crucial.

Update your RSS readers, I’m outta here!

July 11, 2010

To all of my beloved blog readers (be proud, there’s not many of you!), the time has come for me to move my blog (yet again) to my own website domain. Fret not, you can expect an overall INCREASE in satisfaction as it will hopefully be much prettier and easier to touch. If you ever get sad and wish for the good ol days, this one will still be here (for a while) but it will no longer be updated.

Please join me: www.damienmaloney.com/blog

or, if you have a preference for subdomains, you can go to blog.damienmaloney.com without any loss of character.

thanks for playing,

Damien

city shots

June 20, 2010

metro manila

June 14, 2010

tags: cats, not people, people, philippines, portraits, travel

We’ve spent the past two weeks here in Metro Manila, almost all of it spent with GABRIELA. Our exposure program included visiting, learning about and sleeping in several urban poor communities in Muntinlupa City. The focus of our trip was to immerse ourselves in the unique situations of each community. We were also challenged to create a community profile of one of the communities–Anahaw, which was nearly completely destroyed during typhoon Ondoy and has since been rebuilt. Anahaw is built on bamboo and palm tree structures on the shore of Lake Laguna, the largest freshwater lake in the Philippines and the second largest in Asia. I really wish we had been able to spend more time in the community (we arrived in the afternoon, slept there and left the next morning) but I think we put together a good overview of their situation which should prove useful in doing any kind of fundraising for some of their higher-budget necessities, such as a project to build community restrooms.

Catherine contributed her writing and wicked graphic design skills and Julie Jamora from NYC edited and contributed some of the photos.

Check it out here: Anahaw Community Profile

Our first outing with GABRIELA was to visit the 43 health workers that were detained by the Philippine government in February. Considering I’ve never visited a prison, it was quite an experience to do so in the Philippines, which included a strip search free of charge. In all seriousness though, the health workers have gone through such undeserved and completely unfounded persecution simply for filling a need that the government refuses to address. Here are my stamps from our visits to both the women’s and men’s wards.

Here’s a community in Muntinlupa that faces government relocation. Up until recently, there were homes right up to the railroad tracks. The train seems to come by 5-10 times per day.

Kuya Boyd, president of the homeowners association in Anahaw.

After typhoon Ondoy, NGO Save the Children put up the money to rebuild Anahaw’s footbridges (1.4 million pesos) and paid residents 300 pesos per day for their labor. Antonio served as head carpenter on the project.

The chief component to GABRIELA’s community work is educating the women in basic health training to provide to their communities. Herbal healing is a preferred component because it is cheaper than pharmaceuticals. A local elementary school recently dedicated some garden space to GABRIELA to grow plants that have healing properties.

This is the 11 hectacres the government wants to turn into low-cost housing for the relocation of Anahaw residents. Its just down the street from a building labeled “Lethal Injection Facility”.

Some local politician’s face he had turned into the side of a mountain. It is extremely common for local government officials to egregiously brand public projects that they helped to fund.

I also think that I’ll try to put together an artsy calendar of Filipino street cats when I get back.

caramoan adventure

June 1, 2010

Jordan flew in from Manila and after telling him we’d be spending the weekend at the Camsur Watersports Complex, we drove him to Sabang instead where we caught a boat out to the Caramoan peninsula for nice swimming and beaches. Unfortunately we didn’t know the boats would stop running in the afternoon, and that we’d have to hire a smaller boat to take us out there. The dusk fell during our supposed 2-hour boat ride that turned into a 3.5-hour boat ride–including rain, lightning, and our boat not having any lights. When Jordan asked our boat driver about the safety of not having lights in a boat on a stormy sea at night, he said that it would be OK because other boats would have lights. Anyway, the boat ride was really really fun. The hotel we reserved outsourced our room to an old lady in the town’s spare bedroom, which made our adventure even more exhilarating. We spent the next day trying to visit the beautiful beaches on Caramoan’s islands, but the best ones were all closed due to filming Survivor. Apparently after the success of Survivor: France they decided to do 6 more countries there and incidentally closed off all of the nice beaches to anyone.

So we went swimming at the second rate beautiful tropical beaches and decided to go back to Pili to visit CWC. We spent Sunday and getting sunburned and “understanding” wakeboard culture. It was awesome. I tried my Australian accent in front of a table of Australian wakeboard bros and they didnt think it was very good. Catherine is really good at wakeboarding. She got up the first time she tried and I think if we spent a few more hours there she’d be flipping all over the place. Conversely, Jordan was really not good at wakeboarding and Catherine took every opportunities telling him that he wasn’t. We’re in Manila now and we’ll be spending the next week with urban poor communities as part of our exposure program with Gabriela. Here are some pictures!

bicolandia

May 25, 2010

tags: friends, not people, people, philippines, portraits, travel

Since our last update we’ve been hanging out in Bicol. We took a day trip that initially was going to be visiting waterfalls near the dormant volcano Mt. Isarog, but instead turned into an offroad adventure at the base of active volcano Mt. Mayon (if you were paying attention to the news in December you might remember that it had a minor eruption). We drove from San Vicente through Daet to Naga, and from there to Legazpi. We rented ATVs in Legazpi and rode up through a river basin that has been blocked due to lava flow with Catherine’s cousin Romy, who is a hip (like he’s cool, not like he specialises in hips) doctor in Naga.

Yesterday I took my first tricycle trip ever, and boy was it exciting. We first went to San Jose, a nearby swimming hole. Then we went through Daet to see the beach, where I got to eat fish balls and coke in a bag. We stopped at the market on the way home. This weekend Catherine’s friend Jordan is flying in from Manila and we may or may not go to Camsur Watersports Complex, a big wakeboarding spot, but I think certainly we’ll be visiting Caramoan, which is supposed to have very beautiful limestone cliffs.

here I am ziplining over a lava track from the base of Mt. Mayon!

we thought Romy was journaling in the field, but it turns out he was just signing the guestbook.

from the embarcadero in Legazpi

Bekah in San Jose

Catherine’s cousin Erika

this is Catherine’s favourite picture of the day

mabuhay!

May 22, 2010

tags: friends, not people, people, philippines, sunglasses, travel

Well its been a couple of days. After a really fun day of traveling (from phoenix to LA to Seoul) we finally made it to Manila. Our hotel wasn’t all centrally located like we thought it was, but it was a nice place. We waited for Catherine’s mom to drive up and we took a day trip to Angeles, where Catherine went to high school, former site of Clark Air Force base. We came back to Manila and met up with a couple of Catherine’s friends from high school, one of whom is an actor and a dj and several other things. Coincidentally he was performing that night in SPIT (Silly People’s Improv Theatre), a Manila improv group.

We woke up the next morning to solve our travelers cheque dilemma (as in no one will accept them here–as in I got laughed at a couple times trying to cash them at Filipino banks), hit the Mall of Asia on the way out of town (largest mall in Asia!) and we were on the road to Bicol (an 11-hour drive) with Catherine’s mom and her driver.

I woke up this morning in San Vicente to a rooster cock-a-doodle-do’ing and it was awesome. We spent the day in Catherine’s mom’s beauty salon getting Catherine’s hair rebonded, with a massage and pedicure for myself.

We’re going to cook about 10 pounds of vegetables now that we bought for the equivalent of 3 dollars

Stay tuned.

fake Manny Pacquiao billboard.

the aircon in the car broke and we had to give it a freon pick me up. “Take a picture of this, they don’t have these in the States” said Catherine’s mom.