Leyte - Part Two

Leyte is where Imelda Marcos hails from, and as a gift she built the Santo Nino shrine, a chapel/palace that nobody ever stayed in or slept in. It’s more a showcase for her collections. There are thirteen guest rooms, each with a different regional or traditional theme, each with some books and photographs of hers, and each with a diorama depicting some aspect of her life or her projects. Downstairs there is a big salon and a big dining room. Upstairs there is an even bigger salon and a bigger dining room, and big bedrooms for each member of the Marcos family and for the bodyguard. It was very interesting – opulent furnishings and beautiful things.

I went to a local café, bought iced coffee and a muffin, and read the Sunday paper – what a treat! I then took a walk around the waterfront – Tacloban is on a peninsula and I went from the gulf side to the wharf side, past some government buildings and some parks. And then I took a tricycle, jeepney and tricycle to Red Beach, site of MacArthur’s return. This wasn’t the purpose of the trip, but I am happy to have seen both the spot from which he said, “I shall return,” and now the one to which he returned! He landed on October 20, 1944 – almost sixty-five years to the day. It’s hard for me to imagine war – and to contrast that with being there the day after Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The landing spot is marked with a larger-than-life sculpture of MacArthur and others wading ashore. I walked over to the beach, too – no sugar-white sand and no surf to speak of – but I didn’t feel compelled to go in the water; the good news is that I didn’t see a lot of trash, either! I had the tricyle take me over to a hill where there had been a lot of fighting; now there’s a small Japanese memorial. And then it was time to go back! The taxi driver on the way home from the Manila airport told me that he was a soldier in Iraq, wounded in the head and the side, driving a taxi while he recovers enough to go back and fight some more. He needs the money to put his children through college. That made me think about WWII again and the peaceful island that saw bloody battles and all of those photographs I saw. In another sixty-five years, will there be peace? WWII, War in Iraq, Peace Prize, Peace Corps.

On another note, I am able to follow and listen to some of the baseball playoffs. Is it my imagination, or have there been more first-round sweeps since I left for the Peace Corps than there were before? I don’t like sweeps – I like as much baseball as possible! It’s hard to think about fall temperatures and even winter temperatures there – it’s just as hot here now as it was when I got here (and it might have been hotter in Leyte than it has been in Manila!).

One more note – the PCVs in Guinea were evacuated to Mali, and Turkmenistan refused to accept volunteers this year – the day before they were scheduled to get on the plane to go there. There’s a lot of instability in the world….