USA to Philippines

My maternal grandfather, Abraham Dobin, died on October 14, 1983. Aside from my parents and my brother, he is the person who most influenced my development. Much of who I am, I owe to him.

Abraham Dobin wrote an autobiography, dedicated to his four grandsons:

http://www.amazon.com/Fertile-fields-Recollections-reflections-busy/dp/0498015459

Grandpa was a leader, a man of the community. Like my father, he was also a business owner, as I am now. Both he and my father learned, and lived, something important about business: There are two things you must be as a businessman. First, you must be committed to managing your business well, so that it makes a profit. Without that, all of your plans and dreams — to earn a living, to build something of value, to benefit the community and humanity — will come to naught. Second, you must operate with integrity at all times. Without that, you may succeed in business, but you will not achieve true success or happiness as a person.

Abraham Dobin was not a very religious man, although he was very committed to and participated in the Jewish community, was bar-mitvahed at the age of 60, and later played a leading role in uniting three different Jewish congregations to build one temple. That was just one of many causes and community efforts he spearheaded or supported in his life.

He may have been the most competent human being I have ever known.

I last wrote a letter to him in the Fall of 2006, on the occasion of my 46th birthday and what would have been his 99th birthday. At that point I had lived exactly half my life without his physical presence. As of last month, it has been 30 years since he died. It’s time for another letter.

Dear Grandpa,

I wish you could be here now. There is so much I’d like to discuss with you, so much guidance I know you could give me. Whenever I think about you, I feel your spirit and your love, and it brings tears to my eyes.

I want to share with you something I discovered today. Like most of our family, I have not been very religious. There are many parts of the Jewish religion that I appreciate and value, but the prayers and the anthropomorphic conception of God are not among them. But today I found myself doing what I would call praying.

For the last two years I’ve been struggling to build a new business: http://saiffsolutions.com/home/

This business is a dream that I am committed to, that I want with all my heart to succeed. I have been through many challenges so far, and at this point I think I have all the elements in place to achieve some real success. My goal is to reach stable profitability by March, 2014. We have a long way to go in a short time. In the last six months I’ve put together a North American Sales Team, developed a brochure, generated interest at industry events, and, through the sale of my condo in San Francisco, generated enough capital to continue to build the business.

Today, as I drove through New Jersey and enjoyed the beauty of thousands of trees displaying their Fall colors, I felt a powerful call from within myself. I felt vulnerable, bare, open. And this is what I prayed:

I want this dream. I will do and be whatever I need to do and be. I am open to whatever is demanded of me. I will make this dream come true.

What I mean by “this dream” is described on these three pages:

http://saiffsolutions.com/home/mission

http://saiffsolutions.com/home/about/vision

http://saiffsolutions.com/home/our-values

Grandpa, thank you for everything you have given me. Thank you for always loving me, for wanting to be with me, for considering me an important part of your life. Thank you for being the best man you could be, and giving me the strength and wisdom to be the best man I can be. I will always love you and remember you.

Love,

Barry

One of my readers asked for comments on the weather here in Tagaytay this summer. Yes, it is summer now. Summer in most of the Philippines is from March to May, approximately. We’ve had a lot of sun here, some very hot days. But it’s still not like the heat in Manila or Batangas. There are occasional breezes, and in the shade it is OK, even when the sun is at its hottest.

Dindin and I have been on an exercise kick. We’ve been working out on our back deck every other day, using our own free weights. OK, well the last 5 days I haven’t been exercising, but Dindin has (but then he isn’t working 12 hours a day, running a start-up).

MEASUREMENTS

One thing I highly recommend to anyone starting or continuing an exercise program is measurements. When we started on February 17, we took these measurements (all in inches).

Dindin – February 17, 2013

Neck: 14
Waist: 31.5
Chest: 33.5
Shoulders: 39.5
Hips: 33.5
Bicep: 11.25
Wrist: 5.75
Thigh: 18.75
Calf: 13

Barry – February 17, 2013

Neck: 16.75
Waist: 46.5
Chest: 42.5
Shoulders: 43
Hips: 44.5
Bicep: 13.5
Wrist: 7
Thigh: 24.5
Calf: 16.5

Today, one month later, we took these measurements. I’ve put the gain or loss from last month next to each measurement.

