Improving Things at Daru Island

If there is one thing a reluctant flyer is not so excited about going through is to arrive at the destination in the blanket of a passionate night. But a true traveller is unfazed by such a miniscule inconvenience, and the inherent confusion bought about by the darkened unfamiliar place is a welcome challenge.

I arrived at Daru a couple of hours earlier before the sun set down to the East. Interestingly, there are only few cars traveling down the road at any given time. So mostly, it is silent. You can actually hear the neighbours casually chatting to each other if you stay put and say nothing.

Now, isn’t that an ideal place to live in?

This is the house where the managers live in the company that I work with. In the Philippines, we used to have this joke about a house that may look like it’s ready to go any moment: “Isang anay na lang ang ‘di pumipirma, magigiba na ‘yan.”

So in this case, the house looks like it’s about to go down and is just patiently waiting for that single termite to sign it off.

That night, we ate in this old but surprisingly sturdy house. The managers took turns cooking and that was the whole setup. It was this guy’s turn to cook at that time and they said he cooked a sea worm. 

I don’t know anything about a sea worm, but it does taste good.

The next night, it was Levi’s turn to cook. He whipped out some tin fish with chopped veggies for us. Although I’m all set for cooking, I’m not so familiar yet with all kinds of manner of things in this kitchen. I was told  to just watch and do nothing. Well, that seems to be an easy thing to do except that I still did something and took this photo.

While Levi is preoccupied with his tin fish recipe, another manager shoved a real fish into a hot and steamy pot. This in turn makes me wonder, why bother with tin fish when there are plenty of fish around to catch in Daru Island? 

I guess the answer is that, a tin fish recipe is not a tin fish recipe without the canned fish.

The next day, everyone was up early. I climbed up the new building and had a look at the old accommodation where I had my dinner for two nights. The contractor had informed us the day before that they would begin dismantling this house while everyone was out working. 

By the time the noon came, the house looked like this. That was strange, I thought. Because I saw only two men there.  Unless one is the Flash, and the other is Quicksilver, someone without an intermediate skill in carpentry would have wondered profoundly how these two gentlemen have pulled that off. And while it's an obvious work of human origin, my child-like imagination was suggesting a slightly different theory, thinking that it's a bizarre case of tornado attack right up the alley. If that was really the case, I have got to see that for myself.

My inquisitive instinct has got the better of me and I came back later that afternoon only to feel a little frustrated that my theory about a rogue tornado was not proven true at all. It turns out that life, indeed, has full of surprises. Who said that four men could not demolish an entire building in only a few hours?

I think no one has said that before.

When I look at this photo, all I can think about was the Doozers from The Muppet Show. The Doozers are the tiny characters in Fraggle Rock that love to work and build structures. We used to watch that show when I was younger.  I would always wonder why the bigger puppets in that show love to bite on and destroy the things that the tinier Doozers built.

The Doozers.

After a couple of days, what’s left of it are just the posts and metal beams. This helped me conclude that humans not only evolved to effectively build things but had also become efficient in destroying things.

And while some primates, like Chimpanzees, are known to use tools like sticks to hunt ants for food, only humans are endowed with brains that can think of using complex machines to help bring down things when our primitive hands have met their limits. 

This was the room where I stayed in Daru. It didn’t have much things in between, but the bed was enough for a tired IT Manager.  Anyway, I was hoping to finish my work assignment in a month or so. There were lots of things to be done and I could always use a good night sleep.

Until next time.