Yvanovich.com Family Portal

Well, I guess the reality finally sank in. Life in the Philippines is hard! When Anthony and I first arrived we loved everything, right down to the crazy jeepney rides. We thought we had it made. We have been living with our host family for one week now and life has progressively gotten worse. Everytime we go out, people stare. I know we stick out but jeez! Enough is enough! Language lesson are hard and frustrating. Our host family does not speak any English so we have to communicate in Tagalog. We have only been learning it for a week, so you can imagine what are conversations are like. " What is your name?", "I like rice", "We are going to the market." Hardly fluid and sequential. We are both starting to get very homesick. We both miss the comforts of home and our families more than we thought we would. However, our determination is still strong! We desperatly want to make this work and to have the full experience of being in the Peace Corps. Our minds are here in the Philippines but our hearts are still in the US.

Hello Everyone!
I have a feeling yvanovich.com is going to become my personal "blog"! Things here are going well. Anthony and I are starting to get homesick though. We are really missing our families and friends. We were taught how to hand wash our clothes the other day. Let me tell you, this is NOT an easy process. First, you sort out all the clothes by colors in different buckets. Then you wash each bucket (we had five of them) in plain water. It was amazing how much dirt came out of the clothes. Then you dump the dirty water and fill the buckets with clean water and detergent. Then you scrub the clothes, and I mean scrub!, with your hands. They taught us to use our wrists to srub the clothes against, so by the time you are done scrubing, our wrists are sore and bright red. Also, you use a board and a brush and brush the pants. By this time about 2 hours has passed and we are sweating hot! The clothes need to be rinsed too. Every single item is rinsed in three different buckets with more hand scrubbing. Finally, finally!, they are ready to hang on the line. I never really realized how heavy wet clothes are until I started hand washing. Man, I miss washing machines. In the Philippines, appearnace is everything, so all clothes are ironed and pressed. Its a full day activity just to wash clothes!
Our language lessons are coming along. We are starting to make simple sentences. Our host family does not speak English but we are now able to tell them "We like rice" or "We are going to town". We have recieved some letters and pictures. They were the best presents I think we have ever recieved. A letter from home, saying the simplest thing, can really make our day. We love all of you and are constantly thinking of you! Keep us in your thoughts.
With love,
Katie and Anthony

Hello everyone! Katie and I are doing well, in case anyone was worried. I don't know if you knew this but the Philippines is HOT! Well not exactly hot, but extremely humid! Today it's 86 degrees and 74% humidity. We are living in the city of Santa Cruz for the next 10 weeks. You can check our weather out. Our host family is very nice and have a very modern home. We have a flush toilet and a shower! We consider ourselves very fortunate to get such a nice home.
Training has been a tough process. We do language lessons for four hours a day. Our tagalog is comming along well, but we are still having funny miscommunications. Last night we were talking with our host mom and she asked us. "Gusto kaya amin bahay?" Katie and I thought it meant "Do you like to pray in the house?" We tried and tried to figure it out, we put our hands together and tried to mimic praying, and our host mom laughed and laughed. I went up stairs and looked in the tagalog-english dictionary and amin, means "our". Later that night, I also commented incorrectly, "I like to eat your house" in tagalog, which caused even more laughing. Oh well.
After language lessons, we usually do an activity in the community. This week we have been interviewing community members about schools. We are finding out a lot of information about the differences about Filipino schools and Amercian Schools. For example, schools here do not have 7th and 8th grade, instead the go straight to highschool. Then end result is that they graduated from highschool two years earlier. This causes their masters degrees to be equivilent to our bachelor's.
Word on the street is that we get to find out our permanant placements next week, I'll keep everyone informed. Babay!

Katie and I made it safely to the Philippines and are having a good time. Peace corps put us up in a really nice resort that i would recommend to anyone. We have been going through a lot of classes and have begun our vaccine regiment. It was a little crazy for katie having to get two shots, but she handled it extremely well. Unfortunately, we still have a few more shots to go.

