Agno River (Photo courtesy David Rosenbaum)

It was July 2000 and I was 45 years old, having worked for ENR since January 1989.

Already, I had traveled to many North American cities to cover construction-related conventions and projects for ENR, as well as for an earthquake-engineering convention in Acapulco; also, I had traveled to Japan to report on the 1995 earthquake in Kobe (ENR Feb.6, 1995, p. 10).

Now I was reporting on the construction of what was then the world’s largest privately built hydroelectric project, 200 km north of Manila (ENR Sept. 19, 2000, p. 30). 

Socioeconomic aspects practically dwarfed the challenges encountered by Boise, Idaho-based Washington Group International Inc., building what was then Asia's tallest earth-and-rockfill dam, 200 meters high.

For me as a reporter—in an era before digital cameras and smartphones—my challenges included the need to shoot photos on film of the dam site while inside an airborne helicopter minus its doors. Restrained only by my lap belt from falling to my death, I struggled to change film.

Agno river dam site (photo courtesy David Rosenbaum) 

Thankfully, the contractor's point man for taking me around, John C. Lockwood, then resident manager for New York City-based Sithe Energies Inc., prioritized my safety, getting me from place to place with professional car drivers trained to evade terrorists, at a time of kidnappings that prompted the presence, in one McDonald's that I visited in Manila, of an armed guard with an automatic weapon.

For the contractor, challenges that bedeviled the then-$1.1-billion hydroelectric project—designed to provide 345 MW of peaking power in a turnkey, fixed-price contract—included the site's remoteness and isolation—geographically, linguistically and culturally. Additionally, there was the need to give precedence to local customs, such as when indigenous crews at one of the diversion tunnels insisted that a priest slit the throat of a pig in sacrifice to ensure worksite safety.

Dam construction site. (Photo courtesy David Rosenbaum)

With a feasibility study completed in 1979 for Philippines President Ferdinand E. Marcos before he accepted an exile to the U.S. in 1986, the project restarted in 1998, only to generate so much international criticism that critics tried to ambush the project financially through the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, resulting in some delayed payments to the contractor.

Safety concerns, though, became paramount, as managers struggled to facilitate communication among numerous native dialects where few locals spoke the national language of Tagalog. Managers struggled, too, to put an end to deaths among a local machismo culture that sometimes regarded heavy earthmoving equipment, with tires taller than a man, as race cars.

Workers clean construction equipment. (Photo courtesy David Rosenbaum)

The culture sometimes overwhelmed me, particularly on the day of a local wedding to which I was invited.

At one point while outside, I felt the need to sit by myself, and retreated to a fallen log in a clearing. Soon I was surrounded by children. Unlike almost all of their parents, they spoke some English, and asked that I help them practice understanding my language by telling them stories.

To this day, I remember feeling somewhat desperate as I struggled to recall one story after another for them, and more and more and more stories; I recall that I eventually even told them a synopsis of Moby Dick. At the reception—was it before or after my storytelling?—guests insisted that I sing a song and join them in the dancing.

Storytelling and singing at a local wedding was just part of the job. (Photo courtesy David Rosenbaum) 

Little did I realize, as I entertained children and other guests, that I was on a personal journey that was to take me far from my previous careers in structural engineering and then engineering journalism. Two years after I returned from my reporting trip to the Philippines, I left ENR in 2002 to become a high school math teacher. For the next 14 years I taught high school, and then for another five years, middle school. Never once during those 19 years, however, did I ever think to regale my students with the story of the day I accepted a plate of rice and stewed dog.

Some years, I taught in especially tough schools where more than four out of five students qualified for free or low-cost lunches, and few of the parents spoke English. Sometimes I felt that I was engaged in a kind of cultural imperialism, imposing algebra on immigrants whose parents lacked much more than a second- or sixth-grade education. 

On some of the rougher days when I needed to contradict my demeanor as a push-over, I realize in retrospect that I might have snarled and warned my students that I had been known to eat dog. (To this day I remain such a push-over that when my Chorkie—a chihuahua-Yorkie mix—kisses my neck in the middle of the night, I know that he wants me to lift the covers for him to get between the sheets.)

The author's dog. (Photo courtesy David Rosenbaum)

As I look back now at my Philippines trip and my writing of a subsequent eight-page cover story, I find myself bemused—and somewhat embarrassed. Written a generation ago, it now seems fine to me upon rereading, but at the time I was quite angry about the editing of its first paragraph, thinking that some of my original lyricism got trampled. I realize now that I craved soup-to-nuts control over my work product, something that I eventually achieved as a teacher, when my success on any given day in the classroom depended mostly on my own efforts, preparation and self-control (ENR May 14, 2012, p. 132).

But no, teaching six classes per day of math was nowhere nearly as consequential as managing a workforce of upwards of 4,000 at a remote dam site—although in 19 years of teaching I probably taught at least a couple of thousand kids—and I cannot say for sure now that I left behind anything of consequence either as a journalist or as a teacher. 

But I hope that by example I showed others how to take some worthwhile risks, such as during my trip to the Philippines, when I worked up the nerve to follow village elder Pascual W. Pocding, chairman of a local indigenous peoples' movement (and critic of the dam) across a precarious rope bridge over a river. But will I ever again take the risk of eating dog? No–it was much too dark, tough and gamey.

(Photo courtesy David Rosenbaum)

David B. Rosenbaum
Moraga, Calif.
February 2024