Before the World Race, I read a book…The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claibourne. It was very influential in my life…one of the things God used to lead me to the World Race. It is a book that I highly recommend to a lot of people…in fact, you should pick up a copy of it if you haven’t read it already.
One of the things that amazed me about the book was the way he described community…he paints an amazing picture of what it looks like when you choose to live your life in the footsteps of Jesus…people just helping, serving, and loving on each other…it is just beautiful. You will understand when you read it.
I always wondered what it would be like to live the way he describes in the book and I never really experienced it in my life…until I got to the Philippines.
When we first showed up in Manila, we were with our whole September squad for debriefing. After a few days, the other teams left for their new ministry sites.
The day after everyone left, we woke up, had breakfast, and waited to see what we were going to be doing that month. Then Jeff Long (our amazing ministry contact and host) showed up and Danny and I went on a walk with him and Dave (an awesome guy that was helping Jeff and his ministry for awhile…I miss you Dave).
We walked up the street and Jeff began to tell us the story of a four year old boy named AJ.
AJ lived with his family, over twenty people, in a house made of scraps of wood and metal that they had picked up throughout the years. The house they lived in was…maybe, just maybe, a fifth of the size of the house I grew up in with my parents and two sisters.
During the rainy season, their house did an ok job of keeping the rain off of them…they only had a few places where water came in through the roof. The main issue with rain was that it would come in at ground level and flood rooms where they slept and since they don’t all have beds some of them have to sleep in the puddles.
The area they live in isn’t very safe. A few years back, one of the older girls witnessed a stabbing in front of their house. When it became known that she saw the stabbing and that she was going to testify against the guy, they came back to the house and murdered her before she went to court.
All of this is pretty bad stuff, but they were a lot better off than most of the people in this squatter neighborhood. For those of you that don’t know a squatter village is a place where homeless folks decide to build little shacks on the property of others… creating their own little village…but even though they have a nice little village, they live in fear of their houses being torn down…because every so often the owners of the property will give the families a two week notice to pack up and move because they will be coming through with a bulldozer to clear off their property.
But none of this has much to do with AJ…now I only know a little bit about AJ’s story, but what I know is sad…
I hear that AJ was a happy four year old…full of life. But we never got to meet AJ because he died a few weeks before we got there…he died because he got bit by a mosquito and got Denghe Fever.
As we walked up the street with Jeff, he talked about how mosquitoes need standing water to make new little mosquitoes. We came over the a hill, about a five minute walk from out house, we saw all the standing water…only it wasn’t standing water…it was standing sewage water…This whole street was covered in sewage water…for about 100 yards. The hillside alongside the road had eroded down onto the street and now this street the size of a wide sidewalk.
The street was covered with dirt, garbage, and sewage…and it just reeked…this mosquito breeding ground was right in front of AJ’s house as well as a handful of others.
When it rained, there would be huge pools of water and sewage and the only way the pools would disappear was by evaporating. There was no other way for the pools to empty out because they were dammed up by the dirt and garbage.
We stood there for the next 15 minutes or so and talked about the situation. When we looked up the hill we could see a handful of houses and coming from each of them we could see the streams of sewage coming from each one down the hillside to the road where we were standing.
As we stood there in the crap, literally, a few kids came running over barefoot…some to stare at us…some were just playing…others came to wave and say “Hello.”
I sat there and looked at the situation…because that is what it was to me…a situation…so impersonal.
Within a half hour, our four brains had come up with a plan to try to help out. Our plan was to remove all of the dirt, garbage, and sewage. Then we were going to build some type of retaining wall to keep the road clean in the future. After that we were going to put in a couple of outhouses and a septic system for all the people that lived on this hillside.
At first it kind of seemed unreal to me that we were going to try to do this…I had never really done anything like this…and I really had no idea where to even start a project like this.
As we were getting ready to walk back down to the house we were staying at…I kept thinking about how I wanted to tell my team about what we had seen. I wanted to tell them about our plan to try to help. I was looking forward to coming back in the future to try to help.
But then Jeff said, “Shovels, we need shovels.”
About 3o minutes later, Danny, Dave, and I were staring at the mountain of dirt, sewage, and garbage. We had our shovels and one massive pry bar in hand, we picked a side to start, and we started chipping away.
We worked all day in that smelly muck. Slowly as we worked, a few people came out to help us…a few of the men, but also some women and children.
Soon after we started, we discovered that there was a curb underneath it all. It had been buried beneath all of that muck for years.
Since one of our goals was to build a retaining wall, we decided we could use this. We decided to dig out behind the curb and build the retaining wall up to the curb to give it some more support beside the post were we going to build. So we now had a new mission…uncover the curb the length of the street.