Dindin – March 17, 2013

Neck: 14.5 (+0.5)
Waist: 31    (-0.5)
Chest: 33.25 (-0.25)
Shoulders: 40.75 (+1.25)
Hips: 32.75 (-0.75)
Bicep: 12.25 (+1.0)
Wrist: 5.75 (0)
Thigh: 18.25 (-0.5)
Calf: 13.5 (+0.5)

Dindin’s Gains: 3.25″
Dindin’s Losses: 2″

Barry – March 17, 2013

Neck: 16.5 (-0.25)
Waist: 45.75 (-0.75)
Chest: 41.5 (-1.0)
Shoulders: 43.75 (+0.75)
Hips: 44 (-0.5)
Bicep: 13.5 (0)
Wrist: 6.75 (-0.25)
Thigh: 23 (-1.5)
Calf: 16.5 (0)

Barry’s Gains: 0.75″
Barry’s Losses: 4.25″

I had been a bit concerned that our workouts tended more toward Dindin’s needs than mine. He needs to gain weight (muscle, ideally), whereas I need to lose weight (or to lose fat). We do vary our workouts, his are more focused on heavy weight and mine more on speed and endurance, with some aerobics. I think I need to add a weekly run. But our first month results show that our results fit our intentions. He has gained, and I have lost.

Of course, weight loss is 80% what you eat. I’ve been trying to control my quantities, and of course to continue to stick to my ridiculously restrictive diet. Dindin has been trying to both increase his appetite and “clean up” his eating, by eating better quality food.

The scale can be useful, but if it is your only feedback mechanism it falls far short. Measurements are your friend. Get yourself a tape measure and get started!

MUSIC

And now, introducing our newest family member! I learned to play the piano as a child. I have a very good keyboard in San Francisco, but it proved unpractical to ship it here. My plan had been to buy a new keyboard as soon as my business hits its first profitability goal. However, I found this one sitting in the Korean salon where I get my haircut. It’s used, probably needs repair, but it works and has very good grand piano sound, plus lots of other features. 4 of the 88 keys no longer work, but 3 of those are almost never used. I’m very happy to be playing daily again!

It’s been over 4 months since I posted on this blog! Thanks to my loyal readers for their undying patience. Life has been very full.

Initially what led me to stop posting was a rather negative experience of culture shock last Fall. I was driving from Tagaytay City to Manila. In the city of Bacoor I stopped at an intersection, and a traffic enforcer walked up from behind my car and knocked on my window. He said he was giving me a ticket, but could not explain clearly what I had done wrong. It turned out that he wrote on the ticket that I had disobeyed a traffic officer, something I had not done. I spent 2 days contesting this lie, to no avail. In the hearing he told many more lies, fabricating a story in which he had stopped my car, a story that never happened. The hearing officers believed him and I was required to pay 1500 pesos to get back my driver’s license, which he had confiscated.

This incident left me feeling very sad and disappointed, and seriously questioning the wisdom of my move to the Philippines. There are aspects of life here that are very depressing. And while it is possible over time to create positive changes in society here, there are things you just have to live with. I’ve been stopped by traffic enforcers about 5 times in 15 months, and usually they are attempting to engage in deception or corruption. The corruption is part of the design of the system. If you refuse to participate you sentence yourself to significant inconveniences.

However, there are also many positive aspects to life here in the Philippines.  In January we moved to a new house in Tagaytay, with a view of Taal Lake and Taal Volcano, and a separate billiards room that we’ve adapted to become the office of my new company, Saiff Solutions. We launched the company after New Year’s. In early February I was in the hospital for 2 days with a severe infection. I had a very high fever (103F) for several days, and a splitting headache. The diagnosis was upper respiratory tract infection, bacterial. It took me all of February and the better part of March to recover. I still have an occasional cough and congestion, but it isn’t slowing me down much now.

Right, I was going to talk about the POSITIVE parts of living here.

