Life in the PI, Part Two

As promised, here is part two about life in the Philippine Islands!

We live in Dumaguete, on the southern tip of Negros Island. Our mission includes the eastern half of Negros, plus the small island of Siquijor, seen in the distance in the photo at the left. Cebu Island is the major island to the east of Negros, and you can see its southern tip in the photo below. Siquijor is due east of Dumaguete, and the southern tip of Cebu lies northeast. Siquijor is seen in its entirety, while just the tip of Cebu is seen in its photo.

Both pictures were taken from the plaza and boardwalk that runs along the ocean, just a half block from our apartment.  Cebu and Negros are long and skinny islands, and most people live close to the ocean, although there are small towns inland, up in the hilly jungle areas. There are lots of rivers and waterfalls on both islands.

Here is a photo of the church and mission office. The office is the structure on the far right. I took this picture just a few minutes before church started this morning and there were only a few vehicles in the parking lot at the time, partly due to the national habit of running a bit late and partly because most members of the Dumaguete 2nd Ward (like us) live close to the church building. The Dumaguete 3rd Ward meets in the afternoon and there are more cars and motorcycles in the parking lot then since those members live further away, although with five chapels in Dumaguete, no one is too far from a church building.

Few people own cars, but there are lots of motorcycles and scooters. Just look at the outside parking lot at the back of the mall! If you don't have a scooter or a car, there's great public transportation, although the options depend on the size of the city.

In Manila, Cebu, Bacolod, and other large cities, there are taxis, Jeepneys, trikes, and buses, but in smaller towns like Dumaguete there are no taxis. Here, you either take a Jeepney on a fixed route (there are lots of Jeepneys and lots of fixed routes, so it's easy to catch one and this works well if you're going to popular places) or take a motorized tricycle (trike) from point to point.

Although I don't have a picture of a trike overloaded with passengers, pigs, shopping bags, etc., you see that all the time. There could be five people in the sidecar, plus another person on the back seat of the motocycle, plus all their packages. Even in the Jeepney photos, notice the live chickens on the roof of the silver one!

For longer trips, people take the Ceres bus line. Here are two pictures: one from 1976 when my companion and I rode them every day between Bago and Valladolid during my first mission, and one from yesterday in downtown Dumaguete. There is regular bus service between major towns on Negros and also to the neighboring islands. (The buses use the car ferries just like we did when we drove from Cebu to Dumaguete.) Our missionaries ride Ceres buses to attend zone conferences or when they're transferred to a new area. Since Negros is long and skinny, it takes about eight hours to get from 

Dumaguete in the south to Escalante in the north, and about five hours to go around the bottom of the island to Sipalay, our western-most zone. For longer trips, the missionaries stay overnight in each other's apartments to break the trip up into two parts. We can take our car to the same places in one to three hours less time since we don't stop at every town to let passengers on and off, plus we can drive faster.

Speaking of driving, that's one of the funnest things about living here! To most newcomers, it's terrifying. To me, it's like the motorcycle races I used to enter when I was a teenager. It's all about trust.

During a motocycle (motocross) race, everyone goes as fast as possible, trying to pass the other riders, taking whatever route is to their advantage (while still staying on the track), and avoiding collisions because you can't win if you don't finish. It's the same thing with driving in the PI. It's all about trust. Yes, there are roads, but there are no traffic lights or stop signs.

Each intersection is open to traffic from all directions, and you simply navigate by trust and mutual politeness. Notice how all the vehicles in the photo at the left (and in the trike photo above) are crossing in and around and through each other's paths. It all happens in real time, at normal city-traffic speeds, and works very well.

Besides navigating intersections, though, there's the issue of speed differential between vehicles. Trikes can't go very fast, yet they are allowed on highways (think of two-lane country highways, not the Interstate highway system), puttering slowly along, mixed in with slightly faster scooters, still faster Jeepneys, even faster buses, and very fast cars and trucks like we have. When driving, especially over long distances, you have no choice but to pass slower vehicles, against oncoming traffic. Luckily, in the Philippines, everyone cooperates and makes room as someone approaches in the oncoming lane at speed. In fact, there really isn't an oncoming lane. There's just a thirty-foot-wide road, with normal two-way traffic, and people use all thirty feet to pass each other safely. It's as if there are two normal lanes, with a third "middle" lane negotiable as needed.

Most newcomers are terrified when passing slower traffic at speed because you have to trust that the road can momentarily handle three to four-abreast traffic during passing maneuvers and then settle back down to two-way traffic until the next passing maneover comes along. It can be done smoothly and while maintaining good momentum as long as you trust each other. It does make for longer trip times than it would if there were limited-access highways like in America, but I'm just glad the roads (at least on Negros Island) are generally in pretty good condition.

One of the new senior couples was really struggling with driving here until the wife said that she had an epiphany: driving in the Philippines is like walking down a busy New York City sidewalk. On a New York sidewalk there are hundreds of people, all busy, all walking fast on their way to somewhere important, yet somehow they bob and weave and move aside just enough to avoid bumping into each other. That's pretty accurate!

Well, that's all for today. Next time I'll cover the food scene, plus I need to return to the topic of what we actually do as office support missionaries. Goodbye until then!