Update from Smokey

I have a niece who studies engineering at Duke University.

This summer, she and some of her fellow volunteers are serving in the Philippines on a project that they themselves designed, with Duke’s support and endorsement.  (Her mother is Filipina.)

I’m proud of her for doing this, and very pleased that she’s having this remarkable experience.  It won’t always be — it isn’t always — an entirely pleasant or comfortable one, but she’ll learn and profit from it for the rest of her life.

Here’s a report that she sent to her family.  I share it with her permission:

Hello!

So it’s coming to the start of week four since arriving in Manila (wow! 4 already?!?) and we just finished the first two weeks of working at Smokey Mountain.  A quick run down — I came to the Philippines this summer with two other friends from Duke: Christina and Brian.  Christina is also half Filipina; her family is from Pangasinan.  Brian is Taiwanese heritage.  Smokey Mountain is a community that is built on top of a landfill in the Philippines.  Many of the children spend the day with their parents sorting through trash instead of going to school.  There have been community projects to help the people.  For example, one of the projects already in place is called Field of Dreams.  Some years ago, a baseball field was built inside of Smokey Mountain and some of the kids have gotten scholarships by playing baseball or softball in order to get a better education.

We proposed a project to Duke to work in this community “coaching and teaching kids so that they have more opportunities in their lives” and Duke accepted our proposal and funded it with a program called Duke Engage. That was the vague idea before coming here and it sounded great on paper. Now that I’m here, the reality is so much more challenging than presenting an idea on paper.

Touring Smokey

Our first tour of Smokey Mountain was two Saturdays ago, June 13. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I was picturing what I had looked up online, something like this.

But I thought maybe it was a little exaggerated because it’s hard to believe that people live in conditions like this all the time.

In reality, it’s not exaggerated, but that doesn’t make it any easier to believe that people live their entire lives there.

We were given a tour through the community, but first we hired security at the central authority office inside because it definitely wouldn’t be safe to just walk through alone.  The entire compound is like a mini, functioning city.  It smells like the trash when you’ve forgotten to take it out for a few weeks in the middle of summer so it had time to stew in the heat… which makes sense because that’s basically what it is, but left to stew for so many years.  Smokey Mountain gets its name from a tiny little mountain that people’s home are built around. Homes meaning tiny shacks built from pieces of cardboard or metal with sheets hung up in between. There are so many people living in such a small amount of space.  Turns out that the little mountain is actually a mountain of trash. There is a thin layer of topsoil on top and trees and grass grows, so it’s deceiving, but there’s a part that’s cut down straight and you can see the layers of trash. Just like we learned in elementary school about deducing the history of the world from the formations of rocks and sediment….you can see the history of people’s lives there in the layers of trash.

After walking for five minutes through Smokey, we had quite a following of curious kids because we obviously didn’t belong there.  There was sewage in the streets and at one point we had to step around human feces.  There were so many people sorting through trash and burning little fires everywhere.  I think they were burning electrical cords to get to the more valuable metal wire. Those fires also explains the reason for the name “Smokey” Mountain.  To say it was an eye opening experience is an understatement and saying it’s indescribable is a cop out, but that’s the truth.  It’s so hard to convey how we felt as we first saw it.  It made me stop and think and appreciate my life.  I was able to tour through the slums and then take an air conditioned car to leave and come back to my nice air conditioned, running water, real toilet apartment with a pool and gym and tennis court.  It makes me feel guilty.  It’s easy to pity the way they live and then shrug and forget about it as soon as it’s out of sight and enjoy the privileged life of vacations and beaches and a real toilet.  It’s not fair that they were born into that, but they’re not necessarily unhappy.  It’s just all so confusing, and I realize that my 8 weeks here won’t do much for them long term.  Which is probably the same conclusion that so many people have come to before me. How to fix these problems?

The kids seem pretty happy. They’re such smiley, laughing little kids, who love to be picked up and love being tickled and love when you make funny faces at them.  They love to sing the ABCs. They’re the same as any other kid I’ve ever met except that some don’t have shoes, most have rotten teeth, some are as filthy like the google images. They’re not all like that. Some of them go to regular school, and come to our “school” very clean and I’m confused at the difference between the kids. There is definitely a hierarchy within Smokey, although I don’t understand it.

The First Day

 

The first day of our “school” was complete chaos.  There are three of us and about 30 kids showed up, but none of them spoke any English (which we had expected but hoped otherwise because we don’t speak any Tagalog), and the age ranged from 2 years old to 18 years old.  We decided to sort them into three groups — older kids, young girls, and young boys.  We were so exhausted by the end of the day. The thought of repeating thatI didn’t know how we were going to do that for 7 more weeks. We finished the activities we planned for the kids by lunchtime because they have such short attention spans and they loved some games and weren’t into others that I expected them to enjoy. I kept coming up with games on the spot. The biggest hits were the simplest ones like just holding hands in a circle and swinging them back and forth and singing the ABC’s.  Another was sitting in a circle and clapping our hands the number of times someone yelled out.  They also love musical chairs.  I brought a ukulele with me and we use that to play and stop the music.  All of the kids love the ukulele and want to play with it all the time.  They call it a “guitarra”.

