Contradictions and Downward Mobility

Pasadena seems like a city of contradictions to me thus far. Driving through Old Town at night and seeing all of the dressed up folks out for a night on the town, and then crossing the freeway into my neighborhood, the differences in income status are clear to see. Yet even within Northwest Pasadena, I feel the contradictions. From my window I see a man poking through the bus stop trash can, looking for recyclables. If I walk west on Washington, one of the main streets running by my apartment, I'll pass by where one of the first shootings happened this summer. Two of the parks closest to my apartment are known hang-outs for gangs. Yet if I walk half a block north, I see huge wealthy houses with roses growing madly over the fences. Scott McKey, the director for Northwest Neighbors, came over to meet my roommate Diamante and I last night, as we will be tutoring and mentoring youth through their network, and he was explaining that in northwest Pasadena, there are pockets of poverty right next to wealthy streets and houses. I'm just beginning to realize that, and it's a bit disorienting.

I've been reading the Irresistible Revolution, and it's been giving me a lot to think about. Shane writes, "we bring folks like them [suburban evangelicals] here to learn the kingdom of God from the poor, and then send them out to tell the rich and powerful there is another way of life being born in the margins. For Jesus did not send out the rich and powerful in order to trickle down his kingdom. Rather, he joined those at the bottom, the outcasts and undesirables, and everyone was attracted to his love for people on the margins. (We know that we all are poor and lonely anyway, don't we?) Then he invited everyone into a journey of downward mobility to become the least."

The gospels back up his words (Jesus certainly talked to wealthy tax collectors and religious men, but when it came to who he spent the majority of his time with, it was not the well-to-do or socially important), and in theory I am drawn to these words, but when it comes to my life practically speaking, it becomes harder. Am I willing or wanting a journey of downward mobility to characterize my life? I don't mean making foolish decisions that pull me down into want and hardship, but a life that chooses to join in solidarity with the poor, to hoard little and give generously. What do I do with the fact that I would never have gone to such good schools, traveled to so many wonderful places, or graduated from Willamette U. if my immediate and extended family hadn't had a certain degree of wealth to give me those opportunities? Can I call myself a follower of Jesus if I hang onto my stuff instead of following his words to share with his body, the people of God? What does sharing in my context look like? Coming from a middle-class background, I feel like I have simplified some things in my life, but when I'm honest with myself to look at local and global economics, the disparity between what I still have and what fellow members of the human family have is so huge, it flattens me. So what role does grace play--and what role does repentance that leads to action play? I am not quite sure what all this really looks like to practice in my life, but Jesus certainly turns the American Dream upside down.

California Wildfires

Thanks to those of you who have expressed concerns about my safety during these wildfires that have been raging in Southern California. Pasadena has been completely safe so far, so no need to worry, although the sky has been a bit smoky. As I've been watching the news on the fires, I've noticed that quite a bit of attention has been given to the fires' effects on the homes of the rich and of celebrities, but I'd like to highlight a brief video clip passed on to me about another, more socially, politically, and economically disadvantaged group of people that the fires are affecting...illegal farmworkers.

Early Thanksgiving

As I was sitting here this morning working on job applications, since I am still unemployed, I just starting thinking about all of the things in my life recently that I have to be thankful for. I'm thankful that I hung onto my printer that jammed and frustrated me during college, because now I have the technology to print my job applications and resume myself. I'm thankful for the extravagance of a personal computer and home internet access, so that I can search for jobs and keep in touch with friends and family. I'm thankful for God's abundant provision in furnishing our apartment through all of the furniture that other people have given/loaned us for free, so that the only thing I had to purchase was a mattress. I'm thankful for family and college friends who call me and check up on me. In a similar way, the community of fellow Servant Partners interns has been one of the biggest blessings because I have peers who are passionate about similar values and issues to transition out of college with and to encourage and prod each other along the way. I could keep going, but perhaps I'll stop here and go finish my cup of coffee and work on applications. May your day be full of moments of thankfulness. :)

Our new home

My roommate Diamante (another Servant Partners intern) and I just moved into our apartment in Northwest Pasadena this last week, and we've been busy settling in. We are located right at the corner of two fairly main streets, so the traffic is a continual low hum outside--except for when people drive by blasting their radios, and then we have free music! We also hear sirens quite a bit because the fire station is located near by. Yet somehow, I don't think of my apartment as noisy. A bizarre tidbit--the apartment on one side of us, the house on the other side, and the complex across the street are all full of students at Fuller Theological Seminary. Not quite our expected neighbors! We were initially supposed to be living in an area a few blocks south, where Northwest Neighbors is located, as we will be working with that organization, but they couldn't find housing for us, so we are up here instead. It's still a low-income area, but with slightly different demographics. I'll hopefully be able to post more details after I've lived here a little longer.

