Mountain Providence - Cawag, Philippines
Cawag, Philippines
KAYAN WEST
1. People Flordelina and her entire family – Flordelina actually lives in Norway, but she took over the management of the farm when her parents got too old and she manages it mostly over the internet. We talked to her when we were signing up for the volunteer job, so we weren’t supposed to get the chance to meet her, but then sadly her mother died. She was 98 so they were happy about the long life she had. So the funeral was not sad and gave us to opportunity to meet Flordelina and all of her 9 siblings and extended family. They were an amazing family and a beautiful legacy to their mother. They lived all over the world and spoke so many different language. Meeting them all was very impressive. Marylene – is Flordelina’s youngest sister and she lives on the farm. She has three children. Her oldest daughter, Beverly, has 2 adorable boys and they live in Baguio City. Her other two sons are younger, 12 and 7 and they were so cute. Jean and Stephen. We played with them a lot. Noeler – was our main host. He would take us every day around the farm to show us how things worked there and helped us do our work. He was the same age as me, very sweet, and really strong. One day he picked up a banana truck that weight over 100 lbs and climbed down the mountain with it, like it was a stick. He was a really good friend and host. He lived towards the top of the farm near the sheep and goats to make sure people didn’t steal them. Sometimes he would join us for breakfast and lunch and he came by every night for dinner. Some night he would bring his guitar and play and sing for us. Pretty much all the people we met could sing really well and played the guitar. It was so beautiful. Before he came to the farm he used to be a gold miner near Baguio City, but he said that job was really dirty and dangerous, so he like it here better. It was really great to meet Noeler. Ruth and Thomas – Were yoga people from Nicaragua and France. They were also volunteers and they arrived the week before we did, before the typhoon hit and they spent the week before we arrived on the farm in the chapel hoping they wouldn’t get covered by a mud slide. So once we had arrived, that was their first few nights in the cottage as well. Thomas seemed pretty laid back and was easy to talk to. Ruth followed yoga a bit more rigidly and we ended up on opposite side of many issues much of the time. But the both taught us a lot of natural ways to do things like, washing hair, teeth, and face. They were of course vegetarian, so we ate vegetarian also while they were there. They were also on a year or two traveling trip around Asia, but they were interested in learning organic farming techniques, so they only went to organic farms. When they go home one day, they want to start their own healing center and farm. It was interesting meeting them. Stephanie – is from Manila and she arrive the day before Ruth and Thomas left. We had a great time with her and it was nice having her around because she would explain things to us that maybe Noeler didn’t exactly know how to explain. Noeler liked her, but she wasn’t interested in him. She originally came from an island in the south Philippines, but learned computers and moved to Manila where she lives with her sister. One day she wants to move home and start a bamboo farm. She is also teaching herself computer programing. A very impressive girl. She really enjoys traveling as well and maybe we will run into her again while we are bouncing around all these countries.
Francisco – gave us a ride when we hitchhike to Cervantes. He was a really interesting guy. He lives south of where we were at, and said he saw us walking down to Cervantes, so he decided to pick us up. I think this was the first time Mark and I have ever hitchhiked anywhere together. He told us a lot of stories of his travels. He worked in the middle east a lot for many years, Saudi Arabia, Dubia, Doha, Qatar, currently he was working on a farm about 2 hours’ drive from us and was on his way home for the weekend for his son’s birthday :) he is turning 16. His employer’s mom had passed away earlier that week and they could not embalm her because the mudslides from the typhoon prevented the embalmer from getting to the house. He said she was really starting to smell, so he was not able to eat that day and was glad to be able to leave for the weekend.
Local Kids – The kids were so cute and very scared of us. When we were walking around, every time we would look at them, they would scream and start laughing hysterically. It was so funny. One little girl did eventually warm up to me and she liked to hold my hand while we walked. The kids learn English at school, so they did speak a little bit.
