Hello again!
I have been in Camiguin for one week now, staying with Tom and Diane Palmeri. They have welcomed me into their house with incredible hospitality and have definitely treated me like a member of their family. It has been a little difficult adjusting to the time difference, 12 hours, I am literally on the other side of the world from where I usually live! And the climate here also takes some adjusting to. It is constantly very hot and humid, and even if you just sit around you start sweating and the sweat just drips off without making you any cooler. It’s actually pretty interesting, the island has a bit of its own microclimate. There are some very big mountains in the middle, and I think that they somehow form rainclouds. And so at any given time I think that it is probably raining on some part of the island. But each of the little parts of the island also has its own little microclimate, and so sometimes you see a big thundercloud hanging over one part of the island but not another. The Palmeris house is right on the beach of the island, it is a rocky beach and there is a beautiful coral reef right off of it with some beautiful tropical fishes with all sorts of patterns swimming around.
The second day that we were here, Tom and Diane took in a two week old baby. I think that its official name is CJ but we are calling it Andre, I think that’s it’s middle name. The baby’s mother didn’t want to keep it, I think that her husband abandoned her and she felt that she couldn’t take care of the baby. So Tom and Diane took the baby in. The way that they treat for the baby is unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before, it is with a lot of care and warmth but also with a lot of confidence, without the panic that I have seen in some parents at every time the baby cries or appears discontent. Andre is a very very cute baby boy!
On Thursday, Diane went around the island to visit the various clinics and to see the various patients. She works with a lot of children on the island, some are sick and others have birth defects. It was a very unique experience to see these children, some of them are receiving very good top of the line care, but for others, their families do not have enough money to be able to afford the medical procedures that they needed. Some of the children were not being taken care of very well by their parents. The houses that the families that we visited lived in were little wooden huts with ground floors, they slept on beds. Occasionally there were TVs and there were religious icons on the walls. Some of the adults work harvesting coconuts, others are drivers that take people around the island.
I move into the school on Monday and will start doing all of my work then. I will be teaching English to the instructors at the school and perhaps some of the older students. Some of the people on the island do speak some English, although usually it is limited to only a few words. The instructors also usually speak pretty good English, but they make a lot of fairly simple mistakes and end up confusing the students sometimes, especially when they are tested on the very material that the instructors have made a mistake on.
I will write more soon.
Goodbye from beautiful Camiguin,
Eugene
