When I ask several members of my cast what the most meaningful Community Impact Project they took part in throughout our whole tour, the overwhelming response is: our CI in Manila, and I, without a doubt, agree. I think this is the case for several reasons. The most obvious reason is that we practically lived at each of our sites. It was there that we spent the overwhelming majority of our time. But going deeper than that, it was at our CI sites in Manila where we made the most well-rounded impact. We didn’t just go into a school and paint the cafeteria, or refurbish a water feature. We were in people’s homes playing games with them, talking with them, making friends with them, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them in building their homes to make sure they, and future generations of their family, ultimately had a better quality of life.
To most of you reading this post, the words, “Gawad Kalinga” mean absolutely nothing to you. Some of you might even think that it’s a new brand of laundry detergent. But for the members of my Community Impact team, those words mean so much. In Filipino, Gawad Kalinga means “to give care,” and that is exactly what this organization does. Their aim is going into the most impoverished areas of the Philippines and digging those people out of poverty, assisting in building homes for them and teaching them the necessary skills (e.g. business skills, trades, and regular education) to become productive members of the Filipino, and global, societies.
Each individual section of apartments get a certain name to distinguish it from other Gawad Kalinga villages, and since I was living with a host family that I considered to by my European family, I thought it à propos that the CI site we were assigned to was called the European Village. How perfect was that? But what made the experience really great was our CI team, which consisted of myself, Savannah from Colorado, Jenny from Texas, Maggie from Connecticut, Molly from Ohio, Veronika from Sweden, Milou from the Netherlands, Bárbara from Mexico, Franziska from Switzerland, Colin from Texas, Arnab from Bangladesh, and from time to time Johan from the Netherlands would peek in and see how everything was running.
Then there were the people at the Euro Village that took excellent care of us and treated us like a family. At the Gawad Kalinga sites, there was more than just work going on. One of my best memories of our GK site was sitting around the table and singing Beatles songs and other songs from the ‘60s. Other days, the staff at the GK site set up challenges for us to get us working together as a team to reach a common goal.
One of these team-building challenges hinged upon the fact that none of us were native Filipinos. So, the staff got together and set up what they called a “delicacy relay” à la Survivor. We had heard about this particular challenge almost from the very beginning so, we had a little bit of preparation time. What happened was we were split up into two relay teams and stood face to face on either side of a long conference room type table on which were placed ice cream serving cups with plastic lids on top to conceal what was lurking inside. The vegetarian contingent of our group was breathing a sigh of relief at first, but that relief turned into horror when it was revealed that there would be vegetarian-friendly menu items. And that horror turned into terror when they found out that they would be starting the relay off.
The relay itself was quite a scene. It seemed as though the entire village showed up for this international showdown of intestinal fortitude. What am I thinking? The entire village probably did turn up for this event. It was like the Harlem Globetrotters had shown up at the European GK Village in Manila. There was so much shouting going on that it was hard to hear when the competition was going to start.
On the word, “go,” the vegetarians opened up their container and found therein things that might as well have been cultivated on Mars. To me it looked like a bunch of sea vegetation, and by the looks of “what the hell am I eating?” on the faces of my veggie compatriots, I got nervous about what would be staring me in the face when I opened that container. After the veggies were finished and everything was swallowed, the person two people down from me went. This time, it was the world-famous Filipino delicacy balut. Balut is a duck embryo that is a few weeks from being a full-fledged duck. And it’s still in its shell when you eat it. Some of my friends that were brave enough to try this said that they actually could taste some feathers and stuff. So, I am so glad that I didn’t have to endure that kind of test, because I don’t think I would have been able to do it.
The next item on the menu was chicken brain. It just so happened that chicken brain is a popular snack in Bangladesh, and Arnab happened to be the person to get chicken brain, which was good for our opponents. He expertly cracked the skull open and went to town eating the whole thing while Savannah had a hard time with hers. So, I had to eat whatever came next to save our team.