Dogs- The farm had a lot of dogs, probably like 7. Most of them were full grown, but there were a couple of puppies. One that was our favorite was named Blacky and he looked a lot like Mijo. He was very smart and once he realized we were cooking down at our cottage, he was there like clockwork every breakfast, lunch, and dinner to see if we had any scraps to spare. He was a real good dog, but maybe I am just missing my Mijo. There was a little puppy that was pretty sickly. We figured he would die soon because he was small and it seemed like every time we tried to touch him, it hurt him. So we figured there was something wrong with him. Every day we were there, he seemed to get worst and worst. Poor baby. Most of the other dogs were pretty friendly also, but sometimes they would bark at us. It was pretty neat to see the pack dynamics though.
2. Accommodation Farm Cottage – we stayed in a 2 bedroom cottage with a little kitchen and 2 detached comfort rooms. Each room have a double sized bunk bed, so you could fit 4 people in each room. It was a simple structured house and furniture so it made it easy to keep clean. And the view from the kitchen into the valley was absolutely magical. Every morning we could watch the sun rise and the sea of clouds roll in. By 8 am the clouds would disperse. You could tell time by it. :) You had to walk through the kitchen to get to the comfort rooms, and I just loved it. The view was always breath taking. Our cottage was at the bottom of the farm, so every morning we had to hike up these really steep steps to get to work. It took us a few days to acclimate to all the stairs and altitude.
3. Tourist Activities/Adventures Funeral – This came as quite a surprise to us. Right when we got off the bus, Flordelina, met us and said her mom has passed away and they are having the wake right now. Whoa! Okay, I wished I have known before we arrived. I would have dressed better at least. It was a beautiful wake and ceremony though. We were completely impressed with the whole thing. Flordelina explained that usually the mourning lasts 30 days, however, with all the family being from all over the world they decided to cut it down to just 1 week. They cooked a whole pig for the ceremony. Freshly slaughtered they cleaned and cooked it right next to us. For the wake, they had their mother in her house, in the living room and everyone sat around singing their mom’s favorite songs. The town we were in is called Kayan East, and it is really small, just a village really. Their mom’s house was one of the biggest buildings in town. It was sort of the community center because she loved having people over. Even though they would have had the wake in her home anyways, it seemed very fitting for her. Her oldest son led one song about her life. It is a traditional funeral song where the chorus is always the same, but the verses are either stories spoken or sang about the one who died’s life. This is usually a very long song and it was very pretty to witness. After lunch and the wake, we all got in the green bus and went home. The funeral was the following day and her pall bearer came to the house and took her to the church and everyone else followed behind. The church was just across the city courtyard. Not very far away, maybe 100 yards. The ceremony was amazing though. Very Catholic in format, but in 6 different languages – Tagalog, English, Latin, Spanish, and 2 local dialects. We sang a lot of songs, did a lot of kneeling prayers, and recitations. Then the preacher and two of her children spoke. After the chapel service they took her to the cemetery and buried her, then they had to do a cleansing ceremony before they could return and have lunch. It was a very special day, everyone was remember her and rejoicing her life. I was probably one of the only people that cried. :/ I always cry at funeral, they are just so oddly romantic and beautiful to me, I can’t ever help but cry. Internet in Cervantes – In Flordelina’s advertisement, it said we would have limited internet, so we thought we could get some and still be able to coordinate the last minute planning we were still doing. But when we got there, we couldn’t find any, really. We did figure out if we went to the very top of the mountain, we could get some internet, sometimes. We needed to get some internet to wrap up those string and let our parents know we were safe and sound and it would be a little bit before we could talk properly again. Noeler said there was an internet café in Cervantes, which is 8 kilometers from our house and there is a bus that passes by every day, but we had to be out by the curb before 9:30 am and that was a little too early for Mark. So we hitchhiked out there and met Francisco. When we got to Cervantes, we walked around looking for the café and when we couldn’t find it we asked someone for directions and he said go down the road about 300 km, then turn left, you will see it and ask for Eric. Haha! “hey man we heard you have the good stuff, the fiber cable internet…” We found Eric and yes, his internet was really good. We made our phone calls and updated to world about our whereabouts. He had a great system where he charged to use his computers but the internet was completely free. So we were able to spend the whole day getting our internet fix. :) Before we left, we made two more trips to see Eric. Mark finally figured out the bus “times” so he did have to hope on the heart of a stranger.
