I don’t even know where to begin to talk about my experience at Happy Land dump and Old Smoky Mountain (trash mountain) maybe I’ll start by explaining what these places are…. Happy Land is a dump that has been shut down because there’s too much trash there. It’s endless amounts of trash. That people have managed to make homes in. These people live in the trash. Old Smoky Mountain is an old dump that has been completely shut down and left. Layers and layers and layers of trash have decomposed into soil to create a small mountain. When I say small mountain I mean huge hill. People live on top of Old Smoky and are lacking nutrition and clean water.
Happy Land we went in and we fed 360 kids for a feeding. These kids were all so dirty from the trash that they lived in. Who knows the last time they had actual clean water to take a bath in. Turning the corner into happy land is an average alley in the Philippines but then you turn into the dump. My heart broke the moment we turned into the dump. It was so hard to imagine these sweet kids living in such a awful situation but they were so happy. All of these kids were so happy. You maybe saw a baby or two crying, but the kids were so happy and I thought to myself “How can they be so happy with where they live..”. Well they grew up here and so did their parents, they don’t know anything else. So they found joy in what little they had. That’s just so incredible to me that these KIDS found joy in the trash that they lived in. They were an inspiration to me. They are the ones changing my heart and wanting me to choose joy in every situation. As we were leaving I had previously knelt down and got my knee dirty. We hopped on the tricycles to leave and this boy that had been following us around came up and brushed the mud and dirt off of my knee because he wanted to make sure I was clean. Once again broke my heart. How endearing it was to see someone I couldn’t even speak to because of the language barrier take care of me in that way.
Old Smoky Mountain well you have to climb up this “mountain” to get to the top. So once we reached the top we walked for a couple minutes and reached our feeding area where kids slowly started to show up and when they did in total there was about 150 of them that showed up. We got the opportunity to brush their hair, wash their faces, clean their hands, and clip their nails. Then we fed them and they came back for more food and there was nothing left… But everyone got fed. But nothing was left and they were still hungry and that broke my heart once again. The kids up their had lice and lots of it. A couple of the girls I was taking care of had so much lice it was incredible. But we were there to minister to them so I kept going and it was such an honor to be able to do that for those girls and for all those kids. Even though we just got to do those small things for them. They don’t get clean water up on the mountain. They don’t get enough nutrition. But once again these kids are happy and they know the joy of The Lord.
No matter how hard things are there they choose joy and I can’t imagine that comes from anything other than The Lord. The Lord is so good and he puts us in these situations to learn how to have complete joy in just him. We don’t need anything but The Lord and the love and comfort that he offers us. Yes for some of us we have more comforts, more family, more everything, than other people. But The Lord is saying “if I took all those things away and it was just you and I would you trust that I would provide for you, love you endlessly, and take care of you?”
Think about it. Would you seriously be okay if everything you have was taken away and God gave you a bible and said here I am and here is my word. This is all you need. What would you do?
