Notes on Baseball, Rice, and Memory in Olongapo City

Consider time travel1. Not the Hollywood variety with its shiny machines and questionable physics, but the kind that happens when you pick up a pen and decide that something - or someone - deserves to exist beyond their moment. I'm writing about a baseball camp in Olongapo City2, Philippines—though 'baseball camp' implies a level of structure and predictability entirely absent from those two sun-warped days in February.

The equipment arrived in boxes and duffels, gear so thoroughly pre-loved it had transcended mere age and achieved something approaching wisdom3. Each glove carried more history than some small nations, and the bats had developed the kind of personalities4 you typically only find in centuries-old trees or particularly opinionated grandparents. Back home, this equipment would be destined for landfills. Here, it's received with the reverence usually reserved for sacred artifacts or the last piece of chocolate in a shared box.

The field itself deserves mention—a patch of earth shifting between grass, dirt, and what might be grass again5, depending on whether you believe weeds are just ambitious grass. We've mapped the bases with two real ones, a flattened cardboard box, and what I’m fairly certain began as a discarded pizza box6—but has since evolved into modern art (Ceci n'est pas une pizza box).

Maria, age nine, approaches our makeshift pitcher's mound (a worn spot in the grass we've collectively agreed to pretend is regulation through a kind of mass diplomatic fiction7). She's developing a pitching technique that combines elements of basketball, traditional Filipino dance, and what appears to be an interpretive tribute to K-pop dances8. The remarkable thing? It works. The ball travels in trajectories that would make Sir Isaac Newton reconsider his life's work.

I watch these kids navigate between enthusiasm and confusion9, their relationship with baseball existing in a space somewhere between foreign language immersion and improvisational theater. They're more likely to quote Steph Curry's three-point percentage than know who Mike Trout is10. Baseball, here, ranks somewhere between competitive stamp collecting and professional toast buttering in terms of cultural relevance.

Carlos, eleven, steps up to bat with a stance combining elements of a basketball three-point shot and what appears to be memories of his past lives11. His swing contains more moving parts than a mechanical watch, yet somehow, through what I can only assume is a glitch in the universe's programming12, he makes contact. The ball soars in a trajectory so absurd it briefly achieves consciousness—before landing in grass that may or may not be fair territory, depending on how you define ‘lines.’

The water breaks offer their own anthropological insights13. The children handle their water bottles with the careful deliberation of bomb disposal experts, each sip measured and considered14. Some experiences, we drink in; they become part of us. Others wash over us like rain on a tin roof-a percussion line in poverty’s orchestra, played on repeat.

We keep score using a system that evolved organically over the first three hours15, incorporating elements of traditional baseball scoring, interpretive mathematics, and what appears to be a newly developed form of hieroglyphics16. The resulting scorecard looks less like a record of a baseball game and more like the first draft of a new universal language, one specifically designed to communicate the concept of joy to future civilizations.

Our makeshift field has, over the course of a mere two days, developed its own mythology17. The home plate pizza box, through repeated contact with clay-rich soil and tropical moisture, has achieved a level of structural integrity usually associated with low-grade concrete18. The bases, through continuous use and creative reinterpretation, have migrated slightly, creating a diamond shape that would give geometrists fits but works perfectly for our purposes19.

As the camp draws to a close, I find myself frantically taking notes20, trying to capture every detail: the way Carlos adjusts his batting stance based on cloud formations, the specific angle at which Maria's pitches defy gravity, the exact timbre of laughter when someone catches a ball through what appears to be divine intervention rather than skill21. Each detail preserved becomes a kind of defiance against the entropy of memory, a refusal to let these moments dissolve into the vast ocean of unrecorded human experience.

After the final out (though "out" might be stretching the definition to its theoretical breaking point22), we surprise them with a trip to the local ice cream vendor's cart. His eyes widen23 as we begin ordering - twenty-four children plus volunteers. The math hits me like a foul ball to the: a Filipino's typical monthly earnings, about ₱17,000 ($340), roughly equal what I spent last month on streaming services I don't watch and Amazon purchases I haven't opened24. Each purchase multiplied by twenty-four-plus transforms into something approaching magic, the vendor counting the money repeatedly as if expecting it to vanish.

A seemingly unplanned detour to a toy store unfolds like a dream sequence written by a magical realist with a peculiar interest in childhood economics25. We guide them into the toy store, tell them to pick something—a directive that, in its grammatical simplicity, masks the complexity of choice, want, and need these children navigate with a sophistication makinh most adult decision-making look like randomly pushing buttons on a microwave.

At first, no one moves. It’s as if the air itself has thickened, the moment too fragile to touch-like movement might shatter the illusion26.

Jasmine, usually the most talkative of the group (and bearer of what I've come to think of as the camp's institutional memory, given her ability to recall and recite every single play, pitch, and improbable catch with the precision of a baseball statistician with photographic memory), stands transfixed before a shelf of dolls. The kind of dolls that probably cost more than what her family spends on groceries in a week—a fact I'm trying very hard not to think about but am thinking about anyway.

