Ghost Management

We can't get to our money: that's the latest crisis.

I followed all the rules, of course. Went to Associated way back in March or April and told them I'd be spending these 5 months in the Philippines and to please put a note on it. But NO. As soon as I tried to use the card at a cash machine I was denied. Then Dave got an ALERT message that there was "suspicious activity" on my card.

He thought he'd taken care of the snafu. Not so much, it turns out. Still can't get at the funds. So here I am, halfway around the world, and I can't get at my money. It makes me more than a little frantic. The anxiety ghosts plague me all night, waking me up every two hours and chewing at my brain.

On the lighter side, I came down here to the breezeway to email Dave this morning and -- wah la! -- he was on Skype and we were able to have an impromptu chat. Then I ran upstairs to get Lizzie and the videocam and we got to see Dave and the cats and the dog. Tremendous.

At the same time, however, Lizzie got chewed by mosquitoes. Her legs are covered in bites, big mean super swollen bites.

I'm trying REAL HARD not to be the irritating American, all caught up in her rules and her need to keep schedules, to get things done yesterday. But it's very difficult to navigate this new culture, where people still do things the old fashioned way (by hand, cash and carry, and all of this after lunch). At least Lizzie and I now have cellphones, so we can text our new friends when we need help--with some assurance of a quick reply.

We're hitting major roadblocks not only with the money situation but also with Lizzie's potential school. They want us to have Franklin Middle School fax and send (via snail air mail) their required recommendation form, even though when I emailed them about this possibility back in March they said to get a letter of recommendation from her teacher... Not good enough. It took 3 weeks for a letter of invitation from the U of P to arrive for me, a slim airmail letter that weighed less than a gnat. Also, we need a "certified" health record for her. Lizzie can't take the test until we take care of all of these roadblocks.

Further, the semester starts on June 11 and they don't want us setting foot in their offices until we've passed a "voluntary" 10 day quarantine, because we're coming from a Swine Flu swamp. (There are 7 confirmed cases in Manila. 7. They'd die if they knew we had at least 3 confirmed cases on the SNC campus alone.) So all of this information passing happened because Chingbee was our emmissary, passing from the breezeway where we waited into the office and back again, at least 3 times.

I'm starting to think it might be a good idea to get Lizzie into tutoring or something instead of this. Butch (or maybe it was Chingbee) said that people here are quite reluctant to say no. They'll say everything but no. I wonder if Lizzie just can't get into the school, for whatever reason, and they just don't want to say no. Or if it's the same mountain of paperwork for anyone who wants to get into a private school--probably the latter. Just harder to do that when you're halfway around the world.

Yesterday we went to a massive mall to buy our cellphones, and Butch was a godsend because he fronted us the cash to pay for them--and to survive for a few more weeks without access to all our American wealth. He and his wife, Beng, took us out for lunch at a great Asian restaurant, and we've got leftovers to tide Lizzie and me over for a dinner or two.

Then they took us to the equivalent of WalMart and we bought a bunch of things for the apartment: a toaster, a special thingee that you put into a pail of water to heat it instantly (or in a matter of minutes) so that you can take a filipino style bath/shower--sitting on the floor and dumping the water over your head and body. It works! Plus scissors, and a paring knife, and a strainer, and a laundry basket... Butch lent us a transformer so that Lizzie can charge her DS and Beng talked to Lizzie about how to manage our sad ghost. (We need to let as much light in as possible, keep the windows open, use yellow flowers and nice smelling incense, and walk through the rooms disseminating happy thoughts. We also need to put a clear glass of water with salt in it in a corner or two, wait a few days, and then flush that water down the toilet.)

We capped off the day with a trip to Beng and Butch's house for ice cream and cookies. It was a wonderful way to avoid thinking about all the things I can't control--I can't thank the two of them enough for helping us out.

Tiny Little Freakouts

In the building next door, someone has been yelling enthusiastically all day--it sounds like one of those motivational speakers.

While I was putting little slips of paper into my Norton anthology, before I take it (tomorrow) to a copy center, I heard someone singing, in a strange, loud, high pitched (male) and tuneless voice, "Night Fever" by the Bee Gees.

Lizzie's still crashed out on the couch. I wonder if I'm going to be able to wake her long enough to get her into her bed.

My hands and feet and ankles are swelling up in the heat.

I'm afraid to ride in the Jeepneys.

I'm afraid that I don't have the adventure gene in me. There were moments today when I fantasized shutting us up into the apartment and never leaving it. Too bad it's too hot in here for that.

