Just to preface, before going to Manila, I thought I lived in a big, busy, polluted city. If you think this about your home town, then visit Manila and see if you still feel the same way afterwards. I may be remembering it inaccurately, but Saigon is a country village with a parish church and farmers markets in comparison to Manila. Obviously, with so much concrete and life and so many people comes a lot of social issues that the government of a given country either do, or do not address. For the communities that Saint Karin works in, the depressing impression is that it is up to the NGOs to battle the red tape and barriers of poor education, infrastructure, lack of employment, sanitation and malnutrition rather than the government. As a liable protector, I'm sure that everyone is doing as much as they possibly can, and that there are as many shades of grey as there are malnourished street children, but I'll let these photos speak for themselves:
Saint Karin's organisation predominantly provide community outreach in the form of educational opportunities and feeding programs, and Slender Laurel and I were fortunate enough to help out with some feeding sessions, a community visit and a visit to a partner organisation who run a children's home. Behaviour in Watford and Birmingham classrooms prepared us well for the 2-14 year olds that we met and Slender Laurel and I were particularly proud of the success of a skipping rope that we introduced with the intention of a two-pronged attack: either we would use it to skip, or if the fighting in the line continued, we would use it to tie some of the worst offenders to the nearest lamppost. That's good British discipline for you. Luckily, the skipping worked a treat, as did giving policeman, manhandling rights to the big boys, who kept the queue in order.
Check out yellow-basketball-vest bruiser who totally rocked the queue management, even when there were 15 small children to control. Somebody give that boy a prefect badge - he's already wearing the Watts House colours!
Clearly, there is a very serious side to this blog that I won't get into, but as a bit of a shock fact, yellow-basketball-vest boy is not 11, he is 14. The majority of the children in the queue are over 8 years old, and the kid with the red flash in his hair, I think is 10 or 11. This is what malnutrition does, which is very scary. Some of them are at school, some of them are not, and for some of them, the main reason they are not at school is because of the shame of arriving at school without lunch because their parents cannot provide them, or their six other siblings, with lunch. If you'd like to hear more ranting about social injustice, email or arrange a Skype call with Saint Karin, who feels very strongly about these things.
If you are currently experiencing Western guilt, stop for a second and reassure yourself: what you do in your daily lives probably makes a significant positive difference to one or more people around you, and this is a good thing. If you still feel bad, please, don't book a holiday that allows you to skip with street children unless the main purpose of your visit is to buy Starbucks for an overworked friend. Instead, set up a direct debit that does something about children's education at home or abroad through a charity that you trust and believe in and educate your own children about global inequality so that they do the same. We are super fortunate to live our lives in the way we do, and everyone has a gift that they can use to improve the lives of others. If yours comes in an plastic oblong shape with a shiny gold square at one end, then do use it if you feel inclined to.
Phew! Altruistic rant done! Let's get back to the normal blog stuff...
Slender Laurel and I didn't spend our whole visit enforcing skipping rules or sitting in dirt because frankly, we're not that nice. We do good deeds every day in term time when we allow very excitable year 7s to do drama rather than sit in silence and read, and smile at children before 7:55am. Allowing children to leave our rooms on time for break has already bought us our ticket into heaven. Instead, we spent some of our days being tourists and taking fun photos around the old city of Intramurus...
And climbing active volcanoes, leaving a river of sweat to run down the hill behind us...
And obviously, no trip to an Asian metropolis would be complete without a visit to the depths of hell, also known as the meat section of the wet market where skinned pig heads stare at you like the hideous thing from 'Lord of the Flies' and men sleep beside pig carcasses waiting to be butchered and bags of blood sit on the floor and everyone who is anyone wields a huge meat cleaver, and intestines sit juicily in little bowls. Yes. Delicious.
I tried not to breathe, for fear of vomiting:
Unpleasant!
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