Then, in a movement that contains more moral philosophy than most university ethics departments manage to produce in a semester, she turns and walks purposefully to the action figure section. "For my little brother," she explains, her voice carrying a maturity that makes me feel like I'm the child in this interaction. The simple declaration hangs in the air like a pitched ball at its apex, pregnant with implications about sacrifice, love, and the kind of wisdom that apparently doesn't wait for age or income bracket to manifest

Similarly, Jhunmark—whose batting stance had evolved over two days from "completely random" to "possibly revolutionary"—after carefully examining the toy cars with the delicate reverence of a museum curator handling a priceless artifact27 (and here I notice his fingers twitching in that universal child-wanting-something gesture that transcends culture and continent), heads to a different aisle entirely. "Mama" he says along with somenother words, holding up a variety of hairdressing supplies I dont recognize while saying more words I dont recognize. Recognition finally lands on "peynadora." The word itself contains multitudes: profession, identity, family legacy, economic reality. These moments of sacrifice, casual in their execution but intense in their implication, leave me struggling to maintain professional distance. The moment stretches, crystalizes, the scene becomes something more than just children selecting toys - it becomes a lens through which I see everything else.

A celebration unfolds on the second floor of Jollibee, the cathedral of Filipino fast-food dreams where the sacred and the secular mix with the same easy grace as Filipino spaghetti sauce that somehow makes perfect sense here but would probably cause an international incident if served in Italy. The space, usually reserved for birthday parties and family gatherings, now hosts our baseball camp's grand championship finale—though "finale" suggests a planned conclusion rather than this spontaneous eruption of pure joy that seems to exist outside of normal space-time constraints. The sounds of forty children's joy ricochets off the walls in what I can only describe as a kind of acoustic hydra, each laugh triggering three more, each squeal of delight spawning its own echo chamber of happiness. The phenomenon mingles with the scent of Chickenjoy and sweet spaghetti. Joy, like umami, has its own distinct cultural flavor profiles. Little Jun-jun, whose pitching arm apparently doubles as a dancing appendage, leads an impromptu dancing session. Mae-mae and Antonette, meanwhile, have transformed their plastic spoons into impromptu batons, teaching the younger ones a form of cutlery manipulation that walks the line between dining etiquette and performance art.

Then comes the moment with the goodie bags - the final act in our two-day performance of cultural exchange and economic surreality28. The parents gather at the with the kind of expectant patience that comes from long practice29, the same look you might see at a government office or a particularly slow-moving grocery line. But there's something else there too - a flickering acknowledgment that their children have spent two days playing a foreign game with strange equipment for a reward that should, by all rights, be a basic human given rather than a prize.

The rice sits in our goodie bags alongside clothing, shoes, candy and small toys30, five kilos of white rice occupying the same physical and metaphysical space as my weekly budget for Starbucks customizations. The mathematics of this fact expands in my mind until it threatens to swallow all other thoughts - a singularity of perspective that bends everything around it31. A bag of rice, transformed from staple to luxury and back again depending on which side of the economic equation you stand.

Here's what strikes me, watching these kids navigate between want and disbelief32: they've mastered a gratitude and selflessness I'm only beginning to comprehend. It brings to mind something Bob Dylan's father once said about being grateful not just for what you have, but for the absence of things you don't want. These kids embody this wisdom without naming it, finding joy in a baseball game played with equipment older than they are, on a field that barely qualifies as one.

Reading their faces - in triumph, frustration, confusion, and joy33 - I'm reminded of James Baldwin's insight about the universality of human experience. Their moments of pure play, their creative adaptations to equipment that barely meets the definition as such, their ability to find delight in a game they don't fully understand - it all connects to something fundamentally human. Through their eyes, I see my own childhood sporting attempts transformed and reflected back, though my mistakes never earned me rice as a reward.

The final goodie bags pass from hand to hand, a ceremony both mundane and sacred.34. Children clutch a toy in one hand and a bag of rice in the other, the embodiment of childhood's dual citizenship in the kingdoms of necessity and play. Mae-Mae demonstrates her pitching technique one last time for a group of younger kids, passing on a tradition that didn't exist forty-eight hours ago but now feels somehow ancient and essential.

This was never really about baseball—any more than Moby-Dick was just about a whale. It's about the grey area between having and wanting, between playing and surviving, between what we write and what we live. The kids in Olongapo City taught me something I should’ve known: poverty and joy aren’t opposites. They dance together, step for step. They showed me how to find abundance in scarcity, how to drink in moments without drowning in them, and that gratitude isn’t only about what you have—it’s about the burdens you’ve been spared

And now they exist here, in words, playing their impossible version of baseball forever. Every time someone reads this, Mae-Mae's pitches will defy gravity again, Carlos's batting stance will evolve toward some theoretical perfect form, and Jhunmark will touch that toy car for the first time, over and over, in the eternal present tense of written memory. In reading, you become part of their story, and in becoming part of their story, you make them immortal. It's a pretty good return on investment for two days of barely-baseball and a bag of rice.