Shamrell Pacific: April 2014

What an interesting place we live in, and such an interesting period in our lives! The Philippines, of course, is a primarily Catholic country, and there are evidences of that everywhere, but the town where we live, Manaoag, is actually a pilgrimage site. Religious holidays always bring throngs of people here, and Easter weekend is the biggest. The Catholic church here has received "basilica" status, and there is a shrine on the grounds behind the church, where people come to light candles and pray before a beautifully-gowned statue of Mary. Legend has it that Mary appeared to a young man here in the 17th century and told him to build a church there. "Manaoag" is derived from words meaning "she calls," and people definitely answer! I read last week that the town was anticipating a million people coming over Easter weekend. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Manaoag

We were a little surprised to see that Lent isn't acknowledged more here than it seems to be. Our previous experience with Lent had been to see Mardi Gras or Carnaval celebrated right before Ash Wednesday, followed by 40 days of reflection, sacrifice, and repentance, until Easter. Here, we saw people marked with ashes on Ash Wednesday, as expected, and then the carnivals and festivals all began, in every town! And they went on for weeks, with lots of extra market areas opened up along the streets, additional food vendors in the plazas, and carnival rides in some of the towns. But, on Good Thursday and Friday, many of the malls and other businesses closed down, and the radio stations went off the air.

Corn on the cob

Palm Sunday, with some fancy braided palms.

Buko juice -- made from young coconuts.

On Good Friday, Tony was gone all day, doing small repairs in some of the missionaries' apartments, and I stayed home. A neighbor had told us there would be a procession, at about 2 pm, he thought. At 2:00, I took a walk around the town but didn't see anything looking like a procession getting started, so I went home. It was really, really hot that day - - it's been in the mid-90's with at least 50% humidity - - and it took some doing for me to go out again at 3:00. Still nothing, so this time, I asked a policeman what time the procession would begin. "The procession? Oh . . . um . . . maybe about 4:00? No . . . exactly at 5:00." Wherever his sudden certainty came from, he was right, and I was able to watch the whole procession go by, just a block or so from our house. Fortunately, the sun was going down by then, and the heat was more bearable. I perched on a wall, where I could see thousands of devoted people walking past. I can't say who all the statues represented, all regally robed, but the last appeared to be Jesus, lying in a glass casket. Each statue was carried on a small platform, surrounded by lamps.

There's a crucifix, kind of hard to spot in this pic.

So many heads of black hair!

Later that night, President Monahan, our mission president called, to see if we would be available to drive to Manila the next day. This was a bit alarming, as we'd hoped to never have to drive in that city! Manila was our first exposure to Filipino driving and it is such a huge city that the whole idea was really unnerving. But he needed a ride for a young sister missionary to a medical facility there and couldn't do it himself that day. Fortunately, his wife would go with us, and she's a lot more familiar with the city and the route. So . . .

We picked up Sister Monahan in the morning and drove to pick up the sister missionary in Binalonan. There is a sequence of three expressways that extends nearly to Urdaneta from Manila, so most of our trip was pretty fast sailing. At one point, though, we did discover that we'd taken the wrong route and had to backtrack, which cost us some time.

Were it not for our wrong turn, we never would have discovered that the Holy Land is in the Philippines!

And Mexico! Who knew?!

Four times in each direction (to Manila and back), we had to stop and pay a toll. Most of these toll stations took just a couple minutes to get through, but the last one, closest to Manila, even with over a dozen lanes, took us about 20 minutes.

After we got off the expressway approaching Manila, the main street we had to take was undergoing a lot of construction, which bogged things down quite a bit. Otherwise, I think the traffic might not have been as bad as we remembered. I can think of two reasons for this: 1. It was Good Saturday and business was slower. 2. We've become more conditioned to Filipino driving. All in all, the trip to Manila took us about five hours.

We went to the Missionary Recovery Center and got our young sister situated, where she would stay while undergoing tests and treatment at a hospital nearby. We enjoyed a nice visit and dinner with two senior missionary couples living and working there, then got on our way back again.

Not too far down the road, we passed that last toll station we'd gone through on our way into Manila. The lines of traffic by that time stretched at least a couple miles, and I felt so bad for the people in those lines at that point. I'm sure they must've spent at least an hour, waiting there. A lot of people would be going to Manila for Easter.