Those of you who’ve read some earlier posts know that I was writing a book about moving to the Philippines. This transformed about 9 months ago into writing a chapter for a larger book on Moving to SE Asia that a group of writers is publishing. Well, after about 8 months of off and on writing, I’ve finally submitted a complete draft of that chapter, about 90 pages. This frees me up to do all the other writing I now need to do for the business.

I’ve been planning this business for about three years. We launched it  in early January. At that point our site was up (http://www.saiffsolutions.com), and our Facebook and Linkedin pages, and our new Twitter account . We had completed our registration with the national government as a Filipino corporation back in November. Now we’ve completed our local registration. I knew the business was a viable idea and that it could work. The one thing I was a bit uncertain about was, would we get any customers? Well, as of the last 2 weeks we now have 4 customers who have verbally agreed to do business with Saiff Solutions. I am about to hire 2 people, and probably 2 more as soon as I identify them.

The business model for Saiff Solutions is based on doing business with companies overseas – companies in the USA, Europe, and other wealthy countries who need technical documentation or related consulting, in English. Most Filipino companies would not make good customers for us, because they’d be unwilling to pay the rates we charge. Our rates are approximately 1/3 of what companies pay technical writers in the USA, and competitive with what companies in the USA or Europe pay for writers in India. However, our rates are several times greater than the rates that Filipino companies pay local writers in the Philippines.

So, I’ve been surprised to learn that one of the most useful ways to spend my time is networking with people in Manila. Many local companies are involved with foreign companies. And despite the general truth of my thinking on Filipino companies, there are exceptions. In fact there seem to be enough exceptions, that is Filipino companies who for various reasons are willing to pay our rates, to keep us quite busy.

So, I am thrilled that this new company, which I’ve had such high hopes for but also great uncertainty about, is already becoming a success. There are many, many issues to address to make our success possible, and at times it seems overwhelming, but this is exactly the challenge that I wanted, and I am up for it.

Also, we have a new member of our family, and a new wing of the company. Most of you have seen pictures of our shi-tzu, Yeesta. Yeesta is now a 2.5 year-old male. We have wanted to get a companion for him, and Dindin has been researching the idea of becoming a dog breeder for some time. On Sunday we met Sydney, a 6 month-old beautiful female shi-tzu. Her personality seems to be the exact opposite of Yeesta. She is a bit shy and reserved, but she does wag her tail often. Our new house provides a perfect environment for breeding dogs. We don’t let them into the main house, but there are both indoor and outdoor areas for them to play and sleep, and a storage room out back where we plan to keep the puppies when they arrive.

Yes, I will post pictures soon. Sydney is a tri-color shi-tzu with a beautiful coat of soft, silky hair. In the last few days our office has been transformed. Most of the floor space is taken up by a full-size billiards table, which the landlord has required us to retain in the room. We had a carpenter build work surfaces on top of the pool table, with insulation underneath to protect it. He also made another workspace on the side. I selected some beautiful woods, and he did a great job.

Much of the success of Saiff Solutions so far I owe to our newest board member, my friend Leon. Leon has extensive experience in the call center business, and as a salesman. With his help we are creating a sales capacity and developing a pipeline that should keep us busy and growing with new customers every month. In so many ways, this business is being built upon friendship and family. I am grateful to all of our business associates, our whole team, all of whom I count as friends or family.

I will share with you the three elements of the Saiff Solutions corporate vision:

US$1 billion in annual revenue by 2025

To move the annual global budget of The Hunger Project (http://www.thp.org) from $12 million to $200 million, by 2020

To transform the culture of work in the Philippines.

Please like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SaiffSolutions

Follow us on Twitter: SaiffSolutions

Now that I’ve been living here almost 1 year, another level of culture shock has set in. For 50 years I learned how to live, how to enjoy life, how to succeed in life, in the environment of the USA. This is a very different environment. It may not seem so different at first, due to the prevalence of English and the Filipino love affair with many aspects of US culture (songs, movies, malls, some major brands). But it is a whole different world, and navigating it requires different approaches.