Savannah passed me my ice cream dish, and I was really afraid of what it could be. I lifted the lid up ever so slowly and much to my delight found two very orange chicken feet laying side by side. I was so relived to see what was basically the Philippines’ answer to buffalo wings. I found out later that chicken feet are usually grilled and served on long skewers, kind of like a shish-kebab or a corn dog.
I enjoyed my tasty treat as fast as I could, and when I finished, I looked at the next person in line, who shall remain anonymous, and they looked as white as a sheet. “I can’t do it. I just can’t,” they squeaked out.
“C’mon,” I said, “this will be a story for the grandkids! You’ll regret it if you don’t.” After a couple more flat refusals and a, “HURRY UP!” from the rest of the team, I decided to be the pinch eater for that round. The chicken feet weren’t that bad, how bad could this be? I opened up the container and saw two long, serpentine… things coiled up in the dish. “Intestines. I can’t believe I am about to eat intestines.” But I psyched myself up by telling myself that sausages are oftentimes cased in pig or goat intestine, and I love sausages, so this can’t be as bad as that. I popped the first one in my mouth, and at first was relieved when it wasn’t that bad.
And then, I bit down. As soon as I did, I felt this gamey, earthy paste ooze out of the intestine and discovered that for this particular delicacy, they take the intestines straight from the chicken and immediately put them into the boiling pot. Lovely. I looked at the person next to me and said, “You better love me for this.” It took me a good five minutes to choke both intestines down, and when I did, I noticed that Franziska was still working on hers. Savannah patted me on the back and handed me a bottle of RC Cola, which I drank in under 30 seconds. Never in my life did RC Cola taste to frickin’ good. My host brother Mahar later told me that it was called isaw, (pronounced ‘e-female pig’) and that he didn’t really care that much for it, either.
When all was said and done, I think the whole thing ended in a tie, and we all just stood there and wondered what the heck just happened. All of us except Arnab, that is.
In between the Survivor-esque challenges and the Beatles songs, real work was actually getting done. Some of us plastered walls and some of us bent steel rebar, and some of us made tiny little steel AIDS ribbons that would serve as metal ties for the rebar to provide structure to the concrete walls. That was my job. I think by the end of the 2 and a half weeks, I bent close to 7,000 steel wire rods into AIDS ribbons. But I loved my job, because I could talk to a lot of the villagers and all of the kids that hung around the construction site.
In many ways, my most special memories that come from the GK village are of the people who call the village home. The adults grew up with no running water, a very tenuous roof over their head, and hardly any clothes on their back, yet they were among the most genuine and down-to-earth people I ever met on the whole tour. They all smiled and gave me a big hug when I saw them each and every day, and they were very impressed when I flexed my Tagalog muscles for them. My favorite word that I would use often for them was masarap, which means, “delicious.” But the most useful phrase that they taught me was, ano pangalan mo? ‘Ano’ is ‘what,’ ‘pangalan’ is ‘name,’ and, ‘mo’ is ‘you.’ So, ‘ano pangalan mo’ is Tagalog for, ‘What’s your name?’ This came in handy for me every day I was there. A lot of people would just look at me, because they hadn’t really seen anyone with a disability before who rode on an electric scooter. So, I would just say, “Ano pangalan mo?” and they would smile and tell me their name, and the ice would be broken. Language is such an important tool for breaking down barriers.
Every day I would be bending my steel AIDS ribbons, and there would be a steady influx of kids with their big, curiosity-filled brown eyes staring up at me. I would demonstrate how one goes about bending steel AIDS ribbons, and they would dutifully help me for a half-hour or so, and then would run off to learn a new hand game from either Barbie, Veronika, Molly, Colin, or Marieke, whom they all called Hannah.
Then the break chime would sound and Annie and the other cooks would bring out different traditional Filipino snacks for the group to enjoy. One of my favorites, even though I am not too keen on bananas, were the fried, caramelized plantains on a stick, or puto, a sweet kind of cake made out of rice. There wasn’t one thing that we ate that was not masarap. Sometimes I thought something was so masarap that I ate what my castmates didn’t finish. And it was great because it indirectly helped the cooks so they wouldn’t have had as many dishes to do afterwards.