Mud Spa and Healing Spring in Kayan East – So we lived in Kayan West and the closest town to us is of course, Kayan East, 4 km away from our house. Our last Saturday there, Noeler took us to the local Spa. Below the town they discovered a natural spring that had minerals in it. The man that currently owns the land the spring is on said that he was in Italy or somewhere like that and visited a spring like his and they said it had healing powers. So he came home and decided to see if his spring was the same thing and it turned out that it was, so he turned the land into a spa. He dug out some swimming ponds and now the locals come and bath in the water and put the mud from the ponds on like a body mask. He said his mom live on this land her whole life and used the water from this spring. She ended up living over 100 years. He hope one day to build a hospital of sorts on his land where people with skin issues can come and stay until they are healed. Right now he has two little hut people stay in sometimes, just shacks really and a kitchen area. We had lunch with him there. It started raining while we were bathing so we went over to the kitchen area and waited out the rain. The water was very metallically, sort of tasted like sour, iron. He said he drank it all the time and it will cleanse you on the inside and outside. I bottled some to take home also. He said it is supposed to help with skin conditions, so I was wondering if it would help with my acne. It didn’t but it has been the only thing that healed my heat rash. I call it my magic water :) and have it in a little spray bottle.
Ants Galore! I don’t think I knew there were that many different kinds of ants, black, red, big, giant, small, teeny, black head/red butt, red head/black butt, some that walked only in straight lines and some that were just crazy and walked everywhere. We lived in the garden and there were ant all over the place. Slowly all of our food items ended up in the fridge, otherwise the ant would get into everything. They were rather interesting. Eventually we stopped fighting them so much and started learning how to live with them. We didn’t really need to clean anything up in the kitchen because the ant would just clean it up for us. Mark killed a bug and 1 hour later it was gone and so were the ants. After dinner they would clean up around the oven. You just had to make sure you didn’t lean up against their trail or they would climb all over you and get on to everything else. One night, they went too far and made a nest in our bed! It was horrible, they carried their eggs into our bed. It was raining quite a bit that day and I guess they thought our bed was a little bit more dry :/ Mark killed them with our bug spray and then put a moat around our bed. We learned once ants go somewhere, they have a scent trail and they will follow it again. The scent trails are really hard to get rid of. So Mark cut some coke bottles in half and put one under each leg of our bed and filled them with water and it worked! No more ants in our bed, but over the week we did still get a lot in out pants, haha! Silly :) Mark really enjoyed watching them work, with so many workers they were so fast.
Church – we were able to go to church once. The priest in our local church was on Holiday, so we had to go to Cervantes for church. We found an Anglican service and arrived right on time. They had about 6 songs Xeroxed out of an English hymnal and we sang all 6 of them all the way through about 3 times. They were really nice songs, “as the deer” and others. It was fun to sing them. The preaching though was all in the local dialect, so we couldn’t understand it. Stephanie came with us and I thought the preacher was speaking in Tagalog, so after the service I asked Stephanie, “okay, so what did he say, start at the beginning.” And she said. “Don’t know, I couldn’t understand him either.” Haha! Well it was an interesting service anyway and everyone was very happy to see us there.