Given this, experiences of home become crucial to my well-being. I think I’ve always had a strong sense of home, in large part because the house my parents bought in New Jersey when I was 6 months old they did not sell until 40 years later. Unlike many of my fellow citizens who moved frequently as children, I never moved as a child (well, OK once as an infant). I made up for that by moving about once a year in my twenties and most of my thirties, joining the 20% of the US population that moves about once a year. Since then I’ve been more settled. But now I am far from my home country, and I may only be able to return there once a year. How do I find or create home where I am?

The answer for me is community. But not just any community. A community where it feels like family. I participate in many communities. Last week was like old home week, as I got to be in two communities that feel like family to me.

On Thursday night, I attended the first session of the Landmark Forum in Action seminar series, offered in Manila by Landmark Education (http://www.landmarkeducation.com/). Landmark is a global educational company that offers state-of-the-art courses in human growth and development. I’ve been participating in this work since 1981. I’ve done many of their advanced courses, and for a period I led their introductory meetings in the San Francisco Bay Area. While the main purpose of Landmark Education is to empower their customers to live their lives powerfully and to lives they want, an important side effect is the community of Landmark graduates. These are people from all walks of life, adults of all ages, who share what I would call a very special form of humility. Landmark graduates, no matter how accomplished or talented, believe that they can learn more about themselves and the world, and are committed to their own personal growth and development. They are actually interested in finding out what their “blind spots” are, what are the ways in which they have been missing what’s important in life? To me, these are very important qualities. We humans are all arrogant in our own ways, and our arrogance often causes problems for us and those around us. Being willing to see your own shortcomings in a new light, no to knock yourself down but out of a commitment to improve yourself, this to me is the true measure of a human being.

So it was like being at home, to be able to participate with a group of Landmark graduates in Manila in a Landmark course. The seminar meets weekly for 10 weeks. This is one of the major reasons why I bought a condo in Manila (I’ll share about that and post pictures soon in another post), so that after these seminar sessions, which end at 10:45 pm, I don’t need to either get a hotel room or drive 90 minutes home to Tagaytay at night on roads that are not well lit.

If you’ve never heard of Landmark, or if you’ve heard of it but thought it was something different, I encourage you to check it out. And if you used to participate in Landmark but have not in years, I encourage you to check it out again. Landmark has changed dramatically in the last 30 years (before 1991 it was known as est). What I observed as arrogance and obsessiveness in the 1980s is gone now, replaced by a deep respect for people. And love, not romantic love but a natural, healthy acceptance and love for everyone, has returned, not as a focus but as a context of the education. I owe a great deal of my success in life to Landmark Education. Without it, in numerous situations I would have damaged myself and others due to my own arrogance and denial. Time after time, it has opened my eyes in ways that saved my soul.

On Friday night I had another experience of home. I finally went to the Jewish Synagogue in Manila (http://www.jewishphilippines.net/). I attended the Friday night Shabbat service and the dinner afterwards. I was raised in a Reform Jewish congregation in Edison, New Jersey, led by Rabbi Alfred Landsberg. Rabbi Landsberg is one of the people who made me who I am. To him, the most important aspects of Judaism are ethics, love, humility, and family. Long after I moved away I read about Rabbi Landsberg’s leadership in officiating same sex union ceremonies.

I remember the Rabbi drawing a circle on the chalkboard, a pie, and then making slices in the pie for the different aspects of Judaism – heritage, food, traditions, belief in God. He told us that we could choose which slices to participate in. Including belief in God. You didn’t have to believe in God to be Jewish.

Now, to many Jews that will occur as heresy. But that is my background, and I firmly believe that a person’s actions and how they live their lives are more important than what they believe. I am not exactly an atheist, but I do not believe in God as he is depicted in the old testament. So, in some ways, I felt out of place at the synagogue in Manila. This is an orthodox Sephardic synagogue, very different from the Reform synagogue I grew up in.

The sanctuary is beautiful. However, the main part of the sanctuary is reserved for men. Women must use the two sections higher up on either side, behind a large marble wall. Only two or maybe three times in my life have I experienced this separation of the sexes in Jewish prayer. It does not sit well with me. While many Jews will claim that there is no sexism involved, that women’s participation is valued, just in different ways, I don’t buy that. If women are not truly equal, meaning that they are free to participate in every aspect of life exactly as men, then life becomes based on a denial of the true nature of human beings. Women are just as capable, and their contributions in every aspect of life, including all levels of leadership, are just as important as the contributions of men. Traditions can be helpful, or they can be hurtful. At this point this tradition has outlived its usefulness, and it is holding back the Jewish people.

