where is god in it?

As I sit here, writing this post that I've known I need to write and that I've wanted to write, I realize just how difficult it's going to be. First of all because I'm sitting in an internet cafe with tons of people and a tv loudly playing Rush Hour. I miss my room where I can sit in solitude, with only a faint sound of music playing on my itunes, reflecting intently on what I'm doing and writing. So I will try to do this post justice. Please stick with me, it will be long and gruling, but I really want people to read it.

I've been thinking lately how claustrophobic Manila is. How dirty the streets get, how the smells change from bad to worse, and how those few begging children seem like so many. I've also been sitting around wondering when we were going to *do* something. Now looking back I feel very childish. I wish I could go back to a few days ago and stop this nightmare of reality that's been sticking always in the back of mind and sometimes the front. Part of me feels like I can't have had such a changing experience already; it's only two weeks into the orientation. I also think that just a mere weekend of this experience makes me feel so immature, so self righteous. But at the same time I can't deny how intensive this trip was: this trip to live in the urban poor community.

As a little background and set-up, a large portion of the population in the Philippines are poor or impoverished. Most of the jobs hire people as contractual workers. You are not required in the Philippines to give minimum wage and benefits to workers until they have worked in their job for six months. So what most businesses do is hire workers for five months, lay them off for a month, and then re-hire them. So most people are not given the minimum wage of 350 pesos per day, and where the daily cost of living for a family of six is 655 pesos a day (or about ten dollars), they receive about 100 pesos, or less than two dollars. The agricultural industry in the provinces is in the same state. Most of the people here work on farms, but because of the great idea of liberalization of the market and privitization of the land, what were once subsistence farmers can't even make enough crop to sell to pay off the land renters, support themselves, or even enough to eat. Rice farmers are eating Vietnamese rice and selling their own with nothing else to do.

I can't pretend I'm an economist, or that this simplified version of the economic situation in the Philippines even begins to explain what is really happening. But it does set up the story I am about to share.

What all this means is that, one, provincial Filipinos are moving to the city to find work, and two, they are being left with no money, sometimes no jobs, and poor.

The population of these urban poor, mostly families, live in consolidated, dilapidated communities all over the city. Two of those communities are known as Parola and Beseco. They are both on the shore of Manila Bay, separated by the Pasig River and surrounded by bay industry. The houses are ramshackled and shottily constructed, using random wood, siding, boards, and iron. I can't begin to describe the view and the true nature of these houses as we walked down endless alleys, along waste filled gutters and around people, dogs, cats, roosters, pigs, trash, human waste, and intense poverty.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

To start off we were ushered into Becca's van, all eight of us, and told to "have fun." Our driver, Pastor Ronnie of the UCCP Church of Tondo drove us down the bay road to a little impoverished area in Tondo where a daycare doubled as the meeting house for a group known as Samakana. These people, living in Tondo, Beseco, and Parola, have volunteered, sometimes giving up their jobs to do so, to organize the people of the community to fight their situation and the government that comes into their communities to rip out their men to take to prison in undeclared martial law, burn their houses for the mere sake of scattering some residents, and plans to reduce the communities to replace them with businesses and high rises.

After a very brief orientation about who the program was and who the volunteers were, we were split up into two groups, four to Parola and four to Beseco and taken on a quick "ocular" tour. What I saw I began describing above. Here I will just add that the communities were divided into areas that stretched for miles. After each area were long roads, where bike drivers sat with their empty sidecars, praying for a fare, and children and men screamed "Americana!" and "Yo, Joe!" to us. "What your name?" they called. "You buy?" "You want." "What you doing here?"

