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Part-tay

11th December 2005
All of the teachers in the Dumangas municipality got together for a party on the 10th of December. Since I am a teacher now (and not an I.T. professional), I got to come along.

Preparations
Each school was responsible for providing their own food. I provided all the drinks for our school. The day before the party, the teachers at Pulao began their preparations.

Coconuts are a very popular food here. They teachers purchased a lovely bunch of coconuts for use at the party. The juice was used for drinks and the flesh was cut into fine slivers to form part of a salad.

They also prepared a dish called Chicken Adobo. Now Chicken Adobo obviously requires a chicken. They were going to use one of the chickens that wander around the school and they needed someone to kill it. They had heard of my goat exploits and so asked me to kill the chicken. Which I did with the help of one of the 6th graders.

The Big Day
Teachers get paid crap. They earn around 250 pesos ($NZ 6.25) a day. They do such an important job and don't get appreciated for it, so it was good to see them enjoying themselves for a day.

The party was held at Dumangas Central School, which was the school that the volunteers painted the weekend before. The principal of Dumangas Central school officially acknowledged us for our work, which was kind of cool.

Every school had to prepare an item. Pulao did a dance to the tune of "Jingle Bell Rock". It took me awhile to get the steps in practice, but on the big day everything went pretty smoothly. I tried using face paint to make my beard look like Santa's, but it didn't really work.

Emma, a volunteer from England, arranged for her school to do a version of "12 Days of Christmas". It worked very well and got a laugh. Her school won both the "Best Item" and "Best Costumes" award. Rightly so to.

Pinoy (Philippines) Big Brother is just huge here. In fact it is so huge, that the word "huge" is not big enough and you have to resort to something like gargantuan^*. The theme tune "Pinoy Ako" ("I am a Filipino") is everywhere. I know the words to it and I don't even speak the language. Four of the schools did the Pinoy Big Brother dance. The teachers at Emma's school wanted to do the dance as well, but she managed to talk them out of it. Pinoy Big Brother is that big. Thankfully, the series finale has just screened and it has started to wind down.

Emma and I were also called upon to judge this strange talent contest. A random teacher from each school was called upon to act out a scene. We were to base our judging on the quality of their acting ability. The scenes were things like "You see your husband hugging his ex-girlfriend" and "You just won ten million pesos" and the disturbingly bizarre "You come home to find your husband drunk. He has gambled away all of the family's money away and you won't be able to feed your family for a week".

There was also a silly balloon game that the teachers participated in. You had to move the balloon between various parts of your body without using your hands. Very silly, but a lot of fun.

For the most part, it was a lot of fun hanging out with the teachers. I did go into my shell a little bit during the day and kept to myself. It is kinda hard to be very social when you don't share a common fluent language. But I'm glad I went and would do it again.

^*"Gargantuan". I so rarely get to use that word in a sentence.

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(c) 2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
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