Manila

Wow! It has been a crazy couple of days. I am moved here to Manila, and the first day I arrived I turned on my computer to find that it decided to not work any more! I kind of freaked...but it is finally fixed, thankfully. Anyways living here in Manila actually isn’t all that much different from Olongapo. I mean I am definitely living more of the Philippine lifestyle...no flushing toilet, no water pressure, ants, cockroaches, and geckos are part of the building no matter how clean we keep it, and last but not least nothing is convenient. But this is all part of living in the Philippines, right? I have been here for 4 days now, and we have already had 2 births! I am living here in the clinic, currently there is another wonderful student here named Megan with me who has been able to show me around and teach me the way things are done here. The other day we went out to eat at a really awesome restaurant called the coconut house where all of the food, drinks, and dishes had coconut incorporated into it someway or another. It was sooo yummy and unique. but, Megan is leaving in a week and then it will be just me living here in the clinic. We do prenatals every Wednesday and Friday, where we start by teaching a childbirth education class, then do the checkups. It seems to me, the main clientele here are teenagers, our youngest patient is 13 years old. My heart totally goes out to these moms and it is very hard not to fall in love with them and their babies! I am practicing my tagalog alot, because I will most likely be the one here who answers the door in the middle of the night to a laboring woman, and I need to be able to communicate with her. The midwife Gerlene who is my preceptor and owner of the clinic, just lives walking distance from here, and then there are 2 other staff midwives who rotate being here. So, I hope I wont be too lonely. It is definitely going to take me awhile to become confident enough to travel around in Manila on my own, I mean, I got lost in Olongapo, and Manila is just so much busier. As my friends and family know, I have never had a good sense of direction...but, I feel like that is going to change very soon :-) I hope all of you back home are doing well, and I will post pics of the clinic and Manila ASAP, I am alot busier here than I was in Olongapo so I haven't had the time to take many pics yet.

"I've heard there are troubles of more than one kind, some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've brought a big bat. I'm already you see, now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!"
-Dr. Suess

Would you like a Boca?

When Jen and I were waiting for our buntis(pregnant woman) to come for a prenatal checkup in Mercy land yesterday morning, the neighbor asked me if I would like a Boca(coconut). I said sure, thinking she was going to just give me a piece of coconut she had or something, But she asked me to come with her to get the Boca. She led me to a young couples house, told them I wanted a boca, and the young man literally climbed up the coconut tree with his bare hands and feet and chopped a boca down for meJ It was very fun to watch, and I videod it just for you guys!… but I was holding the camera in a vertical angle and don't know how to flip the video the right way :( oh well, its still fun to watch...

The coconut was very yummy! And the coconut water that was inside was way better tasting than when I have drank it from a coconut in the states...it was naturally slightly carbonated, sweet, and coco nutty!

Right before he jumps on the tree like spider man hehe!

Coconut trees are so pretty, and did you know that coconuts are actually very large, shiny and green in their true form...

Change of Plans...

Well, while Cecille and Emelda are packing up and moving into the temporary birth center we have set up here, I will be getting ready to move to…Manila! Yep, that’s right, plans here can change in a blink of an eye, it’s the fun part about living in the developing world…I will be moving to Manila in about 2 weeks and staying for 3 months apprenticing with a Filipina midwife who has a VERY busy birth clinic down there. Moving to Manila now while the birth center here is being built and clientele established, is giving me the chance to immediately start catching babies getting the experience I came here for. Manila is about a 3 hour bus ride from Olongapo, and one of the largest cities in the world. To tell you the truth, I am a little nervous, because I just got used to living here in Olongapo, and I feel like moving to Manila will be like culture shock all over again, but I know that it will be good for me; and I am definitely learning what being flexible actually meansJ(gotta be flexible in order to be a good midwife!) I will also miss everyone here during the time that I am gone, but I will be back in Olongapo after the three months in Manila just in time to jump into all of the action here. Manila is definitely bigger, busier, and more polluted. Also, Manila does not have as many “Americanized” products that I am able to find in this area. the reason being the US military was based here for a long time making in impact on what food and other products were sold...So, I won’t be able to have my little American treats that remind me of homeL... but, I am excited to get busy and start catching babies!      

