Day 2 (8/20/10)

In the morning, after some shoe-changing and bug-spraying, we visited Barangay Pasil. Secretary Jaeana gave us a tour of the Barangay, including the "wet" (fish) market and one of the 7 working communal restrooms. We were surrounded by those bicycle taxi things and...crowdedness. A random middle-aged man ran up to Ryan to get a high-five (anyone want to guess why? :P). We then met with both the head of Pasil's sanitation and head of Pasil's waste management at the Health Center. They gave us some background information on Pasil in general and their departments, and then there was a really interesting Q&A.

We learned that the Pasil community as a large transient population. The local government is very supportive of waste segregation, but is constrained in its ability to implement a program due to lack of space. In-home vermicomposting (as in using worms to compost) may be the solution. Vermicomposting could be especially effective because of Pasil's large fishing industry, which means that a large portion of Pasil's waste is biodegradable. Most importantly, we learned that Mike Rama =/= My Grandma.

We were running late, so we rushed over to UP Cebu High School to get lunch at their cafeteria. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough "lunch" food left, so we bought cakes and chips for fuel. Then we met the UP Cebu high school students! We talked about the definition of service leadership--repeating our workshop with the Cebu National Science High school students from the previous day. And we got paired with our mentees! Talking one (or two)-on-one about absolutely anything was a ton of fun, and definitely the highlight for me.

After some delish take-out, we had a group meeting concerning the direction of our project. This included the "stake" of our project--the underlying motivation for our work--which we phrased as "Education, Inspiration, and Waste Management Implementation." We also determined our "outcome," or concrete goals, which included creating a leadership handbook and forming a partnership between Feed the Children Philippines and the high school students. We finished with a brainstorm of the topics we want to address in the leadership workshops.

-Nicole/Kenneth