Farewell, Philippines!

I am writing this post right after saying goodbye to all of my amazing coworkers and supervisors.  It was hard to say goodbye to my hard-working, fun, and truly caring advisors here at IRRI because I do not know where my life will take me or if I will ever get the pleasure of meeting them again. Although all three of them were constantly helpful and supportive, I appreciate Dr. Ces for always helping us get the most out of our experience in the Philippines with as many excursions as possible, I appreciate Joyce for being a ray of sunshine at the office every day and for her genuine and helpful personality, and I appreciate Ana for her guidance, humor, and efforts to share her plant pathology experiences with me throughout the summer. There are many other people around IRRI who made my time here wonderful such as my coworkers and the Bean Hub staff, and it will be weird to not see them in the office or the coffee shop tomorrow morning. Finally, I would like to thank the Freeman Foundation and Dr. Teddy Amoloza and her family for arranging and allowing me to have this life-changing experience in the Philippines.

Although I have truly had so much fun with all my travels this summer, Dr. Ces was right when she said the most important thing is to hang onto the lessons we have learned here. The impacts this experience has had on me come from some of the things that started out as challenges and goals. One of the aspects of this internship that challenged me this summer was the dynamic of working for a busy team. Everyone working with the Heirloom Rice Project has many responsibilities, keeping them busy both in and out of the office on any given day. Although this meant I worked largely autonomously this summer, I knew there were still expectations of me which some of the time I struggled to identify on my own. From this experience, I improved my autonomous working skills and learned to clearly express the right questions to solve my problems without interrupting the people who were there to help me for too long. Another personal challenge I felt when I first came here involved identifying how my academic goals aligned with the tasks within my internship.  I was constantly asking myself before and at the beginning of my internship how my experiences with the IRRI Sustainable Impact Division would end up helping me to pursue a career in the area of biology.  This internship was truly a focused effort to grow to understand the challenges of heirloom rice farmers and learn about all the projects the HRP has and plans to implement so that the abundant data taken from these farmers can be presented as a story that tells why it is so important help preserve their tradition and livelihood. Through these few challenges my internship presented to me, I know I have taken the first step towards achieving and better understanding my broad goal to travel the world!

One of the most important things I learned from this internship experience is that I won’t always have a preset path for how my experiences in life will turn out before the experience starts, and I have to learn to be okay with that.  This bothers me because I like to see an end goal from the start so that I can do my best to achieve it.  I came to IRRI not even knowing what project I would end up working under, let alone what my supervisor would want me to contribute to the project by the end of the summer. I thought once I got to IRRI all of these questions would be cleared up, but I ended up participating in a variety of experiences and tasks this summer and during the last week of my internship, only after all of those experiences, I was given the task to make infographics representing findings from the project surveys taken throughout the summer.  I presented my work to the Sustainable Impact Department at IRRI, and many people mentioned how much they liked the way I used the graphics to portray the data and share the progress of the project.  I may not have understood the goal behind all of the data encoding and analysis, and the very long roadtrips from the start, but now that I have created cohesive visual representations of the project implementations thus far, I feel I have finally achieved the goal of my internship.  I appreciated the many opportunities this internship gave me to travel across Luzon seeing very different places. From the mountain terraces of the Cordilleras to the Southern city of Sorsogon, I look back and appreciate the unique places I have gotten to meet genuinely nice and inquisitive people, and I appreciate the breadth of experiences I had this summer which gave me the insight into the project that I needed to get right down to the goal of it all.

As one of my wonderful advisors at IRRI once said, sometimes we need to look beyond the rice plant and focus on the people.  I came into this cultural anthropology rich internship not quite knowing what I would take away from it as a biology major, but open to the experience all the same. Had I been placed in a lab-based internship at IRRI, I’m sure I would have had a wonderful, yet entirely different internship experience. As someone who hopes to find my ideal career somewhere in the field of biology, my experience this summer taught me the importance of coming face to face with the very people who are affected by the research and innovations made by the scientists behind the scenes. I have talked to a farmer who was concerned that growing genetically engineered rice affected the biodiversity in his fields. I have also been to towns in the Cordilleras that grow their rice entirely organically because due to their low income, they cannot afford fertilizer every year and last time they tried to grow rice in a field without fertilizer after having used it the previous year, their crop yield was down for a while. Along with these farmers’ concerns, there are many who hang on to their traditional local varieties, but also those who have switched to less healthful high yield varieties to make money on the extra crop. Income, local tradition, and many other factors influence the rice crops farmers plant, so it is important to not only introduce new varieties to them that have the potential to improve their health and income, but also to ask them what help they need to keep their very nutritious heirloom varieties a part of their local culture.  After all, if the goal is to help these farmers’ health, the other part of their lives, their culture, cannot be ignored.

