After a week of housekeeping I was eager to return to the field this morning. We visited Tanauan, a small town near Tacloban that you probably recognize as the ‘Skimboarding Capital of the Philippines,’ and the lenders there did not disappoint. One woman owned a ‘Mini-Zoo.’ That means that she kept an eagle and a baboon in tiny cages on her porch; she grumpily refused to do an interview with us, and my translators agreed that it was probably because the zoo was illegal. The monkey said goodbye to us by shrieking and throwing his body against the bars.
After work I had lunch at the No Problem Foodhaus. This was my second day in a row eating there. Yesterday I ordered pumpkin and mung beans, delicious, and today I had eggplant and some banana product, which both tasted fine but made my mouth itchy:
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| $.84 |
And now I’m working on data entry and field notes in Libro, a trendy café/bookstore:
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| Chocolate cupcake and banana shake |
I am going to propose to my bank that they keep a baboon in the lobby.
ReplyDeleteOn a less serious note, I have been thinking that this whole series of blogs about the Filipino adventure has been much more interesting because of the underlying theme of the task of conducting the study. It's more than a travelogue.
I was thinking of you yesterday when a probation officer was interviewing my client and trying to apply the categories like "job history" and "wage" to answers from a guy from Mexico like "Well, my mother sells firewood out of a truck in Tucson so I chop wood and help load the truck, but when that's not busy I help out on the ranch and I can fix cars so sometimes I get money for that and then there's some other odd jobs..." This particular interviewer was getting all bothered by how this lack of precision prevented the form from being filled out. It was pretty entertaining.