A woman at the Office for Student Affairs is filing the paperwork for my visa. She has our passports right now. That makes me break out into a hot sweat when I think about it. And she'll have them for a month, she says. I'm supposed to call her if I need them, "because I'm hardly ever in the office," she says. What?

People here call me "mam." I look around for the old lady before I realize I'm standing in her shoes.

People here say "uh uh" to mean yes. It was particularly disconcerting when the visa lady kept saying it, after I asked her to clarify the procedure for the nth time.

My fiction writing class doesn't have any students in it at the moment.

My American lit class turns out to be for freshmen. And it's nearly full.

I feel like slipping down the same rabbit hole as Lizzie.

*

Pardon me while I have a little nervous breakdown.

Last night, Lizzie went to sleep at 4 PM. I went down at 8 PM. Then I was up at 11:00, 1:00, 3:00, and finally for good at 5:00. Each time, my stomach roiled, the roots of my hair froze in my skull, and it felt as if my skin was lifting off a little. God, I thought, what if I've made a horrible mistake for us?

Today, I thought I'd tackle some of my worries. I'm worried about getting Lizzie into this school. So I tried calling the school. Turns out I have to tell the man at the front desk downstairs to call the number for me. Then he calls me and transfers the phone. A woman I could barely hear said a bunch of stuff I couldn't understand. I tried to explain to her that I'd emailed her a few months ago about getting Lizzie into the school. When was that? she wondered. I told her I thought it was in May. Or April. Probably March, I'm thinking. She couldn't find the email. Didn't remember me from Eve. Okay. Could we come by in person, now that we're in town? She was still looking for the email--at least, I think that's what she was doing.

She transferred me to "admissions." A phone rang and rang and rang. Finally, I hung up.

Zero for one.

Then the Chair of the English and Comparative Literature department, Naida, called me to say that it looks as if no one is signing up for the Fiction Writing course. So can I teach another course on Fiction?

"A reading course or a writing course?" I asked.

"A reading course."

Okay. Time to reinvent the wheel. At the last minute. When I don't have any of my books around me. "Sure," I said. "I can do that. I was going to stop by and see you today. I was just leaving."

"I'll be here all day," she said. "But it's lunch from 12-1, so don't come until after 1:00." It was 11:30.

Zero for two.

Now it's pouring. While I was emailing Dave to set up a Skype date for Saturday evening, rain blew into the patio where I was writing and something happened to the internet connection. I got hung up in Gmail. I freaked out. But eventually, I think, I did manage to send the email--Dave will have to tell me if he got it.

Now there are sirens blowing all over, drilling into our eardrums. Sounds like the siren they use in the States for a tornado. Do they get tornados here? They certainly flood.

So, yeah. I'm trying hard to act as if I can go with the flow. But the flow is turbulent.

Reassure me. The worst that will happen is that I can't get Lizzie into that school for a while. She can be a student online. She can hang out in the apartment while I'm teaching, watching ridiculous things on the non-cable TV.

*

We braved the torrential downpour (and torrential is not hyperbole--the rain comes down in a solid, soaking sheet, and the wind can blow it sideways, so an umbrella is basically useless) and went over to the College of Arts and Letters to meet with Naida. When it rains like this, the streets quickly flood, and so we had to wade across a few curbs. It's turning out that my Earth flip flops are the best footwear for this weather. By the end of 5 months, I should have some wicked developed calves.

Naida took my course packet (it was over 200 pages, I think, and it only cost me 155 pesos, which is about 3 bucks) and showed me where to drop it off for printing. She took my syllabus for the American Lit course and said she'd have it copied.

What if I want to print out a file? I asked.

I need to bring it to the office, she said, and they'll print it out there.

Then we went to meet with the director for the creative writing courses, Cheng Bee (sp?), who turned out to be one of the most fabulous meets so far--she's a young woman with a great sense of humor and fluent (American?) English. I felt, for the first time, completely at ease.

Cheng Bee was hanging out in her office with her friend, Rex. (No one at the university leaves their door open. You have to knock and wait.) Both Rex and Cheng Bee remind me of the people I went to graduate school with--smiling, a little snarky, open. In short order, Cheng Bee volunteered to go with me to the Miriam School tomorrow to sort out Lizzie's situation. Praise Jesus!

Then she started to tell me about the class I'm supposed to teach, a literature course on fiction for writing majors. Okay, I can do this, I thought, as long as I have the right materials to photocopy. Did she have any anthologies lying around? She handed me The Story and Its Writer--fabulous. Then she got the brilliant idea to call Butch, the UP professor who exchanged at SNC two years ago. He's taught the course, she said, and we can get his syllabus and maybe even materials.

