Monkeywrench Your Life! – Come along for the ride as I live my life and try to figure out what it all means to me

Water, Water Everywhere…

Well, that’s what I thought anyway. It’s the tropics. It rains a lot. Everywhere I go I see flooded rice fields. When we started the process of looking for land, I was told by numerous people to make sure the land doesn’t flood in the rainy season. So having an adequate supply of water was never on my radar as a possible issue.

When we bought our land, there were two hand-dug, shallow wells on the property, though we only knew of one of them. The property was very overgrown and the second well was buried in brush. The well we knew of is 18 feet deep, probably about a meter in diameter, and had 12 feet of water in it. That seemed like a lot of water. What I didn’t like about it is that the water was very cloudy, and being an open, shallow well, I’m sure there was a lot of surface contamination. Still, I thought yeah, there’s plenty of water here. But when my in-laws moved onto the property and started using the well every day, the pump quickly ran dry as the well was drawn down and the water level was not replenishing.

If you’ve been following my Facebook, you know that we’ve made a number of attempts to drill a well, and have failed spectacularly over and over. That sure does make me feel incompetent! So I figured I might as well try to lay out the whole story to date here. Note I said “to date” as we still don’t have a reliable source of water. The saga continues.

Our first attempt was hiring a tasok team recommended by the broker who helped us find our land. After agreeing on terms, they came out one bright and promising morning and started to work. They lasted about 3 hours. They hit a chunk of rock they couldn’t drill through or dislodge, and they quit; packed up their gear and went home.

Let’s pause and explain some terms, at least as I understand them. A tasok well is a well that is drilled by hand. There is a drilling rod with a drill bit on the end, and water is pumped into the top of the drilling rod. This is all just like the big truck-mounted drilling rigs used all over the world, just scaled down to be operated by human muscle. The drill rod is lifted up, slammed down, twisted, lifted up, slammed down, twisted, over and over, ad infinitum, all powered by the arms and backs of the tasok crew.

When I asked Inday what the literal meaning of tasok is, she thought for a moment but couldn’t come up with the English word. So she poked me in the ribs and asked “What’s that?” I told her she had poked me and she said “Yes, they poke a hole in the ground.”

So, our first attempt at getting a well drilled lasted only 3 hours and ended in failure. I used to do a lot of work at Harvard Business School back in my video production days, and one theme I heard over and over while working there is that it’s okay to fail, but you should fail fast. Check! We seem to have succeeded at failing fast. Time to regroup.

Our next attempt was another crew of tasok men. This time the crew was from Barotac Vieo, and was led by someone my in-laws know. They spent a couple of weeks living on the property and dug a total of 3 wells in various locations before hitting what they thought was sufficient water. They sunk a PVC well pipe and moved our hand pump over, and it did indeed produce decent water. Unfortunately it didn’t recharge quickly enough and the first time we connected an electric well pump to it, it ran dry in a matter of minutes.

So now I, the impatient American, am starting to lose it. I told Eden we need to quit screwing around and hire someone with a “real” drill rig and get the darned well drilled. I’m sure she could tell you about listening to me rant in frustration over how hard it is to get anything done here in the Philippines. Sweetie, thank you for your patience listening to me vent!

It was at this time that Nathan, Eden’s brother-in-law and the guy who managed the building of the water tower and my in-law’s house, said he had heard of a method of scanning the ground and locating the exact location of water, and suggested we let him investigate this for us. So, a few weeks later we had a couple out to the property with their equipment to do geo resistivity scanning. This is a process of putting electrodes into the ground, shooting an electrical current down into the subsurface, and measuring the resistivity of the various layers of materials. I don’t have any photos of them doing this as the equipment is apparently sensitive enough that they asked everyone to turn off their cell phones while they were doing the survey.

The result of this survey was to identify two spots on our property where there is good water about 60 meters / 200 feet down. One was the preferred spot as they survey showed much less dense material (rock) above the water. They put stakes in the ground at these two spots.

Okay! So now we know where the water is, all we have to do is go get it. To me, this seems like it should be easy. We’ve defined the problem. We need someone who can drill right here for 200 feet. We can even show them a picture of the ground they need to drill through.

