Returning to CdO from SEMCON Philippines ‘07

SEMCON (Search Engine Marketing Conference) Philippines 2007, came out well. Marc Macalua, the founder of SEO Philippines is now like the Danny Sullivan or the Brett Tabke of The Philippines. Marc told me that three weeks prior to the event, only about 40 people had signed up, and they were really only expecting about 120 to show up. However, over 230 registered and the place was packed. I expect next year there will be well over 500 registrants.

The trip was exhausting for me and I am glad to be back in Cagayan de Oro. On the way to the airport I did see one interesting thing, a public, outdoor “male urinal”.

I didn’t see anyone using one, and it doesn’t look like there’s any plumbing, no drain. I speculate a guy just walks into one and urinates while facing away from the open doorway. As an American, I never would use such a thing, but I guess for The Philippines, this is better than the alternative.

At the airport I heard that the flight to Cagayan de Oro had been delayed for an hour or more over the public address system, so I was sitting at cell phone recharging station checking email via my WeRoam PLDT nationwide wireless connection, when I heard myself being paged over the loudspeaker, telling me it was last call to board my flight. The flight was ahead of schedule and I was the last one to board. When I told the flight agent that I had heard the flight to Cagayan de Oro would be delayed I was advised that was the Air Philippines flight and not the Philippines Airlines flight. “Oh”.

On the flight back I sat next to a New Zealander and his wife, who were missionaries, returning to The Philippines after spending two years back in New Zealand re-acclimating their two teenage children to the real world, after having prior to that spent five years in tribal villages in The Philippines converting the pagans to Christianity. I asked him if I could interview him for my blog and let him talk about some of his previous experiences in The Philippines, and then broke out my laptop on the plane and showed him the videos I had taken in the “tribal” Village of Conception. After seeing the photos and the videos, he told me that Conception was nothing like the villages he had spent time in, that he had been in really remote tribal villages.

He also told me about occasional encounters with NPA. And after mentioning that there were several other missionary teams in Mindanao, he thought better of announcing his arrival on my blog. Most of his previous work had been in the province is Agusan del Sur, which is actually a pretty sparsely populated, and one of only a few land-locked provinces in The Philippines. There are five tribal groups there. This guy and his wife are associated with the New Tribes Group, which looks like it specializes in converting, well, illiterate tribes.

I just remember when my wife and I honeymooned at the Banaue Rice Terraces that when I asked our guide what religion he was, he replied, “it depends on the circumstances. Sometimes I am Catholic, sometimes I am Pagan”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 6:27 am and is filed under Philippines Expat Life, SEO Events, Travel, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.