Fiesta...party time!

Each city or village celebrates the day of his Patron saint. For Zamboanguita that was May 15 and nicely coincided with Annelies' birthday. Festivities already start a week before the actual date. Motorbike races, elections of miss Zamboanguita (the winner gets an astonishing 20.000 pesos), extra cockfights, boat races, disco and lechon parties are all part of the festivities. I'll elaborate on the nicest activities.

We visited the boat races on Saturday. There were two competitions, one for the fisherman boats, which had to peddle a full round (some 600 meters) and the race competition. 10 guys had boats they made themselves from marine plywood and metal outriggers with nice aerodynamics and a small engine. They had to race against one other competitor for two rounds. It looked a bit like a formula one race with nice maneuvers. Unfortunately, both in the semifinal and the final one of the boats gave up prematurely because either the outrigger broke, or the engine stalled. Look for some pictures on the facebook page of Annelies. The races were originally created because everybody has a hangover after the big party on May 15. People go to the beach anyway to have a swim to get rid of their hangover, so the municipality came up with some nice entertainment. Apparently the same guy wins each year, but because his engine stalled in the final somebody else won. The public demanded a second race and indeed, if his engine would have functioned he would have won easily.

We were invited for three lechon parties in two days. A wedding lunch, the birthday of the mayor and an invitation of a good friend of a friend. When Filipinos throw a party it includes food, and a lot of it. Prime dish is the lechon, or roasted piglet. A whole piglet gets roasted over a fire and they stuff some herbs in its belly. The result looks like some medieval painting, only missing the apple in the pigs' mouth. Prime parts (for Filipino's, not for most foreigners) are the ears, eyes and nose. They make a sauce from part of the blood and finely chopped organs (yummie). The pig is served on a wooden dish in the shape if a pig and two big carving knifes so you cut a part of meat of your choice with some crisp skin. The taste is pretty good (of the normal meat part), but after three lechons it is time for some vegetables again. Vegetables are not part of a special meal, you just have the choice between 5-7 different meat dishes and accompanied with rice of course. We got instructed that with parties it is very normal that if you are not a close friend of the birthday boy, you eat the food and then go again. The richer people are, the more people they invite. After two hours everybody has eaten (you're only supposed to stay for about an hour) and you continue the party only with family and close friends.

The wedding lunch was also nice because it gave us a peak into Filipino wedding customs. Everybody marries in church (that makes sense, the whole country is devotedly catholic), but very few people have enough money to rent the whole church for the service. So you marry with more couples at the same time. In this case mass started at 7 in the morning, so 16 couples could be married before various wedding lunches started. Tony, our Coastal Resource manager and close friend explained that when he married there were an additional 52 couples. He was last in the alphabet, so by the time he had to tell his vows he had already hard them 52 times and so it was easy to remember for him what to say.

We were only invited for the lunch since we didn't even know the bride, we had met the father a couple of times though. He used to be a sailor and had even been in the port of Rotterdam.

We visited one of the disco parties on Thursday evening. That was not really a success, they had a huge music installation and light show on the main square, but the square was so big that even with 300 people on the dance floor it seemed half empty. The DJ had a different opinion about good music than us, so we kept it at one party.

The municipality with the nicest Patron saint is the neighboring municipality of Siaton were we often dive. Their Saints day is on December 6 and is also known in the Netherlands as Sinterklaas!

Meeting interesting people

We have been pretty busy the last few months. Supervising volunteers, designing and carrying out the biological research, writing research ideas for new thesis students and interns while trying to relax a little bit in between all the activities as well.

We have had some good talks with local institutions. We had a visit from the director of the marine research institute of Siliman University in Dumaguete who was interested in what we are doing and were we live. Hopefully we will be able to cooperate with the university and for instance be able to use their marine lab if thesis students want to make water samples to check the level of pollution and sedimentation and see if we can help them with collecting data. Now it's time to visit the marine lab and talk with professors and teachers to find out exactly what they are doing and if they have data from this area.

Dolf attended a three day conference about seahorses in Dumaguete last week (somebody had to take the volunteers out diving so Annelies could only attend the fist day) and came back full of ideas and a new social network. At the least we can at least contribute to their seahorse research, because yesterday evening during our night dive we found two seahorses, including a pregnant male (yes you read this correctly, the male has a brood pouch).

We now have a good relationship with the mayor of Zamboanguita as well, which resulted in some useful talks and a cooperation with the municipal agricultural and environmental office.We are very lucky that the municipality starts a project in our own barangay (neighbourhood), with money from the GIZ (German embassy, we saw GIZ projects when we were in Bolivia as well). In two barangays of Zamboanguita Marine Protected Areas will be re-implemented or re-enforced. The MPA's will be enlarged and neighbouring sea grass beds and mangroves will be included in the MPA as well. They are important, though often neglected, because they have both a nursery function for fish (juvenile fish hide between the roots and leaves and are safe for predators) and function as a sink for sedimentation from land and thus protecting the coral reefs. We had a nice conversation with the provincial environmental department who is responsible for carrying out the project together with the municipality. We need some patience though: the project was supposed to start in January 2015, but the money still needs to be transferred to the municipality before it can start. The projects also contains a plan to start a mangrove nursery so people can replant mangroves. Our role will be to do the scientific monitoring of the area, to organize activities for the local monitoring team consisting of fishermen and to help out with the mangrove nursery and replanting.

We start coming Friday with finding the sinkers of the old MPA. The MPA needs to be visible for everybody which means the demarcation line will consists of buoys who need to be attached to concrete sinkers. The sinkers are still there from 6 years ago when the MPA was implemented the first time, but the buoys are long gone because of the 2011 typhoon.

The peace corps is very active in the Philippines and the municipalities of Zamboanguita and Siaton have their own volunteer. They work a lot with the local community and speak Visayan fluently. Unfortunately, both volunteers leave in September but we could take over their Visayan books, so now it's time for us to include Visayan lessons in the program and practice with our cook, who speaks both English and Visayan. The Zamboanguita peace corps volunteer already does a lot with environmental education and she even has two environmental clubs/ groups for high school students which we will take over when she leaves.

So, slowly slowly we start working together with more and more people and some of MCP's ideas are starting to take shape.