Now, no matter how much an impatient autistic American is champing at the bit to get this thing done, nothing happens quickly in the Philippines. Things happen at their own pace. I don’t understand it, but I am (barely) starting to accept it. After some time, Nathan introduced us to a team of deep well drillers. We met and discussed the job in detail. I asked all the questions I could think of to ask, we agreed on a price, and the next week they showed up with their equipment and started to drill at the designated location.

After some days drilling, they hit some rock that for whatever reason they couldn’t get through. At this point, a decision was made, without consulting me, to move the drill spot about 10 meters west and start over. On our next visit to the property I was surprised to see they had changed the location without talking to me, but then I figured 1) they had seen the scan, 2) they’re the professionals and know a lot more about this than I do, and 3) they had discussed it with Nathan and he had approved, so I figured it made sense to go along.

I’m sure you see this coming: After a month of drilling, they finally finished the well, installed the casing and the submersible pump, and started to clear the well. And it failed. All we got was muddy water, and they repeatedly had to stop pumping as the well ran dry.

Now, unlike in America, where you pay drillers by the foot whether they hit water or not, drillers in the Philippines only get their full pay if they produce adequate water. But that doesn’t mean it’s free. The client had to pay all the expense; transportation, fuel, and a daily allowance for food for the crew. Over weeks and weeks of work, that adds up. And there was also a “mobilization fee” for them to start the job. So all these starts and stops with various crews has added up to a tidy sum of money. And we still don’t have a good supply of water. My in-laws will be moving into their new house in the next couple of weeks, but there will be no running water.

Once again, we are in search of a competent well driller who can actually do the job at hand. This time we’re going to see the equipment they intend to use before we agree to hire them. I really don’t think it should be necessary that I know everything there is to know about well drilling just to hire someone to drill a well, but apparently I’m wrong.

The saga continues…

Being Autistic In The Philippines

On so many levels, it was an insane choice to move to the Philippines as an autistic person. I did it anyway.

There are some common challenges shared by many autistic people. Being a rather common person, I too struggle with these challenges.

Of course, the Philippines can be a sensory assault.

The Philippines is a tropical country so it is hot and humid. If I am outside and moving around or working, I constantly feel wet and sticky. I deeply dislike that feeling.

The Philippines is crowded. It’s a small country with a lot of people. People bump into me and brush past me on the sidewalk and in stores. I can struggle with people I know touching me, and having complete strangers touch me can be nearly overwhelming.

The Philippines is loud. Filipinos like it that way. If you go into a mall in America, there is quiet background music playing. In the mall here, that music is loud. If Filipinos have a party — and there is always a party! — they haul out enormous speaker towers to play music and sing karaoke, and there is only one acceptable volume setting; MAX! I know that people enjoy this loud music, but I don’t understand how. To me, it is physically painful.

The Philippines is chaotic. Driving in the Philippines is nothing like driving in the West. In the West, I treated driving as an exercise in rule following. Here, nobody follows the rules. It took a long time traveling as a passenger for me to develop a paradigm for driving that would suit me here: I treat driving as an advanced exercise in pattern matching. By carefully watching everyone around me on the road, I can recognize patterns and predict amazingly well what others are going to do. It is exhausting, though.

But the biggest challenge for me is communication. The Philippines, and much of Asia, is a high-context culture. According to Wikipedia:

“A high-context culture places emphasis on nonverbal cues, social roles, and shared experiences in communication, while a low-context culture prioritizes explicit verbal communication and direct statements. In high-context cultures, messages are often implicit and rely on understanding the background, relationships, and unspoken rules within a specific group.”

Now, in this comparison the United States, and indeed much of the West, is a low-context culture. But when comparing autistic people to neurotypical people, even in the West, neurotypicals are high-context and autistics are low-context. Autistics tend to process language literally, and struggle with figurative language and social context.

What all this means to me as an autistic living in the Philippines and trying to communicate with Filipinos, is that I am far to one extreme in communication style while Filipinos are far to the other extreme.

The only way I know to communicate is to say what I mean, as clearly as I can. I don’t mean more than the words I say, and I don’t mean less. But people in a high-context society do not speak this way. In fact, it is often considered rude to speak this way. You never say anything that might embarrass somebody publicly, for example.

So often, I end up feeling like the proverbial bull in a china shop, having made a simple statement and then feeling like I’ve insulted everybody involved. And, conversely, I often end a conversation and am left feeling that while I understood all the words that have been said to me, I somehow have missed the actual meaning of what they are trying to say.