Noeler’s Primary School – Noel took us on a tour of Kayan East. Most of it is houses but we also went to his primary school and the kids were in class at the time. The school was very pretty, mostly made out of recycled materials and there were signs all over the school encouraging people to save the earth and recycle. All the kids were very excited to see us. I was a little sorry we were disturbing the class. Some kids were playing outside and they were so excited to talk to Mark and touch his beard. Some of the other kids were playing basketball and badminton. My favorite were the gardens and all the interesting things they decorated with old coke bottles. We walked through the school and just as we were leaving, the kids were released from school and that is when they were laughing and following us. We had quite an entourage. :)
4. Food Chicken and Pork Adobo – I think this is the number 1 dish in the Philippines. My fav was the Chicken, Mark liked the Pork. We at so much Adobo and it was awesome. It is a simple dish, well can be simple. Meat stir fried in soya sauce, garlic, vinegar, bay leaf, pepper, with some vegetables like potatoes, onions, and maybe some peppers to spice it up. Then served with rice.
pancit (noodles) – good but sometime it was just the cheap ramen noodle. If they were good noodle, they were stir fried and very yummy, but always thin.
halo halo (shaved ice with toppings and condensed milk) – I got this in Cervantes. It is shave ice, then you add whatever topping like tapioca, jelly, coconut, mango, banana, ube, mung beans, and they put condensed milk on top. Was super good, but even better when I let the whole thing melt and it turned into a drink :) The coolest thing about halo halo is that in Filipino it means “mixed together” and the Filipino people are very proud of the fact that they are Halo Halo, that is why this is like the national dessert. Because of all the different countries taking over the Philippines, the Filipino people are now sort of a blend of Asian, Spanish, and American, and because they leave the country to find work, their culture has been influenced by so many different worlds, thus the people there are proud to be Halo Halo :) very few completely indigenous people are still around, maybe in the south were not too many people travel because of the dangers.
Dragon Fruit – The farm grows organic dragon fruit and on our first day there we got to taste some. The red kind and it was so delicious. There are two kinds of dragon fruit, a white and red kind. The red one is more expensive, so usually I just eat the white one. But I love both equally. Dragon fruit season is around April to June, so I can’t wait till it comes around again. I am counting the days :)
Sticky rice in banana leaves – They made this special dessert for the funeral lunch. Ruth and Thomas helped them make it. I think it is sticky rice soaked in coconut milk rolled into banana leaves and steamed. Sometime I have seen they will cook it in bamboo also. It is super yummy and they made so much of it, it ate it like all weekend.
Farm Fresh Vegetables – Green beans, squash, cucumbers, okra, corn, lemon grass, malunggay leaves, sweet potato, and aloe – Since we were working on a farm, all the vege we ate was organic and fresh from the earth. Our number one vege was green beans. We ate so much green beans, Mark was totally beaned out by the time we left. It was really fun to have so much vege available to us whenever we wanted some.
Sugar Cane Wine – We could buy this is Cervantes and it was interesting, very brown, like muddy looking. It came in a liter coke bottle and cost like 100 pesos a bottle so like $2 USD. Noeler said it takes like 8 months to make and only cost $2! Wow. Mark liked it a lot, I thought it was okay. Better than other stuff we tried, but mostly interesting.
Cassava cake – So cassava is a root vege and I have bought it in America before, but I always roasted it like a potato. Here they use it for everything and today we made a cake out of it. They peel it and shred it up then add sugar, milk, eggs, and a teeny bit of flour then steam it. It was pretty good. A little bit bland, I put peanut butter on it and it was so yummy!
Fried banana heart patties – so the banana hearts are the bulb that grows at the bottom of the banana bunch on the tree. You can chop these up and mixed them with egg and a little flour then fry them. They tasted really good and everyone told us to try them with vinegar on top. Fried Fish – So we cooked for ourselves every day and Ruth and Thomas were cooking for us since they were vegetarians, but after they left I took over. Stephanie didn’t really know how to cook, and I didn’t really mind. It ended up being quite fun after a while. Marylene would bring us whatever and I would try to think on recipes to cook with that. :) She brought us some fish one day, like a whole fish and all I could think of was the salted fish we was in Hong Kong and I decided to try it. I made fish and chips for Mark and he loved it. I learned how to clean a fish and fry it. It wasn’t too bad. I probably would still never cook like that at home, but I would clean the fish and bake it. It was really fun getting to experiment and learn how to cook a different way.