The service was completely in Hebrew, again not what I am used to. Despite the lack of spoken English, and my inability to follow most of the Hebrew in the prayer book, I loved hearing the singing of the prayers. Although our services were part English and part Hebrew, as a child I loved hearing and singing in Hebrew, and I realized how much I miss that. Every year my family would attend a Passover seder at my orthodox cousins’ house, and we would sing many Hebrew songs together over dinner.

The congregants and the Rabbi were all very welcoming, and I met some wonderful people. While their practices are in some ways foreign to me, they are Jews, and we share a heritage of thousands of years. Despite all our differences, it felt like family, like home, and I look forward to returning there. I am very grateful for what the Rabbi and the congregation are doing, creating a home for Jews in the Philippines, a country where the total number of Jews is probably only in the hundreds.

The Philippines is in the tropics, so things grow quickly here. There are all kinds of plants and animals all around. Having lived most of my life in cities in the US, I was used to the assumption that there are spaces reserved for humans, where other animals only rarely tread. Here it’s a bit more mixed up between the species.

Insects

The cockroaches here are not merely humongous, they also fly. I realized that while they are bigger than the cockroaches I’m used to from the US, I did see some this size in Florida once. In Florida they call them palmetto bugs. But according to wikipedia, palmetto bugs have short wings that are useless for flying. These cockroaches here really do fly. Not that often, but when you least expect it they may fly right past your face. We’ve found the best solution for them is spray – get the can that says Cockroach Killer on the label. It works pretty fast. Whereas if you step on them or flush them down the toilet you may not actually kill them.

I’ve seen bees here the size of lemons. OK, that includes their wings, but even the body part is maybe 4 times the size of the bees I’m used to in the US. I’ve seen one moth that was the size of a large grapefruit, again including the wings. Lots of smaller moths that have little clear wings. They are attracted to light, easy to kill, but very annoying.

Mosquitoes here can carry not only malaria but dengue fever. Dengue can be fatal to children, less so to adults, but it can make you very sick for weeks, as it did to a friend of mine here. Lots of smaller insects like ants of all sizes, termites, and things I don’t have a name for.

We also have lizards, which eat the insects. Most Filipinos live in harmony with the lizards, as we do here. I once saw a lizard actually eating a moth here, so I know they’re on my side. But one day there was a horrible smell in the bedroom, it turned out there was a dead lizard there. There are spiders too, of all sizes, and I suppose they also eat insects. Their webs are sometimes annoying. Walk in a place where we haven’t been recently and you’ll get web all over you (and it’s not the world-wide kind).

Sometimes you can’t even see the insects until they are on you, or you find yourself scratching later. At least twice I’ve been sitting here at my desk and something dropped into my hair.

Rodents

Then there are the mice. Little tiny ones that can hide in the walls. We managed to catch a few with the little glue trays. Of course then you have to pick up the tray with the still moving little body on it and dispose of it. A few weeks ago Dindin went to visit his family for a few days. I called him one night because I saw something, larger than a mouse. First I had heard it, rustling the plastic garbage bags in the hall where we keep the garbage. Yes, we had a rat, actually it turned out we had rats. Seemed like he might be too big for the glue tray, so the sales person at the hardware store recommended the fly paper. Well he just balled that up and ignored it. The glue tray held no interest for him. We tried a mousetrap, he got the cheese out without springing the little trap. I bought a cage trap, but when I got it home I realized it would not kill him, and then I’d have this large, living animal to contend with. So we got some poison. We had been concerned about poison because then we could have a dead rat smelling up the place and not be able to find it. But they sell poison that works slowly and slowly causes blindness, so the rats seek the light.