I don’t know that there is a solution to this. I have learned a lot over my six decades of life in a neurotypical world, but I am autistic, not neurotypical. I do not think like a neurotypical and I do not communicate like a neurotypical, let alone a neurotypical from a high-context society.

In the end, Inday ends up bearing the burden of interpreting much of what is going on for me. She often saves me by coaching me on what things I can and can’t say. This is an unfair burden on her, and I wish she didn’t have to fill this role.

Eden will often defuse my frustration by smiling and saying “Sweetie, it’s the Philippines!” Indeed, it is the Philippines. I chose to come live here. There is so much to love about being here. Yes, it was a rather crazy choice for an autistic to make, but I made it. It keeps life interesting! Much worse than living what is at times a difficult life, would be living a boring life.

Free Range Life In The Province

I’ve never been a city person. That doesn’t mean I don’t like cities; I do. Cities are amazing. Boston. New York. Dublin. London. Nairobi. Dar es Salaam. And even Iloilo City. These places offer opportunities and experiences and services that you can’t find anywhere else. But that doesn’t mean I want to live there.

In the province, the chickens and ducks are free range. In the province, the dogs are free range. In the province, the children are free range. And in the province, my mind is free range.

And when I say the chickens and ducks are free range, I mean they wander where and when they choose. Someday they will end up as dinner, but in the meantime they get to live fully as chickens and ducks. While they mostly stay pretty close to the house, I am often surprised to run across them in far reaches of the property. A few days after my in-laws brought the chickens from Barotac Viejo, two of them disappeared. The general consensus was that they had ended up in the dinner pot of one or another of the neighbors, which happens sometimes in the province. But some days later one of the neighbors was passing by and let us know that the chickens had been hanging out in their yard. So yeah, the chickens just went visiting and stayed with the neighbors for a week or so.

As for the kids, well, what better place is there to be a kid than out in the province, or, as we say in the West, out in the country? Since it is the summer school break, Edrian has been spending a great deal of time out in Dueñas with Mama Nec. Sometimes one or another of his cousins will be there as well, and their days are filled. There are trees to climb. There are bugs to hunt and capture. There are tadpoles in the old fish pond to be carefully studied. And there are the workmen building the water tower to be watched. And all of these things pull at their attention in rapid succession, such that no time can be wasted and they must move from one attraction to the next at a dead run.

For me, the property represents a lot. I expect it will be my last home. I look forward to building a peaceful, comfortable home where I can feel rooted and content. I love being there. When we drive out from the city, turn up the last dirt track to the property, and pull up and shut off the engine, I feel peace. I love working on the property and seeing the progress of improvement as we shape it to our vision. And I love that when I’m tired, or when I start feeling too hot to work, I am free to quit and go sit in the shade with a cold drink. But the best thing of all, the thing that makes me feel the most content and happy, is when I get to sit under a tree with Eden and we quietly talk about our plans and dreams for our future there. I’ve always preferred looking forward to looking back, and looking forward with a partner is best of all.

Powering Up

Our property in Dueñas has a small house on it, and electricity of a sort. There is no proper connection at the transformer, rather there is a jury-rigged power line, held up on some flimsy bamboo poles, that actually terminates at a neighbors house, and is connected/disconnected there. This worked okay for the previous owners, as the neighbor is a relative of theirs.

So we need to remedy this, and get a proper, and safe, connection to the grid, and our own power bill. Of course, this is the Philippines*, so it’s not a simple matter of going online and ordering service from the power company. Inday has so far spent two half days at two different offices of ILECO, the electric utility that serves our area. We’re nowhere near done with the process, but she has gotten far enough that we have had the master electrician for the utility come to the property to do his site survey and to give us a breakdown of what needs to be done and the cost in order to get hooked up. As part of this we have to install two poles to carry the wire from where it will hook in to the existing power lines, to the house.

To my surprise, the electric utility doesn’t just sell you these poles and charge you for installation. That would be far too easy. Instead the master electrician gave us a list of materials to purchase, and we had to hire a welder to construct the poles from these materials, and a laborer to dig the holes and set the poles. So this past Saturday we set off to the local hardware store to purchase two 20-foot poles, some rebar to be used to construct the foothold for climbing the poles, a couple of insulators to be welded at the top of the poles, and concrete and sand for setting the poles.