After two months in the Philippines, living here finally seems normal even though we still get stared at a lot for obviously being foreigners.  Just in the last couple weeks, I have continued to meet people who I had to say goodbye to too soon. I know local people and hangouts, and I am used to my work routine. In my life, I have had very little experience traveling outside the Unites States, and I am so incredibly grateful for my time studying and being immersed in Philippine culture. From church to family dinners, strangers and new acquaintances alike have been so kind and open to sharing their perspectives and getting to know mine. I have always wanted to travel the world. This goal in itself is not very specific, but what I want is to see more of the diverse and history-rich places that exist both near and far from the United States. Being in Asia, especially the Philippines, has personally showed me some of the big and small differences between the different Asian countries through the eyes of locals, and even differences within the Philippine islands themselves.  I have talked to many Filipinos who feel like they are going to a whole other country when they go to a different region of the Philippines due to culture and dialect differences. Additionally, the international population at IRRI has given me the chance to meet people from Germany, Sweden, and India just to name a few, and being surrounded by people with such different life stories makes every conversation with a stranger an enriching one. This experience has immersed me in different cultures thanks to all of my travels with the Heirloom Rice Project. I realized my old goal was more akin to being a tourist around the world, but to travel the world and really see what a place is all about, it is best to share stories with locals and visit the places they love in their home!

Intramuros and Infographics

As the last trip of the summer, my fellow IWU interns and I took a weekend trip to Manila.  Lauren’s aunt lives near there, so she joined us for the day and actually planned all of our activities and accommodations for us! We woke up early Saturday morning to catch a bus to Manila, then met up with Lauren’s aunt and our driver for the day.  Our goal for the trip was to tour the Intramuros, or “walled city” district. This area of Manila has many historical parks and churches with architecture dating back to the Spanish colonial period. Although much of this area was destroyed in the 1945 Battle of Manila at the end of the Japanese occupation, restoration projects have restored the Intramuros to a historically and architecturally rich gem in Manila.  We went to lunch at a restaurant near the San Agustin Church and were lucky the towering wooden chapel doors were propped open with a wedding going on inside, so we were able to see the incredible arches and domed ceilings. We also got to see the Manila Cathedral which happened to also have a wedding going on at the time! After a short stop at an ice cream cart to get mango/cheese/avocado ice cream cones, we went to walk around the Baluarte de SanDiego. Known as one of the oldest stone fortifications in Intramuros, it once acted as a fort and then a foundry. The circular stone structure used to be connected to the walls of the city, but after several attacks, earthquakes, land reclamations, and restorations, the ruins stand in a beautiful park covered in moss with a view of the Manila skyline. Next, we visited Fort Santiago, a 16^th century military defense structure that stands at the mouth of the Pasig River. This historical site is now a park that hosts theater events and continues to represent the heroism of Filipinos through the centuries. True to its name, the Philippine rainy season struck while we were walking around Fort Santiago in the early afternoon. Luckily, we all brought our umbrellas and decided to take an umbrella jump shot! In my picture gallery, there is a progression of pictures showing how this photo-op turned out for me. As our final activity of the afternoon, we visited the Bahay Isinoy Museum of Chinese in Philippine Life. This museum was really cool because of the elaborate mannequin scenes available to walk through documenting the ways Chinese and Filipino life has blended throughout history. I am so glad I got to travel to Manila and see a piece of the Philippine capital’s culture!

 

After that exciting weekend, I came back to work this week to finish out my IRRI internship!  I worked on a few Heirloom Rice Project infographics highlighting data I analyzed from the nutrition surveys taken in Mountain Province, Kalinga, and Ifugao. This summer I got to witness surveys being taken at farmers houses and in the rice fields, I encoded and analyzed the data from those surveys, and I presented infographics on the highlights of the survey data to the IRRI Sustainable Impact cluster! The work became much more interesting towards the end of July because I could finally work with the data and travel to Ifugao as I talked about in my last post. I traveled so many cool places and learned to think about situations and problems not only from a scientist’s perspective, but from an anthropologist’s perspective, putting culture first. I am excited to come home to see my family and friends soon, but leaving the breathtaking views and friendly people of the Philippines will be bittersweet.

