Athletes

I am being asked pretty regularly whether I am a basketball player, and one a few occasions people have been asking me if I am seven feet tall. Ha ha. So I tell them that in high school I was too short to play on the varsity basketball team! And the look astonished. However, I don't point out that I was only 5 feet 4 inches and 102 pounds when I was fifteen.

Yesterday I woke up with three little kids coming in and asking me to bless them. I do this by having them take my hand and lift it to their forehead. One of my favorites is a little boy of three who always says, "Hello Americano!" Another boy of about seven with a collection of 175 rubber bands on his wrists loves to have me throw him tennis balls while I juggle. Several of the kids who live near the payag have learned to juggle, and I am giving them tips on new tricks to try.

In the early morning I headed to Sogod where there is a sports meet between four universities. On a single day there will be a track meet, basketball games, volleyball games, and softball and baseball competitions. There is also a cheer leading competition, and I am pleasantly surprised to see my student Camille Glory from Libas being the leading dancer for Southern Leyte State Universities Webmaster troupe. Camille is a beautiful girl, but more important one of the greatest natural leaders I have ever met. She introduces me to her fellow teammates from the Information Technology group. They are all in dress competition and Glory informs me that they are hungry so we head for snacks and then later to the Payag for lunch and karaoke. Before we do, I videotape some of the track competition and interview some of the winners about their training. Maybe I lose some in the translation, but it appears that it is close to non-existent.

The students are incredibly polite and fun to talk to. They point out that many students in the Philippines are training for jobs outside of the country because of "corruption". When I pointed out to them that I thought the Philippines will be dramatically changed by the internet, they listened intently. My argument was that that with the high expense of books, the internet could make a huge impact on education. As it is, comp[uters are used by many people through internet cafes, but from what I can gather most of it is for use in chatting and gaming. I described to them how my students in America are using the internet increasingly for the research that they do. Textbooks are often outdated by the time they are published. The fact that computers here are often slow now should be remedied I would think. I will have to ask Faith Caron about this.

The price of pineapples here is about ten cents with the difference that they taste much better, and haircuts cost about fifty cents, but books cost about the same here as they do in America. It is not surprising that I see very few books in most houses. The ability of the internet to bridge this gap I think could be enormous.
I have started doing interval workouts here and the pleasant weather as really been nice. I hope I didn't jinx anything by calling the weather nice. ha ha. The student who has been driving me was third in the 200 meters yesterday, and having heard that he has no training regiment I offered to buy him a stopwatch and train him. His nickname is Aking and he is an excellent chess player. (that means he beat me ha ha). It would be nice to see him play my student CJ! He is hoping he makes the 2012 Olympic team.

Pete fustanes and Dami Canize are the names of the mayor and chief of police.