March 10 from Cliff Sporn, Team Leader

At breakfast this morning I was able to talk more with Joji, my host. She is an Orthodontist and works out of two offices in the Manila area. I also met her husband, Conrad, who writes a column in the financial section of the Inquirer, a major Manila newspaper.  It turns out the Conrad likes to play golf and it looks like we may play on Sunday.

After breakfast another Rotarian, DahDah, picked me up and took me to our meeting place, a Starbucks on EDSA, the main road in Manila.  The traffic can only be described as somewhat organized chaos.  For everyone who doesn’t like traffic lights, Manila is the place to go as there are very few of them.  When encountered they seem to be obeyed to a point.  The rest of the intersections are simply a free-for-all.  Motorcycles routinely drive between the lanes of cars.  We encountered a number of occasions where the oncoming traffic was on our side of the road and we did likewise when the need arose.  Despite all this, there was surprisingly little evidence of accidents.  While they do occur, you just didn’t see as many dented cars as one would expect given the chaos that driving in Manila is.

After our meeting at Starbucks we were off to the Isaac Lopez integrated School.  This school is an integration of all the ages of children in one campus.  The school was not very close to the standards that we would expect to find in the United States.  Most obvious was there was only natural air-conditioning.  Having said that, we were greeted warmly by the students.  They were well behaved and attentive. In the two classes that we went into, they each sang us a song as we departed.  The culture of group singing seems to be very important to the Filipinos.   After we were done and about to leave, we went to the Principal’s office for some apple juice and fried banana.  As the day went on, there was this developing theme that no matter what we did, some kind of meal was involved.  The Filipinos are very friendly and hospitable and are always looking to offer you something to eat.  They are proud of this tradition.

From the school it was time for lunch.  We went to the Mega Mall and found a Filipino restaurant called Cabalen.  There we had a buffet lunch.  As part of our lunch each of us had Bulalo soup, which is a bone marrow soup.

The mall was huge. It was five stories high with a full height open atrium.  This mall could be in any large city in North America.  All the top world stores seemed to be there, Izod, Swatch, etc. Inside this mall was an entire catholic church so mass could be held daily.  The other thing of note is that almost everywhere we went there was security.  To just go into the mall you needed to go past a security guard and have your bag checked and swept by a metal detector. When we drove into the parking garage, the guards used mirrors to look under the car for anything unusual.  Some cars had their trunk searched.

After visiting the mall, we went to the Quezon City Circle.  In the circle is a rather large park.  There we met Tony Castro and his wife Elizabeth.  They are very active in environmental conservation and have set up an earthworm demonstration project in the park.  About 100 meters from the park restaurants they are processing all of the food and biodegradable waste that is generated.  They feed it to the earthworm plots, which convert the waste in about 2 weeks into a very rich and healthy compost. There is no odor and no flies.  This is then returned to other areas of the park for the gardens or sold as compost.  At a farm north of Manila, they are doing this on a much larger scale.  The whole concept comes under the idea of generating zero waste which if done on a larger scale, that is everyone doing their share, then we can have a significant positive impact on the global climate changes that we are facing.

After a brief stop at the University of the Philippines for pictures, we went on to the meeting of the Rotary Club of Makati Desmariñas.  Both Joji Tan and Conrad are members of this club.  To start the meeting we were asked to lead the sing of our National Anthem and then they in turn sang the Filipino National Anthem.  Then we sang there club song.  Fortunately, they had the words on the screen for us to follow.  The SVP or Club President was Lu.  She was a very gracious host.  We were able to give our presentations and I think they went well.  We were asked a number of questions afterward and it was fun to respond.  Afterward, the team split up to go back to their host families, although Ben and Tim went to another Rotary party, oh to be young again.