19 September 2005.

Ahh yet another day of rest for me. Let found a local gentlemen, Joel that speaks English fairly well and can take me around and show me the island of Leyte as well as a few of the outlying islands. This gentleman will be escorting me for a couple of days as we go visiting other towns and islands, though we will be using Hilongos as our base point. This works good for me and good for him as he lives here and has a family. He isn’t working at the time, though that is on purpose. His wife has a good job with the power company and earns the income. He stays home and takes care of his four children, tends to his house, and to his rice field. He says he is doing this as favor to Let, but there is the understanding that I will pay him, though he is very reluctant to discuss what I should pay him. He has quite a nice house especially for here where many of the housed are made from bamboo. His house I would say is about the size of the average home in the United States, or at least the homes I have lived in. To earn enough money to buy his property and build his house he worked in Taiwan as an electrical engineer for a phone company for three years. After that he and his wife felt that it was time for him to come home as family was more important than money, and they had enough money to do what the needed. He takes great pride in his house, having designed it himself and done much of the work to build it. He turns the lights on and says that he did the electrical wiring. Good enough for me, I’m impressed. His house is about 300 meters off one of the main highways on a dirt road, and perhaps another 500 meters from the main part of town and its surrounding houses. But oh what a difference it makes. The houses aren’t piled on top of each other, they each have there own plot of land, and you don’t have to listen to your neighbors TV. Not to mention that it’s just a whole lot quieter because there are no motorcycles buzzing by or the neighbors baby crying in your window. The level of trash and filth diminishes greatly in just that short distance to where it comes into view that this is a lush tropical island, something that sort of seems to be missing from the cities and towns. It rained the better part of today so I didn’t get out to do much, mostly spent the day at Jim’s house visiting with them. Joel came over and we worked out our plans for how we would travel, looking up places of interest, and looking at a map and seeing how we could put the two together to make the most of our trips. After that and settling on how we intended to arrange transportation Joel took off for the day. I didn’t do much after that mostly just bummed around Jims place and went back to the Lyra pension house at about 9:30. So far that’s my day, and now it has pretty much ended so I may watch a little TV and then go to sleep.