At any rate, it's lovely to be settled in a place, and with all of our pictures and things unpacked, it's starting to feel homey. God is so good and provided abundantly for us: Dia had a little furniture but another person moved into a furnished apartment and so is lending us all of their furniture, and someone else lent us a bunk bed and mattress, and our apartment came with a fridge and stove. So now the only thing we still need is one more mattress! But it's ok, I'm using my sleeping bag for now. It's still strange to think about where I was three weeks ago and where I am now--my host Kulot's house in Manila is the size of the bathroom in my apartment. The disconnect in realities is so huge. Diamante and I are trying to figure out how to live more simply, for multiple reasons--as an act of solidarity with the poor, as a reminder to ourselves of the disparities in the world, and as a way of freeing more resources to put to better use--but they seem like such small actions. sigh.

Other than unpacking, we've been busy job-searching. Thankfully we finally got a phone line and internet today, which should help the job search. I used a laundromat for the first time the other day, and we've been running various random errands. It's also been fun to try our hands at cooking. Dia is from Texas, and her mom is white while her dad is culturally Cuban, so she's been making chalupas and southern sweet tea for me, and I'm cooking stir-fry and Thai curry for her. :) Yum!

Manila 3

Read my first and second posts on Manila before you read this one! :)

My emotional and spiritual journey...

My trip to India with InterVarsity’s Global Urban Trek last summer was really hard, and I was praying that God would have a different experience for me in Manila. And Manila was SO different! Not in the physical discomforts, like sweat, but the relationships I developed during my three weeks there were really what made all the difference. It’s hard to get to know people in such a brief amount of time, but that’s what we spent a lot of our time doing. Whenever we didn’t have a meeting or activity as a team or were taking our own quiet times, we would hang out on the tracks or in front of people’s houses and talk to them. It’s easy to meet people because so many people are unemployed or the mothers are home all day while the dad works, and many people hang out in front of their houses. Simply walking from my house to where we ate breakfast in the morning, I passed by at least three groups of people that I could later go back and sit down and chat with. Thankfully a lot of people spoke at least a little bit of English, so that helped in the bonding, but a big part of bonding was also making myself practice my tiny bit of Tagalog with everyone I met, and then asking them how to say more phrases and words as a way of making conversation and building relationships.

We also had the treat of home stays, where two-three of us were matched with a family or individual from the small Balic-Balic church. Twice a week we’d go hang out with them for a day, and then at night we’d return to where we were staying (there really isn’t extra room in the families’ houses for us to sleep there). My homestay was a 23 year old young woman named Kulot, who just graduated from college and is looking for a job. She lives in a tiny one room building just big enough for her bed, a chair, and a couple boxes of her things. The roof leaks when it rains, so she’s got her diploma, school papers, and documents for job applications in a plastic folder so they won’t get wet. It was so much fun to interact with another woman in the same stage of life as I am—only with very different family circumstances and choices in life. She has an awesome laugh and taught us praise songs in Tagalog. :)

I was also blessed to have my small group led by a Filipino Christian woman from Balic-Balic named Ate Cora (Aunt Cora). Right from the start, she told us that she felt like a mother to us, responsible for taking care of us, so our small group called her Ina Cora (mother Cora). Ina Cora taught us Tagalog, smashed cockroaches for the girls on our team who panicked at the sight of them, fixed the water in our house as it stopped working about every other day, shared her wisdom and spiritual insights with us (her favorite Bible verse: Proverbs 30:7-9), and continuously poured out an extraordinary amount of love, patience, compassion, and gentleness on us as we blundered around in her community. She is truly one of the clearest representations of Jesus and his love that I have ever encountered in a person.

