The following was written by my awesome team leader, Brant Copen, who captured the extremes we see in the Philippines very well! [Thanks Branthony!]
"I am sitting on the roof of a church on the other side of the world. Sweat has soaked through my shirt and I have to squint to see our little Christmas tree a few feet away in the direction of the sun. Off in the distance, across Bay Lake, I can see the skyline of the giant metropolis of Manila, partially immersed in its cloud of smog from the 21 million inhabitants. The church is surrounded by muddy water. It floods regularly here and can take months to recede, which is why most of the squatters build their shacks on stilts.
The poverty level here in the Philippines is set at around $400 a year. 26% of the population falls below that excruciatingly low line. In a squatter’s village everything holds value. An old guitar front-face serves as a patch on a plywood wall, styrofoam packing is tied together for a raft, and old glass bottles hold oil at the market. People eat chicken feet, chicken heads, chicken lungs; but mostly just rice. It is a hopeless endeavor to stay clean when you have to wade through 2 feet of muddy garbage water to enter your front door.
It is a strange thing to live in a place where children line up to receive a bowl of fortified rice while turbo jets line up in the sky to deliver their tourists and where ripped bed sheets compose the majority of an exterior wall while shiny skyscrapers compose the horizon. I told my teammate that I have never seen such stark contrast between rich and poor. “I have” she said, “in Toledo.” I guess that is probably true, but it feels different when you are living with them; when your friend Joshua is one of the kids lining up at the missionary’s bus for his only meal of the day, when your neighbor is the one not wearing shoes because he can’t afford them, when those statistics smile and shake your hand as you pass them on the way to the market.