Back to Banaue

I started this week visiting the same place I went at the very beginning of my time here in the Philippines; Banaue, Ifugao. While the last trip was more for casual chats with locals and sight-seeing, this trip gave me the opportunity to see the Heirloom Rice Project in action! I have spent a lot of time this summer encoding and analyzing HRP survey data, but this week I got to see how the surveys are taken in person and learn how to take earthworm and other pest samples in the rice fields. I travelled to Banaue this time with my fellow intern, Chaepter, and two of my advisors at IRRI, Joyce and Ana. Once in Banaue, we met lots of other members of the HRP who had gathered for the Ifugao survey taking, many of whom had just graduated with a degree in agricultural sciences and were working for the Department of Agriculture.  Some of the people were local to the Cordillera region, so they spoke the local language. On Monday, we set out for our first day of surveys. My group’s surveys for the day started in Batad, one of the barangays in Banaue that is famous to tourists because of both its expansive rice terraces and its waterfalls! We hiked down to the first farm via steep and narrow stairs that seemed to just keep winding down the mountain endlessly. During the first survey, I sat in front of the house of the Farmer we were visiting with one of the women who would record the survey data. The barangay captain even stopped by to say hello. My survey partner conducted most of the survey in the local dialect. Most of the people in Banaue prefer to speak in either the local dialect or English instead of Tagalog which is widely spoken in other regions of the Philippines. Even though I could not understand the words being spoken, I was very familiar with the sections of the survey, so I could tell the topics they were discussing.  The walk back up the mountain to the next survey area was quite a workout, but there were fantastic views of the terraces the whole way.

At the next farmer’s house, I went with two of the young DA employees to learn to take samples in the rice fields. Climbing up to the terraces was always a bit precarious but walking along the terrace walls so high up was a very cool experience.  I touched a growing rice plant that was almost ready for harvest for the first time, and both the grain hull and the leaves were very spikey if brushed a certain way.  Some of the rice varieties have hairs that are an inch or longer that stick off the end of the hulls to protect them from being eaten by birds. Since rice fields usually have standing water the plants are growing in, we looked for mud casts to indicate where the worms had burrowed and upturned some of the mud to reveal them.  If a farmer’s field did not have standing water, as lack of water is often also a common problem, we did not bother looking for the semi-aquatic worms because they would be burrowed too far down. Earthworms are a problem for a lot of farmers because they burrow into the levees that keep the water from running down the mountain instead of staying in the terrace fields.  This weakens the terrace walls and causes erosion. After visiting a few more farmers houses, we were done for the day and the surveyors got together and recorded the data that had been taken into excel. I am so glad I finally got to go on one of the survey trips because meeting the farmers, taking a short look into their ways of life, and seeing the problems in their rice fields in person gave me better perspective and appreciation for the Heirloom Rice Project I have been helping with this summer.

 

 

Paradisal Palawan

Last week, I began working with nutrition survey data collected on a recent trip to the province of Kalinga. I couldn’t go on this trip because the farmers in this area only trusted people from the Philippines to survey them and their farms. Soon, I will start making and updating info-graphics to help with the marketing of the second phase of the Heirloom Rice Project.  Last week felt longer than usual because I was looking forward to a weekend in Puerto Princesa, Palawan! We spent two days at the Daluyon Mountain Beach Resort and enjoyed a very uncrowded beach due to it being the off-season for tourism here. The resort was beautiful with cabana beach houses to stay in, and tropical greenery decorating winding pathways.  We enjoyed lots of boogie boarding on the waves that crashed less than 100 feet away from our front porch at high tide, and I spent just about as much time in the ocean as possible.  We also got to drink smoothies in the infinity pool.  On Saturday morning, we took a short walk down the beach to the famous subterranean river of Puerto Princesa.  Here, a guide paddled us through a river that runs through a cave with amazing rock formations and probably thousands of bats! We were kindly reminded several times not to look up with our mouths open. It was an audio tour, so we listened to the history of the discovery of the cave, and right on cue with the audio, the guide shined his headlamp at cool rock formations that resembled things like garlic, a horse, and a castle just to name a few. When the guide turned off his headlamp, the cave was completely dark, and it was creepy to be in the smelly bat cave on a very deep (up to 30 feet) river and not be able to see a thing.  This paddle boat tour is a must-see when traveling to Puerto Princesa! We only had time to visit Puerto Princesa because we had one weekend to be in Palawan, but I have heard that El Nido and Cebu are gorgeous as well. This will probably end up being the only beach trip we take this summer, so I am glad it was at the most perfect beach I could have asked for.  Also, Lauren’s guyabano smoothie was delicious.