A Day Out On My Own

Oh my Goli! (oh my goodness in tagalong) where do I even began…First off, I am feeling much better(thanks for all the prayers!) So my day began with this morning doing checkups on our moms in Iram, and coming home realizing I really needed to go grocery shopping. Since I have been here for 3 weeks, I decided that I should be confident enough to go out on my own for the very first time and go grocery shopping myself, right? Boy was that a mistake! Now, in order to get to Royal (the grocery store) I have to take the brown jeepney with the white top to the market(15 min. ride) then hop on a yellow jeepney to the Subic Bay gate(15 min ride) then walk to this parking lot and hop on a bus which takes me to Royal(5 min ride). Easy enough, right? Well I got to the grocery store just fine and was all proud of myself(I even stopped in Starbucks, it reminded me soo much of home, I almost cried!) but on my back, well, that is a total different story….So, I was on the yellow jeepney needing to get off to switch to the brown jeepney with the white top, when I totally realized that I had no clue when to get off to get to their terminal. By this time, I knew I had already totally missed it, because I had been in this yellow jeepney for quite a while, and he was driving in an area I did not even recognize at all. To make things worse, it was also getting very dark outside! So I prayed that the driver would know english and surprisingly he knew enough to understand that I needed to get to the brown Jeepney with the white top. He informs me that we had passed that stop a long time ago! Ugh! Right after he tells me that he would turn around and take me to where I needed to go, I got a random txt message from Vicki saying “hey Alyssa, where are you!?  How would you like to go to a birth right now!” Well, of course I told her I would love too, and I would try to get there ASAP! While thinking to myself, “Shoot, what a great day Alyssa to think that you were able to go out on your own!” LOL!  Traffic was crazy, but I told the jeepney driver to drive fast because I needed to get to a birth! So, I finally got to a brown jeepney with a white top to take me to Kalapati and arrived in this health center right when the mom was pushing, like 10 minutes before the baby was born! I was able to assist this “government” midwife for the delivery and after. To fill you in about this midwife…Our Mercy In Action team had introduced ourselves to her awhile ago and she informed us that if she had a birth she would call us so that I could assist her, she is also open to learning some new things from us to improve her quality of care... The baby was a girl, weighing about 6 ½ pounds, which is considered “big” here in the Philippines, she was healthy and oh so cute! And the mom did so well. I was able to initiate breastfeeding and basically I wasable to "protect” the baby from being taken away from the mother hehe… It was great! I stayed there for about an hour and a half after the baby was born, and then had to get my groceries in the refrigerator, so I said my goodbyes and took a tricy home. Wow, what a day! 

Yes, Starbucks has made it all the way to the Philippines!! 

So happy!! Every sip reminded me of home!...okay maybe I am a little too
excited about this whole Starbucks thing hehe

Mom, dad, and their new baby girl...my first birth in the Philippines!

sick:-(

As most all of you have heard, I have been under the weather these past couple days. I am feeling a little bit better today mostly now just have sinus congestion, headache, fatigue, and cough. No more fever or throwing up, so thats good. Thankyou to all who are praying/sending good thoughts over my way. Yesterday I missed doing prenatals with the midwives in the landfill area, but in a way glad I didn't go because when the midwives got back they told me that they went to one of our patients houses, and her deceased grandfather who had apparently passed away 3 days beforehand was still laying there in her house! Wow! I don't know how I would of reacted. What do you do in that kind of situation? We will check up on her again next week because she has very high blood pressure, and at 18 weeks pregnant we were still not able to hear a baby's heart beat. She is definitely in my prayers.

Today I was supposed to go help Cecille and Joks paint the temporary birth center, but they had to go do it without me. I will be moving in there within the next couple of days and do not know when/if I will be able to get internet connection. The internet guys here are like the cable guys in the states, where you wait at home all day for them, and then they don't even show up! I hope all of you back at home are doing well, and I miss you guys! For some reason, me laying here sick makes me miss my family even more.  

Moving soon...