Pulled pork – So we ate a lot of pork up here also and when Marylene would bring it to us, it would be like just a piece of the pig, like the leg chopped up. The skin was still on it and everything. So the best dish I know how to make with a hunk of pork is pulled pork and it came out perfect and was delicious. I was surprised a little people didn’t eat it here often, but it does take a long time to make and either a lot of propane I guess or electricity. Anyways everyone loved it and I was glad I could should them something different. Stephanie liked it with rice and Mark ate like 3 sandwiches :D I love my babe!
Rice Burgers – the last night we were there, I threw all the left overs together and made rice patties. They came out surprisingly good. We were going to give whatever was left over to the dogs but Mark said, oh no, that was good, it is mine for lunch tomorrow :) I am glad I can make my babe, food he like even when it is just out of whatever is on hand.
Peanut Butter Ice Cream – So they have this really good peanut butter up in mountain providence. I think it is so good because there is a lot of sugar in it. At least that is what I think. The Philippines is also known for their variety in bananas, so what can I made with peanut butter and bananas? ICE CREAM! Stephanie and Noeler loved it. I was sure to leave the recipe with them so they could make it again. It was so simple I just smashed everything together and put it in the freeze for a day and it came out smooth and perfect, just like creamy real ice cream. I probably could have left it in the freezer for a few hours and that would have been good also. <3
5. Transportation Local Bus – So it took us two busses to get up here to mountain providence and those were at little bit of a long drive, but the views of the country sides were amazing and totally worth it. We drove over so many mountains and some of the roads we drove over were quite scary. Right up to the edge of a large drop off into the valley. There were a lot of farms which were just gorgeously planted on the mountains. Around our farm, there was a local bus, but it took us a while before we could figure out when it would pass by the house. Mark finally worked out there are times, but the busses usually end up leaving 1 hour to 30 minutes before the stated time. They do this because, they leave when they are full or when the bus driver feels like it. :/ not the easiest to work with, but what can you do, they do what they want. They have the power! Marylene says the best thing to do is have the driver’s phone number and call them to schedule a ride when you need one. Oh! We ended up hitch hiking a lot of the time :)
Hitchhiking – This method of travel is quite common in the mountain providence and it was pretty easy to catch a ride. There was only one road in our area, so anyone passing by us was going our way, thus they didn’t mind giving us a bit of a lift. :) my favorite time was when a truck picked us up and we held on and rode in the back. It was so cool, like we were flying! I had seen someone riding like that earlier that day and said, “Ohh I want to do that.” And in the afternoon on our way home, bam, there we are surfing down our mountain on our metal steed straight back to our beds, haha! The best part of that ride, was we were headed home right as the sun was setting. It was such a beautiful sight. It was just a ride home in the back of a truck, but I think this is going to be one of my favorite memories of our whole trip.