Now that we’ve been working there for two weeks, we’ve fell into a routine and it has become better.  I’ve learned a lot about working with these kids and it’s amazing how their individual personalities have come out. Raiza is the troublemaker who has an attention span of 2 minutes — long enough to write circles for every single letter — and then she’s up and running around.  Edward is really sweet but he can’t even write his name.  That’s my goal for him by the end of the 8 weeks.  Now he can write E and D, so we’re getting  somewhere. Trisha manages to write every single letter backwards, but from right to left so if you help it up in a mirror it would be perfect. It’s actually quite impressive if you think about it.  Princess rarely smiles but she still loves sitting in your lap.  Justine is a smarty who always asks for more math problems, and his little brother Dennis likes to help us collect the pencils.

Christina and I handle the little kids in the morning, ages 2 to 10, and Brian takes the older kids, ages 10 to 18. After lunch, we help him with the older kids so we can give them more individual attention.  Different numbers show up every day and we’ve had new kids every week — anywhere from 13 to 20 kids for the little group and 6 to 10 for the older group.  It’s a challenge because the age range and skill of the kids varies so much and there are only 3 of us who are not even qualified to teach AT ALL because that wasn’t initially the project idea we proposed.  The skill level really varies so it’s hard to try to teach to all of that at once.  We’ve started making worksheets with different skill levels every night before and printing them out.  The first day, Edward didn’t know how to hold a pencil but Camille could recognize and write every letter.  None of the little ones can read, but I taught Jeffrey to do math problems with numbers that carry over.  It’s hard because we really do want to teach something to the kids this summer but we can’t give the kids individualized attention because all the kids want attention and if you don’t help them too, then they start running around.

Our classroom is an old gym at a facility built near the entrance to Smokey Mountain. It’s called Gawad Kalinga and it’s basically a tiny school and community center for the kids that live in Smokey.  There are other classes that are much more organized and the kids have uniforms and proper supplies.  We don’t have desks, so every morning we set out two chairs for each child, one turned around to act as a desk. We’ve run out of pencils because the kids take them home with them and there are birds in the rafters above us and cats that come in and out. One day there was a dead bird that a cat had gotten on the floor and I had to stop Jay-Ar from picking it up.  Another day, a bird actually flew into my head. It came from the rafters, bumped into my head and kept flying. It should really look where it’s going.  Sometimes the kids’ moms will sit in the back of the classroom — maybe to escape the heat of the outside, although the gym isn’t much cooler.  One has a baby and she nurses it right there in the back of the room.  The place is so dirty from the air and the floor and the kids that every time when I come back to the apartment, the same amount of dirt comes off the second time as the first time. Underneath our fingernails is black at the end of every day.

We face so many more challenges than just the ability and short attention span of the kids and the lack of resources.  The language barrier is huge. If I had a super power, I’d choose to be able to communicate fluently in any language. I’m learning basic words, but it’s never enough to understand what they’re telling me.  The kids love us though. We’re like magnets and they can’t help but gravitate towards us as soon as we sit down. If we stop moving for a second, five or six kids will be on you — one clambering up on each knee, one in each arm and one climbing on top of your back.  They’re cute, but it can get overwhelming when you’re trying to get them to learn to write.  They call us “Ate (A-teh) Mia” and “Ate Christina” and “Kuya Brian”.

I’m definitely glad for the experience here but it’s hard to figure out how to best help the kids.  We’re basically pilots for the program called “Helping Hand”, and the partner we’re working with here in Manila (called JCI Manila) wants to develop this into a program every summer so that international volunteers can come work with the kids.  That attention would be great for the kids and whenever they come, they get fed a meal and snack every day.  We also always pray before every meal. Everyone is very Catholic here and Christina and I have already been gifted by 3 or 4 rosary bead bracelets from the kids.

If you want to see pictures and here updates from the Helping Hand Project, like this page:  https://www.facebook.com/jci.helping.hand

If you have any ideas for the kids, that would be really great too.

Love you!

Ate Mia

These are some of our kids:

Some of the homes nearby:

And now a note from me, her uncle:

I’ve seen this kind of appalling, wrenching, horrifying poverty in various places, particularly in Egypt.  I understand pretty much where it comes from, but there is no justification for it.

For, behold, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and that which cometh of the earth, is ordained for the use of man for food and for raiment, and that he might have in abundance.

But it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin.  (Doctrine and Covenants 49:19-20)