Baguio scene comes to the Penguin, Manila

I've heard so much about Baguio, Sagada and the mountainous regions to the North. Rice terraces, misty mornings, the tribes....chilled, laid back, arty scene... I've been wanting to go, but the 10h bus ride makes me think twice (might opt for the 1h flight to white sands and palm trees).

Well last night, Baguio came to Manila. A bunch of artists hosted a show at the Penguin in Malate. The papier mache sculpture of Jose Rizal is by Kawayan de Guia. He has donated a small work to go in my Suitcase show, very cool.

Drum circles, margaritas, and even something called a beetle nut: lime, a nut and a leaf. Stick it in your cheek, spit out the red juice, and you get a small rush. Apparently the rice workers use this and it's popular from India to Japan, they tell me. That's me with the nut in my cheek...

I had Hughes and Nathalie's Etat d'une Reflexion on me, so we used the excellent projector to show some of the Suitcase show are here at the Penguin.


















As Carlos said: "For you they are hippies, but for us they are tribal." Yeah, I'll take a drum circle and beetle juice any day.

Quiapo Church - prayer and sin

Carlos gave a tour at Quiapos today with a crew of Lomo photographers. You can get everything in Quiapo -- 1$ DVDs, Jade bracelets, votives....and even secret potions.

Here's Carlos showcasing a bottle of mojo used to help capture the one you pine after. It's the love potion for your secret love that is completely oblivious to your advances.

The women selling Sampagita flowers that smell just amazing. It's also the national flower. Apparently once the Philippines was bought by the US, it was "americanized" and therefore needed a National Anthem, National Flower, National Fruit, National Hero.... I bought Sampagita massage oil as well, good stuff.

Here I am rubbing the foot of the Black Nazarene.... apparently brings good luck.









And not to be missed (yes, I admit this is turning into an obession) the small stream covered with plastic trash.

Smokey Mountain - environmental remediation

David is leading the environmental remediation component and invited the University of the Philippines to come with us to Smokey this morning. It was the first time David was visiting the area and my first time on the mountain. U.P. will be helping us with leachate testing. Leachate is the result of rain percolating through waste and reacting with the products of decomposition, chemicals and other materials in the waste and is basically slimy nasty stuff. Part of our strategy is to put a giant raincoat over the mountain to help collect the rain and treat it, rather than allow it to just ooze out of the mountain.

Here you can see the mountain, the community that is built around the mountain and also the mountain from up close -- it looks pretty and green but in fact is a pile of trash that has been sitting around for fifty years and stopped being used as an active dump for 10 years.

Here you can see where the rain water ends up... it oozes off the side of the mountain, pours into the two rivers on either side of Smokey, sits in concrete areas where children splash and play, and waters vegetable gardens growing on the sides of the trash mountain. Just because it's green, it doesn't make it good.

























































































This is a community where every four year old child knows that collecting plastic bottles can bring an income (this picture is taken on the main road driving pas Smokey and that goes South directly to my place on Manila Bay. We couldn't find a taxi so David convinced a fish truck to give us a ride).

It's also a land where banana trees are a sign of good fortune. One of our environmental leaders in the community asked me to take this picture. We are smack on top of the mountain of trash. It seems that good spirits called white dwendes live under certain trees.

Rainy Karaoke Night

Tonight Anthony Chu invited us to a Chinese restaurant managed by a childhood friend. We had the private back room on the second floor. They looooove Karaoke and here is Prof Alvin with Anthony's beautiful daughter... Of course David and the German student Lars are checking out the "ladies" across the street. It was raining so hard I could not make it from the restaurant to the sidewalk to the street as it was flooded with water. As the boys scampered off to their cars (I had been secretly hoping they would carry me or something), I finally hailed a bicycle with a side car that was able to drive onto the sidewalk to fetch me directly at the restaurant door. I'm feeling rather satisfied with myself in this picture. Minutes later, I fall flat in the muck trying to climb the stairs up to my apartment.

Carlos' Beach House

Completely relaxing and necessary... one night at the beach house and I'm recharged.

This is an album cover photo - Steel Teal or something like that. Moi Carlos and Denis.

Opening of the suitcase show

It was a great night... still recuperating... more on the show after my weekend at the BEACH!!!

This woman below is the MOMO - the Museum Of Mental Objects. It has been operating for four years and has collected 4 mental works, always whisepered to her by an atist, never written down or captured on film. Visiting the museum is a small performance.

High Tech cooperative - second meeting

I met with High-Tech today, first at their main offices and then at the area off of the main road to Smokey where they have their operations. It was the most depressed area I have visited so far and although I know this is a means of livelihood for more than one hundred families, it still squeezed my heart to see the conditions in which they are working. That's why the new land we are getting for them is so important; it gives them the opportunity to build a more decent area for sorting and selling trash. Their concern however is that buyers and sellers are used to coming to this location -- will others take their place and steal their supply and demand chain? It's an issue because the new area is not off of the main road and much harder to access.

The coop is taking many new measures to improve their revenue stream -- you see here two of the ladies from the main office (they wear uniforms to be more professional), two of the board members and also junk shop owners in the front, and Mico in the back, their new general manager, who strikes me as an extremely competent person with good intentions to match. He wants to help improve their bottom line, go into new waste businesses (they recycle paper and glass for now) and improve the conditions of the coop members. Basically, the 79 members are junk shop owners ranging from small to large (own their truck, have more employees, etc.). These junk shops buy and sell all kinds of waste but the paper and glass goes exclusively to High Tech, that way they can sell in volume and get a better deal. Dividends are paid out at the end of the year and the coop has a tight bookkeeping process as well as overall mission, vision, operational guidelines, etc.

