Job Description

I thought the readership of this blog was a solid four – including my parents, my brother, and about six other people who so seldom look at it that they all count as one.

Recent e-mails and letters have indicated, though, that maybe I underestimated the number of people who are actually kind of interested in my life. And when I say “interested”, I don't mean to sound arrogant. I know that most of you are just checking to make sure I'm still alive, and also to make sure that I'm not writing about that time where you did that thing and the cops came. Don't worry, I won't ever write about that.

Considering that the number of people who read my blog is actually “four plus”, I now feel that perhaps I haven't been fair in the telling of just what I do here. Perhaps some of you want to know more than the current state of my bowel movements and other bodily functions. So here it goes, but just the once.

This country has tremendous aquatic resources and, in fact, more shoreline than the entire United States, even though it is only the area of Arizona (36,000 km of shoreline as opposed to 19,000 in the U.S.). There are about 1,000 populated islands of 7,000 total, and sixty percent of the population resides in the coastal zone. A majority of the population is dependent on coastal resources in some way shape or form, especially as a direct food supply.

Small islands are especially succeptible to environmental degradation because their ecosystems are smaller and more likely to crash when overexploited. Moreover, these smaller systems are indicators for larger and longer-lasting problems that are happening in the greater oceans. Enter Katrina. Essentially, my charge was to teach islanders of a small island group, the Cuatro Islas, why the marine resources they have been thriving on and exploiting for years need to be protected, in the Cebuano language no less.

For nearly a solid year, I lived on one of the islands, Himokilan, full time and tried to develop programs that could be replicated on the other islands. Living there was important to both me and the islanders, because it helped me fully integrate into a foreign place and learn the language, while simultaneously building their trust in me. I beg you to imagine being the only English speaker on an island with 600 people, no water for four months of the year, and nighttime electricity only. This was a big change for me. It took me nearly a year to deal with the many rashes and lack of electric fan, let alone figure out my assignment and how to do it best.

During that first year, I taught all grades of the elementary school weekly about the marine environment. I used to work on gardening projects, composting projects, solid waste management projects, and adult environmental education. I started one environmental group comprised of out-of-school youth called the Green Team, and I also tried to re-organize the island matweavers into an active people's organization. I used to and still do get asked daily about when I am going to marry a Filipino.

Today, all that exists of my early attempts is one adult education program that, as it turns out, is the right formula for success. After five months of the program, a lot of my targets have been met, like recycling and composting in 50% of homes, and it has been rewarding to see some very positive changes.

Many of the other projects I originally pursued turned out to be the wrong formula, and I stopped them. I refocused my attention in other areas, namely solid waste management in high schools and ecotourism development, although I do have side projects that I attend to about once a month like art clubs and the like. The other stuff failed for a reason, which I now see with clarity, but am not disappointed because I had to try things that didn't work in order to find the better formula.

In essence, failure has been a very big part of my experience here. I have failed a lot, and have also had a lot of successes, though nothing compared to the failure. I won't remind myself of the Great Duck Experiment of 2006. Why the failures have been so valuable to me is because I learned this very important concept: the way they teach you to save the environment in college doesn't work.

“Saving” the environment is not about picking up trash; it is not about replanting trees; it is not about land-use-planning and point source pollution and habitat restoration. In a developing country, is about addressing fundamental education, health, political, social, and livelihood problems. It is very complex, and many people who I work with don't see the need to target these problems in the context of the environment. That makes my job very difficult and very exhausting, not to mention one I am wholly unqualified for (though the internet has taught me a lot...).

The time I spend actually doing community trainings is a small percentage of the total. The amount of time I spend preparing for presentations, writing documents, and creating educational aids takes most of my time, and it is always hot which makes the work that much harder. So it's not like I don't do work ever. I do. Lots.

The reason I don't write about it is because that stuff isn't interesting at all. And, furthermore, since I don't get paid for it, I do a lot of it during evenings or early in the morning, which leaves the majority of daylight hours open for great adventures like caving and napping. Be thankful I don't write about work more, because something like Building a Solid Waste Management Framework for the Integrated Protected Area of the Cuatro Islas really is as boring as it sounds.