We are doing really well and are adjusting well to the heat. They have just started their summer season here so it is expected to get much hotter. I am just going to consider the time I spent in Florida growing up training for the Peace Corps Philippines.

Katie and I went to the mall today duruing our free time. The mall is in Cevite, which is near Manila. The mall is something else, and extremely western. It's best attribute though is that it is air conditioned. :-)

I am running out of time at the internet cafe. Please send us emails, they are the best.

Hello all! Anthony and I have just finished our staging in Detroit. We leave tomorrow to embark on journey of a lifetime. This journey starts with a 19 hour and 25 minute plane ride! I wanted to thank everyone in our cheering squad. I can't tell you all how much it means to us to have the support and love from home. It makes this incredibly hard but rewarding experience just a little bit easier. Keep on cheering for us and know that we are thinking of you too. We will post again (hopefully soon!) from our new home, the Philippines!

Katie and I have arrived safely in Romulus, MI and have begun staging. It has been a crazy day beginning at 6:30am. To make matters worse, we only had 2 hours of sleep. Luckily once we reached the hotel, they had a room ready for us. We slept until we had to go to register officially for staging. We learned about the goals and mission of the Peace Corps as well as keeping ourselves safe. Everything is going well and we are having a good time. I don't know when the next time I'll get to post, but I will try to do it as often as I can. Wish us luck!

I added the Delicious Library link to the Popular Links block on the left. Don't bother opening this link with I.E. as it won't render it correctly due to I.E.'s non-standard CSS support. Mozilla, Firefox and Safari will display it correctly. This is a static view of our current library and will be updated periodically.

Yesterday I had to work from home because I was having a fence put in and had to be there just in case problems came up. Everything went smoothly and we now have fences on all sides of our yard that aren't falling apart. We also put in a gate on the other side of the yard, which should be nice, especially when doing yardwork in the front yard.

While I was home working, packages started arriving that I had ordered little while ago. A new iBook (one of the cute 12" jobs), an airport express, a new keyboard for the upstairs iMac whose old keyboard had been drenched in yerba mate and one of the arrow keys never came back to life and an iSight.

I transfered Delicious Library to the new iBook and now with the iSight attached to it, it is a portable scanning machine. Rather than bringing batches of items to the iMac, now we can bring the iBook to the location of the items that need to be entered.

The wireless networking was a bit of trouble to set up but I eventually figured it out and now we have an upstairs airport extreme and a downstairs airport express which are joined together using MDS.

Now that Joani has a new iBook, we need to figure out where to put the iMac that is currently living on our kitchen table. We also need to figure out what to do with the old G3 tower. It still functions, although is vastly underpowered for any modern Mac software. It doesn't even have OS X installed on it.

We bought a cute new server box for yvanovich.com. It is about 8" wide, 7" tall and 12" long. It houses an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor and a 300 gig drive. We combined two big old tower servers into this one small compact server. It was a lot of fun to shop at Fry's with Anthony for all the parts and then put them together. We found that the Hamilton Ave Fry's sucks compared to the one near 101 and 880. We had to return the CPU twice to the Hamilton Ave Fry's because of bent pins and when they ran out, we went to the other Fry's and not only did they have a good one but it was $20 cheaper. What's up with that? They also had a 400 gig drive, which I probably would have bought but we had already opened the 300 gig by this time. Once we had a good CPU, the system was assembled easily.
Shuttle makes great little barebones boxes, and the assembly manual was one of the best we've seen. The step by step instructions were clear and easy to follow. The only hiccup was that the box we got didn't have a video card so we had to use one from one of the other servers. This made it rather difficult to copy the information from the other server's hard disks to the new hard disk. In the end, we temporarily attached them to the new server and copied the information over (which was probably the fastest way to do it anyway).
We updated thje web server and mail server to more modern versions. We moved all the old information over, but some things are still a bit broken. At least e-mail is back on line and most of the main web pages are back. We'll get it all working eventually.