Homebirth was just recently outlawed here in the Philippines, the thinking behind outlawing it was, if they make every women go to the hospital or clinic to have her baby, the infant and maternal mortality rates would hopefully go down in this country. But, the thing is the hospital and clinic fees are too expensive for most families, and many women do not want to go to the hospital. And now since the law is midwives here cannot attend homebirths, the moms just deliver the baby on their own without anyone. As you can see this law is not working out as planned here. And since us midwives have been doing prenatal checks 3 times a week we have some moms that are coming to us who’s due dates are very soon, and we cannot deliver them in their home. This is why we need to get a clinic going ASAP. Vicki, the director of Mercy In Action found a cute little house that we can convert into a temporary birth clinic until the building of the main birth center is done. I will be moving into this temporary clinic with Cecille and Emelda( Filipina  midwives) probably next week. All morning today we were cleaning the entire house inside and out, and we will be painting this weekend, then moving our stuff in. It is not far from where I am living now, probably a 12 minute Jeepney ride. It is actually on the same dirt road that one would take to get to Mercy Land, which is where the birth center is being built. Our Mercy In Action team has been making more friends with the locals, we are getting more mothers coming to us for care, and people here are starting to trust us more it seems...we just need to keep on praying!  

Laundry day

This chore is much more time consuming and complicated here…First, I have to put my dirty clothes in the washing machine than fill it up with water from a hose and add soap. Now, the philippinos call it a washing machine, but its more like a big basin that will swish around your clothes in soapy cold water for about 10 minutes. Once my clothes were throughouly “swished” I had to turn the knob to "drain" which drains all of the water out through a hose, then I grab my soaking wet laundry put it in a basket to take to the shower where I have a big and small bucket full of yet again cold water. I put my clothes in the big bucket and let them soak for awhile, then hand wash them before I dip them into the smaller bucket of water to rinse the article. After I am done with that whole process I take my laundry and put it into the dryer (which is like a salad spinner, and spin dries the clothing for 5 minutes) once that is done I hang up my still wet laundry on the clothesline to fully dry, and of course for everyone to see all my pretty clothes hahaha…now if that process isn’t hard enough already I forgot to mention that the washing/spinning machine is located out back in an alleyway type thing that is full of mosquitoes. So, I have to douse myself in “off” every time I go out there, and then when it is time for me to get my clothes off the line, I never come out of it without at least one bite, because for some reason the little buggers love hanging out inside my clothing and start going crazy attacking me when I shake my clothes to get them off and put them in my basket to bring inside…Mom: when I get back home I wont mind doing laundry anymore, because in America it truly is such an easy choreJ At least I don’t have to handwash my clothes with rocks in a creek…

Filling up the "washing machine" with nice cold hose water

done being in "washing machine" now time to soak

scrub, scrub, scrub

time to rinse

now time for the dryer/spinner

hanging up clothes to fully dry

yep, my clothes are ready for mosquitoes now lol 

Prenatal Day-Landfill

Wow! What a day. Yesterday we went to the landfill to offer our services to the people living there.  Yes there is people actually living in the active landfill here. I would say that these families are the poorest of the poor. The area is more like a land full of garbage, not a land fill because there is no hole that the garbage goes in like at the garbage dumps that I have seen in the states. The garbage was just piled up creating mountains and mountains of garbage for miles. I had to put on a straight face and pretend like the awful smell didn’t bother me. Tons of plastic bags were blown by the wind and stuck to the fences around this landfill. The people that live there start early in the morning and “shop” within the mountains of garbage for things that they need. Most of the houses are made out of scrap pieces of wood and garbage; there were some houses that had cement/brick walls. My heart goes out to these people. Our team walked around from house to house asking if there were any pregnant woman they knew. After searching for awhile we found and went to a house of a woman who was pregnant and when we told her about us, she was so happy and blessed that we were there and soon enough we had 12 buntis(pregnant woman) at this house waiting for a checkup from us. The news that we were there went around fast. The entire crowd of woman had not received any prenatal care yet in their pregnancy, and even though some are due in a couple weeks they had not yet been seen by anyone and didn’t really have a plan of who was going to be their birth attendant at the time of birth. Some of you reading this are probably thinking. “What is the point of helping these woman when their babies are going to be born in a garbage dump and probably live very poor lives, if they even live past childhood.” Well, the point is that every woman has the human right to a skilled birth attendant being with her and her baby at the time of birth no matter if she is the poorest or richest woman alive; and if we can get that mom and new baby off to a good start bonding and breastfeeding, we can promote safe motherhood and child survival. We were able to give all the woman prenatal vitamins and some of them iron supplements, because most were anemic due to malnutrition. I pray that they choose to have us attend them at the time of birth, but we never know which moms are actually going to contact us when they go into labor. Our team will keep going to the landfill every Friday to do checkups. I am glad that we found an area where the woman are willing to let us help them.“If we are to heal the planet, we must begin by healing birthing.”~Agnes Sallet Von Tannenberg

