A huge commotion just happened outside the front of our house. We live on a paved stretch of road in a rural but semi-heavily populated barangay called San Fernando, a small suburb of Bislig City, Philippines.

After a few minutes I decided to go check it out, and saw nobody was in the house. They were all out standing by the edge of the road. It turns out that a child had been hit by motorcycle. The motorcycle was laying flat on the ground, and there were a large group of people standing around the accident.
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I got this comment and thought the response warranted its own post.

I was introduced to a 27 year old girl from the Philipiens. She seems really nice and I have been talking to hear through the internet. I am truly interested in this girl and considering going to the Phi;ipiens to meet her. After doing research I am almost thinking it is possible that she is a retired sex worker. My question to you would be is there any sure signs about these women to look for.

How do you avoid scammers in the Philippines? Here are some of my thoughts on the subject. Read the rest of this entry »

This comment was made in another thread here and I thought it warranted its own post.

I married a woman from Davao several years ago, and we now live in Toronto. Every few weeks, she sends money remittance to her family. Then every six months, she sends a box of clothes and food home. Every weekend, she buys a calling card and talks to her family in Davao for an hour in some strange dialect. Then, every few weekends, she invites a bunch of her filipina girl friends over to the house, and they eat pork & rice, and suck on bbq fish heads. They finish it off by singing on the magic mic til midnight.
When they are all in the kitchen cleaning up, they all talk at the same time to each other. They all have cell phones, and if the cell phone rings, they will talk loudly in it, even though they are singing or eating with the group.
What’s a white guy like me to do?

Click to read rest of entry for my response to this … Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been holding off on this second post for a while because of lots of little situations going on that I’ve been wanting to have resolved first. My advice at this point is … don’t build a (concrete) house in the Philippines. Maybe under certain circumstances you could, but it seems like in my situation it was a really dumb idea.
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It seems year after year that Manila is always flooding with landslides. Watching the news, this year seems to be the worst flooding in the last 100 years, the death toll right now is 78 and it honestly looks as bad if not worse than New Orleans did after hurricane Katrina. I’m also seeing on the news that Cebu gets pelted with a lot of rain. People have this notion that Davao is unsafe because there’s Muslim extremists in Mindanao. This all begs the question, where’s the best place to live in the Philippines?
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Here I talked about a situation where a family came asking for money to help their child get an emergency appendicitis operation. A few days ago, that child died. He was about 14 years old.
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Announcing Christian Michael Hemminger, Born September 12th! Elizabeth and I have a healthy baby boy. Click read more for more pictures.

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What would it be like if the president of the united states just came out and said “starting tomorrow, all medicine is going to be half price by law”. You would have a lot of happy people, as well as many furious manufacturers and hospitals who are sitting on stock purchased at higher prices which now must be sold at lower-than-cost.

As it turns out, the president of the Philippines did just this about 11 days ago (August 15, 2009). I heard about it then on the news, at the time I dismissed it (not fully realizing what had happened as it applies to me). However, I had to buy some medicine today (co-amoxiclav) and was surprised how much it cost. Read the rest of this entry »

Many times I’ve said people will ask to borrow from you in the Philippines, and just to say no. It’s not always that simple to do though. This morning, a neighbor came to our house needing to borrow 5000 pesos for an emergency appendix operation.
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I’ve mentioned other methods of making money in the Philippines in previous articles. However, I thought I’d outline my own personal struggle of what I used to do to make a living, and having to modify it to make money in the Philippines.
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