I am often bothered by the sight of a parent going about her business, followed by a small, screaming child who is being 100% ignored.

The other day in my Cagayan de Oro coffee shop, I saw a guy who is occasionally there with his small daughter. My guess is that he is French, and she is three. They sat for quite a while, and she cried and cried, and he mostly just let her cry. After a while, he got up and walked out, and she toddled after him, still wailing. This did not bother me at all. In fact, it seemed like it was probably good parenting technique.

I’m trying to figure out what the difference is. One possibility is just that I’ve seen this guy before and I know that he is always with his daughter and clearly adores her, so I have enough context to know that he is not a generally neglectful parent and must have good reasons for his current behavior.

But I think it’s something more than that, in the tone either of the kid’s distress or of the parent’s ignoring. What bothers me the most is when I see parents ignoring kids who seem genuinely upset or terrified, not just toddlers who have worked themselves up into a mad fit. There’s also something about the parent’s attitude, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Help from those with experience with childcare? When is it approved technique to ignore your kid?

Things I wish I had known: Part 1

Things I was glad I brought or wish someone had told me to bring before I started traveling in developing countries:

Hand sanitizer – There won’t be soap, and sometimes not even water.
Toilet paper – Really. Especially in Asian countries, in my experience. You don't have to cart this with you from the US, but definitely buy some and carry it with you when you travel in-country.
A bandanna or large, sturdy handkerchief – Will double to wipe away sweat so you don’t look and feel so nasty, and to cover your mouth while you sit in smoggy traffic in big cities.
A very small umbrella – I haven’t taken my own advice on this one, but the point is that rain in the tropics is different than in a lot of the US – if you are out in it uncovered for even a minute you will be drenched and it might take you a week to dry out again.
Ciprofloxacin – Easily available broad-spectrum anti-biotic, which fixes everything.
Non-rot-able flip-flops – For beaches, showers, and keeping your feet cool. But make sure they’re not leather or fabric that will rot if they sit around wet in your bag overnight.
A big sarong – Serves as pretty much everything: towel when your hotel doesn’t have one, beach cover up, blanket on long bus rides where the AC is up too high, something to wear in your hotel when there is no AC and it’s too unbearably hot to wear clothing, pillow, bag to wrap your laundry in…
A scrunch-able fleece or sweatshirt – Paradoxically, stores and vehicles in tropical countries seem to have no middle ground between unbearable heat and uncomfortably strong AC. You will want something warm surprisingly often.
A small, zip-able change purse – You don’t want to carry a wallet or loose change in your pocket because it will be stolen, but you’ll need regular access to small change for buying food and paying for transportation.
A very tough medium-sized backpack – It makes no sense to carry a wheeled suitcase for short trips, because there are no sidewalks or escalators, so you’ll end up hefting it around anyway. A pack that is large enough for weekend excursions and small enough to carry for a long time without killing your back is ideal. (Thanks, Barbara!)

I’m compiling a list for my friends and new IPA hires. Anyone have anything to add? (I’m looking at you, people I know have traveled in Thailand/live in Beirut.)

Commitment strategy

This probably isn't very useful, since you all have no plausible enforcement mechanism at the moment. Nonetheless, I'm going to tell you all the things I am thinking about writing, both in the hope that it will encourage me to actually do it, and that you may express some opinion on what you're actually interested in reading about.

Apologies if the tendency toward more abstract or political posts is less interesting than travel stories. I've been finding it useful to write down the things that have been knocking around in my head for the last ten years, because I tend to forget my opinions otherwise. No, really.

Philippines:

• Cultural beauty standards, or according to Mrs. Lim, why white men have terrible taste in Filipinas.
  
• Things I wish someone had told me before I traveled in developing countries
  
• Filipino racism and whitening facials soaps.
  
• Pictures from my walk to work in the morning (I'm trying to get brave enough to take these picture, so I'm hoping that if I promise it I'll have to actually do it). Because you all really, really need to see the three kittens that play in the carpentry shop I walk past every morning.

Development:

• More dissing Nigeria! Why we should do development in South Africa and Botswana, and relief work in the Congo and Somalia, and stop thinking that Nigeria (okay, and a bunch of other countries) represents the ideal middle ground.
  
• Top-down policies don't work, but neither do bottom-up ones. Why the Millennium Villages are sort of lame. Is leadership the bridge over this gap, and if so, how do we find/build/encourage it?
• Why the World Bank is not actually the devil, although the IMF may be.
• Technical vs. moral authority. Hint: we need more of both.
• The case for and against randomized trials, aka, am I wasting my time?

Recent ballot measures/other stuff:

• Gay marriage: 1) Why there IS judicial precedent for a Supreme Court case; 2) Why I don't necessarily agree with the judicial precedent; 3) The social/cultural case for gay marriage even if I don't agree with the judicial one. Teaser: Roe v. Wade sucks! But I'm cool with polygamy and marrying your cousin! Awesome!
  
• Affirmative action: Why the case for anti-affirmative action ballot measure is lame *cough*
• School vouchers: Why the US should go to a completely voucher-based system. With many, many caveats.
  