The Heirloom Rice Project

For work last week, I traveled to the province of Sorsogon in the Bicol region of Luzon for a national agriculture and agrifishery festival. We went to this southern region of Luzon to spread the word about the Heirloom Rice Project that the DA and IRRI are working on together. This project aims to help farmers continue traditional rice growing practices in order to preserve the local tradition and ensure this rice with naturally increased nutrient content continues to be produced.  Many regions have their signature brown rice varieties that are a part of their community’s history, and a lot of them are pigmented varieties with higher nutrient and antioxidant content.  Some farmers in the Cordillera region where heirloom rice is farmed have started growing alternate rice varieties that grow faster so that they can make more profit. While these farmers are switching to fast-growing varieties because they need the money for their families, it is sad for many of them to see their traditional crops and community farming practices in decline. The youth there are not as interested in running their families farms as in the past, and the tradition of using nearly all of the rice harvest for family consumption has shifted to a practice of growing as much rice as possible to instead try to earn more money.  Aside from a break with local traditions, it is also unfortunate that less of the heirloom rice is being farmed because the faster growing varieties can be less nutritious with their higher starch content and glycemic index.  With all of this in mind, there are a number of initiatives to try to keep the heirloom rice farming practices alive.

One of the things this is team trying to help them with is obtaining a geographic indicator for their local rice varieties. The Cordillera region’s high elevation terraces make a suitable growing environment for their special rice. When other people try to produce their own rice and market it as an heirloom variety for a lower price, it hurts the true heirloom rice farmers because they cannot make a profit anymore. Even if farmers from other places had the same exact heirloom rice seeds, the rice would not be able to thrive the same way, and it would not be the same quality of heirloom rice.  The Heirloom Rice Project team at IRRI aims to go into the farming communities and ask the farmers what problems they observe in their rice fields, and what they are in need of the most to keep planting heirloom rice.  There is an emphasis on not coming into their communities and trying to tell them how they ought to fix their problems.  Many people are already wary of outsiders trying to help them because they have been taken advantage of in the past. There is an overall problem with water availability and erosion of the mountainside terraces, as seen in the picture above. Currently, people are having issues with loss and contamination of rice during the post- harvest processing, so technologies have been introduced to them such as a “solar bubble dryer” which uses a solar panel, a car battery, and a giant windowed tarp bag to keep air circulating around the rice, and keep pests from eating and contaminating it while it dries in the sun.  Several drying and processing machines have been distributed to help speed up the production of heirloom rice by making the post-harvest processes quicker instead of making alternate crop variety choices.  These implementations are improving the safety of their rice, as well as encouraging the continued production of heirloom varieties.

To help spread the word about the value of heirloom rice, we set up a booth at the 75th annual FPAAA national conference and agriculture festival at Sorsogon State College among many other groups advertising scientific equipment, food research, and local food products. Our booth displayed examples of a few varieties of heirloom rice from each of four different provinces in the Cordillera region that the project is focusing on right now; Kalinga, Ifugao, Mtn. Province, and Benguet. We also displayed the vacuum packaging and moisture-free ways the rice needs to be stored for longer shelf life, posters showing a lot of the data that has already been collected on this project, and pictures of food dishes that can be prepared using the heirloom rice along with their recipes.  The two other interns on this project and I worked at the booth answering questions.  We got to talk to a lot of local students at Sorsogon State College, attend a talk about scientific writing, and hear a lecture that our supervisor gave on the Heirloom Rice Project’s benefits to nutrition.  I had a fun time meeting local people, trying some local foods like pili nuts, tamarind balls, and seaweed pasta, and spreading the word about the Heirloom Rice Project.