Butch appeared like the genie from the bottle, a ray of welcome light from the past. He decided, on the spot, that I shouldn't be teaching a lit course ("The two courses, the American Lit and the Fiction Genre course, are too similar," he said. "You'll be using a lot of the same readings for both courses, and you might have a lot of the same students. That won't work. And we need someone different to teach fiction writing, a taste of another approach. I don't want to give up on that.") Instead, after some strange sleight of hand, I'm going to be teaching a Fiction Writing course for undergrads--just what I'd prepared and planned for.

(Oh, and here's the kicker. It turns out that the course that didn't make was actually a graduate level POETRY workshop, rather than a fiction workshop. Yeah. Can you imagine showing up for the first day and discovering that you're pushing the wrong genre? Thank god that particular humiliation was avoided.)

Butch is also lending us his car and driver tomorrow so that Cheng Bee can take us to the Miriam School. And when that's all over, he's going to the mall with us to get cell phones--if you don't have a cell phone here, you might as well be cut off completely. Everyone texts rather than calls--texts cost about 1 peso each, which is about 2 cents. Lizzie's really stoked about the cell phones. She thought she was going to have to wait until she was 13.

So. Crisis averted. But it's still pouring (oh, and all those sirens earlier? About 15 tiny fire trucks roared past us to a fire that, it turns out, was in a building behind our apartment) and it looks as if we'll get completely drenched if we go out for dinner, as Lizzie wants.

"Welcome to the typhoon," Butch said, as he ushered us into his car for the ride home. "This should go on for--oh--three months."

Good thing we're on the 5th floor!

Pictures to Follow...

We're here, at last, after at least 30 hours in airports and airplanes. Our leg from Chicago to Tokyo took 13 hours--at one point, I got up to use the bathroom and thought my rear end had atrophied.

Somewhere over the Pacific, we crossed into tomorrow and ended up here. Our flight from Tokyo to Manila took about 4 hours, most of which Lizzie and I spent dozing. I don't know about Lizzie, but my eyes felt like scratchy marbles in my head (I couldn't get to sleep much on the long flight, don't know why. But Lizzie managed to use me as a pillow.)

As we wound away from the airport, into the dark, past speeding honking buses and men on motorbikes and men on bicycles (without lights), past jeepneys and little decorated buses crammed with people, I asked Norberto/Bobot, a small smiling man who reminds me of a very tanned Bob Boyer, if the city ever slows down. No, he suggested. And in the morning, the road we were on would be jammed with traffic, he said--as if it wasn't already pretty busy. Dogs and cats, lots of cats, wandered in and out of people, cafes, piles of bagged and unbagged trash.

Our apartment is small, clean and spare. We're in an "International" apartment building on the very large U.P. campus. Little busses decorated in fancy colors and names blat up and down the streets, picking up packs of people who hang out of the window slots and the back doors. This morning, a rooster woke me up and I shot awake, afraid it was Lizzie screaming.

We've got window airconditioners in our rooms, thank god, and fans in nearly every room. Lizzie says it's nearly "too hot." I like the heat, but can see how it will get old pretty quick. Little lizards run up and down the walls--and across the floors of our apartments. I'd get a little freaked out about the wild life if I didn't suspect that the lizards are our friends--they'll eat the mosquitos that make it past our screens.

We can use the internet downstairs in an open breezeway. As I quick sent Dave a message to let him know we'd gotten here, rain gathered and poured down in sheets, misting us where we sat. "I'm getting wet," Lizzie half wailed. She couldn't figure out how to get her laptop to connect to the wireless, and when she turned on her computer she got an error message about her clock being wrong--and she doesn't seem to have administrative privileges. The rain pushed a yellow cat out of the jungle and onto the patio, where it regarded us with hungry suspicion.

It's our shower that makes me immediately miss home. Two or three weak dribbles come out of the head, enough to slowly wet your hair and rinse the shampoo out. A glorified cat bath (what Mom used to call a washcloth-on-the-important-bits). There's a big bucket in the shower (which is just a curtained off corner of the room, really, as I suspected it might be, and a little drain in the floor, just like in Mexico... only less impressive).

Last night, I lay down on my hard bed with my thin pillows tucked under my head, and read a little more of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. Lizzie's wobbly lips kept rolling through my mind. "I miss our animals," she said. "And Dad."

So do I, darling, I thought. So do I.

Let the culture shock begin!