Building relationships with actual people among the urban poor was foundational to my learning journey in Manila in several ways. First of all, these friendships gave me the emotional sustenance to keep pressing on when it began to get hard and tiring. Secondly, these relationships gave me access to discovering the actual problems facing my friends in this community, and the oppression that they were experiencing. If I didn’t know my friend Kulot, I would never have seen the list that she pulled out for me of the job requirements for one of the jobs that she was trying to apply for—an extensive list including many documents that each required a separate trip around town, a fee, and a waiting period. I wouldn’t have thought about the fact that she doesn’t even have money to eat right now, but she has to borrow money from her sister to pay for the public transportation and fees for these documents so that she can even apply for a job, much less know if she will be employed there. I wouldn’t have known that jobs there have height and weight requirements—that an employer can turn you down just because they think you are too short. I wouldn’t have heard stories of police officers that come into the community and arrest innocent people because they assume that everyone who lives here is a criminal—and then when their families can’t pay bail, the officers force those whom they’ve picked up to go steal an expensive cell phone for the officers in order to secure their release.

My experiences in Manila really grew my understanding of why it is valuable for anyone who wants to work for change in a community or in their society to develop relationships with the people experiencing oppression in that community or society, so that you really have a window into the injustices that are occurring. You aren’t sitting on the outside deciding what is wrong, but you are talking to people who are suffering and hearing their stories of what is happening. I wish that as middle-class American Christians, we would change our mindset about justice and righteousness to include not just chilling on the outside, but building these kinds of relationships, whether that means moving into a different community, or whether that simply means living where you already are but getting connected to a homeless or low-income individual or family and becoming friends with them and learning from them.. I don’t know what all this could look like, but it seems like us middle-class people would be way more effective and motivated in working for justice if we would develop these kinds of connections and relationships.

In addition to giving me emotional strength and teaching me about the oppression taking place in the community, the relationships I developed in Balic-Balic were a pivotal part of God’s convicting me about my own role in the oppression my new friends experience. Our intern class studied the book of Amos together and poured over the connections between the ways the people of Israel abandoned God and abused the poor and needy, and God’s just fury at their injustice, and the ways that we saw many of the same things in America. Amos really hit home when I was reflecting on how my choices on how and where to spend “my” money, my choice to advocate or remain uninformed on various issues, my political decisions, and all of these choices had direct implications for why my beautiful friend Kulot can be so hardworking and diligent and smart and loving—and yet be living in a squatter community in a tiny house the size of my bathroom in the States, where the roof leaks when it rains, there’s rats, she’s struggling to find employment, and all she has to eat most days is rice with maybe a little sauce or salt on top. It makes me sick. And I think that my budding friendship with her is one of the reasons that it’s so painful to seriously consider my role in this whole global picture—when I was sitting in her house in Balic-Balic, it was impossible to deny her reality, or to say that as a fellow follower of Jesus that her reality doesn’t need to make any difference in how I live my life. How can I say that she is my friend if I don’t care about her and her life? And is my pursuit of God actually glorifying to him when I am deeply implicated in oppressing other people? I know that none of us in America can completely break free of the oppressive effects of our actions and our country’s actions, no matter how hard we try, but I sure feel like I have a lot of growth to do in that area to get my lifestyle in sync with the justice that Jesus talked about.

Shopping with Ina Cora was also a moment of realization for me—she took us to the mall for our Sabbath day to give the foreigners a break in the air con, and although we each had some spending money with us, walking around with her by my side, it was as if I had a completely different set of glasses to see what I would spend my money on and whether I really actually needed or wanted that item. If she was keeping me company every time I went shopping in America, I think that my consumption patterns would definitely change, not out of condemnation from her, but because when I would look at her patiently walking around with us, even though she couldn’t never afford to buy anything there, and knowing that her beautiful family often can’t even eat three meals a day, where I care about putting my money really changed.

Even as I was convicted about my own oppressive role, God also used relationships there to demonstrate his crazy abundant love for me at the same time. What a contrast! The day when I was reflecting the most on how my lifestyle hurts people like Ina Cora, she insisted on giving me a pedicure. I don’t know about Americans, but having grown up in Thailand, feet are the lowest and dirtiest part of the body, and it’s very emotionally deep for me to have someone willingly touch my feet for something like that. As she was gently cleaning my toes and painting them, I was all choked up and speechless. It was a picture moment to me of how God loves me—that even though I don’t deserve it, God’s love is overwhelmingly abundant and overflowing and excessive, and that his love and forgiveness doesn’t depend on my deserving it or not.

