Family news

 It's the hot dry season, but now that Covid lockdowns are gone, the churches are up and back to doing their thing.

Joy just spent two days in Manila for a Protestant woman's prayer meeting/revival at one of the local stadiums. It was large, but I can't find a photo or video.

she also has been busy teaching a course in agriculture at her Bulacan coop, and is now teaching at her church as a pastor assistant.

She converted after marrying Kuya, and attends a Pentecostal church near our farm, but Kuya usually goes to the local Baptist church, although for the past year he has been driving me to the early mass since I have been too weak to walk there as I have in the past.

The staff is Catholic, so they took off Good Friday afternoon for the procession around town to commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus. I can't find video from our town but this is from a nearby town. No, we don't have crucifixions in our area: that is done in Pampanga, a very poor area west of us.

I have been weak/exhausted, partly due to the heat, and I have been this way since I had Dengue six months ago. I was recovering, but then relapsed after I got shingles. And the heat makes me tire easily. So no long walks, no shopping at the mall, and no church for the last two weeks.

In the meanwhile, our white dog Barry got sick on Thursday, and of course the vet is closed all weekend (heck, everything is closed from Wednesday to next Tuesday).

The maid however found a vet that was open and we took him there Saturday morning for IVs etc. and he has improved. I thought he was dying, but the vet thinks there is a good chance for him to recover, and today he is eating and drinking a bit.

But the cost of the tests emptied my cash reserve I keep here in the house, and it is a long holiday weekend.

I tried to get money from my ATM, but all the local ATMs were empty.

 So this morning early I went to one bank about a mile away, near the mall and got some money to pay the vet bill and have cash for expenses.

The weather is clear, but for some reason asthma is bad. I am wheezing, as is the cook, and one local lady came several times for medicine for her inhaler (machine). She usually comes weekly, one of our regulars.  And there have been several old people having strokes or going to the hospital from the heat. We don't live in a gated community, but in the middle class area downtown, and nearby are the less affluent areas, so we do get asked for help with medicine etc.

People are poor, but the cost of medicine and especially the cost of hospitalization is high: Even if you get free public hospital care, there are expenses.

I say the cost of hospitalization is high, but that is because the minimum wage is about 7 dollars a day, and right now it is the hunger season for farmers: Waiting for the winter harvest and out of money and sometimes low on food from the last harvest.

Sigh.

I am again being warned not to open the door early in the morning, since an old lady was shot recently. The druggies are back robbing people. This is the part the so called human rights folk who hated Duterte's drug campaign never noticed: the crime against normal people that went down when the druggies were pressured to go sober and there was shooting of the criminal gangs (and their innocent patsies who helped them because they were poor). And now with Marcos making nice with the USA, to counteract the pressure from China, he is cutting back on the hit squads, so I suspect crime will go up again.

But to make things worse, Kuya is getting threats to pressure him to sell our rice land: thugs have gone to the farm and threatened our tenant farmer there, and they approached our cook asking if Kuya is home, and how many people live here. 

Here, rice land is valuable, and with the improved roads, and the improvements in the city, we are also becoming an area for second homes for the affluent in Manila...

And we also have fields near a main road, where rice land could be diverted into plots for large luxurious houses, businesses, etc.

Of course, we don't own much of this land: there is a limit on how much land any person can own, and only citizens are allowed to own property. But he farms the fields owned by relatives living in Manila or living overseas, and of course he subcontracts land owned by the local farmers, so apparently some shady person thinks he can threaten kuya and buy the land cheap and make a profit. Not true, but in the meanwhile, we have to keep safe.

Sigh. 

Kuya lives upstairs, but I am on the ground floor, so it means locking the doors at night. We only have dogs for protection: After Lolo had a stroke, Kuya gave away his (illegal) guns, because as a Christian kuya would not break the law. (Lolo was a good Catholic and only obeyed laws that made sense... even in the USA he always carried a gun because theft and robbery of doctor's houses and offices are common).

Me? I can shoot a small rifle, but not a handgun. I even had a waiver not to carry a gun when I was a doc in the USArmy Nat Guard. My grandfather, a cop, taught my father not to have guns in the house if there were children, so we never learned to use them. Ironically, my mother, who had five brothers, learned to shoot and got a sharpshooter medal in her high school rifle club. And my sons had various rifles because where I raised them in rural Pennsylvania, hunting was a religion and the place shuts down for the first day of deer season. But they had to learn to shoot from a neighbor who took them hunting.

So with no guns on site, that leaves me with only the dogs for protection: and it is my large dog that is sick, so only medium sized terriors are here to protect me: noisy but not much protection.

In other news:

The newspaper reports quite a few drowning deaths: some at picnics etc. and some just kids trying to cool off in the local rivers/canals during the heat spell. 

We just heard the six year old daughter of one of our ex employees drowned in a river. Sad. Her mom became an OFW to support the family, and the father and grandparents didn't know she was playing near the river.

Sigh.

Since it is Easter, here is a film about a crippled street kid who spread peace and joy, and is thought by many locals to be a saint.