Our trip home, amazingly enough, took only three hours. No heavy traffic, no long lines at toll booths. Where the expressway ends and we got off, there was a lot of slow-moving traffic headed onto the expressway, going the other direction. We saw several tour buses and large open-bed trucks lined with chairs - - oh, yes, they travel this way, too! - - and thought of all those people who were likely headed back to Manila after visiting Manaoag. They would have a very long night on the road, and sitting in line for toll stations.

We weren't sure on Easter morning which branch of our church we would be able to attend. With so many people in town and traffic being diverted onto our little street, it was sometimes hard to get out of our driveway. If this were the case, we would just walk to the Manaoag chapel, a 12-minute walk. But we were able to get out, so we drove to San Jacinto, which is a tiny branch, more in need of our help. I ended up playing piano in Sacrament Meeting there, which was nice and simple, with three speakers telling the Easter story and of the Atonement of Christ and its importance in our lives. (Well, that's what I gathered from what I was able to undertand!) After three hours of meetings and classes, I had one piano student, and then we drove on to San Fabian, where there are branches meeting both in morning and afternoon. So, after similar meetings and classes there, and two more piano lessons, we were pretty well fed, spiritually and socially. : )

San Jacinto chapel


San Fabian chapel (photos taken on a rainy day in August)

Well, since we were already in San Fabian and there was mail in the back seat for the missionaries in Lingayen, we decided to make a quick (30 minutes each way) run to Lingayen before heading home. Tony made a wonderful dinner of fish, baked potatoes, veggies, and fruit salad for our Easter dinner. Later on, we were able to skype with some kids and grandkids in Germany, and thus ended our Easter weekend.

Each holiday we spend here in the Philippines is another new experience for us, with some differences and some similarities to our customs at home. We're so grateful for this experience, and we're grateful for the wondrous blessings and promises that are ours, thanks to the sacrifice of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Happy Easter to you all . . . after the fact. : )

Laundry is kind of a big deal here. I didn't realize that a few months ago, when one of my piano students couldn't come to her lesson on a Saturday because she had to wash clothes. I thought that was a pretty lame excuse, like a girl in an old movie telling the guy on the phone she couldn't go out with him that night because she had to wash her hair. You can do laundry any time, right?

Well, we can do laundry any time, because we have an automatic washer. Not so with most people in the Philippines. In all likelihood, my piano student had to wash her clothes by hand. Maybe all her family's clothes. Maybe even other people's clothes that she's been hired to wash. This is no small task. It involves filling a large basin with tepid water from an outdoor faucet, or from a pump, using a bar of laundry soap, and rubbing the clothes clean on a scrubbing board or maybe with a brush, wringing them out by hand, dumping and refilling the basin with clean water, rinsing them out, wringing them again, maybe repeating that rinse-and-wring part, and hanging them to dry. Of course, after they're dry, they'll need to be ironed.


This pump has a spigot that swings from side to side, so they can fill their basins where they are, without having to move them. I was impressed with how fast these ladies work.

Some people do wash their clothes in the river, and we've seen clean laundry spread out on the gravel to dry.

You can buy a washer in the Philippines, as I've said. Of course, they're not cheap and many people can't afford them. They're also not very large. Ours is about the biggest I've seen here, and it's much smaller than our washer at home. A washer here may or may not be automatic. You might have to fill it with a bucket. And it might have two tubs, side by side -- one for washing and one for spinning. Another option is to buy just a spinner, a machine that does only the 'spin' part of a wash cycle. That's quite a savings over buying a washer and might be tempting if you had a lot of towels and jeans to wring out. Imagine how long they must take to dry on a clothesline on a humid day! (And every day is humid in the Philippines.) But I know someone who owns a spinner but doesn't use it much because it makes her power bill too high.

One other option is to hire a lady to do your laundry, and many missionaries do that. It's not expensive. We haven't, as yet. We do have a washer, and a nice rack inside, where we hang our laundry on coat hangers to dry, and a clothesline outside, to use on dry days. We are having to do a lot more ironing here, without an electric dryer to tumble our clothes. But it hasn't been too burdensome, so far, so we do it ourselves.

The water here is extremely hard, by the way. Your clothes come out feeling like they've been starched, and towels are downright scratchy.

But everywhere you go, there's laundry hanging, often right out by the road . . . on a clothesline . . .