This and that

So, yesterday I fasted.  Then, this morning I ate a bowl of oatmeal and went to work.  What should I find there? If you were guessing a full fledged catholic mass in the lobby of municipal hall, then congratulations!  I, for one, was a bit surprised.

After mass, they served chicken and spaghetti - this at 9:00am.

In other news, I was wondering about yesterdays holiday.  Turns out that they were celebrating "an important day for our muslim brothers!"  Thats all I got.  No national holidays for the muslim faith in the US, I notice.

Here is an interesting tidbit...  I may have mentioned that the husband of my landlord is an engineer of some sort... I think electrical.  Not much work for him in Lagonoy, but he IS employed at Toshiba.  Every 6 months or so, he travels to Saudi Arabia and works there... then, he takes a few months off, returns to the Philippines and then repeats the cycle.  Well, he was just about ready to leave for SA but he had a terrible accident.  Somehow he broke his arm and needed to have some rebar surgically placed to repair it.  I saw the X-ray and this is a pure compound fracture.  Anyway.... the interesting thing is that he had this surgery just over 2 weeks ago....  and the man has no cast!  And I saw him last night riding a bicycle!!!  I ran up to him amazed.  He told me that his doctor encouraged him to exercise, so that was what he was doing!   Talk about pain tolerance!!!  Amazing.

Tomorrow is a big day. Meeting with all 38 barangay captains and I get to present some of the stuff Ive been doing.  I'll be asking them to help me collect some risk assessment data.  Ultimately, I want to combine this empirical data with some mapping that I want to have done.  I am astounded that the municipality, for all its land use planning and GIS equipment, does not possess individual maps of each barangay.  They have a map of the area (all 38 barangays) but that area us huge.  They have nothing at the local level.  My goal is get these individualized maps and then overlay them with the vulnerability data.  Hopefully then, the land use plan can be updated to restrict building in these areas.   Sounds simple, right?   Anyway, this meeting is going to be prep for a more important meeting on 9/22 - 23.

On Thursday, I am going to be visited by the Peace Corps!  Yep, my PC coordinator is coming on over to check on my situation here.  I am excited!  He is looking to see about more placements in the future in Lagonoy, Goa and perhaps San Jose.   I just may join him!  So, that is something to look forward to as well!