Finally (yes, I promise this is the end! congrats for making it this far!), relationships brought up the question of hope. As I learned through relationships about the oppression taking place, and was convicted about my own brokenness, it was clear to me that neither the systems nor myself had what it would take to bring healing and wholeness. At times I felt overwhelmed by the immensity of brokenness in the community and in our world community (and this is just in three weeks!). The Christians in Balic-Balic put their hope in Jesus—let me tell you, it is profound to hear someone who doesn’t have enough to eat each day tell you with full conviction that God is good. I want to have faith like that; I want to be able to look back at my life and the ways in which God has come through in my desperation and be able to say that as well. When Ina Cora says that God is good and that he loves his children, she really means it. And she’s not saying it because it’s the comfortable thing to say. If we as people and the systems in this world are broken, Jesus has to be our hope, because only his power is big enough to change us and for us to draw upon to change the systems. But I don’t think I understand this at this point. I am still asking if there is hope. And if there is, where it comes from. I think that this will continue to be a significant question as I enter into these next two years in northwest Pasadena.

Manila 2

How do I describe Balic-Balic? A brief sensory portrayal...

Sights of garbage covering the tracks and choking the canal, the black and rotting teeth of these little kids hugging me, smiles on strangers’ faces as they say hi, little kids’ bare feet running over the train tracks and the trash and broken glass, watching the community come outside their houses in the evenings and chat on the railroad tracks while the little kids play, small rats running up the walls of my homestay’s tiny room

Sounds of train horn, thud thud thud as the trains thunder by our house, “magandang umaga”—learning to say good morning in Tagalog, my new friend Kulot laughing as I try to pronounce words she’s teaching me, the satisfying smack! of smashing a cockroach with my flipflop, the glorious music and singing of worship songs in Tagalog and English, clap clap of little kids playing hand games, soft sound of guitar as Scott (SP teammate) plays during our reflection times

Touch of cold water cooling me off during each bucket shower, hot fried bananas burning my fingers, sweat dripping down my back, little kids’ hugs, uncomfortable plastic chairs during our meetings, whispers of wind as the fan blows in the heat, sleeping on a mattress on the floor

Smell of rotting garbage, clean laundry, choking in the pollution as we sit in public transportation, delicious smells wafting at lunch time, the scent of rain

Taste of pan de sal—hot bread buns for breakfast every day, Ate Emma’s delicious Filipino cooking, sticky sweet mangos, banana chips, prawn chips (oh yes, Mom, they have them in Manila too!!), the treat of peanut butter on our pan de sal, the cheap rice and soy sauce we ate to understand what our new friends often only have to eat when there’s not enough money for food

Manila --background

It’s been hard to figure out what to post on Manila, so please forgive me for taking so long. I have so much I wish that I could tell you and show you, but hopefully this will give you at least a small taste of my three weeks in Balic-Balic. I’ll break it up into three sections, so you don’t have to read all my extroverting in one sitting if you don’t want to!

A little background...

So Balic-Balic is an informal squatter community located along the railroad tracks in Manila, Philippians. With so many people moving to Manila for work, and an extremely tight housing market (something like 70% of residents in Manila rent housing because there aren’t enough places to buy), many many informal communities have sprung up around the outskirts of Manila and in the cracks and free spaces in the city. Balic-Balic, for instance, is built on the strip of land on each side of the railway tracks that run through the city. Although the settlement is illegal, the people who move in are either buying their tiny “houses” or paying rent to someone to live there.

As the train company will be working on the tracks, the government is in the process of evicting all of the residents of Balic-Balic and demolishing their houses. The stretch of land where we stayed is the only community on the tracks that hasn’t been demolished yet. So folks that have grown up here their whole lives are about to lose their homes, their social community, and access to the schools their kids are going to. The government did build several sites of houses outside Manila and residents can sign up to move there and gradually over time pay off the price of the house so that they can legally own their residence, which is a good and just idea. Unfortunately, it isn’t working out so well—the settlements are too far outside Manila to be able to live there and work in Manila, so some folks are moving their families there and then the men will return to live and work in Manila during the week; the houses are not super high quality; and this program is only open to those residents of Balic-Balic which are on the census, which is only about 50%, so half of the people living in this community are not considered eligible for any government assistance whatsoever.

Our intern team stayed in a couple houses in the community right by where the Servant Partners missionary couple in the area is living, right at the intersection of the train tracks and a canal that runs through the community. The place I stayed with four other woman was right on the tracks; the trains whooshed by only feet from our doorway many times a day, blocking out all light in our house when they were speeding past. Thankfully all of the community pitched in to keep us safe, warning “Train! Train!” when one was approaching, and making sure that we got off the tracks.