I ended up with very mixed feelings about 2009 it had great highs and some pretty big challenges some of which will need to be resolved in 2010 – but we made it thru with lots of new adventures and many new things learnt.
The first quarter of the year was stressful in not knowing whether or not I would get a job and the last few months of the year wondering whether I wanted to keep it. But more on that later.
The move to the new house in central Makati made a huge difference to our lives with the girls being able to walk to school and live in the same village as their friends – Angelica has a new best friend Diana who is the same age as her and lives next door. Gianna has a couple of classmates that live locally and often goes to and from school with them. Marc was able to cut his commuting and walk to work in 15 minutes giving him an extra 2 hours in bed each day. Me? I had to start commuting back to Quezon City on the train each day which takes around an hour but as I can be flexible on my hours (in theory) I can try and avoid the worst of the traffic. Its great as we can walk to the mall, cinemas, restaurants and bars which are literally on our door step.
We travelled north for Easter to Pagudpud and Blue lagoon at Easter and Erica came in April and we had a wonderful trip to Club Paradise in Palawen – Club Paradise, truly amazing place and swam with turtles (photos in earlier blogs) – Erica then headed back to UK and then relocated to New York which seems so far away.
In May Gianna went by herself to UK with BA which was a huge success. (she did her own blog entry and posted lots of pics in earlier entries) She loved the solo flying and spent time with family in Edinburgh, London and the Wirral. The tricky bit was getting her ferried between stops but everyone helped out and moved her around the country. In July she did her first billboard shoot and has been on a large poster in central Makati since November. Every girl should have the chance for a makeover and be on a billboard once in their life
Angelica started big school in June and joined CSA the same school Gianna attends. She has a couple of close friends including Venice who is the daughter of a former runner up miss world and belongs to a showbiz dynasty. We went to Venice’s birthday party which was bigger than most weddings I have attended complete with stage set, TV personality compare and heart throb pop star uncle in attendance. The prizes for games included bikes !!! The contrast between rich and poor never ceases to amaze me here – It probably would be fair to say that Angelica was not a model student at first being told off for bringing her friends Barbie watch home, calling her class mates losers and stealing her teachers perfume!!! But she seems to have settled down and is apparently very popular and now doing very well. Personally I would feel much better once she can read but they start later here (like some parts of Europe) and they are not expected to read until they are 6.
As they grow the girls I can see the girls different personalities, they will both look quite different and have different perspectives in life – Angelica is very sporty loves being outside and running around, gets taller everyday and is fearless. Gianna is more of a social bunny, hates exercise, and prefers social networking (on the PC) to physical activity and much more cautious in her approach to life. She still misses home and her friends which at time is really hard for both of us. I am already so aware that we are fast approaching crunch time regarding her schooling. She says she wants to stay and graduate from grade school next year at CSA but then she will have to either be in an international school or return to UK from 2011. She is of course already a tweenie growing fast – sometimes when I look at her its scary to realise that in 6 years she will be planning her own life and moving onto university or work …….time goes too quickly.
One of the perks of the job is that I have been back to the UK myself several times over the last year and able to catch up with my mum brother and sister and see friends albeit for fairly short stopovers. In September I was able to go to Bestival (on the Isle of Wight) with Jacqui and Jo, Chris Lawrence and the rest of the gang. I brought made to measure space girl outfits from the Philippines and we looked great!!! During the same trip I also went to Berlin for a conference – I had not been back for quite some time probably at least 8 or 9 years and it was great that I was able to catch up with Helmut and Patrick one night in the Tiergarten. The conference included a bus tour of Berlin and I found it fascinating to see how things have changed since the wall came down having lived there in 1981…... so long ago!!!! It’s a beautiful city and extremely green, something I had forgotten over the years
In late September the people of Manila faced the havoc that Typhoon Ondoy. We are fairly well insulated against storms etc where we live . In fact apart from raining incredibly hard all day we did not directly witness any real flooding. We had a few leaks in the house more irritating than disruptive and my only major hassle was having bored kids on my hands. We even went over to Greenbelt (local Mall) and out for dinner on Saturday night blissfully ignorant to the loss of life and hardship elsewhere. We knew that travel beyond a few 100 meters was impossible but for us that meant escaping at least for a short time covered head to toe with waterproofs.
The surprising thing about the storm was that no one was expecting anything out of the usual – we have around 20 typhoons a year so a tropical depression, as it was until Saturday, barely merits a mention in the news. We were weather watching as we had hoped to get to the beach overnight on the next island (Mindoro) with Pete and Marie –Lyn (friends from the UK) – a tropical depression was kids stuff so we actually thought right up until Friday night we were going. On Saturday morning I went on line and realised we were suddenly in a Signal 1 typhoon warning and that we were going nowhere. So many others must have been caught out in the same way. The rain was apocalyptic – we had a whole months rain in less than 24 hours and believe me it usually rains a lot in September - over one metre…… It affected both rich and poor another unusual factor about Ondoy, although of course a month later it’s the poor communities that were still wallowing in mud and shit with little prospect of things improving for some time. Surprisingly many in the new condo units were badly affected with flooding of underground car parks wrecking cars and buildings’ electric systems – its an amazing sight to see cars just swept away…the questions have begun about how it could have been so bad? The 3 dams reached their limits and water was released, a factor many blame for the sudden flooding late Saturday afternoon. It appears that water should have been gradually released earlier to prevent the huge overflows but once the water built up there was no choice but to release the dams burst.
