Natures Cottage

UP, aming minamahal.
Good ole oble. I study at the University of the Philippines. My course is major in social anthropology, minor in poli sci. I just started tho, because I shifted course. My original course was educ, – I do still intend to take educ units.

I just got back from classes a few minutes ago. My Pol Sci 14 teacher is a terror! Or at least he is quite intimidating. He’s huge, talks real fast, hits the board, the table, the chairs, talks real loud- as if almost yelling, and even just the way he looks at people is kinda scary, but at least I know he’s a genuine male specie! I don’t mean to offend anyone, but sometimes I wonder who’s truly male and who isn’t. Being of the supposed “female” specie, of course the males are quite intriguing. Speaking of intriguing, the “foreign language syndrome” is quite a story! Do check out these women who just woke up one day with a different accent!

In the meantime, kita kita nalang sa lobby!

I just started reading the “Chinese System of Food Cures, Prevention & Remedies” by Henry C. Lu today. Here are some interesting excerpts from the book:

Five Flavors of Food
The five flavors of food include pungent (acrid), sweet, sour, bitter, and salty.

Pungent foods include green onion, chives, cloves, parsley, and coriander.
Sweet foods include sugar, cherry, chestnut, and banana.
Sour foods include lemon, pear, plum, and mango.
Bitter foods include hops, lettuce, radish leaf, and vinegar (I list vinegar as bitter because the Chinese call vinegar “bitter wine”. Vinegar tastes both sour and bitter; it is common for some foods to have two simultaneous flavors.)
Salty foods include salt, kept, and seaweed.

The flavors of food are important in Chinese diet, because different flavors have their respective important effects upon the internal organs. Food that have a pungent flavor can act on the lungs and large intestine; foods with a sweet flavor on the stomach and spleen; with sour flavor on the liver and gall bladder; with a bitter flavor on the heart and small intestine; foods that have a salty flavor can act on the kidneys and bladder.

At the beginning, some foods with obvious flavors found to act on some internal organs perform specific actions in the human body. The basic relationships between flavors and internal organs and the actions are studied and analyzed by a process in science called the inductive method. As time goes on, other foods whose flavors are more difficult to determine may be found capable of active upon some internal organs and performing some specific actions.

In general, the common action of foods in regard to their flavors are as follows:

Pungent foods (ginger, green onion, and peppermint) can induce perspiration and promote energy circulation.

Sweet foods (honey, sugar, and watermelon) can slow down the acute symptoms and neutralize the toxic effects of other foods.

Sour foods (lemon and plum) can obstruct the movements, and are useful, therefore, in checking diarrhea and excessive perspiration.

Bitter foods, reduce body heat, dry body fluids, and induce diarrhea (which is why many Chinese herbs recommended to reduce fever and induce diarrhea taste bitter)

Salty foods (kelp and seaweed) can soften hardness, which explains their usefulness in treating tuberculosis of the lymph nodes and other symptoms involving the hardening of muscles or glands.

Mmm… it’s nearly been exactly a year since I went to China. I loved the place we went to, and the food! I never ate so much street food in my life. If only I hadn’t accidentally deleted all the pictures we took of our trip. :’( I just have a few left now.

This was taken in La Union, Philippines, soon after one of the big typhoons hit the area.

First of all, congratulations, President-elect Obama! I usually follow the US elections quite closely, but this year I only just started following the election news a few days before the election itself. I was not really eagerly wishing and praying either one would win. I do not exactly fancy Palin, although I am a republican, or maybe I should just start saying I’m an independent. Anyhow, Obama has made history, and I hope the best for him during his term(s).

Now for my day- I just finished enrolling this morning. The second semester starts next week. Yay. I love learning, but sometimes it is hard to keep up with all the different responsibilities, and some teachers are just down right terrors.