Taal Trek

On Saturday the 23rd, all of the IRRI IWU students, plus some from other sites went on a day trip to Tagaytay to see Taal Volcano. There is a lake on the Philippine island of Luzon that has its own island inside it. On this island is Taal volcano, and inside the crater of Taal is another lake! We started off with a boat ride across the lake in small brightly painted boats and saw lots of water hibiscuses. The driver of the boat played dance remixes of 80’s pop songs, so we had a good time. Once we got to the island with the volcano, we met our tour guide who would hike the trail up to the crater of Taal with us. It was a hot day and several people in our group had a hearty breakfast of milky flakes before the climb. The trail was rocky and steep, and the skinny paths were well-worn by horses. Once we got to a flat area for a rest, we could see the beautiful view of the lake we had crossed way out beyond the trees.  A lot of people were tired already, but the tour guide, Ate Regie, continued to lead the way quickly and effortlessly. I tried to climb up through the rocks, placing my feet in the same spots as the guide so I could keep up. A lot of the trail was shaded by trees, but some parts were out in the blazing hot sun.  After climbing most of the way up, we reached a long stretch of steep trail in the sun.  We powered through it and the view we met at the top was well worth the hike.  The crater was filled with swirls of colored water in blue and green shades.  After getting plenty of pictures, the tour guide practically ran down the mountain with us. We were all exhausted and went to finally get food at a local restaurant even though we were all covered in dirt. To finish off the trip, we made a stop at the Puzzle Mansion. This is a museum displaying hundreds of puzzles all made by the same woman.  The museum apparently holds the 1st, second, and 3rd biggest finished puzzles in the world, and they were all completed by this one woman, the “Puzzle Queen.” We found the attraction online and didn’t know what to expect, but we were pleasantly surprised how cool it was. I am looking forward to more travels both with friends and as a part of my internship!

Hiking Mt. Makiling

For my first weekend in the Philippines, all five of the IWU students plus another friend we met here all went to the Makiling Botanic Gardens at the UPLB college of Forestry and Natural Resources. The gardens and trails have an amazing amount of plant diversity, and we saw lots of new bugs and lizards. Some of the bugs had a square back that looked like a bright painting with mixed colors like pink, yellow, blue, and red. Since I was usually hiking in the front, I got to see a lot of lizards, some more than a foot long, before they ran away from the path. That, and I got a few face-fulls of spider web. I wanted to take a picture of every new cool plant I saw, but there would have been many dozens of pictures that I don’t know what I would do with. At least we got lots of sweaty selfies (swealfies) of ourselves. After a few hours of hiking, we went to the store to get drinks because everyone ran out of water. I tried mangosteen juice, and weirdly enough, we all agreed that it tastes a bit like spaghetti-o’s. The next night, we decided to check out an Italian restaurant in Los Banos that had been recommended to us by last year’s interns. I still prefer Olive Garden, but it was a nice break from rice! (Don’t get me wrong, rice is delicious) Overall, it was a nice relaxing weekend before my first week of work on the IRRI campus!

First Day at Banaue, Ifugao

On the first full day in the Philippines, all of the IWU Freeman Asia students in the country got together at a hotel near the University of the Philippines, Los Banos (UPLB) campus, and had an orientation.  We were taught a bit about Philippine culture and learned some useful phrases in Tagalog. We learned that Filipinos value hospitality, family, and hard work. This orientation was a great opportunity to meet some of our contacts in the Philippines, and become a little bit more acquainted with what to expect.

We started off our second full day with a tour of IRRI. We got to see the rice health inspection labs, the freezer the rice is stored in to dry out, and the genebank. We even got to learn and try different ways to prepare the field for planting, and then planted some rice.  After orientation, three other interns and I boarded a van and set off on the 14 hour trip to the rice terraces of Banaue, Ifugao. The trip was only supposed to take around 10 hours, but from my newfound experience, traffic is usually very heavy in the Philippines. On our long winding drive up to Banaue at sunrise, there were beautiful views of rice fields and terraces and a mix of happy and sad sights of families going about their daily tasks. When we got to the hotel we would be staying at, our supervisor went to a meeting with other department of health professionals, and we were taken to visit some local farmers and ask them about a variety of things such as their thoughts on the Heirloom Rice Project that IRRI has been helping with for years. We wanted to know whether they thought the project had been helping their community or not and talk to them about the importance to them to preserve these traditional varieties of rice their families have been growing for centuries.

After talking to one farmer for a while, his wife brought out coffee for all of us. It was such a nice gesture and showed the cultural spirit of hospitality. Another farmer we visited was a woman whose house was a short hike from the road. The path opened up to a gorgeous view of hers and others rice fields as shown in the picture above. While we were talking to her with some help from a translator, her grandsons were running around playing outside and chickens and dogs were running around with them. She talked about how it used to be the case that each family would only farm enough rice for their own family to eat, but over the years there has been more of an emphasis on growing as much rice as possible to make a profit. Also, I found out that families used to go out and catch animals in their rice fields like fish and snakes for food, but now people more often go out and buy prepackaged food for cheap.

Learning a little bit about the lives of the farmers and seeing the poverty that so many of the people live in helped me to better understand why keeping the local tradition of growing heirloom rice unique to that region is so important to many farmers, yet so difficult for other farmers to do when they are struggling to make money.