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.