more recent pictures

o boy.

It's getting so close. I thought at this point I would be bounding out of bed in the morning, so excited to wrap things up and be on my merry little way back to the States. Instead, as my 5am rooster crows, I find myself wanting to just hide. I would so much rather disappear in the night than have all this attention that I am leaving, the goodbye parties, the gifts, etc. It's overwhelming. But Filipinos don't need an excuse to throw a party, so you can imagine what its like when they do have a reason. I'm knee deep in packing (how I have acquired all this stuff in two years is beyond me...my family and friends definitely win the award for most-consistent care-package-sending), visitors keep dropping by with goodbyes, well wishes, and gifts to take with me (no, i CANT TAKE MANGOES! i wish...), everyone in my neighborhood wants to know what I'm getting rid of and can i have it and are you REALLY throwing that away?? I want it! Let's factor in the fact that its upwards of 100 degrees, and every little face that asks me "Ate Carrie, uwi ka na? Kailan mabalik?" makes me have to fight back the tears.
Yes, you precious little things, I am leaving. And no, I'm probably not coming back. How do I say that? So I lie. Yes, maybe in 5 years....I tell them. But even if I do, the girls at my center will no longer be there, and they are the ones that are hardest to leave. Peace Corps' slogan is that it's "The toughest job you'll ever love". It's not tough to love. It's tough to leave.

the goodbye series: part 1

I hate them. Saying goodbye is one of my least favorite things to do, and i just had to say it to most of my peace corps friends. Last week was our COS(Close of Service) conference in Manila, which was a week-long lovefest with sessions about readjustment to life in the US, closure, reverse culture-shock, and LOTS of late nights. I am going to miss these exceptional people all so much, my heart hurts.

hiking mt. pinatubo

Over the weekend Sherry, Adam, and Pat came to my place to hike Mt. Pinatubo. Here's a little info about it, copied from wikepedia:
Mount Pinatubo is an active stratovolcano located on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, at the intersection of the borders of the provinces of Zambales, Tarlac, and Pampanga. Ancestral Pinatubo was a stratovolcano made of andesite and dacite. Before 1991, the mountain was inconspicuous and heavily eroded. It was covered in dense forest which supported a population of several thousand indigenous people, the Aeta, who had fled to the mountains from the lowlands when the Spanish conquered the Philippines in 1565.

The volcano's eruption in June 1991 produced the second largest terrestrial eruption of the 20th century.[2] The 1991 eruption had a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 6, and came some 450-500 years after the volcano's last known eruptive activity (estimated as VEI 5, the level of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens), and some 500-1000 years after previous VEI 6 eruptive activity.[3] Successful predictions of the onset of the climactic eruption led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from the surrounding areas, saving many lives, but as the surrounding areas were severely damaged by pyroclastic flows, ash deposits, and later, lahars caused by rainwater remobilizing earlier volcanic deposits, thousands of houses and other buildings were destroyed.[2]

The effects of the eruption were felt worldwide. It ejected roughly 10 billion metric tons of magma, and 20 million tons of SO2, bringing vast quantities of minerals and metals to the surface environment. It injected large amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere—more than any eruption since that of Krakatoa in 1883. Over the following months, the aerosols formed a global layer of sulfuric acid haze. Global temperatures dropped by about 0.5 °C (0.9 °F), and ozone depletion increased substantially, but has since recovered.