Drawing a Map of the World

Oh, how I miss Rice Paddies...

So, I really like to make maps. 

Ever since I was a kid, I would doodle maps of random made-up countries in my spare time, and make full world maps of places in my head. So when I actually decided I was going to be spending the next year in the Philippines, one of the first things I did was to look at maps of the country, and draw one of my own as a way of situating myself. It was sort of a way to make the whole thing seem a little more real. I drew the first map in the notebook I was using to learn Tagalog, and I don't think it came out half bad for a quick sketch: 

It was a useful thing for me to do, as I suddenly had a better visualization of the country, and where I would actually be. It was also good for me, as I'll basically be making maps the whole time that I'm there.

Maybe I should back up a little bit. 

So why am I actually going to the Philippines? The (long) answer to that goes back to my junior year at Middlebury College, when I took part in a traveling study abroad program to Vietnam, Morocco, and Bolivia. Around this time was when I was starting to think more about the terrifying prospect of what I was going to do once I got out of college. I was realizing that my true passion lay somewhere in international development, not diplomacy and international relations as I had previously thought. On that study abroad program, I happened to have a wonderful professor who specialized in the field of disaster risk management. After talking with her about the field and doing some of my own reading, and after a really great internship at the World Bank, I decided that disaster risk management was ultimately what I wanted to focus on.

This is going to sound a little weird and/or macabre, but I've always been fascinated by natural hazards. I would memorize the names of all the hurricanes each hurricane season, and most of my Wikipedia history consists of research on random volcanos or earthquakes. But beyond the actual hazards, I think that the study of vulnerability to hazards encompasses so many other things I'm passionate about studying- economics, socioeconomic inequality, gender, ethnicity, environmental degradation, etc. I won't bore my (hypothetical) audience with any more descriptions of how cool I think disaster risk management is- I think you get the point. 

My senior year at Middlebury, I began looking into various possibilities for after graduation, and ultimately decided to apply for a Fulbright fellowship, something I've wanted to do for a very long time. I knew I didn't want to go right back to school, and I also knew that I loved doing field research abroad and wanted to do more of it. Southeast Asia has always been fascinating to me, and I fell in love with the region during my time studying abroad in Vietnam. The only problem was that, while I had a great deal of contacts in Latin America, a region I've spent a great deal of time in, but knew almost no-one in Asia. I did lots of frantic emailing a couple of weeks before the application deadline, and ultimately found that my professor from study abroad had done research in the Philippines and was able to hook me up with a friend of hers who was a professor there. Since the hardest part of the Fulbright application for me was finding an academic advisor in-country, that cinched the deal. I worked with my advisor, and banged out a proposal to do a research project on differentiated vulnerability to natural disasters, and working on alternative forms of disaster mapping (I'll explain more about my research plans once I've actually spoken with my advisor and figured out what I'm doing).  Six months later, I learned that, against all odds, I had actually been accepted as a Fulbright scholar! In all honesty, I still have no idea how I tricked the Fulbright Commission into thinking that was a good idea.

Unlike most people, I started out my application knowing what I wanted to study, but not where I wanted to do it. Therefore, as I was drawing my map of the Philippines, I realized that, in many ways, it was a country I knew almost nothing about. I knew it had been a Spanish colony for a really long time, I knew parts of the country were devastated by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, and I knew it had a lot of volcanoes. Oh, and I also knew the basic grammar of a Spanish creole language spoken near Manila, because I did a research project on it once in my linguistics class. But beyond that, I was embarrassingly ignorant about the country I was about to spend a year in. 

So, over this past summer, I've spent as much time as I could reading about the Philippines and its culture, history and geography. I won't try and list everything I learned here, because that would take too long and also because I'm probably totally wrong about some parts of it and I don't want to make more of a fool out of myself than necessary. However, I will share a couple of main things I've picked up in all my reading, that I think are particularly interesting and might define a lot of what my experience is there:

• The Philippines is big. Thanks to our stupid map projections, we tend to view the US as way bigger than it really is, and countries closer to the equator as way smaller. But in reality, if you were to place the southernmost point of the Philippines in San Diego, the northernmost islands would be up around Seattle. And there's not a convenient way of getting from north to south, because it's all. Islands. (Some other fun facts from the website I used to find the size comparison: if I were to live in the Philippines, I would apparently die 7 years sooner and make 91% less money. But on the other hand, I'd spend 98% less on health care, and be 84% less likely to be in prison. So there's that.)

