Isang Puti Sa Pilipinas (On Holy Week, With Whippings).

I am here in the Philippines for the CISV Asia Pacific Regional Workshop/Junior Asia Pacific Regional Conference. Together with a Swede named Bebbe I am training Japanese, Filipinas, Indonesians, Koreans and Thais to be staff in a Seminar Camp. In spare moments I am encouraging as much dancing, human-pyramid building and teenage hook-ups as possible. I am hanging with kids I haven't seen since they were eleven, in Norway four years ago. I am sharing a room with a moonfaced Chinese guy called Terry. There are about a hundred of us in all. We play basketball at dusk and sing songs about the deliberate arson of superhero residences. The mood is rosey and confident and bright. We are on the edge of a volcano inside whose crater is a lake, in the middle of which is another mini volcano, inside of which is another mini volcano - a volcanic Russian doll. Filipinos smile and laugh a lot, and speak all cute like Americans with a special interest in diphthongs. I would build beautiful gardens in honour of a great number of them. Yes, oh, yes: this is a lovely place to be.

Before the conference there were days on a lake, warm days with dragonflies and Japanese laughter. On the edge of lake we slept in a tent, albeit the type of tent with electric lights and as big as apartments I have lived in. The day before was Good Friday, when, in a nearby province which, much to my disappointment, I could not reach, a number of men followed the annual Filipino tradition of being nailed to crosses in tribute to big JC. Big news this year involved the Scottish guy who attempted to be the second ever non-Filipino to take part in the cruxifiction but, after having carried his cross two kilometres to the makeshift Golgotha, and having watched the pained faces of the other wannabe Christs, broke down and cried and said he could not do it. He was booed and pelted with fruit.

In other areas of the country, citizens were flagelating themselves with spiked whips.

In the old Spanish city of Intramuros the people sold cotton candy and long balloons and assembled to complete the twelve stations of the cross and to kiss the toes of the statues of Christ. The stone walls and cobble roads glowed in the lantern light. We ate halo halo, some weird Filipino muck involving ice and milk and toasted popped rice and jackfruit and coconut meat and sweet yam and flan and shreds of sweetened plantain and motherfucking mungbeans and sometimes, if you're lucky, icecream. It gets my weird food award, hands down.

Hey, it turns out that if I bemoan things on my blog then events seem to be changing for the good shortly afterwards. ie: I sobbed about kidnapped activists - shortly afterwards the survivors were rescued. I got sad about the schisming of young Katie Moore and myself - voila, she is back in Australia and will be beating me back to Perth. Having this sort of power can really go to a cracker's head. I'm thinking of just starting to bitch about everything thats messed up in this world and cross my fingers.


No, you're perfect.