Apparently I'm stressed out and that explains why I've gotten 16 collective hours of sleep since last September. Stress....I don't get it. You mean the constant wailing of neighborhood chickens and pigs, the trucks downshifting on the highway outside my house, the neighbor's obsessive watching of “Deal or No Deal”, and the general angst of being a foreigner in a foreign land is stressing me out? Is that what my doctor is saying?

She suggested I go to a counselor, to which I responded by asking if it was more cost effective to send me to Manila for a five-day trip where the counselor would tell me I'm stressed, surprise, or if it was better for her to just send me some sleeping pills so I could give them a shot. I really, really want to sleep, not talk about why I'm not sleeping. So tomorrow in the mail I'll be getting two, just to try them out. Yaaaaaaay. Hello, sleep. My name is Katrina and I LOVE YOU.

Strange that I'm not sleeping, really, because the amount of physical exercise I do these days astounds even me. I do nothing all day but bike and run and drink orange juice (the orange juice, incidentally, was gifted by God last month to the local Mercury Drug Store and now I drink real orange juice as opposed to sugar with orange flavoring). I owe thanks for this new and demanding schedule to the fact that local politics have taken a turn for the worse and I, consequently, have no work, ever (as previously communicated to loved ones back home in letters, phone calls, faxes, smoke signals, and falling leaf patterns). Being able to exercise not only kills hours and hours of my day, but it also has the added bonus of making me feel more like a single 24 year old instead of a lumpy toad girl.

Oh, my day isn't without challenges. Trust me, I'm challenged. The most challenging aspect in my day-to-day is finding a new and clever way to lie to my host family about why biking is work. “I'm just stopping by my office!” means that I'm going to the bakeshop across the street from my office for a snack. The same thing, no? “Oh, I'm visiting another volunteer to discuss work,” means that we sit in aircon in Jolly Bee and discus the lack of the aforementioned.

Another challenge has proven to be waiting an entire, excruciating week before I can read the episode recap for "The Office" on Saturdays at the Internet Cafe. I don't laugh as hard as I would were I watching the show, but I laugh pretty hard making up the episode in my head based on the recap.

I don't mean to imply that I do absolutely nothing. Fortunately, the inventions of both electricity and computers allow me to create brochures for ecotourism, proposals for said ecotourism, proposals for solid waste management, environmental education lesson plans, and lots and lots of photo journals. I have plenty to do and plenty to keep me productive during the times when I can rely on no one but myself. The problem, as it turns out, is that I find other people increasingly unreliable. Lack of funding and political barriers prevent a lot of plans from being implemented, and keeps a lot of people uninterested in aiding little development workers like myself. In consequence, a lot of communities like my own appear to stagnate, and my own work appears non-existant.

In truth, progress happens every day, if only in the sense that people keep tyring to devise new ways to implement change. After 20 months, that becomes hard to see; instead, it's easy to see failure and disappointment, and those thoughts tend to keep a person awake at night.