family news

 Joy is now back from Hong Kong.

She was with a delegation from the Dept of Agriculture that sent a group to China, Hong Kong and Macau to discuss organic food exports. But at the last minute, the Chinese part of the trip was canceled. Hmm... wonder if China is mad at the Philippines again.

Well, on the way home she ran into a British lady who had worked as a medical missionary to the Philippines years ago and had adopted a daughter here, so she was visiting friends and family here. And since her plane trip back to the UK was via Doha, alas her plane trip was canceled. Presumably the airports are closed due to drone strikes, and will reopen soon.. If she was rich she could reschedule via North America but she isn't rich and the airlines just say wait.

So she is staying in the guest room.

Luckily she is a dog person and the dogs are letting her alone (we have five watchdogs who we leave outside to roam at night to guard the house and business compound).

Don't ask me what is going on with the war.

Much of the news ignores that Iran has had proxies making war against lots of folk in the Middle East: Syria's civil war comes to mind, and their proxy Hezbollah put thousands of rockets in civilian areas of Lebanon, but if Israel takes them out, the news merely says Israel is attacking another country.

Sigh.

Sometimes I think that I know more about the military than a lot of these reporters. And of course there is a lot of propaganda out there: From China or the extreme left. 

Trumpie boy finally called out someone named Tucker Carlson for being an anti Jewish bigot, and some of the anti Jewish stuff out there is so ignorant that one wonders if they are reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was a Russian disinformation book put out by the Czar's version of the KGB... I even read that some  politician posting a recipe that includes Jewish blood as an ingredient.

But hey, the press won't notice this because he is a Kennedy 

In the meanwhile, the Pope has his knickers in a knot about trumpieboy on many levels. 

Of course, he was quiet about the Syrian civil war with Iranian mercenaries who helped support the Assads in a war that killed half a million people. For that matter, he didn't notice or the fact that Iran's proxies shot rockets went against Israel and a lot of innocent ships in the Red Sea.

,,. Heck, the Pope can't even criticize China for sentencing Jimmy Lai for daring to say Hong Kong should have freedom of speech (under legal agreement after Chinese takeover of Hong Kong the British law was supposed to stay there). Instead, the Chinese govt imported their patsies to run the place, something most folks there know (because they speak a different dialect).

In the meanwhile, it is the start of summer here: Hot and dry season that will last until the monsoon arrives in June.

It is of course Lent, and last evening, during mass, a bunch of people came into the parking lot in a bus all with similar tee shirts;;They didn't come into church but went to the nearby open shrine to Mary across the parking lot.

. It is a fiesta celebration for Mama Mary, and the Church  has the Divina Pastora shrine here (translation: Holy Shepherdess). When we went home, there were five other buses parked in the street, and the maid said they were doing a pilgrimage to various shrines for some feast day this weekend.

As a Yank I am not up to date on all the feast days here. The city church honors the Three Kings so we have that fiesta, and the Divina Pastora shrine is there because the Spanish gave a statue of this Spanish madonna to a local family and it saved them from a flood, and then we also have barangay (Neighborhood) fiestas: ours is San Lorenzo, St Lawrence, the patron saint of bakers (don't ask) and the next neighborhood is St Vincent (the Spanish one), and this week another neighborhood where the mayor lives is having a fiesta (non saint) and then there is the Sandal fiesta (one of the local businesses run by a previous mayor, so not celebrated with this mayor). There are also federal holidays for various heroes, and then there is Ramadan, and of course Chinese New Year, The big fiesta here is May 1, a feast of Mama Mary, when lots of local people travel home for family reunions

but the big celebration is Christmas season lasts from Sept to the end of January and again it is a reason for traveling home for family reunions.

I mentioned I was in church yesterday, i.e. Saturday...I should note that since Vatican II, Catholics recognize the ancient practice of starting the sabbath on the evening.

If you have Jewish neighbors you would be familiar with this, since many Jewish families dress up and do a formal dinner on Friday night. This is best known to gentiles via the scene in Fiddler on the roof, but many Jewish families continue this practice (I had a Jewish roommate in Medical school whose mother kept kosher).

Well, anyway, here in the Philippines we have all the holidays off: Including the Muslim ones. Even though we are in a rural area, we do have a halal butcher down the street and several of the kiosks at the palenke are run by Muslim women. I am not sure if they are from Mindanao or were reverts after working in the Middle East.

there are a million Filipinos in the Middle East, so here people worry about war there. 

But I have to shake my head in wonder when the US MSM breathlessly say 1000 Yanks out of 100 thousand living there want to go home because they are in danger. Well, the Phil gov't also say 1000 people want to return home too. But the other million are staying put for now.

Sigh.