There was no way I was going to try to transport these 20-foot poles and rebar in our truck with a 4 1/2 foot bed, so I asked if they could be delivered. In response Inday walked outside and flagged down a passing tricycle driver and asked if he would deliver them to Sawe for us. The driver and the hardware store staff loaded the materials through the middle of the side car, tied everything down securely, and off we went.

In the afternoon the welder and his helper came by and got to work. They cut and bent the rebar as needed, and built the two poles. Meanwhile the neighbor we hired had dug the holes for the two poles, and my father-in-law cut some bamboo poles to use to brace the poles and hold them in place while the concrete sets.

Once everything was ready everyone set off to set the poles. Cement and sand were mixed on a cleared spot on the road, water was added, the poles were set and braced upright, and concrete was shoveled into the hole. A simple form was made from a piece of metal roofing for the part of the concrete that is required to extend above ground level, and the last of the concrete was shoveled in and leveled.

All in, materials, transportation, and labor, the two poles cost us about $100 USD. But we’re not done yet! There are several more steps to be accomplished before they will actually come out, string the line, and hook us up to the grid. Bureaucracy is a beautiful thing!

*This is becoming an oft-repeated refrain accompanying life here. When I ask silly questions like why we have to do all the work when we’re paying for some service to be provided to us, Inday replies with some version of “Sweetie, it’s the Philippines!”

Did Somebody Say Dragons?

Our search for our little piece of paradise has been ongoing for a long time and now, finally, we are a step away from the finish line…

Do you like Dragon Fruit? I do.

They’re rather expensive; more so in the West than here, but even here they’re pricey. If things go as planned — and, you know, life always goes as planned — we will soon be the owners of a dragon fruit plantation. Not that I know a damned thing about growing dragon fruit, but I can learn.

Our search for our little piece of paradise has been ongoing for a long time and now, finally, we are a step away from the finish line. It’s not a done deal until money has changed hands and papers have been signed, but we’re that close now. We have the money sitting in the bank account, and our attorney is drawing up the Transfer of Title document. Hopefully we will soon be sitting down with the seller and the attorney to execute the transfer.

Camilo discussing the property with Inday

The key here, I think, is that we finally found an agent who listened to us and worked to find us the kind of property we wanted. We lucked into finding Camilo Pagurayan. We spent two days with him looking at properties before we found this one.

The property is about an hour outside of Iloilo City, in the municipality of Dueñas. One of the first things Inday mentioned to me when we learned we were heading to Dueñas is that the town is famous for aswangs (witches)! You might chuckle, but many Filipinos take such things very seriously.

The property is 1.68 hectares, or just over 4 acres. Much of it is sloping, forming a small valley which has recently been planted with dragon fruit trees. There is a well on the property, and electricity. I’ve no idea how reliable the electricity is out there. We might have to explore solar options to avoid the annoyance of brownouts.

There is a very nice, high, level spot where there is currently a bahay kubo and a small sugar cane field. This is where we plan to build our house. There is also another elevated, level spot at the other end of the property, and this is where Eden’s parents will build their house. They’ll be close, but not so close that we’ll be in each other’s way, and Eden and her parents can work together on the agricultural part of the enterprise. There is already the dragon fruit trees, and Eden has been talking about building a fish pond and developing a bit of the valley bottom as rice land. And of course a garden for vegetables, and chickens for eggs and meat, and maybe a carabao to help with the work.

Geez, I guess we’re going to need a name for our little farm! Any suggestions? Maybe The Garden Of Eden?

The way things look right now, we may be able to close on the property next week. Please keep your fingers crossed for us that all goes smoothly!

Here are a few photos of the land:

A Quick Update

I am long overdue in writing this update, but I just haven’t felt motivated or organized enough to do so. So this will be very short.

The lot in Barotac Viejo we were on the verge of purchasing didn’t work out. Everything was fine with the two lots we were going to purchase, but there ended up being a possible issue with access. We needed a right-of-way across another lot purportedly owned by the seller, but on investigation it turned out that another family was contesting ownership of that lot. I know that sounds unusual to my western readers, but nothing here is as cut and dried as it is in the West. You really have to check out every detail on your own.

