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| Isla Bonita |
After a night of little sleep due to creating a focus group guide and go to the mall I had to get up, eat and be ready to head out by 6:45am.
The morning started by making a courtesy call to the Rosario Municipality. It's a way for us to know whats going on in the government and for them to know that we'll be in their barangays for the next week doing work. We got a chance to do some informal key informant interviews with a few sanitation worker and just see all the departments of the government.
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| Helen and Arti on the zip-line |
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| Isla Bonita |
After that we went to Isla Bonita which is the city beach area. It used to be a trash dump but has been cleaned up and turned into a beach with restaurants and its own zip-line. We hung around, waited for the mayor, relaxed, ate some food, really good chicken and rice, and of course went on the zip-line. This was not an ordinary zip-line. You actually had to lay face down on it and it took you over the water and then you climbed the other tower and it brought you back. At first on one really wanted to go on it and a few people thought they would get stuck or fall in the water below. But when it came down to that time to fly 6 of us ended up doing the zip-line. I went with Jen and I told her if we fell in the water I would pull her out because she can't swim. Though swimming was the least of my worries if we fell in, the place used to be a trash dump site and there was still plenty of trash and other things in that water. I was more worried about catching some nasty disease if I fell in. But we all made it across and back across the bay just fine.
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| Chicken and Rice |
Zip-lining completed we headed to our first barangay to test out our focus group guide, key informant guide and our survey if there was time. We encountered many roadblocks and found out that we needed to change lots of our focus group guide. As part of the focus group this was our first time doing a problem tree and for many of us our first time facilitating a focus group. By this time it was well after 2pm and we were so tired making it harder to change on the spot and come up with ideas and more questions.
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| Julie and June doing a problem tree |
Normally when you conduct a focus group or any type of assessment you would first have a look around the community and do a little back ground research and possibly a windshield survey so you would know what the community had and what they didn't have. We pretty much went into this knowing nothing and having our own perceptions which were shattered as soon as we started asking questions. We quickly found out that our perception of flooding is so much different than the Filipinos perception of flooding. I mean we think its flooding if its up to our ankles and here that is normal. Some people here only consider it flooding if its up to your waist and if its to your knee that is just high tide. Also, when your used to coming from a place where you can technically drink the water out of your sink at home its hard to see people say that they are fine just buying mineral water by the liter.
The most interesting part of this focus group was finding out about the "flying saucer". Some of the places we visited didn't have bathrooms or comfort rooms as they call them here. So we asked were they went and we were told they went in a plastic bag, tied it and flung it--hence the term flying saucer!
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