Many believe that the real death toll will never be known, our gardener claims that he saw over 100 bodies himself that had been swept down river to his Barangay – official figures of only 249 dead would seem vastly underestimated. The problem as always in Manila is that so many people are not registered, so simply put no one knows how many people there are to begin with. Families have to pay to register a birth and for the poor this means that most children are never registered and when they lost in disasters such as Onday they are therefore never officially missed.
The kids ended up having extra Saturday school because of the time missed due to the 5 Typhoons we suffered in Manila including Ondoy and Swine Flu which closed the school for 2 weeks at the start of the school year . I now realise why they don’t have official school breaks between Jun and October as each year the kids miss a couple of weeks due to bad weather.
After a lull in visitors in 2008 we had a steady stream in the later part of 2009 with my mum coming for a month again in October. This year we went off to Bolinao for a week. It was touch and go with the weather whether we would make it as yet another Typhoon threatened but in the end we had beautiful sunshine every day we were away. Mum went along to the opening of the Mango tree house school, a school for street kids near the Patayas dump in Quezon City. Some of the pictures feature earlier in the blog.(photos posted earlier)
In November I was lucky enough to get to go to Cape Town which is a fantastic place. I had never realised the place was so beautiful with a stunning coast line. Also very outdoorsy and sporty. The work event I went there for went very well and was a high point in a frustrating 9 months at WGNRR. We had gathered members from all over Africa some of whom had not left their own countries before – it was a great learning experience for me as well as hopefully for them too, hearing about the challenges of reproductive health in places such as Congo and Sierra Leone and sharing strategies and approaches to try and improve women’s lives .
In December Marc's cousin Angela and husband came and joined us for Xmas at Erik’s house at Puerta Galera, we have stayed there a couple of times before. Rishita and Fedra joined and brought along Jessica and her friends. It was one long exhausting party ……with outing in jeepneys and boats lots of food and living like royalty for a week. New year we stayed in Manila and had a fairly quite new year at home if you can ever call Manila quiet at New Year when threes a hundred thousand fireworks going off …..Our neighbour opposite from Blackpool has a sack full of huge rockets and fire crackers so we took the sofas out and sat outside enjoying the show. Over the holidays we saw Avatar in 3D at the IMAX which I though was great – and climbed the nearest volcano as well as lunched at Antonio’s reportedly the best resto in the Philippines and jolly nice it was too….and now back to work
The job itself is far far more demanding than any other I have ever had and I also had to face the problems of lawsuits from staff, being badly flooded during Ondoy and having to cancel a major event in Beijing when visas for my staff and most participants were refused. However the major problems all stem from the move from Amsterdam to Manila in 2008 which resulted in an entirely new staff team and a lack of systems and procedures to support the organisation day to day running. It will take another 12 months to unpick all the bad stuff that was allowed to happen in the early months after the transfer and capacity build the organization both in terms of skills and content.
My main reservations relate to my quality of life which seems to have taken a nose dive as I am constantly working, or worrying about work or travelling. Consequently the kids feel they don’t get enough time with me ….even when I am at home. I need to seriously address both the work life balance and the financial rewards for the job in the early months of 2010 or look for new opportunities. The aim to make the break from the UK was to get away from the stress of CEO of a charity and I seem to have recreated it here in the Philippines where I get much less money. Although the job is hard, it remains potentially very exciting and is at times incredibly rewarding. I have learnt so much about Reproductive Rights, a whole new area for me and have undoubtedly increased by skills and therefore the types of jobs I can apply for when I do move on. I am glad I have had the chance to try my hand at something so different, not many people get that chance in their late 40s.
We have the election next year. Which will challenge any person out side the Philippines view of how good democracy works. For us in the Philippines we just hope for just someone who doesn’t already have a lengthy track record of crime and corruption. Erap, who you may recall, was found guilty of massive fraud and embezzlement whilst president and pardoned by the current president , is of course running for re-election . Gloria, she queen of corruption and election fraud and current president ,will run for senator hoping to get back in the presidents seat in 3 years no doubt.…. Nonoy, son of Cory Aquino, does seem to have the lead at the moment and although closely aligned with the catholic church at least supports publically the Reproductive Health bill here which would allow for the first time formal sex education, and is possibly the most progressive candidate at least with any chance of success
Of course the whole sorry affair will take place in a environment where votes will be bought. The very poor have no time to try and work out which bad politician to vote for, they may as well take the bribes and buy some rice as oppose expecting anyone to make a radical change to their lives. The election violence has already started with the massacre of 57 in Maguindanao, in Mindanao with the leader of a powerful political clan in the dock. The people killed were friends and supporters, many women lawyers, of the opposition family. It just seems incredible that it would occur to anyone that the best way to rid yourself of the opposition is to kill them and their supporters on mass whilst they were on the way to register their cadency against you, and that you can get away with it . Of course the killing is not limited to Mindanao and in fact candidates have been killed in other locations too. Last time I stopped counting at almost 200 deaths. Politics is a dangerous game in the Philippines .
I plan to bring both girls home in May – partly to get them out of the country during the elections but also because they need to keep their relationships with family and friends back home.
So its now the first weekend in the new year and we are off to spend Gianna’s earnings from her billboard , Madame has decided she wants a phone and Guess jeans for starters . Gianna is back in the cheer dance team this year and Angelica has started football so we are in for a sporty few months – They say summer has started early and will last till early June! Meanwhile Europe seems to be having the worst winter for years with thick snow and freezing temperatures. Lucky us ……30 degrees again today. So new years resolutions ???
1. Work more at home and see more of kids
2. Get a car so I can do more with kids at weekends. I am so sick of taxis
3. Loose the weight that crept on at the year end (how does it do that every year?
4. Relearn Spanish (sort of have to as hosting an event in Guatemala in September)
