In Memory of Julia Campbell

I have a backlog of 20 entries that will make their appearance later below this one. This one needs to be posted in real time. Please check BELOW this entry for new ones as I update the blog. My post for Julia will remain on top.

Among many great people I met in the Philippines these past 2 months was Julia Campbell, Peace Corps worker. Fellow Brooklynite. All Around Cool and Nice Person.



Julia hiking with friends in Sagada


Her body has just been found in Batad after she has been reported as missing for a week. It's one of those moments when the absurdity of life just reaches out and smacks you in the face.

It's absurd that a middle-aged, smart, savvy, culturally aware individual and New Yorker like Julia would be dead. Just like that. It's surreal that she was found buried in Batad, which everyone considers to be a safe little town. It's on the tourist trail for its serene rice terraces.

Yes, there are NPA guerrillas in the general vicinity, but everyone knows they aren't interested in tourists and that they don't have a presence in Batad. They did kidnap a Peace Corps worker once, but that was 17 years ago, and they released him unharmed.

It's beyond surreal that the night before she vanished in Batad, she and I and 6 other travelers were sitting around a cozy fire in Sagada after consuming an excellent Italian meal at the home of a Sagadan couple. It doesn't seem to inhabit the same time-and-space universe that on Saturday night Julia and I had intense conversation about New York, and what it was like to be away from that city and what it's like to uproot a life you actually like to go chase a dream, and that the very next night she would be gone.

I met her first in Donsol, where she was doing her work with the Peace Corps and I did a short volunteer stint with Hands On, a typhoon relief group. Both groups got together for a St. Patrick's Day dinner, and she heard me say I was from Brooklyn when we introduced ourselves to the group, so she sought me out to talk about the 'hoods we were from. It was to paint the marine ecology center she had helped put together that the two groups had gotten together for -- the next morning several Hands On volunteers and Peace Corps workers were painting the center together.

When I got to Sagada a few weeks later, I wandered into a tiny restaurant, Bamboo Grill, across from my hotel and she was sitting in there trying to text her friends on her cellphone, sporting the exact same Brooklyn Industries t-shirt that I own.


Thanks Iya for the photo of her. Chance and circumstance placed Julia in the background of Iya's photo of her husband, as chance allowed me to run into her that night.

Because of that chance encounter we ended up hiking around Sagada and having dinner together the next 2 nights with my friend Kathy and 5 of her friends. We were among the last people to see her before she vanished.

Julia joined the Peace Corps when she was 38, because she had always wanted to and the opportunity presented itself at that age. But it's harder to do something like join the Peace Corps when you're already happily settled somewhere and you have something to leave behind when you go to the other side of the world for 2 years. It's much easier to do if you are 22. She rather sheepishly said, more than once that Saturday night by the fire in Sagada, how she felt guilty for leaving her friends in New York like that for so long. That she had a lot of work to do when she got back to make it up to them.

I felt like she must have had great relationships with people in New York, because I know how we New Yorkers make second families out of our circles of friends. Her apartment buliding in Brooklyn Heights was pretty communal, from the sounds of it. She described common areas where people hung out, like the roof, and it sounds like people just stopped by each other's apartments to say hi. I think it was one of her neighbors in that building that was Filipino-American. She was hoping to get him involved in a conversational Tagalog group she wanted to start later this year in New York, and she wanted me to meet him. She was also working on me to study Tagalog back in New York so we could practice together.

We talked about culture shock. She was surprised at how Filipinos don't think anything of commenting on your weight directly to you. Julia was thin as a rail, but she, like most American women, she said are used to hearing comments on their weight as criticism -- not to mention Filipinos simply insist on continually feeding guests as a gesture of hospitality. I liked talking to her about the Philippines because in general I feel she listened to the people she had met and wasn't judgemental about the differences between cultures, that she respected the culture she inhabited.

My friend Kathy (also from Brooklyn) was curious about what kind of reverse culture shock she might experience when she went back after having been in small town Philippines for 2 years. I asked her what she missed about New York the most, but I don't remember what she said. I teasingly said: bagels? But that wasn't it. Maybe it was taking hot baths, not showers, maybe it was just being in New York, maybe it was her friends. I don't remember, but I remember that she was really looking forward to it.

She talked about her first host family, who lived in a 2 bedroom nipa hut. She got one of the bedrooms and the entire family of something like 11 people stayed in the other bedroom. This is because it is a Peace Corps requirement that she have a door that could close. She also said how surprising it was to see so many gay boys in the province she was in, so far from a big city. She said the kids were excited about staging a Miss Gay Philippines pageant, complete with costumes and talent contest, that they liked "Ate Julia" a lot and wanted to decorate her nipa hut for her. Everyone sitting around the fire cracked up at that image of Queer Eye for the Nipa Hut. We cracked up again when she told us that she had cheerfully told her Filipino friends in Bicol that she used to be a tomboy when she was a little girl, and that was how she found out that tomboy is slang for lesbian in the Philippines.

She really had an awareness of poverty in the United States as well, I remember that when we all got into debate that night about the differences between poverty in the Philippines and poverty in the U.S. she talked about the people living in Appalachia here in the States. She was mindful.

In addition to teaching English and helping organize the marine ecology center in Donsol, she also did a little yoga teaching (being a typical Brooklynite she was a certified yoga teacher :-) ) just before she left Bicol, which she said was well received there.

She was about to go to NYU graduate school in the fall. I think she was to study journalism. Before that she was planning to ambitiously travel overland all the way through Asia in the span of 2 or 3 months, starting in mainland SE Asia and then going all the way through Russia to finish in Poland and fly back to New York.

I want to know what happened to absurdly, surreally, interrupt the story of her life in full swing.

I barely got to know her, and I'm sad for that.

If you knew Julia, I invite you to post an anecdote about her here in the comments section. Let's honor her however we can. If you have photos of her you want to share, email them to new.yorkian.afoot@gmail.com so I can post them here.