6 - Housewarming

I feel I’m well into the swing of things now in the work I’m doing. I presented my site development plan for Handumanan village to the benefactors, (the alumni of St Johns) in a café meeting late last week and they loved it, so it’s full steam ahead. The roads were staked out by the surveyor in preparation for the earthmoving, only to be removed by a local who is opposed to the project. So the site was staked out a second time and a security guard employed to prevent it happening again, but to no avail. The stakes were removed again. Perhaps the guard was bribed? who knows. It turns out the perpetrator is a squatter who planted crops on the site and just wants 2 months so he can harvest them, but the benefactors are keen to get on with the project. So the strategy … do the staking out and the earth moving simultaneously. Risk management in a different cultural context!


Thursday 28th August was a big day. It was the 27th Birthday of my flatmate, Aruna, and the 48th Birthday of my counterpart, Butch! The following night we threw a party to celebrate Aruna’s birthday as well as our housewarming. It was a week of preparations, cleaning, shopping, cooking and decorating but in the end it was a great night. We had about 40 guests and it was really good to be able to return some of the hospitality that we have received. It was a multi-cultural menu: I made pumpkin soup and ANZAC slice, Aruna made Indian curry and fruit salad, and friends helped us make Kinilaw (Philippino fish salad) and Lumpia (Philippino spring rolls).


As you will see from the photos that accompany this blog post, we also gave the place an Aussie touch with green and gold balloons, we had Aussie music playing from my laptop and a continuous slide show of Australian scenes. Aruna’s colleagues had brought along a Karaoke machine and later in the night they cranked it up. Philippino’s are, almost without exception, all great singers. But eventhough they’re a hard act to follow, Aruna and I (the Downunder Duo) got up and sang a couple of songs! “When’s the next party?” the guests asked as they started to leave at around midnight.


It certainly is a good house for a party. It is 3 storeys. The ground floor consists of the garage and the maid’s quarters, and as we have neither a car nor a maid we don’t use the ground floor. The first floor is the Kitchen, open plan Lounge/Dining area and balcony – with pretty good cross ventilation. On the second floor are the 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. It is within a complex of 12 apartments with a 24hr security guard who made sure we didn’t get any random people wandering into our party! We’re really happy with the place and now that we’ve got a few candles and plants around, it feels a lot more like a home.


In the same week, I attended another housewarming of sorts. GK Smile Village in Murcia had the handover ceremony for the first batch of affordable housing for municipality employees (such as school teachers, fire fighters and police). This development model is the first of its kind in the Philippines, whereby the houses are constructed by the beneficiaries of GK houses who aquired the skills building their own homes as part of the GK Program. The wages of these workers and the building materials are funded by a Mutual Development Fund. Thanks to the elimination of a profit margin on wages and the discount on building materials attainable by GK, these costs are half to a third the cost of a conventional house of the same size. The municipality employees then pay off the cost of their home via a low interest housing loan provided by the Mutual Development Fund. One of the really positive aspects of this model is that GK Smile Village now has the poorest of the poor co-habitating with working class. Although, it hasn’t been completely smooth sailing. As you could imagine, the Construction and Real Estate Building Association was not too pleased as it meant loss of income for private builders. Perhaps with our current housing affordability crisis in Australia we could learn a thing or two from this project.