But once we uncovered the curb, we still couldn’t build the retaining well yet. There was still a mound in front of the curb that needed to be moved. As we cleared away the dirt in front of the curb and dug out behind it, some of the men came over to start working on the retaining wall.
We had a few guys that began working with us…Cardin, Sherwin, and a couple others. Cardin was the leader of this area and Sherwin, I learned later, was AJ’s uncle. We worked side by side. They spoke some English, so we would do our best to communicate with each other. We would take turns chipping away at the dirt and shoveling.
And for the first few days, it was just us…busting our butts in the heat and in the rain. But slowly some others came to join in. Some women and young kids would come over and grab a shovel and start shoveling.
About the time our backs were ready to give out, one of the people working with us said he had a friend with a front end loader…and that he would be able to bring it by to help move the dirt. So for about an hour one day we got to take a rest and watch the front end loader move the larger piles of dirt…which helped so much, but still didn’t take care of all the dirt.
Jeff also knew some people with a truck and we borrowed the truck to move dirt and garbage down the street, which we later used for planting flowers in front of the house we were staying at.
And we just kept plugging away…chipping dirt away, shoveling…and after about 2 weeks all the dirt, garbage, and sewage was gone from in front of the curb.
During this time, I started to get to know Sherwin and his family really well. We would talk and laugh. I would chase his nieces, nephews, and kids around. His mom invited me over to eat a couple meals with them. I went to church with them and held his daughters on my lap. They started calling me Tito Kyle, which is like Uncle Kyle. I would stop by to challenge Sherwin’s younger brother to chess games every couple days. It was just really cool to get to know them.
After all the dirt was gone, we started working on the retaining wall. We would mix all the cement by hand. Often times, the women and kids would jump in and keep mixing it for us while we laid the block to make the wall.
As we worked on the wall, we decided to do a few other things to help the people out in the area. We noticed that the people that had to walk up to their houses had to walk on steep muddy paths. So in one section, a couple of the guys put in a set of steps up to the top of the hill for a few families…while we worked on another section.
We also got to know some of the other families in the area. Every day we would take a short break in the morning when Dave would buy everyone a soda. We would sit and relax in the shade. We were invited to sing karaoke and play a billiards-type game with some of the adults in the neighborhood. We even got introduced to someone’s pet monkey.
We also had some down time one day while waiting on supplies and we went over to the other side of the road and started moving some dirt and noticed that there was a really nice side walk under a mound of dirt. So we removed all the dirt and cleaned up the sidewalk. Next to the side walk we planted a bunch of flowers for them.
We also noticed that a couple other families needed a sidewalk to their house and they needed to have a drainage system for some sewage and rainwater. So we started working on a drainage system and sidewalk for them.
We spent a few days getting the dirt all leveled, after that we started putting the concrete and drainage ditch in place. When we finished, it looked really good.
After the retaining wall was up, we started working on the septic system. Originally, we put it off because it was supposed to be a secret. We didn’t want to get in trouble by the guards so we put it off until we were finished with the wall. We were planning on going in at night and digging the hole for it, but at the last minute, they gave us permission to do it so we started working on it during the day.
So we spent a couple days digging a hole about 5 feet deep and about eight feet wide through some pretty hard dirt, garbage, and fire ant hills. (This is where I take credit for discovering the hard way that they were fire ants.)
We had the septic tank and drainage system in a few days later and we were done with that big project.
After getting to know Sherwin so well, I learned that his family of 20 was struggling. So we brainstormed as a team and decided to get Sherwin two goats. He named them Billy (for obvious reasons) and Shakira.
The rest of our September team came back and a bunch of us spent an afternoon cleaning up the endless garbage in the area. There were about 10 of us and about 50 kids walking the streets picking up bag after bag of garbage.
Sherwin’s mom offered to teach me how to cook this really amazing banana desert that she made me one day so I took her up on her offer. I went up to their house one afternoon for a cooking lesson with one of my teammates, Haley. It was really simple and so delicious.
My time in the Philippines was amazing…I got to know Sherwin and his family very well. Sherwin and I even got matching haircuts one day for fun.
On our last night together, we went up on top of hill overlooking all of Manila. We watched the most amazing display of fireworks that I have ever seen in my life. New Years Eve in Manila is nuts…people launch fireworks all over the city for about 3 hours straight. It was a great way to end the times we spent together in Manila.
I will never forget the time I spent with Sherwin and his family in the Philippines…It is amazing what can be accomplished when you keep Jesus in the center of what you are doing.
God is good…All the time…
