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.