Out of everything, though, my most cherished memories will be of my lunch family. At the beginning of our time with GK, they assigned to each of the people in our group a family for whom an apartment had already been constructed. GK would provide the protein part of the meal, and the families would provide the rice.
On the first day, I pulled up to my family’s apartment, and Charisse and my lunch mother helped me in to the apartment where a huge bowl of rice was waiting for me. Charisse left and my lunch mother and I got acquainted with each other. When I sat down at the table, she said, “Don’t be shy. Eat!” Then she sprang out of her chair and went to her fridge. “You should drink something. What do you want?” I asked her what she had, and she listed off a variety of things, Coke, water, Sprite, and some other things. Thinking that a Sprite would be refreshing, I chose that, and as soon as I had made my selection, the refrigerator door was shut, and she was out the door in hot pursuit of Sprite. If I knew that she didn’t have Sprite in her fridge, I would have asked for something else. I told her this, and she said. “Don’t worry. You are a guest in my house. If you want Sprite, I give you Sprite.” If that doesn’t just pull at your heartstrings, you’re one cold— well, you can finish that sentence in your free time. But every day after that, she’d help me in, and there waiting for me on the coffee table was a whole paddy’s worth of rice and a liter bottle of Sprite.
Then, on the final days of eating in my lunch family’s home I finally met my lunch sister, who was actually right around my age. We talked about a lot of things, but the one thing that sticks out in my mind was when she told me about her financial situation. She had a husband and two small children. Every day, her husband worked outside of the village and earned 6 Philippine pesos per week. If you figure that US$1 equal 50 PP, 1 PP would equal 2¢. So therefore, her husband was bringing home 12¢ a week, and food for the kids cost 20¢. But she was so grateful for her mother who had weekly reflexology clients, which helped them make ends meet.
After telling me that, she looked straight at me and asked me, “Is your bathroom the size of our house?” The forwardness of her question kind of surprised me, and it knocked me out of myself a little bit, because for the first time in a conversation, I was the so-called “rich” person. I looked around the 10 × 10 apartment, and said that my bathroom was about a quarter of the size of their apartment. Then, I told them that my bedroom was about half the size of their apartment. Then to kind of have them relate to me better, I told them about UwP’s fees and how hard I work fundraising the money. I told them it was really difficult to come up with the money to travel, but that I had tremendous community support and was, in the end, able to come up with the money. I told them that I knew what it was like to live from week to week.
Then Savannah came and told me that it was time to go back to work, and so I give my lunch family a huge hug, had Savannah take a picture of us, and we were on or way. What I think was the most special about my time with my lunch family was that I learned that even though we came from two quite different socioeconomic backgrounds, we could still connect with each other and share our humanity. And that’s an awesome thing.
On the last day in the GK Euro Village, the whole community organized a huge festival with all sorts of dishes and music, and dancing. One of the moments I probably won't ever forget as long as I live is when all the kids perfomed “O Alele” for us, which was one of the hand games we taught to them. It was in that moment that I realized that we weren't there just to help them out with the labor it required to build apartments. We were also there to reach out to them and show them that we, as people who had come from literally around the planet, cared about them and that we were willing to go there and share our humanity and compassion with them. And that I something I will always carry around with me proudly.
But then, the most wonderful thing happened. After the whole festival had ended and I was back to bending my AIDS ribbons, I see a woman carrying two pots with her. It only took me a couple of milliseconds to realize that it was my lunch mother carrying with her the usual kilogram of rice and chicken soup. She sat down next to me at the table, opened up the pots, took out a bottle of Sprite from her bag and said, “Don't be shy. Eat!” And even though I was stuffed to the gills with all that wonderful Filipino food from the festival laid out before me, this woman whom I had shared several lunches with took the time and money to cook me a meal, for the road. So, I ate, and we talked, and before she left to go back to her apartment, we hugged one last time.
No comments:
Post a Comment