• Teachers unions and merit pay: Why I, like many otherwise perfectly left-y pro-union public school kids, can't stand the only union I've ever actually come into contact with. And why I'm torn about what we should do about it.
• Abortion: Why most arguments made on both sides about abortion are really lame, as are the current legislative and judicial approaches. Also why this is probably inevitable and I have no idea what to do about it, if anything.
• Gender norms: Why I am probably a closet misogynist, but would probably go for femme-girls if I were gay. Does this mean I care about gender more or less than other people?

And yes, this is why I didn't get to sleep until 4am last night.

Input from the peanut gallery, please

1. I'm considering going by Mary here. People have a lot of trouble with my name: the most recent egregious spelling was “Marratitch”. I feel like a condescending jackass when I sound it out syllable by syllable, and half of them still don't get it.
   
2. I've located the offices of the local Girl Scout council and Planned Parenthood organization, and am thinking about dropping in and seeing if they want volunteers at one or both places.
   
3. I bought a 1 month membership to a gym at the mall today. It's PhP 1,200/month if I buy a 6 month membership after this. I like it, and they have weights and cardio machines and nice showers, but: I can't keep a locker there, so I have to bring gym cloths and shampoo and flipflops and whatever with me to work or go home first; I can do a lot of the exercises I do there on a yoga mat in my room for free; I have to get my butt to the mall in order to work out.
   
4. The middle aged guy from the home laundry place where I get my clothes washed has "friended" me on Yahoo chat. I didn't notice this for a week, because I never use Yahoo chat, but he asked me yesterday when I picked up my clothes why I hadn't accepted his friend request.
   
5. I can buy DVDs with 15 movies on them for PhP 50 (about $1.10). Almost certainly illegal, but how bad of me to buy? Renting a movie costs PhP 25 per DVD, and watching a movie in the theater costs PhP 70.
6. I was congratulating myself on having my life relatively under control, until I realized that I've only played my oboe 3 times in the last year. :-(
   

A room of one's own

I have a housing dilemma. I’ve been staying in a “ladies dormitory” (which appears to be populated at least in half by men) that is kitty corner from one of the larger wet markets in Cagayan and 4-5 blocks from the bank where I work. The grand strategy has been, all along, to use this for a month as a base of operations from which to find a more permanent “bachelor pad” for the year. My month is up on Tuesday.

Over the course of a couple of weekends, I’ve scouted out the neighborhood behind the bank (Carmen) and a nearby middle class gated neighborhood (RER Subdivision) looking for a pad. Since most pads are rented by private owners who have a spare room or building, this has involved wandering the streets looking for “pad for rent” signs or knocking on the doors of houses that look promising. While entertaining in some ways (How to choose – the apartment building with cows grazing in the front yard, or the lechon dealer’s building with squealing piglets penned under the stairs?) this strategy has failed thus far to yield a place for me to live.

Perhaps my criteria are too demanding? They are:

- A room with a private sink and toilet

- Aircon OR screens over the windows

- Internet access

- A building that looks clean/new/unfallingapart enough that I’m convinced I won’t die from rodent attack or a mutant tropical fungus infection on the first night

Internet access may sound excessive, but given the density of hole-in-the-wall internet cafes in this town, my guess is that it’s not. Plus, I’m willing to pay extra for it. Plus, how else will I update the blog?

The closest hits I’ve had so far are two pads which were PhP 6,500 and 7,000 per month, respectively, for a room/AC/internet combo. One is in the lechon dealer’s building where my American co-worker Mark lives, practically across the street from the bank. The other is in Mrs. dela Cruz’ (a retired teacher who now sells Malaysian food products in her neighborhood Mary Kay style) home in the RER Subdivision. Unfortunately, neither is currently available.

In contemplating this state of affairs, something occurred to me. The dorm I’m living in now is PhP 8,000 per month. That includes internet, unlimited AC, a communal kitchen with a stove and refrigerator and rice cooker, a hot water shower (not included at the other places), a flat screen TV with cable, nice young women who talk to me and in theory clean my room, and nice young men who guard the entrance 24-7 and glower at the clowns outside who try to talk to me. It looks shiny new on the inside (ants not withstanding), and has much nicer bathrooms than anything I’ve seen anywhere else. It’s within walking distance of the bank, and is across the street from a large grocery store and wet market where it’s easy to buy stuff and catch jeepneys at all times of the day.

Assuming I could get one of the other pads now, which I can’t, I think that the best I’d do would be PhP 6,500 per month – more if I use the AC a lot – plus several thousand pesos in start-up costs to buy a stove top, fridge, rice cooker, and hot water heater.

I see a few options now:

1. Take a substandard pad for a month for a lot less money (PhP 3,500 – 4,000) and keep looking for a nicer place. Resign myself to a hot room, cold showers, and no internet for a month.
2. Pay for another month at the dorm and keep looking or hope that one of the other places I’ve found becomes vacant. Most places are full with local university students right now – I’m not sure if that situation will change or not.
3. Arrange to stay at the dorm long term, and see if they’re willing to lower the rent at all if I commit to a whole 6 months or year.

Thoughts? Keep in mind that we’re talking about a 25% price difference here. And that 25% of my monthly rental is equal to about $30.