Sorry I have not posted in a couple of weeks; I have been very busy and gotten quite behind on my blog. I’ve been working, traveling, attending a workshop, skyping, and shopping. I have a lot of things I want to blog about, so I will try to get all the posts up this week – many updates to come!

My first update is from last weekend. Chernor, my Kroc classmate and roommate, was out in the field and I had a lot of time to myself. So I used the time alone to do what I have been wanting to do for a few weeks now, that is, I journeyed out into the city to learn my way around. I just wanted to walk and walk and learn all the streets. My dad calls himself the “human map,” because he is amazingly good with directions. And I think I definitely picked up some of those genes. When I get to a new place the hardest thing for me is not knowing my way around. I remember crying in frustration when I would get lost driving clients around in Minneapolis when I first moved there. So whenever I go somewhere new in Davao I try to follow where we are going and memorize the roads and neighborhoods. But being in the passenger seat hasn’t really helped me learn my way around; I needed to walk the city.

So I took my lonely planet book, which had a map of downtown and walked from the City Museum, to People’s Park, to a tourist shopping area, to the outskirts of Chinatown, then to Torres St. for dinner. I essentially walked around the core downtown area. And I definitely don’t have everything down yet, but I have much better bearings for the area and I’ve figured out how to take a few different jeepneys. I noticed I felt quite empowered by having been able to walk around and find my way. I had a new sense of the city and my place in it. I didn’t feel such a stranger. Here are some pictures of where I went. First the City Museum, then People's Park, then Chinatown. Of course, I didn't bring my own camera because I forgot, so I found these online:

Taken from: http://www.yousaytoo.com/museo-dabawenyo/318178

Taken from: http://tagadavao.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/durian-dome-at-peoples-park-davao/

Taken from: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=269391&page=47

As the day ended I thought back to the women and men I worked with in Minnesota, they were all trafficking/domestic violence victims. Most of them didn’t speak English, had few relations in the Twin Cities, if any, were undocumented, and had few possessions or little money to their name. Sometimes, as a completely untrained case worker, I wonder if I really did much to help them. I realize how much more I could have done with a degree in social work. But walking around the city, I felt as though I got a small taste of what my clients went through. I am in a place where I don’t know the local language, the customs, food, and people. Most everything is different. I often feel quite alone. Just knowing one new thing about this place – a few streets – made me feel just a little bit stronger and less lost. This little walk around the city reaffirmed my belief that even if one isn’t able to make great, worldwide changes in their lifetime, the small changes, small bits of help we offer to our fellow humans can be just as powerful and life changing as these big efforts. Here is one of my favorite quotes from writer, David James Duncan, who can express this point better than me:

“When small things are done with love it’s not a flawed you or me who does them, its love. I have no faith in any political party, left, right, or centrist. I have boundless faith in love. In keeping with this faith, the only spiritually responsible way I know to be a citizen, artist, or activist, in these strange times is by giving little or no thought to ‘great things’ such as saving the planet, achieving world peace, or stopping neocon greed. Great things tend to be undoable things. Whereas small things, lovingly done, are always within our reach.”