Then we were halved again: two back to another area, and myself and my new neighbor Martha taken to the shore line. I looked out from the end of the "road" over a railing and into the Pasig River. I noticed along the side just in my view from under the houses that were built on stilts along the river that there were water plants, entangling trash of all kinds. Some children swam around, some naked, some only half clothed, climbing onto boards and scavenging in the trash for plastic that they could sell for what little money it would get them. Martha and I then went to go meet our host families and we sat in their small one or two room houses on the floors or in the only chairs they owned which they willingly gave us. We talked about the situation in the community. Why were they there? Where did they come from? How do they get the little money they had? How long had their children been in school? How long could they keep them there, with the weekly cost being more than their daily income allowed? And they asked us what we thought, what we believed. What is a Democrat and a Republican? What did we think about American Imperialism? Did we support Bush? Where there places like this in the United States? Where we married? Why not, we were so pretty? What did we learn in school? The conversations waned to and from the political and social to the little casualties of life. Children poked their heads from behind corners, laughing, giggling, smiling, staring. Crowds would gather around the doorway to stare at the rich, white faces sitting on the floor of the small hovels. And then the question would come again, "why are you here?" Only this time we would have to answer. "To learn," we would say. "To understand your situation." Only how could we? Two nights? Was it enough time to truly understand. What is really feels like, what it means to have another Friday come around and still be in the same house. To not go back to an internet cafe and only write about the horrible nightmare you woke up from. We went to a sari-sari (variety) store and met two brothers who had just been reunited. One way gay, he was "a gay" as they say. We laughed and discussed and they taught me a little Tagalog, even though they spoke mixed dialects closer to Cebuano.

That night I had lunch with my family: fish and rice. Somehow I was full when we finished. We sat and watched television on a small screen in black and white, the "antennae" being moved around by the middle child to find where we could actually get a picture, the sound coming out of another tv that's screen was broken and held on by a pin stuck in the power button. RC, my guide, translated to me. A report about Dengue, a disease carried by mosquitoes. Mosquitoes were everywhere in Parola and especially Beseco. Some people had died last year from it, but they weren't reported. They didn't have the money for the hospital and no one really cared about those people in Parola. I used to CR (comfort room), which was a ledge out of the back of the house covered by a thin sheet. It was raining. A small hole in the gaped planks was my toilet. I couldn't see below me, but I never even though about where it was going. I went back inside where we stayed up talking. About the mundane, the trite, namely me, and then about politics and philosophy. RC had been a philosophy major in school. He had read about revolutions and God and governments and the Bible and prayer and everything but what did I think?

I slept that night on the floor in one of the two small rooms in the house. They left the light on for me, even though I didn't need it, to keep things away. I slept next to two of the boys on a mat in my malong cloth, a pair of pants for a pillow. They kept their only fan on me the whole night, which I wasn't allowed to refuse, even when I moved it stealthily in the middle of the night. The funny thing is how sick I am even now from the fan being on me for two nights. I woke up the next morning to breakfast: sweet coffee bought from the sari-sari store for me and some break we filled with noodles. They asked me, "you shower?" Sure. I went back out onto the ledge from the night before. They sun was just right in the sky, everything glowed with color. Just over the roofs was a clear, beautiful view of the bay and the ocean water. A beautiful white dove sat and watched me, edging closer and closer when my eyes were closed. The site was out of place in its beauty it seemed, because how beautiful was the beach front, but what the people who were blessed enough to live with it had to live life was heartbreaking. Then I looked down over the ledge. The edge of water I had seen the day before wasn't just the edge of the water. The trash was covering the ground. Human waste from the houses iced the tops of boxed and plastic. A diaper hung from the rafter it had caught on. I realized what I had been sleeping over during the night, and where everything that was leaving the CR was going.

After my shower, RC took me to meet the others in my area to go to a house for a lecture on "activism". We sat in a very nice house for the neighborhood. It had the pseudo-tile laid and indoor lighting. I learned how lucky I had been in my house. Two of the others had no electricity. Their rooms were smaller and their floors the ground. In the group we were shocked to learn we would be talking about Communism and Chairman Mao. His five golden rays and view of Liberalism were on the docket. What did we think of Communism. Could they do something like this? This is why they were organizing. To teach the community, to join it together. But for communism. Why hadn't it worked before, they asked. Were we liberals in the United States. We were taken aback. How were we to answer. The Hacienda Lucido workers had revolted and ended up with seven dead, we watched the video. "How does this make you feel?" I shut off. I began vigorously journaling, hoping the boys squished next to me couldn't read my sloppy cursive or understand English well enough to care.

I vented my frustrations. How can these people believe in God. Would I be able to in these situations? How are the poor "blessed"? How can somehow say "God will provide" when God hasn't seemed to? I poured out how much I hated being there, and how ashamed I was of that. How I was counting down the hours until I could go back to the special projects house with Becca and a mattress and AC. I even wrote how much I hated myself for thinking how I just wanted them to tear it all down, just so I could know it wasn't there, haunting me. They were some of the worst thoughts I've ever had. And then I thought how I wanted somehow for everything to change. For the businesses to start paying the workers. For the American and Japanese industries to leave and let new businesses build up. For them all to pay at LEAST minimum wage. For the houses to be torn down and replaced with homes that had electricity and water and plumbing. And then sickeningly how I knew, honestly, I really didn't have the faith or the hope to believe it would ever happen.