It is hard to see in these pics but this is all garbage-the big mountain thing on the right is a huge pile of garbage

Walk, Walk, Walk

Today the midwives and I hiked up to Mt. Muahay about an hour hike; our goal was to get to the Assembly of God church in the village and ask their pastor if our Mercy In Action team can do a medical mission in June. Well, when we arrived, the pastor was not there and the church was locked up. So, we asked some locals where the pastor lives, they told us that he lives in New Cabalan which is, by the way, close to where we started this whole hike. We gathered our things and started to go back hoping we could find the pastors house. As we were walking along, we passed a kind looking man who said hi to us and thought nothing of it until, we were told by a vendor a while later that the pastor just walked by him not to long ago. That’s when we realized that that kind man who said hi to us was the pastor we were looking for! Ugh! We quickly turned around and headed back for the church (all this work just to talk to one man!) We were very hot and sweaty by then, especially poor Jen who had Ken Ken her 71/2 month old baby boy in a sling carrying him. But, it was worth it because the pastor told us that he would love for us to do a medical mission at his church and also said he would spread the word  about our team doing free prenatals every Thursday in Mercy Land. This is great, because our Mercy In Action team has to do everything we can to advertise and start getting the Aeta tribal families to trust and know us...apparently a rumor is circulating that there is a cult of people capturing children and harvesting their organs… well, if you thought that wasn't bad enough, there is another rumor going around that our team is that cult. We have to break this rumor and gain trust so that we can start serving these families with much needed health care! 76% of the Aeta tribal woman are giving birth to their babies alone with no one there to help in an emergency, so the infant and maternal mortality rates are very high, and breastfeeding rates are low...the other day we went and did another postpartum checkup on that mom and new baby in Iram and found out that the mom is bottle feeding!(we encouraged the mother to start breastfeeding immediately before her milk dries up) The thing is, she has no way to sustain buying formula. In these situations the mother usually ends up feeding her infant rice water, or diluted formula, or some other thing that she can come up with. So you ask "why do these moms even start bottle feeding then." Well sadly the Philippine people as a culture believe that if one can give their baby formula it is the very best thing for the infant...why? Because Americans do it so it must be! And you ask, "well why do Americans do it," I honestly do not know that answer. ‎"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever does." Margaret Mead

Pics of our hike: 

Aeta children, because of their dark chocolate colored skin and curly hair they look much like Africans instead of Philippino 

 

Looks alot like Oregon, don't you think?

Having fun in the Philippines

Cecille and I together on the jeepney coming back from the market

awww so cute, this was taken in Iram when we went to go do a checkup on our mom that just delivered, and her new baby

Eating Halo Halo for the first time with Cecille and Jokes, it is a very popular Philippino treat...fruit, beans, jello, coconut, shaved ice, condensed milk and sorbet, it was yummy! 

The back of a Jeepney(main way of transportation in the Philippines) 

Jeepney-they are usually packed, you feel like you are in a can of sardines

Tricy-the 2nd option for public transportation-you either ride on the back of the motorbike or in the side car, they go pretty fast and will take you anywhere you want to go

thought this was a neat pic

By the way, HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!!!!!

Easter Holiday

I wrote this this morning but wasn't able to post it until now:

Easter Holiday…

Here in the Philippines Easter is a national holiday; the Philippines is mainly a catholic country and the way they celebrate easter here is very unique. Most everything closes down on Friday and Saturday and then opens back up on Sunday, this is because they literally believe that Jesus is truly dead on these days and comes back alive on (Sunday). So for Friday and Saturday(and sometimes even earlier in the week; the holiday week starts on Wednesday) they believe that since Jesus is dead there is no protection for themselves and it is not safe to be out. But, on Sunday everything opens back up again and goes back to normal because it is the day that Jesus rises from the dead… It is Friday morning here and until 3pm there is a very “famous” parade/tradition type thing that is put on every year for this easter holiday. In this parade, people walk down the streets being whipped beyond bloody by themselves or others. There is also living people who will be hung on crosses by nails hammered into their hands while being carried down the street. These people take this very seriously, they are trying to reenact what Jesus went through believing that if they do this, they will be loved and cherished by God even more. (Thank God for Jesus! He did it so that we don't have to!) It will be very gruesome and we do not want the little ones to watch this, so our Mercy In Action team is leaving and going to Subic Bay for the day...oh my gosh! I thought it wasn't going to start until later in the day, but just now as I type this it is going on right in front of our apartment complexes...