So, we’re back looking for lots. Meanwhile, we moved out of the condo and into a small rented house in the Savannah subdivision. The house was mostly selected because it has a yard, which is not usual in subdivisions here. There is also a vacant lot next door which we are also renting for Inday’s garden. Inday is a farmer at heart, and she needs to grow things. She has room to do that here.

The condo was fully furnished, right down to linens and kitchen stuff. The house was rented empty. That means we had to buy a houseful of furniture and linens and cooking stuff and plates and cups and silverware and appliances. That took a good bit of time and attention. After looking at the cheap particle board stuff in the furniture stores, we found a custom furniture maker and met with him and told him exactly what we wanted. It took about six weeks, but we ended up with everything custom built, delivered, and installed.

Then, of course, there was Christmas and New Years and all the activities those holidays bring. And now it’s finally 2025, and we are back to our hunt for a place to build the house where I will live for the rest of my life. The best news is that we’ve finally found an agent who we feel comfortable working with, and we might, just might, have found our place. We looked at it yesterday and liked it very much. Now comes the process of checking everything out and making sure there are no issues with the lot, the title, access, etc. Reagan said “trust, but verify.” When it comes to real estate in the Philippines, don’t trust anything anybody tells you, you have to verify absolutely everything.

Okay, that’s all for now. More later.

Here We Go Again!

Writing this sure feels familiar. Was it four years ago I wrote here about the urge to buy land? In fact, that was also in October! That was when I purchased a piece of land up on the Colorado Plateau in eastern Arizona, just below the Navajo Nation. I’ve been thinking about that today since my brother Dana and his wife Claudia have been traveling around the west this year, and paid a visit to my little piece of land today while visiting the nearby Petrified Forest National Park.

So why not do it all again, but here in the Philippines? For a few months, Eden and I have been looking for a piece of property here to buy and build a house. The easy thing to do would be to buy a lot in a subdivision, so of course we are not going to do that. For myself, I am not a city person and would very much rather have some space around me. For Eden, well… Eden is a farmer at heart. She needs to grow things. To plant and to tend and to harvest. And owning land and being able to grow your own food gives one a deep level of security.

All that being so, we’ve been looking for a piece of land out in the province, away from the city but still close enough that it’s reasonable to come into town to buy things we can’t get out in the province. We are also constrained by budget, so we’ve mostly been looking at properties out on the unpaved barangay roads. We’ve seen some beautiful pieces of property, but they were never quite right. One was so far out into the mountains we needed 4WD low on the truck just to get there, and we could never do it if it were raining. Others were too expensive for our budget.

Finally, we found a nice 2.25 hectare (a bit over 5 1/2 acres) lot in Barotac Viejo, just outside of town, that looks like it is going to fit our needs. We’ve visited the lot twice, did some arms-length negotiating with the owner via the agent, then finally had a sit down meeting with the owner to work out the final details.

The system for buying and selling real estate here isn’t as regulated and structured as it is in the West. Basically, you have to look out for yourself because nobody else is going to. So we hired an attorney and had him check the title for the property and that all the taxes were up to date. Yesterday we had a surveying company out to survey the lot and confirm the property lines. We also need to talk to the barangay office and make sure what we think is the barangay road actually is.

The partner of one of Eden’s sisters is an engineer working for a building company, and he kindly came out yesterday and looked at the property with us. He confirmed my fear that the route to the spot where we want to build the house is too steep for a driveway and would require some cut and fill, as well as likely concreting of slopes to prevent collapse onto the driveway. The solution to that is to also purchase a smaller adjacent lot, which would allow a much more gradual approach, and also provide us with another 6/10 of a hectare of more level, cleared land. We made the owner an offer to buy both lots, and they’ve accepted. Isn’t it always the way with real estate that things creep up and you end up stretching to get a bit more? Anyway, if we have to spend more money we’d rather spend it for more land rather than more concrete.

If things keep moving in a positive direction, sometime in the near future we will be the owners of a little piece of Panay Island! I long ago gave up trying to predict how long it takes to do anything here in the Philippines, so the most I can say is “soon”. And then the real fun will start; building a house. That should be worth a few more grey hairs.

Stay tuned…

Here are a bunch of photos taken during the survey yesterday:

End of the road. Our right-of-way for a driveway will be where the path on the left is

The surveying crew at work with my in-laws looking on

Getting Married

Getting married in the US is easy. You go down to the city hall, show them your ID to prove you’re of age, fill out the application for a marriage license, and you’re all set.