When we left the house, seven hours later, we went back to Sara's host family's house. We saw only with the two small oil lamps in the house. Suddenly Angie, a resident and youth volunteer ran up. There were two ministers in the community, did we want to meet them? Of course. We walked through the streets, a little distant, until we came to a small door in the middle of a market. We went inside to find four men praying. Two were pastors of the building: a Methodist church. "Please come in, sit, pray with us." We had a small bible study, about Job. Job's faith wasn't dependent on what he was given, but simply because of God's love for him. "Those that receive often, forget where it comes from," he said. Could this be true. Could these concurring members who had trickled in believe this? That what little they had was from God, and they didn't believe because of what they were given, or not believe because of what little they were given? Could a lesson so cliche, but rarely understood, for most Christians as Job fill them with faith? We prayed. We prayed A LOT. Long prayers. We took an offering. We prayed again. Would Sara pray for them, they asked. Would she pray for the people to come together and stand against the government and demand their rights, with one voice? We returned to our homes, ate a quick dinner, and feel asleep, this time knowing what was just below the floor.

The time flew after that. I ate breakfast. Smiling, jovial Nina and Angie came and got me, took me back to the daycare in a bike, free of the much needed charge. We met the other four we had been away from for so long. Helen was covered in mosquito bites and hadn't slept all weekend and Sarah had taught the Tondo children some songs when they had been trapped there the night before from the rain. Everyone gathered. What were we thankful for from the weekend? Would we remember them? Would we come visit? Then they insisted on taking tons of pictures from our cameras, photos they would never see or possess, as a remembrance of them, as Angie said.

Then Jed came, one of the workers. We were driven to pastor Ronnie's church on the better side of Tondo. We stayed there for awhile, ate at the Jolibee, had cotton candy at the children's carnival, toured the sanctuary, and were driven home. We drove back past Parola and Beseco, our homes for a brief breath. Hadn't we just been there? Didn't it seem so long ago?

Even now I feel odd about it all. every time I close my eyes, I think about how hard it was, even though there were times during it when I was truly laughing or enjoying my conversations with others. How quickly and thankfully I have re-entered my semi-comfortable life in Malate, a few mere miles from the North Harbor. I'm thinking that right now these people are going on with their lives living in the "reality". That word was used more than any other all weekend. "This is our reality," they kept saying. And still it feels like a dream. Is it because I can't truly handle the truth that that life really exists. Am I so naive to think this small experience has really affected me so much? I don't know. It certainly has sparked a long and intensive blog entry to say the least. I don't know what I can tell you from this.

Why are you here? What do you want to learn from this? What are you going to do now? I can't expect anything to really transfer through this computer to you, any understanding. I don't know what I want to do with this, or what I want to encourage you to do. Like me, this will be just a memory in a short while, and back to "reality" we go. I guess like we said to the people of Parola and Beseco, we're just learning so we can tell people. So in my own little way, I'm telling you a short page from the life of the Philippines. I hope that you've made it through this far, maybe in a few installments. Please don't think less of me for my honesty. Just think about them at least once and maybe take the time to say a little prayer for them the next time you talk to God. That's more than they have now.

The time I've spent in this cafe has been long enough to cost 100 pesos...a days wage...

Peace, I hope

(note: the added pictures don't do justice to capturing the true poverty of these communities. I often felt ashamed to try and take pictures, so I took ones when I wasn't feeling so invading or when I was asked to take one. The one of the large group is especially misleading since this was a very nice in comparison to all the ones we saw. Please understand that the room we are in is half the house, the other half being the kitchen and CR, and that right outside the door are the narrow, dirt filled streets so common in the communities. The two girls are Angie and Nina, and my host mother appears in the picture of us with the banner, behind me and to the left. The open air type picture is a large road that ran between the different areas of Parola and the bike that appears in the first picture was so rare outside of these areas where a lot of men try to get money by driving tricycles, that I was shocked to see it. Please don't be mislead.)