Wow! What a way to experience how different cultures celebrate holidays...

Prenatal Day

Yesterday the midwives and I traveled out to a village called Iram, we have a building there that we can do prenatal checks out of.  We will be going there every Tuesday, but we don’t yet have very many women coming to us because it is taking a while to gain their trust. They are a people group that were displaced from the big volcanic eruption (Mount Pinatubo) in 1991. But the midwives did have one patient who was supposed to be delivering soon and when we got there we found out that she delivered already the night before on her own. She wasnt able to contact us for some reason, when woman here go into labor and don’t have any “load” (money) on their phone to txt the midwife, they just have the baby on their own. It is very sad, but that is one of the reasons why having a birth center is good because a woman can walk to the birth center where the midwives are when she goes into labor, and she doesn't have to have money on her phone in order to contact the midwife to come to her. Anyways, we were led to where the new mom and baby were so that we could do a checkup. The baby hadn’t nursed since it was born 6 hours earlier, so our main goal was to get the baby nursing before we left.  When all was well, we prayed over the mom and new baby and headed home. So for now I will be going with the midwives Jen and Cecille 3 times a week to do prenatal checks and be attending the homebirths. As for Mercy In Actions clinic, the process is going slower than expected and the building of the birth center has not yet been started, they are working very hard to get things going and to get all of the permits and licenses they need, but it is more complicated than one would think. Here is some pics of Iram...

The Market

I have to learn how to get around in Olongapo confidently, and safely, so the Philippine midwives I am staying with decided to take me out today to teach me. The main use of transportation in the Philippines is a Jeepney. I will have to take a pic tomorrow and post it on here, but it is like a very small open bus. They are colored coded depending on where in the town you are going. The ones we have to take from our house to get around are the brown jeepneys with the white top. It cost exactly 12 pesos each way which is about 3cents in American money. The jeepney does not stop only slows down a bit, so you have to hop on quickly and when you are at your destination you knock on the roof and the driver will stop to let you off. On the jeepney there is a padded bench on each side and you have to squish together(like a can of sardines) When I thought that no one else could possibly fit the driver let 2 others on. Good thing I am not claustrophobic! Once we reached the market we all hopped off and joined the bustle of Pilipino’s buying and selling things. To explain what the market is like in American terms-it is like a HUGE Saturday market but people also sell electronics, clothes, toys, ect...The people treated me like a celebrity always saying hi maim, beautiful girl, pretty girl, wow look at her, what is your name? Are you wearing contact lense?(they find it hard to believe that my eyes are actually blue) It is saddening in a way of how much they want to be like Americans-the people here never want to be out in the sun, and buy whitening products for their skin even...The fruit and vegetables here are amazing and fresh, I bought 9 mangoes for 80 pesos which is about $1.75. Seeing the meat on the other hand was very interesting. The smell of raw meat is not very appetizing to me anyway and the meat lays out on tables the entire day waiting to be purchased. carcasses would be hanging with flies on them and animal heads would be staring right at you…I am sure that it was fresh; just butchered even; just the way that it was presented made me think about if I wanted to ever eat meat again... There are many beggars in the market and the little kids try to sell you plastic bags to put your stuff in, one little boy and 2 girls came up to me to try to sell me one, and I gave them my fried plantain shish kabob instead. It seemed they were more pleased with that than if I would have buyed the bag. Next was going to the grocery store, unlike the grocery stores in the states, it is very hard to come by milk or cheese, lettuce, or spinach and many other things. If one wanted to buy a more Americanized brand of something, it would be very expensive. A box of cocoa puffs was selling for $10.80. But most things are very inexpensive here, I bought some stuff to make spaghetti for dinner for the family tonight, hamburger meat and all and paid 436 pesos which is about $9.00, don’t you wish food was that cheap in the states? All in all I had a blast going through the market. It is so interesting and fun to experience a whole different culture! I feel like I will get used to living in the Philippines soon, my jet lag is slowly resolving!

What are you looking at?

The people loved posing when I would take a pic

Those fish were still alive flopping around

yum yum