It's been a week since I arrived in Manila. The city is hard to describe and much of it depends on my mood. It would suffice to say that I'm undergoing severe culture shock. The food, the people , the place. It's been difficult trying to deal with living with another family and eating food that I'm not used to. Have been treated like a queen, but would rather not. And the daily diet consists of nothing less than eggs, shrimp, mussels, oysters. Still, I eat only bitefuls. There are so many people living in a single space, I feel encroached upon all the time, which is an irony, since I am the one encroaching on their space.
Field work is hard work. Hard because there are so many research disciplines that you want to keep to but simply cannot. It's impossible. There is no map of the place where I live because squatters are raised and razed within a day; no demographic information of the people who live here, because some are legally here, some are not. I visited a family of 7 tday: 2 adults and 5 kids, living within a space that's about 6 x 8 feet. There's that sense of guilt as I interview them, beacuse all I can think about is how my $70 pair of shoes will feed this one family very well for a month.