Monthly Report

For the first time in my life the past month has felt exactly like a month. It hasn't gone quickly, it hasn't gone slowly, it has just passed—30 days, predictably 12 hours long. Watching the tide and the moon so carefully has helped with this, I think. We have been occupying a room at Oceans 101 for four and a half weeks and it is time to move on, but we can't quite get ourselves prepared to move again. Siargao Island has become a kind of home and we will be sad to leave. But it is strange to make your home at a resort. We are craving some kind of domestic freedom: to make our own breakfast, to buy our own groceries, to sweep our own front porch. Having people cooking and cleaning for you every day sounds nice, but we are too independent for such a life.

The one thing I have reclaimed is laundry, doing it by hand in the shower and hanging it on our jagged stick fence to dry. It is hard work scrubbing our sweaty, muddy, salty clothes with a brick of soap like a slippery pumice stone. I crouch in the shower over the bucket feeling very native, wishing only that I had a good river rock to scrub against. The first time I was hanging our laundry out, one of the girls who works here walked by astonished. What is silly about the whole thing is that the resort has a washing machine, but it isn't that we are too cheap to send our laundry out but more like it is somehow the one thing that I have chosen to repossess from my former non-vacation life. She wasn't astonished that I had the nerve to turn down their services, she couldn't believe I knew how to do laundry. "How do you know how to do that?" she asked. "In my country, when I am at home, I do all my own laundry and cook my own food and clean my own house." Suddenly my skin felt very white (despite the impressive tan I've worked up) and I felt very defensive and then sad for our world, in which we constantly find ways to create power instabilities, where hard work leads to luxury for some and means only more hard work for others.

The thing that's nice about living at a resort is the constant flow of new people to meet. They come and go like the tide and we've met a whole cast of interesting characters while we've been here. Only one other guest has been here the whole month—a one legged conspiracy theorist from Australia, who surfs on his one leg, drinks his own pee, and sees UFOs almost every night over the sea. Friendly enough guy, though. The family, of course, is always here. The owner is an Australian surfer who owns a heavy equipment company back home. He spends most of his time here though where he is married to a savvy and beautiful local woman. They have three kids, and it is the six-year old we have the most contact with. She is a smart but bored and bratty girl, who won't go to school with the village kids and spends most of her time cheating at cards or pool with the guests. She has developed a love/hate relationship with Peter, who is the only one who will call her out on her deception but also really wants to make her island life a little more educational. The one-year old daughter loves Peter, too—loves to grab his goatee and touch his rough face. She is doted on like crazy around here, passed from mom to aunt to grandma to guest to uncle to sister all day. She's moments away from taking her first step if only someone would let her.

Of course there's the staff, who are like family, too, in that they are always around. But they aren't treated like family even though they live here. The waitresses are waiting all day (7 am to 10 pm) in the restaurant to take our orders and the cooks are in the kitchen prepping or blending up fruit juices for our whims. When things are slow (at one point we were the only guests here with about 10 people waiting on us), they sometimes go out and pull weeds in the lawn. They never get a day off and sleep five to a room on a foam mattress made for two. But they are charming girls and when we dance with them at the village disco on Saturday nights we are lucky to have them as dates. They dance full steam—like they have a lot to let out—and stay out until 2 am. When we see them again it is breakfast and they have slept for maybe three hours and our asking us what it is we'd like to have today while we peruse the menu we have memorized.