us and help give shape to the world; we also receive what is outside us, and reshape our inner selves.”

Then there’s Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images. In referring to an article that decribed a young Filipino-African child as a “monkey,” Evelina Galang writes, “In the end, we concluded that the reason things like this happen is because our history books- and I mean our American history books-do not cover this, our Asian American history- the atrocities, the accomplishments, the contributions, the acknowledgment that we are a part of this America, not visitors, not ghosts, not foreigners, not monkeys.”

I also like how she describes the artwork in this book as “ the most abstract, the voice that is deepest inside us that has the longest route to travel before it could be heard.”

And finally, there’s Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. I finally got my original copy back- the copy that has all my marks, sidenotes, and highlighted quotes. “It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”