Well after a few days, we found 2 small dead rats outside on the lawn. So it apparently worked. They were larger than the tiny mice, but not as large as I had feared. About half the size of a small banana. Disposal was fairly easy. Now, I know some of my friends will object to the cruelty, and perhaps I should have used the cage and taken the animal elsewhere, but wouldn’t that be likely to just cause problems for some other people? This country is full of people – almost 100 million of them. I think we did a public service by killing those rats and mice. At least we did a personal service for our household.

Snakes

I haven’t actually seen any snakes, but they are here. It’s a consideration in landscaping. You don’t want areas of thick growth where the snakes can hide. You want to be able to see the dirt. I actually like snakes, but I don’t want to be surprised by any.

Ever since I got back from the USA on July 20, it has rained. Every day, or almost every day. Yes, it is the rainy season, which in the parts of the Philippines I frequent runs roughly from June to October. There was a typhoon this week, but it traversed across our island, Luzon, on a fairly straight east-west course 6-8 hours north of us here in Tagaytay. But I think that typhoon is long gone, and we still get rain every day. Sometimes the rain is light. Sometimes it is very heavy. Sometimes it rains all day or all night or both. More often it rains during some parts of the day and night.

There are many areas in the Philippines where flooding occurs quite often. Tagaytay is not one of them, as we are perched on a mountaintop 600 meters above sea level. But to me, it seems amazing nevertheless that our house doesn’t float away. Especially since, from the outside the back of the house does look a little bit like a ship.

How can the ground absorb so much water, repeatedly? Apparently it’s not a problem here. Everything gets greener and more lush, which is nice. This week we asked the man who usually works at the house next door to come and clean our pool and trim the yard on Tuesday. Tuesday it was raining very hard all day. And Wednesday. And Thursday. On Friday he must have had some kind of premonition, as he and his wife both showed up early and worked all day, until about 4 pm, when it started raining very hard. How did he know the rain would come late on Friday? I have no clue.

I’ve done some feeble research online into the levels of precipitation here. As usual, weather data on Tagaytay is readily available but mostly worthless. As I’ve noted before, almost every site that shows weather data for Tagaytay notes in the fine print that the data was collected at Manila airport, where the weather is about as close to Tagaytay as Southern California weather is to San Francisco. However, I found this page, which has 3 nice graphs summarizing historical weather patterns in Tagaytay:

http://www.weather-and-climate.info/average-monthly-Rainfall-Temperature-Sunshine-fahrenheit,tagaytay,Philippines

And this page, which predicts it will keep raining every day for the next two weeks (no, I’m not surprised):

http://www.accuweather.com/en-us/ph/cavite/tagaytay-city/forecast2.aspx

This page has a nice brief summary of weather patterns in the Philippines and when it’s good to visit, with nice pictures:

http://www.worldtravelguide.net/philippines/weather

However, if you haven’t been to the Philippines yet, I’d suggest you ignore what it says on that page about places other than Manila. Most of the places they mention are not likely places you’d visit on your first trip here, unless you have family or friends in those areas.

I’m still frankly very happy with the weather here in Tagaytay. At least it’s not unbearably hot that often. I can take some rain. What I don’t want is extremes – way too hot, way too cold, winds or rain of hurricane force all the time, lots of snow, etc. Tagaytay offers none of those so far, but then again August is historically the month with the most rain, so we’ll see how that goes.

On Sunday Dindin and I drove to San Pascual, Batangas, where his family lives. It’s about a 90 minute drive from Tagaytay, but can be longer depending on traffic. We were delayed by three different funerals. Outside of Manila, funerals and parades seem to be the main impediments to the smooth flow of traffic (but tough competitors are poor road conditions, vehicles in poor condition, and a near total lack of traffic law enforcement). Some of the hearses here are quite beautiful, basically similar to hearses I’ve seen in the US but more creatively designed.

The worst of the three funerals (in terms of its traffic impact) must have had at least 100 vehicles (although who knows, some of them may have just been tagging along to avoid the gridlock). This one did not seem to have a hearse at all, although there was a van from a funeral home and a large flatbed truck. Perhaps they had several corpses on that truck, which would explain the unusual size of the caravan. Overall I think it took us about two hours to get there.

