Children in Quezon City. Photo: Freya Blyth.
‘I want to get stuck right in there, with local people and small charities.’
The Philippines is defined by its emerald rice fields and teeming megacities. But those cities are host to serious poverty and violence. Freya Blyth went to get involved
It took months of planning, dreaming and praying to bring me here. That is what I remind myself of as I stand in the middle of a narrow street in the centre of an illegal settlement community in the capital city of Manila, in the Philippines.
It’s hard. People often forget to tell you that, as they scroll through their travel photos, showing off tanned skin and beautiful images of waterfalls. I have the tanned skin and the photos now, but also bags under my eyes from jetlag, and 3am cockroach scares. I’ve had a funny tummy from the diet change and spend at least eighty per cent of my days very confused by a language I’m still learning.
I love to travel. I enjoy the challenge of a new context to rediscover myself in. For me, a big part of that is working – I want to get stuck right in there, with local people and small charities, doing work and making a difference to the community around them. With that in mind I made contact with a group working with children in the illegal settlements (what we might in the UK call slums) around Batasan Hills, Quezon City, Manila. The group has been running this community project for over thirty years, and has a hugely admirable level of dedication to the area – known even around Manila to be a highly impoverished and dangerous one. I spoke with locals who have lived in Manila their whole lives and who frankly declared ‘I have never been to Quezon City, and wouldn’t feel at all safe’. It’s true that without knowing locals, and the way the tiny winding alleys between shack-like homes work, it feels as if it could swallow someone up. In a way it does, with over 2.9 million people in this part of the wider metropolitan area of Manila. It is densely packed, with thousands of children who have little access to a healthy living space or education.
Local knowledge
The team has many locals working on board, lending the necessary knowledge of what will or won’t work in this environment. The group now just does that – what works: going into the streets in teams of five and playing basketball with the children, running art activities with coloured pencils and stories. These are simple but effective, because the activities themselves are not important. What matters is the consistency of attitude towards, and treatment of, the children. Every week, visiting twenty communities, the team shows that consistency, arriving to the same street, at the same time, on the same day each week. The children run towards us – as I join in I very quickly become part of the family of ‘us’ – with open arms, laughing with delight at the sight of our welcoming smiles.
There seems to be an interesting level of wary respect from the adults we see in these communities. Hardened by life, and no strangers to the gangs, gambling and criminal activity that fill many of the side streets we walk through, their eyes seem to shrug at me, saying: ‘Well, if you want to walk in here and spend time educating and entertaining our kids, we aren’t going to stop you.’
It’s on just such a street that I find myself now as the light fades into a dusty early evening. The air has begun to cool from the tropical heat and my body sucks in a breath of relief. Sticky from a day’s heat, and with a raspy voice from the last hour of playing and singing, we turn in to an open area with a group of young shirtless men playing basketball on one side and older men gambling on the other. Lolas – grandmas – gossip around the edge and children play games with shouts of glee, very much at home in this meleé of activity. Dogs (we can’t tell whether or not they are strays) weave themselves in and around us, hunting for scraps. The smell is thick, the lack of a sewerage system or running water hangs heavy, mixed with sweat and dust. Just another perfectly ordinary dusk in another settlement, of which there are hundreds, separated by unseen borders mapped by communities and gangs across the city.
Outside eye
There’s something beautiful here as well, although not immediately visible to the naked western eye. Here lies a level of interdependent community life I have never encountered back home. In a hot-climate culture, the self-termed ‘Pinoy’ people are rarely indoors when they could be outside. Who can blame them, when the small houses are often cramped and overcrowded with too many bodies for the space, and certainly no living area? One woman invited me into what has been her home for over forty-five years, and it’s barely two metres squared, stuffed with mattresses and blankets heaped on top of each other. These are unwashed and, with no windows, there is no ventilation. The walls are made from corrugated iron and wooden planks. My host’s face shows weariness as she tells me that she shares the space with her twenty-two-year-old son. But here is where we can often unwittingly make assumptions about the cause of her strained-looking eyes, because it is not a result of her situation or lack of opportunities in life, as I might initially conclude. She confides that it is because of the political climate. Her sons have been forced to betray the law, a law that now has shot two of her sons without trial.
What else can I offer but listening? At nearly seventy she expects little to change, and has no energy for it. She simply wants to tell a stranger her story. To be seen and heard is a valuable thing.
A child tugs me out of my thoughts as I am offered a charming broken-toothed smile, the result of penny cheap sweets and no parent encouraging brushing. Asking with a lilting accent: ‘Australian?’ ‘Taga si England,’ I reply and am rewarded with a squeal as many more children circle me. ‘Shall we sing a song?’ It’s almost rhetorical, since we don’t speak the same language, but it somehow doesn’t matter – we are communicating plenty through touch and laughter, smiles and eyes. We are dust of the same dust and made of the same flesh. Language becomes a minor detail. I start to sing and, because the children can’t join in the words, we do actions that they follow along with exuberance and hilarity. A new game! I have no idea if the game is singing, or ‘copy the foreign lady making weird arm movements’. It truly doesn’t matter, I am laughing and their smiles are infectious in their unabashed joy.
Personal challenge
All of this challenges me so much - this joy, which has no strings attached. It is not because of something; but rather because why not? The sense of life here is the most real thing I’ve felt in years. Here, where life is so very close to the line. Disease is in many lungs, as I hear the coughs of tuberculosis echoing through tiny chests. The poverty aches, with lack of food or hygiene visible in many still radiant faces. They have something, these beautiful cheeky beings before me, something rare that I’ve not seen before. Some level of trust that allows them to laugh completely without fear of the future. The haunted look I have seen on many a face on the London Underground is surprisingly absent here. Amid real hardship, I see only light.
The sunlight has faded now. It’s past 7pm, and the children are colouring pictures of animals with increasing intensity. Etched on their faces is such sweet enjoyment that I search for a way to prolong it. There’s no electricity here, so the dark brings with it only the option of finishing. My eyes meet those of a man, in his fifties maybe, from across the road. Eye contact with men is not culturally appropriate here, but in this moment something is understood without words.
Perhaps his daughter is one of the little girls at my feet, because he stirs and produces a torch, sent via a scrawny child across to me. I hold it up in one hand, my phone acting as a torch in the other, and inhabit my new role: glorified lamppost. I am not unaware of the metaphor, the children need light in a dark place. All that I can do in that moment is meet that immediate need, and I am utterly content in my job.
Shared hopes
I cannot change the Philippines’ corrupt politics, which seriously affects the situation before me. I cannot provide safe jobs to give these children legal or sustainable avenues for their future. Food programmes here have been attempted but shut down – they can’t hold up under the overwhelming need. Such programmes also problematically remove the responsibility of parents to provide food for their own children, with the spare income then leading to more money for gambling.
How can I bear this need, breathe it, and feel it persistently pulling on my clothes for attention. A deep sense of love rolls up from within, a love that needs to be channelled into action. What I do must be revolutionary. So I smile.
The power of the returning grin smashes down walls of difference. Years of separate culture and unknown language tumble before the experience of a shared smile. Revolution will be our aim, and kindness our weapon. So I stand, humming gently over the guardians of the future, a singing lamppost shining light into the night. I am praying over these children of Quezon City Manila, that they will be hungry also with taste of hope, provided in the stories that teams like this one tell them, a hunger that helps them fight for their own future.