It doesn’t work like that in the Philippines.

In the Philippines, the list of requirements is a page long. You have to have documents to prove your identity. You have to have documents to prove your age. You have to have documents to prove your citizenship. You have to have documents to prove that you are not already married. You have to take a class.

And if you want a Catholic Church wedding, there are even more requirements. Do you have your baptismal certificate? How about your confirmation certificate? Good. Almost there. Now you need to go to counseling with a priest. I guess because he knows so much about marriage.

For Eden, we had her birth certificate and her national ID, and we had to go to the Philippine Statistical Authority (PSA) office to get her Certificate of No Marriage (CENOMAR).

For myself, I had my birth certificate and my passport. Since the federal government in the US doesn’t keep records on marriages, there is no US equivalent to a CENOMAR. Instead, one has to go to either the US Embassy in Manila, or the US Consular Office in Cebu City, and write up a document detailing any previous marriage and divorce, and sign it and have it notarized by the staff there. this is known as the Affidavit of Legal Capacity to Contract Marriage. And if you are divorced in the US, then you need to obtain a certified copy of the divorce, and have that apostilled to make it a legal document here in the Philippines.

So, I made an appointment online with he Consular Office, then we had to fly to Cebu so I could appear in person at the Consular Office. And I enlisted the aid of a friend in the Boston area to make a trip to the courthouse to get a certified copy of my divorce documents, then take them to the Secretary of State’s office to be apostilled, and finally to ship those documents to me here in Iloilo City. These were two very expensive pieces of paper!

As for the church… They kept insisting I needed a certificate of baptism from a Catholic church. I was not baptized in a Catholic church, and I do know that the Church recognizes baptism in other churches as valid, so long as it meets three requirements. And I know that my baptism meets those requirements. But good luck arguing with a church here! I did check with the church where I was confirmed and took first communion, but they couldn’t provide any record of it. That being so, we were told we cannot be married in the Church here, BUT, if we first have a civil marriage, THEN the Church will marry us.

So, we gathered all the required documents and applied for a marriage license in Barotac Viejo, took the required class where a woman half my age explained marriage to me in a language I do not understand, waited the requited ten days, then went back to retrieve our license. We then took that over to the courthouse and applied to be married by a judge. Finally, this Monday morning we went to the courthouse and got married.

The plan is still to have a wedding in the church in December, with my daughter Anju with me and, of course, Inday’s family. With Anju, the plan was for her to be here for about a month, so she could be here for the wedding and for Christmas and New Years. But I just heard from Anju yesterday that she may not be able to come. She has two dogs that her boyfriend was going to take care of in her absence, but they just broke up so that isn’t going to happen.

So now I don’t know what is going to happen in December. And those of you who know me, know just how well I deal with uncertainty! The church wedding doesn’t carry much meaning for me. The part I cared about was Anju being with me. If it is important enough to Inday, then we’ll still do it for her and her family.

In any case, we’re married! And now we are free to start working on the next big project; looking for a piece of land where we can build a home and settle down. Stay tuned.

Wheels

Back in April I wrote about having to make a late night trip up to Barotac Viejo when Edrian was in the hospital, and how that had made me rethink buying a vehicle now rather than later. I did some checking into how much it would cost to park here at the condo where we live, and was shocked by the P6,000 per month price tag, so after some discussion we decided to put it off.

My lease here is up in early December, and the plan is to move out of the city. Out in the province we will have more of a need for a personal vehicle, including traveling into the city for doctor visits, as well as when shopping for things not available in small towns. We’ll likely start looking for a house to rent around the beginning of October, and we’ll need a vehicle for that. Looking for a place here is nothing like doing to same back in the States. You need to wander around looking for houses with FOR RENT signs on them, and talking with people and asking. Eden says “you need to use your saliva,” meaning asking around. All that being so, we had decided we’d go through the process of buying a vehicle in September.

Meanwhile, I did a lot of reading and looking and decided on what I wanted to buy. We definitely want something with ground clearance and 4-wheel-drive as our long-range plan is to buy a fairly large chunk of property out in the province, and the cheapest property is out on the unpaved barangay roads. So I had settled on the Ford Ranger. It turns out that the discount available in June, coupled with an impending price increase, made it worthwhile to buy now rather than waiting, even with the added cost of renting a parking space, so that’s what we did.