During the semester break I took advantage of the extra time I had to work on the projects I am working on. I come from a middle class family with an upper class background. My dad has done community service for the past 30+ years or so, and I think it’s rubbed off on me. I love working with people and know community service is definitely very fulfilling. As the old saying goes, “Good is the man who strives to do his best. Honorable is the man who lives not just for himself, but for others. Glorious is he who lives for the Lord, dedicated to His cause.” Not that I am saying I’m honorable or anything.

Yesterday, it was in our headlines that the Philippines is top 5 in the world for hunger. Knowing that, it is not surprising to know that there is a very high amount of malnourished people in the country. Just in the little elementary school that I volunteered my community service hours for school last semester, over 90% of the children are malnourished. The irony of it all is that these people live in farms and are farmers! Unfortunately the consumerism attitude has greatly influenced these people, and our politicians are no help either. Instead of growing food and eating it, they grow food and sell everything they grow then buy some “goods” wrapped in plastic from the store. What was common knowledge in the past has now been forgotten. People no longer know the herbs to take as medicine, nor do they know the basic foods to eat to keep their bodies strong and healthy. It is this that I want to change. I would like to make it so that my fellow people can have the basic needs and rights that all living beings deserve – at least a full belly, good health, and of course, real education. I have started out outlining my plans and am working with the mayor and other government officials and a big group of my friends and fellow volunteers to get this project to lessen hunger (and hopefully eliminate it) going. After all, how painful and difficult is it actually to reach out and help a fellow human being? A single smile of thanks from someone else can erase all personal sacrifices in such work.

With that, I leave you with some pictures. The first one is one is a picture of rice terraces, as you can see, that my friends took during our hike up to a beautiful waterfall I’ll post about tomorrow. The second one is a nice little river that is just about 200 meters away from the elementary school I teach in. The kids brought me there during their school break the other day, when I was walking around their school taking pictures. The following picture is a picture of the great garbage control system they’ve got going. I especially like how all the plastics and non-degradable wastes are thrown as near the water as possible. (In all the schools I’ve been to the situation is the same) And finally, pictures of my 1st grade students. Just look at those smiles! One thing I really like about working in the rural if not- provincial areas, and with children like these guys is that despite the fact that they’ve hardly got anything, their eyes seem to retain a clarity and the bright freshness like that of cool winds blowing through shady bamboo, and they are definitely much quicker to smile than city folk. As you can see tho, they need some major dental help. That’s another project I’d like to do to help the people around here.

Who would have thought..

Killers In Paradise

The tropics are home to the world’s most venomous creatures-jellyfish with 4 brains, 24 eyes and stingers that can kill you in a minute flat

The sky is an immense bowl of blue and the boiling-hot sun speckles the flat green waters gold as our boat edges out of Port Douglas, Australia, just north of the tropical resort town of Cairns. On board, tourists from around the world are heading for the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest natural structure—stretching for 1,400 miles along the continent’s northeastern coastline.

After a 90-minute journey, we arrive at Opal Reef, a chunk of the Great Barrier Reef five miles long and three miles wide, where frothy white waves break gently over shadowy outcrops of coral as big as houses. We throw on our snorkeling gear and slip quickly into the water, drifting over the shallow reef facedown, entranced by the multihued coral—some resembling giant brains, others massed like stag horns and mammoth fans—and the neon-colored small fish that dart in and out. Not one of the crew members has bothered to warn us that Opal Reef is where one of the planet’s deadliest creatures killed a visitor three years earlier.

Robert King, 44, from Columbus, Ohio, was snorkeling over the same underwater landscape when he felt a mild sting on his chest and came back onto the boat. Within 25 minutes his face flushed tomato-red as severe pain gripped his stomach, chest and back muscles. The skipper radioed for a medevac chopper, whose crew injected King with a massive dose of pethidine, an opiate-like painkiller, then winched him from the boat and rushed him to Cairns.

By the time he was wheeled into the emergency ward at CairnsBaseHospital, King’s speech was slurred. He was put on a ventilator, as doctors pumped him full of painkillers while racing to save his life. A local zoologist, Jamie Seymour, was called in to take a scraping of the sting site. While he worked, Seymour noticed that King’s blood pressure was spiking dramatically. King lost consciousness; then, Seymour says, “an artery or vein in his brain blew.” Blood flooded King’s brain tissues, and two days later he died.