Sunday was Duane’s second birthday (Duane is the third child of Dindin’s sister, Loids). So we stopped to get some chocolate fudge cake. We also had plans to take the car to the Toyota dealer in Batangas on Monday. Of course, we knew it would be hot. The summer here is supposed to be from March to May. But it doesn’t follow the calendar as reliably as I’m used to in the US, and there seems to be a lot of disagreement about when it begins and ends. Summer started late this year, in late March. But it ended on time, according to the newspapers. Except the weather didn’t seem to cooperate with the news reports. Here it is June 7 and it was a hot day today, even in Tagaytay.

Anyway, Sunday in Batangas was very hot. Duane seemed to enjoy his birthday. He looked quite different than I recalled, because his head was shaved, or almost. He reminded me of the boy in the movie The Last Emperor. Luckily my rib has healed enough so that I can hold him now, because he kept asking me to pick him up. But this time he didn’t cry when I left. He has learned “bye-bye” now.

On Monday Dindin and I woke up at 5:30 am. I wanted to go to Toyota early, so I didn’t go back to sleep. It turns out that Monday, June 6, was the first day of school for 28 million Filipino youth, including Dindin’s nieces Aprhille (13 years old) and KC (8) and his nephew Damiel (7). The school is quite close to their house. I walked with the kids and the adults to the school yard. On about 5 hours sleep, I was amazed at the level of activity at 6 am. The whole town seemed mobilized to get all the kids safely to school.

It was quite a large campus, with several buildings. Aphrille had already left to go to the high school part when we left. The two younger children are both in the same third grade classroom. All the students were dressed alike, more or less. The boys had white tshirts that have the school name on the front and the boy’s first name on the back. The boys all had black pants, either long or short. The girls had matching skirts and white blouses, with plaid ties (ascots?) hanging from their necks. The list outside the classroom for third grade part A had 23 boys and 22 girls on it. 45 students and one teacher, but it could grow higher if other kids showed up.

This is the tragedy of education in the Philippines. The public schools are underfunded. Most students attend for only 10 years. High school begins at age 13, and kids graduate high school at 16 or 17. There is a plan in place to extend schooling by three years, by adding kindergarten and two later years, for a total of 13 years. While this would bring the country closer to international norms, the way this plan is being implemented suggests it may do more harm than good. They have begun rolling out the first phase, kindergarten, but have not provided any more teachers. They expect the overloaded first grade teachers to also teach the kindergartners. Of course, my information here is limited to reading a few articles in the newspapers and talking to a few people.  So my details may be way off.

What I observed Monday morning, aside from the high student-to-teacher ratio, was quite wonderful. Children are very important in this society. While the funds from the government may fall short, the enthusiasm and dedication of the whole community was evident.

While I took the car to Toyota, Dindin took Yeesta, our shi-tzu, to the vet to have his hair cut. The difference in his look is dramatic. He is usually a ball of fur. Now he is a seemingly hairless, naked little dog, except for his very furry ears and tail.

As planned, Dindin’s mother, Luzviminda, came back with us to Tagaytay. Our plan had been to drive to Manila on Tuesday, as I had some business to attend to there. Monday night Dindin reminded me that we cannot drive to Manila on Tuesday. Not on any Tuesday. Because of the number coding.

Number coding? Yes. It’s a system they have here to try to reduce the number of cars on the road. There is one day each week, determined by the last digit of your license plate, when you cannot drive your car in Manila. Of course, I bought my car on December 30, 2010, and I had to wait until mid-May to get my license plates, so I wasn’t yet used to this. Before I got the plates I could drive any day of the week, wherever I pleased. Now that the plates are on the car, ending in the digit 2, I cannot drive in Manila on a Tuesday.

So today we stayed home. We could have driven the car, as in all the other areas we tend to drive (basically in the provinces of Cavite and Batangas) there is no number coding. But we were all tired and decided to take it easy. Besides, it’s cooler in Tagaytay than anywhere else we would go.

The main cultural difference between the Philippines and the USA is that the highest value here in the Philippines is family. (The highest value in the USA is definitely not family. Personal achievement perhaps.) While I have always been very happy with my family of origin and didn’t think I was looking for another family, I am grateful for the truly wonderful family that I have here.