6. Volunteer Work - Layog Community Farm – Flordelina started taking on volunteers just barely this year and she had a very professional program. She stayed in contact with us all the time and had a great set up for us when we arrive. She started the program more as a cultural exchange and education, I thought, than actually needed help with the farm. I didn’t not think we helped her as much as her full time workers did and probably more often than not, Noeler could have probably done at least twice as much work without us as we did in the whole day with all three of us. But Flordelina was trying to bring foreigners into the mountain providence to expose the local more to the world and to expose the world to the locals. She explained to us that in some part of the Philippines, they think people in the mountains, the Igorots look like monkeys, with tall and don’t know how to speak. She has a real heart for home town and it was wonderful to be a part of it for a bit. Her farm covers the large part of a mountain from top to bottom and she has a house smack dab in the middle of it. Next to it she has a chapel and in the back she is going to build a community center to have classes. They had about 8 full time workers and some lived on the property and others lived in town. There were a couple of house near the top of the farm and another behind the chapel. Flordelina is one of the first farmers to decide to go organic in the Philippines. So all the farms around her are not organic and she is having a little difficulty on the admin and politics side of the farm getting the organic certifications and selling the fruit in the market. Because it is organic it tastes better and she is selling it at the same prices and the non-organic fruit and vege and that is making them made. But Flordelina just wants to care for the locals and provide good food for them to eat. Feeding rabbits – Our very first task. Noeler had a lot of bunnies, which they sell for food or I guess eat themselves. Last week he had two new litters, but one of them died. The mom was a new mom and she didn’t take care of them very well :/ Then she died herself. It seemed like her back legs weren’t working very well or something like that. Poor bunny. The other litter was just fine though and the baby bunnies were so cute! Like little fur balls. It was so cool to watch them grow from little naked hamsters into bunnies. Harvested Cassava – before we turned them into cakes, we harvested the cassava out of the ground. You had to find the tree with was sort of gray with green leaved that had red stems. First Noeler chopped down the tree then he and Mark dug up the root of that tree and that was the cassava. We probably chopped down like 4 trees and ended up with 8 liters of cassava which turned into like 3 or 4 pounds of stuff to eat. Weeded Coffee Trees – we did this for two days, and it was pretty hard work. You see their farm is on the side of a mountain in a forest. So weeding is a never ending job and making sure the farm doesn’t slide down the mountain when it rains is another monumental task. So we walking into what looked like normal forest grounds and Noeler pointed out the coffee plants to us and said they were in rows about 1 meter apart from each other. We had to then clear around each plant. Sometime it was pretty hard to tell the difference between the plants and weeds, but we did pretty well. It was hard sometimes not to fall down the mountain yourself, haha! I was literally grabbing for straws sometimes. The other thing was the ants and of course with all the damp everywhere, there were mosquitos. Every morning Mark and I would cover ourselves in bug spray and head into the forest with our invisible armor on. Sometimes it felt like the whole mountain was just one big giant ant pile. We had to dance our way through the weeds just to keep them off of us. Noeler said it would be about 5 year before the coffee plants turned into proper trees and started producing a good amount of coffee beans. This was a new venture for them, so I hope it all turns out well. They said the mountain providence was a great place to grow coffee, then they ship it off somewhere else to get roasted.
Made plant food, vermine, and IMO – the other ladies that worked there showed us how to make this stuff. Mostly it was chopped up plants, sunflower, passion fruit, banana trunks mixed with molasses and set to ferment for a week or longer. Then they would spray it on the plants as food, pesticide, or deodorizer.
Made mulch from banana truck and sunflower stems – Mark didn’t really agree with this job. So we had to make mulch and compost for the plants and we chopped up a banana truck and sunflower stems (which can get surprisingly hard with they get old) with a machete. It took us all day, chopping chopping chopping. It was a good work out, but Mark thinks it would have been more fun to use a wood chipper. :) after it was all chopped up we left in to decompose and later it will be used to fertilize the plants.
Planted Banana and Cashew Trees – Planting the trees was quite simple and fun, cleared away the weeds and ants then dug holes in the side of the mountain and planted the trees. The cashew trees we planted were little like house plants, however the banana trees we planted were huge! Like 4 or 6 feet tall already and we had to dig them out of the ground near our house then carry them on our shoulders up to the other side of the farm and plant them. Stephanie and I worked with Noeler that day while Mark went to Cervantes to work on the interwebs. The banana trunks were pretty heavy and it was a work out just getting them up the mountain. Noeler was amazing at digging the holes though. The first time we went out, we had a metal rod and a machete, to dig hole with. The shovels I think were being used to clean up a mud slide near the chapel. :/ we had to dig 3 big holes for the banana trees and we did it. I don’t know how we did it with a stick, but we did. The next day we found a couple of shovels and it was a lot easier. It would take us quite a while to break up the land and get the dirty out, but Noeler, her would take that shovel, slam it in the dirt and clear a hole in minutes. It took him like 4 scoops and the hole was already pretty big. I was very impressed. I just wanted to stand there and watch him work, then I realized oh yeah, I should be working also, haha!