Sometimes there are moments in Peace Corps that make you sit back, smile and remember why you love this job.
The community of Jovellar, Albay is extremely rural and is one of the poorest in the province. Over the last 6-12 months (depending on how you look at it) I have been working with a number of local NGOs and government agencies to develop the plans to construct (2) piped water systems for barangays Rizal and Quitinday in Jovellar.
Just last week, my counterpart and I met with the barangay council of Quitinday to spell out the division of labor for pipeline and tank construction. We needed the council to offer, as the community's counterpart, local labor to haul all construction materials 2km into the jungle to the site where we will lay the pipe and build the water tanks. The total cost estimate, using local daily wages, came to about 25000 pesos. It is hard to understand how difficult it is to ask for donations from people who struggle to buy a kilogram of rice for their families everyday (even with the world rice crisis, 1kg of rice runs about $0.75 a kilogram).
They all speak a rural, upland dialect of Bikol that I can only partially understand, so I had only a vague idea of what they were debating. After an hour of raised-voice deliberation over how the materials would be moved into the woods, all 15 council members leaned back in their chairs at the same time, clapped once and said "iyan" (translates as "like that"). They had decided to have the council buy food for all the workers and families of the workers who will carry materials to the site.
Bikol is, for the most part, a contextual language; sentences are not too complicated and you can usually understand what someone is talking about just based on what they are doing at the time. To have a group of people who don't all necessarily agree with one another have one communal moment of clarity and come together with a clap and a "iyan" was an amazing sight to see.
From the volunteers I have spoken to, and my own personal experience, the best feeling a volunteer can get isn't building a pipeline or planting a tree but when someone UNDERSTANDS you. If a local takes what you tell them, interprets it and acts on it in the way that you intended the information to be used, there is this almost giddy sense of success that I can't really put into words (though clearly I am trying to).
Not too many people will admit to having "the clap" as their best memory of Peace Corps, but I know I will.