I signed more papers buying this truck than I’ve signed in all the real estate closings and vehicle purchases I’ve made in my life, combined. Efficiency isn’t a hallmark of the Philippines. It took a couple of hours, but we were finally on our way home with the new truck. Poor Edrian was rather freaked out when he realized I was going to drive home. He didn’t believe that Tito Allen knew how to drive. When we made it home safe and sound, he said “Good job Tito Allen!”

It sure is nice having our own vehicle for trips up to Barotac Viejo. Before we had to take the bus, and it was hot and very crowded coming home on Sunday afternoons. And this past Sunday, the bus from Barotac Viejo to Iloilo City lost both dualies on the driver’s side rear and flipped on its side. I’m really glad we weren’t on that bus!

Eden doesn’t yet have her driver’s license, but she’s working on it. She’s taken the required theoretical class and she’ll get her learner’s permit next week, then she can practice driving. It’ll be nice when she can share the driving, and when she can make trips up to Barotac Viejo without me.

We picked up the truck on a Tuesday, and that Thursday I was stopped by traffic enforcers who shook us down for a bribe. It hasn’t happened again, and hopefully it won’t.

So This Happened

I’ve been living here in Iloilo City for a bit over 6 months now. It feels like just yesterday that I got here, and at the same time it feels like I’ve been here forever. I will interpret that as a good thing; it feels new and fresh and exciting, and at the same time it feels like I’m settled and in place. When I tried settling in Tennessee, I never had that feeling of being in my place.

After I had been here a while, I met and dated a woman a few times. She was nice and we got along alright, but there wasn’t any spark between us so we ended that. That’s alright, I certainly didn’t expect the first woman I met to be my soulmate.

Then I met Eden. Our first date was a walk along the Esplanade on a Saturday evening, followed by pizza at Giuseppe’s. At the end of the night I asked her if she would take me someplace for Filipino food the next day, and she agreed. We started at the food court in SM City for batchoy, then we wandered around and talked for a while, and ended up at Pedro Bulalohan a couple of hours later for several dishes I didn’t recognize, and don’t now recall. I do remember we ordered way too much food for 2 of us, so we ended up taking the leftovers over to Inday’s (Eden’s nickname is Inday) workplace and sharing it with her colleagues.

That day out continued into the evening, when we finally ended up in Molo Plaza. It being Christmas season, which in the Philippines runs from September to January, the plaza was lit up with Christmas lights, and being Sunday evening it was crowded with families. At Christmas time small groups of children go around singing Christmas carols, and in exchange you give them a few coins. After one trio sang for us, Inday opened her purse and took out coins to give the kids. Afterwards I said something to her about not giving away all her money, and she replied “That’s okay. Those are the coins I didn’t spend for my food today because I am with you.” That made a big impression on me, because that’s the kind of person Inday is.

So, we’ve been together every single day since then. Has every moment been perfect? Of course not. There are cultural differences to adapt to in each other. There are food differences. I’ve eaten more rice in the last six months than I have in my entire life pre-Philippines! Eden speaks excellent English, but in the beginning I could tell that having to speak English constantly was wearying for her. And anyone who knows me knows that I am pretty rigid. I doubt anyone has ever described me as being flexible or easy going or anything similar. But we’re good together. Really good.

A few weeks after we met, we made the trip up to Barotac Viejo so I could meet Inday’s family. I met her mom and dad, her 5-year-old son Edrian, and several of her 6 sisters, and various children and neighbors.

I never expected to meet somebody and be in a committed relationship so soon after arriving here. Just before I met Inday I had committed to a 12-month lease on a 1-bedroom condo here in Iloilo. It was plenty of room just for myself, but now there are three of us.

As of this last Saturday, we have been together for 6 months. We are now engaged and planning a December wedding, on Inday’s birthday. We have plans for our life together, but more on that later. For now, I just wanted to introduce you to Eden and Edrian, and share the part they play in my life now. I will add here that my daughter Anju has agreed to be my “Best Woman” and stand up with me at our wedding. That makes me very happy. I’m looking forward to her being here for the wedding and Christmas and New Years, and seeing what my new life is like.