After analyzing the shape and size of the stinging cells, which were about an inch long, Seymour blamed King’s death on a nearly transparent jellyfish the size of a thumbnail. Covered from the top of its head to the tip of its four tentacles with millions of microscopic spring-loaded harpoons filled with venom, it’s one of at least ten related species of small jellyfish whose sting can plunge victims into what doctors call the Irukandji syndrome. “The symptoms overwhelm you,” says Seymour, 40, who himself was stung by an irukandji on the lip, the only part of his body uncovered as he scuba-dived looking for specimens near an island off Cairns in late 2003. “On a pain scale of 1 to 10, it rated between 15 and 20,” he says, describing the vomiting, the cramps and the feeling of panic. “I was convinced I was going to die.” But he was lucky; not all species of irukandji administer fatal stings, and he recovered within a day.

So far, only King’s death—and perhaps that three months earlier of an Englishman, 58-year-old Richard Jordan, farther south on the Great Barrier Reef—can be attributed to irukandji venom, but Seymour cites research suggesting that because the symptoms may resemble strokes or decompression sickness, and can lead to drowning, countless more swimmers have probably fallen victim to Irukandji syndrome in offshore waters throughout the tropics. Stings from the irukandji species who live in waters closer to shore are rarely fatal but are still excruciatingly painful: for centuries before the tiny jellies were identified as the culprit, the local Aborigines at Cairns, the Irukandji tribe, knew that to swim in the shallows in the rainy season, from November to May, was to risk getting stung, although they didn’t know by what.

More ominously for residents of North America, doctors at the U.S. Army Special Forces Underwater Operations School at Key West, Florida, have treated military divers suffering from symptoms similar to the syndrome; U.S. Navy divers have seen Irukandji-like jellyfish in the waters off Cuba’s GuantánamoBay; swimmers have been badly stung in Hawaii; and the Gulf of Mexico and the adjoining southern U.S. Atlantic coastline have seen an increase in people being sickened by stings that almost certainly come from an irukandji or a related jellyfish.

Most jellyfish are passive; they drift up and down in the water column, or are pulled to and fro by the tides and winds. They float through the oceans devouring tiny fish and microscopic creatures that bumble into their tentacles, and are no threat to humans.

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Heres the new pic of the day. It’s a cabbage tree. Ever heard of that? they’re pretty cool trees.

Food, (pun not intended) is an all devouring topic and issue in our world today. Time has a very interesting photo gallery of what people from around the world eat. I posted some of those pictures here. It’s interesting that my diet is most similar to the people from Shingkhey Village- wherever that may be.

Here in the Philippines, as of the news report the other day, hunger has gone up by 18.74 percent. It is too bad that people have become so dependent on what has been referred to time and time again as the “colonial mentality”, and so they starve. In a tropical country like the Philippines, almost all the weeds that grow quite abundantly around are edible. Of course it is not just ignorance that has brought about hunger in my country, but also the corruption of our leaders. Of course the next question will be – “Then who put them in power?” And so it goes, the endless cycle.

In my own little ways I work to help educate the Filipinos about their previous way of life, when food that grew around them would be eaten, and not sold and exchanged for store bought foods wrapped in plastic or packed in cans.

What I find most ironic however, is that it seems sometimes, that the bigger problem in our planet is obesity and weight control rather than hunger! For the most part, there seem to be more people running around and trying to lose weight rather than gain weight. Then again, I suppose that is a good thing… but still points down to very basic yet deeper problems/questions that none of our educational systems tackle or even dare go near.

I went to Onemana today, a really nice little beach. It’s a perfect temperature out there lately.

I got a few nice pics. I like the artey little pics of nature if you can’t tell already.My favorite time of the day to go for a walk on the beach is when the sun is going down into the ocean. Unless it’s windy then I’ll stay inside.

It’s a very mode of goodness time to be with nature. Makes me feel good