High-Tech itself is a very small MRF operation: they have a tiny area for collecting paper and conducting quality controls on their three main products. They are surrounded however by their junk shop members. What you see in one of these pictures is their paper weighing and quality control area -- water covers the ground, there's no ventilation (just the front door) and no electricity for fans or lighting. I also took a picture of their mission, vision statements, framed and neatly hanging on the wall. The way trash is sorted and organized is quite impressive, if you can get over your immediate surroundings: kids running around barefoot, people living above trash piles, women picking head lice, "sorters" going through trash with no protective gear.

This is me with Mico, I think we are going to work well together.

Sun Valley - Model recycling community

With Philip and David, we headed south today to Paranaque district to visit Bert Guevara, Captain of the Sun Valley Barangay (mentioned in an earlier blog). First we visited the composting operations in a subdivision. There are about 40,000 people living in Sun Valley and all their waste is collected and sorted. In most of Sun Valley, households drop their organic waste in plastic bins at the street corners adding in a layer of coconut dust or sawdust provided by the Barangay. The other waste is collected separately and sorted at local MRFs. Bert estimates that 35% of the waste that would have typically ended up in a landfill is now being re-cycled (the new law on solid waste management asks for a 20% reduction, so Bert is by far a model in a country where less than 1,000 of the 42,000 barangays in the Philippines are actually recycling and implementing MRF strategies).

Bert explains that this initiative was built over the years: he started recycling in his Barangay on a smaller scale in the early nineties. He tells us it takes time and patience and numerous meetings with people before they buy-into environmental initiatives, none of this happened overnight. For now, there is not a huge demand for this compost as they can't guarantee its quality. They give it away or sell small quantities. The operation is very simple: collection is then followed by mixing with sawdust (donated) and bacteria (bought). This mixture sits around in bags in the heat for about 3 weeks; the water evaporates and fermentation takes place. Hopefully it's hot enough to kill most of the bacteria. I should add that there was practically no smell and we were standing right next to the heaps of organic waste. The next step is shredding, using a machine manufactured in the Philippines. They then use sifters to make sure all non-organic materials are removed. About 10 bags of 25kg are produced each day, but for now composting does not have a large market.

Moving to another part of Sun Valley, we visited a larger MRF that collects all types of waste. The organic is treated locally (they include a "washing" process that doesn't make much sense to me, why add water?), the plastics and other recyclables are put to the side for sale, and the non-recyclables are shipped off to the landfill at San Pedro Laguna, probably 35km away. Bert tells us that the trees we see planted here grew up with the MRF. This site is run by the home owners association, barely breaks even, but has managed to reduce operation costs by selling more recyclables and reducing the amount of trucks needed for non-recyclable waste. Plus the people working here have salaries, so there's a job creation aspect.

The next site visit is to a processing facility primarily for PET. PET PET PET, they love it here. They buy, they "clean" (removing labels and chopping off the caps), they crush and bale. They can also make flakes. The profit margin per kg is very low but the volume is huge! They are processing 30 tones a day in this facility and have expanded operations to another site in order to move up to 50T/day. "It's so easy to do business," the manager and partial owner tells us (before stepping into his black-tinted-window Mercedes), "you just compact the PET and they pay us. It's easier than trading gold." We tell him about recycling in Switzerland and he's ready to come over and buy a boat-load from us. They have begun selling to a massive packaging and beverage franchise group here in the Philippines -- they are setting up the first plant for PET to PET recycling, to supply their own business but also others. Apparently these guys will buy PET, pay a good price, and even accept with caps and labels (as you can see in this image of a bale).

I'm taking notes and David is taking pictures, and that's probably why these sorter ladies are smiling at the camera! What a charmer. The women are doing the manual labor, while the men are maneuvering the machinery. No gloves, masks or boots. The manager however has a shiny black pair of wellies. Must match the car!

My new love affair: Halo Halo, the local dessert

I have a new love, the irresistible halo-halo dessert (translates to mix-mix) made with sweet preserved beans, coconut meat, pounded dried rice, sweet yam, cream flan... all that with crushed ice, coconut milk and topped with ice cream. It's supercalifragalisic and supercaloric as well. But hey, we are sweating all day here in the tropics! A girl needs her fuel.
Here's Anita eating Halo Halo in Intramuros...

And me again, on our drive back from Carlos' beach house. That's Denis in the back.

Meet the neighbours - Coco, Baby, Nana... and Spike.

I really live in a great building, Coco and Baby let me use their wifi today so that I could do some camera Skyping with Jean-Claude in Geneva. Coco is Hughes cousin, one of the French artists I'm showing at the opening next Friday (see my first entry). Baby even put on Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert, without knowing that this is part of our morning coffee ritual at JCs. Perfect, perfect. Then there is Spike. There is nothing spiky about Spike, he is a non-stop licking loving bull dog, absolutely adorable. (Maybe his water is spiked?) Here is Nana, their daughter, showing me how he can jump through hoops. Let's all say adorable again, but with a French accent this time. A DO RABLE!