• The Philippines was colonized a lot. Ferdinand Magellan was the first European to set foot in the Philippines (though that [didn't go very well for him]), and over the next century the archipelago was colonized by Spain back when it really went on a big "conquer countries and take their resources" kick. It was a Spanish colony for 300 years, until an independence movement started around the turn of the 20th century. The USA intervened in favor of the Filipino independence forces, helping them to drive out the Spanish, then promptly turned around and conquered it for itself (and here we were taught that the US was never a colonial power...). It was an American colony for another 50 years, until it was finally allowed independence in 195x. Towards the end of that period, it was briefly taken over and ruled by Japan, before the USA won it back in World War 2. American, Spanish and Japanese are the three cultures I'm most familiar with at this point, so I'd like to think that this might give me a leg up in understanding the country. However, I also see how it makes me seem even more colonial/imperialist than I ordinarily would, which is saying something. 

• The Philippines is really diverse. Before Spanish colonization, there was really no unified Philippine nation or culture- instead it was a patchwork of city-states and chiefdoms particularly influenced by Indonesia and China. At the time of colonization, Islam was spreading through the archipelago, beginning in the southernmost island of Mindanao. It would probably be a Muslim-majority country now if Spain had come much later, but instead the vast majority of the population is Roman Catholic- it's arguably one of the most Catholic countries in the world. However, there are still a number of Muslim-majority regions in Mindanao today, which were centers of resistance to colonization, and today are an independent administrative region. There's also a fairly powerful separatist movement based in the area, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (decent name, very unfortunate acronym).  The official languages are Filipino (basically Tagalog with a couple alterations) and English, but there are around 180 languages spoken throughout the country, probably something to do with being entirely composed of islands. 

• It has a troubled political past. After independence, there were a number of decent democratically elected presidents, but in the 1970s and 1980s, they were ruled by Ferdinand Marcos, whose reign was one of political repression and kleptocracy. Imelda Marcos, the first lady, is mostly famous for her collection of over 2,000 absurdly expensive shoes. Other wacky exploits of the Marcos' include building an entirely new palace to impress the pope (he was not impressed]), and kicking The Beatles out of the country when they refused to give a private performance for the first lady. Marcos was tight with the Reagan Administration, so there was very little international motivation to do much about the regime, and Ninoy Aquino, the main opposition to the president, was shot when he dared to return to the country. That provided to be the motivation for a popular revolution, the People Power revolution, which toppled the regime and installed Corazon Aquino, Ninoy Aquino's widow, as the democratically elected leader. Unfortunately, even since then the country has been plagued by corruption and government ineffectiveness- one of the recent presidents is currently evading jail time for corruption charges, and the current leader, the Aquinos' son, doesn't seem to have greatly improved the situation. This in particular is something I'll have to learn a lot more about when I get to the country.

The Philippines is really $%&*ing far away from Michigan. I've written this entire blog post on the plane from Detroit to Tokyo, as well as watching three feature-length movies, and I still have 8 hours until I arrive in Manila.

On the plane ride over, I also drew another map with random tidbits of information I've gleaned over a summer of reading about the country. It's most likely completely inaccurate, but I hope to be able to finish up the year with far more knowledge of the Philippines than what's shown here: 

At the time of posting, I've been in the Philippines for about a day- I'll have another entry up once I've been here long enough to actually have thoughts about the country beyond slight existential dread. I welcome comments or questions, as always!

DISCLAIMER: This is a personal blog, and does not in any way represent the views of the US Department of State or the Fulbright Commission. I encourage readers to reach out with any complaints or inaccuracies.