Ep. 408: Filipino superstitions when moving

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online. Filipino specialists. This is episode 408, Filipino superstitions when moving. So the concept of moving is pretty simple. I mean, you move from one house, you move your things. So one of the life changing things that I hear about my OFS is and other people's OFS is that when they get a job, they change their status in life. Their full time job working for a foreign company often lets them move up in life. So I'll hear about people moving out of poverty into a middle class neighborhood. And this is actually quite common with people who start to work online. So often people, they have no ability to get a job because they're in an area where there just are not jobs. And all of a sudden they get a job making $500 a month. Where before that their hope was to get a job making $350 a month or $200 a month. You know, just something that they could sustain the family on and continue in poverty. And when they get a job making five or six hundred dollars a month, it moves them out of poverty into middle class. And this concept of moving is, is really simple, like you pick up your things from one place and you put them down in another place. But in the Philippines, there's more to it than that. There are a lot of traditions and superstitions and I'll let Julia explain. I'm going to read it. Moving to a new home. Lipat Bahai. I don't know what that means, but she, she included those words in parentheses. After moving to a new home in the Philippines isn't just about changing your address. It's an opportunity to bring in good luck and shake off the bad luck from your previous home. That's why when moving we try to follow as many superstitions as we can. Superstitions like finding the ideal time to move. Apparently it's bad luck to move Fridays, Saturdays and rainy days. I understand the rainy days part because most of our moving trucks for hire here are open trucks. We don't have U Haul here. It sucks when your things get wet. The superstition of not moving on Fridays and Saturdays though, doesn't make sense. That's when most people have free time, making it easier to ask friends and family to help with the move. Because of this, when we moved into our home more than 10 years ago, Jam, my husband, had to take a week off from his call center job because it was bad luck to move On a weekend. And we're not even superstitious. For good luck, we make sure to be in our new home before 6am on a new moon day. This is a practical tradition because it helps us avoid the morning rush hour. This also gives us the entire day to unpack and to do the other superstitious traditions. Next, tradition, she writes about sprinkling salt and quote Padugo. Yeah, I don't know what that is. To appease the supernatural spirits that live around our new home, we have to perform a Padugo blood sacrifice. There it is. It's a blood sacrifice. That sacrifice is usually the blood of a newly slaughtered pig or chicken poured over or around the house's foundation. I know it's creepy, but there's a practical aspect to this. The slaughtered pig or chicken would be cooked and served as a meal for the people helping us move. This works in rural areas with space to do this, but it doesn't make sense in cities with most apartments, condos, and small homes. So instead, we buy fresh pig or chicken blood from the market. Once that's done, we sprinkle salt around the house to keep unwelcome spirits out. Next, traditions to bring in good luck. The first thing we bring inside our home is a container full of rice. This symbolizes a promise that the people in this home will never go hungry. So with that, I feel like I need to explain. In the Philippines, rice is everything. They eat rice three times a day. They eat it with breakfast, they eat it with lunch, they eat it with dinner. Rice is everything. There's my son in the Philippines right now who is serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He. He has these companions that are his. His working companions. And they talk about food sometimes and they, they cannot understand the concept of not eating rice multiple times every day. They're like, if you don't eat rice, are you hungry all the time? How do you get full? Because rice is what makes you full. What do you eat if you don't eat rice? That's their question to him. He says, well, you know, we hamburgers or we eat pasta or we eat burritos or. And that. The concept just doesn't. It just doesn't work for them. This has been an ongoing thing since he's been there for the last 18 months. This conversation about, you don't eat rice every day, how's that even possible? What could, what could you eat to get full? Are you hungry all the time? So when they bring rice into the house, that's why she continues. We also bring in new brooms and cleaning supplies. This symbolizes letting go of the energy of the old house and welcoming good energy into our new home. Scattering coins in the corners of every room and burying old coins at the doorstep are done to bring prosperity. Next, housewarming blessings and pausack. I don't know. I think she's going to explain it. We also have housewarming parties here in the Philippines. But before the party, we would have a blessing and pausak fumigation. Okay. Fumigation. Both traditions are done to drive away evil spirits, and they're very similar. The blessing usually involves the priest or pastor praying and sprinkling holy water around the house. The pausak is done by either end. This is a witch doctor, Al Balario, I don't know, a priest or a feng shui practitioner who goes around the house praying while burning incense. After the blessing in Pausakh, that's when we have a housewarming party with friends and family. So I will talk about the fumigation. The number of stories that my son has told me living there has. It's been incredible. He was taking a shower one day and feels something on his leg and he finds a spider. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see a spider crawling up his leg that's like that big. Like the size of. The size of half your face crawling up his leg. He, of course, freaked out one night. He woke up with a rat on him. On him. He woke up with a cat on him that had come in from outside and it was on him in his bed. Cockroaches. Yeah. I mean, just the amount of stuff that is common. I guess he doesn't even talk about it anymore because it's just. It's not interesting or exciting or different for him anymore. So the fumigation piece of this. Yeah, Cool. I get it. Next, housewarming presents. If your ofs is moving to a new home and you want to buy them a housewarming gift, do not buy them knives or sharp objects. If you it symbolizes discord and a future where you become enemies. Traditional housewarming gifts like candles, art and throw pillows are welcome. But if you want to give them something that would bring good luck, consider getting them plants, like lucky bamboo, indoor plants, or jackfruit trees, or items made of wood, like wooden utensils, abacus wall art, new brooms, feng shui items, wind chimes, laughing Buddha, lucky animal sculptures or mirrors. So that's the end of what Julia writes about this and I can't think of a time when an OFS told me they were moving, so I was buying them a gift of some sort. Usually they want to keep their private life kind of private. Not always. I can't think of a time when we helped people move because of a natural disaster, but like, their house was destroyed and so they're relocating temporarily for a reason, so that's not really moving. Or I guess it could just be a shortcoming on my part that I don't know when they're moving because maybe I don't pay enough attention to their personal lives. In any case, it's good to recognize that moving is a big deal in the Philippines, just like it is here. They have a lot more going into it than we do with the traditions. I don't feel like we have any of those things for us. We just move our stuff and that's it. But in the Philippines, it's a process. It's an involved process. And if you know someone that's moving, you might want to consider getting them a good luck gift.