My Site Placement
All right! So anything I hinted at for the location of my permanent site was wrong. I knew that it was hot, and knew a few other things about the area, but the actual provinces and towns I thought it could be were way off. I will be going to the town of Dupax del Norte in the province of Nueva Viskaya (you can google map it).
Geographically there’s a lot I won’t really understand until I am there (as a matter of fact, that can be said about everything concerning my site). I know it’s hot, but not as hot as manila. It’s rural with a total population of just less than 28,000 for the area, encompassing seven different ethnic tribes. They do speak Ilokano as their main form of language as each separate group has its own dialect and Ilokano is the language used to communicate amongst the different groups. There’s a waterfall about five kilometers from where I’ll be staying, and there’s a school next to my workplace with a track and gymnasium.
As for the job itself, I will be working at the MSWD (Municipal Social Welfare and Development office) with the primary project of increasing the capacity for youth leadership. My first major activity will be to create a module for their annual youth summit which will take place at the end of November or early December. Ideally I would have liked to spend a bit more time observing and getting to understand the community before acting, but I think I can balance my time getting a better understanding of Dupax del Norte and working on the module. Beyond that, there seems like so many things the town wants from providing life skills to OSY (out of school youth [and yes, the Peace Corps loves acronyms]), helping with computer literacy, assisting with special topics from human trafficking to aids to handling people with different disabilities. First is youth leadership though, so in my first few months I will do my best to stick with that goal, and let the others come as they may.
What is Community Building?
Community building is not about building a well into a town and then walking off into the sunset. It can be, but a lot of the time it’s not about the tangible, but the mindset of the people. Leadership for example is not something that can easily (or at least accurately) be measured. Neither is self confidence. Also consider a homeless family. You can give a homeless family a roof over their heads and food on their plates, but do you think they will stay there is they think the street is their home? Will they stay in a house when they make their livelihood two miles away from scavenging recycled bottles from the garbage and begging in the subway?
Community building also requires a shift with all of the population. With funding a revolutionary new technology, you can create a state-of-the-art sewage system that can deal with any waste management problems a city may have. Consider though that it’s unlikely most places are going to have the kind of money to pay for it. Consider also that sometimes it’s not a question of technology, but space, as most countries in the world have a high population density than the US and therefore have less open land to deposit waste. So then, the problem falls back onto the people to see whether they recycle or not, whether they separate biodegradables from residuals, and whether they are active in preventing littering and other negative practices of other community members. This kind of process is hard, slow, and often fails and sometimes you simply cannot change the mind of the community on some issues.
One last thing I will say about community organizaing for now is it is more about facilitating than leading. I am not going to Dupax del Norte with a thousand ideas in my mind and how to make their lives better. How can I when I’ve never been there, when I haven’t seen the problems they have, and especially since I don’t know what steps they have and haven’t taken towards solving their issues. Ass that onto the culture gap, and it becomes clear why putting my in the role of a leader would be a poor choice. However, as a facilitator I can organize community members and ask questions that can drive out their thoughts and ideas. By having their draw maps of their community circling improvements they want made, places they like, community resources, etc, I can get a better picture of what they want done, and also find out what they can use to accomplish those goals.
A Waterslide leading to Reality
For two-and-a-half days I stayed at the Island Cove resort outside of Manila for Supervisor’s Conference where I found out my site placement, and met my future boss Nereo Fragata, the Officer in Charge of the MSWD (and a couple other things as well). I also got to see everyone again save the few who left the Philippines already deciding not to go through with service. It was a nice place, the highlight being to get to go swimming and go down the waterslides at their water park. After having struggled with language classes, technical sessions, and cultural immersion, it was a chance to have a short respite with the people I had gotten to know, but hadn’t seen for nearly a month.
After supervisor’s we went into the heart of Manila for street immersion. A quick note of caution for you though: street immersion was very serious, very real, and very dramatic, so if you’re not in the mood to read some sobering stories read the rest of this later. The goal of street immersion was to put us face to face with the darker side of the country, and to observe some of the more troubling issues of today, the three general categories being poverty amidst waste, prostitution, and street children.
We visited and walked around areas that appeared as, and even one that was, a dumpsite for trash. One of the locations was a dumpsite right on Manila Bay where a small community lived, and worked. Shoeless children ran through a muddy field covered in trash, men worked within a stretch of building making charcoal, the smoke making it hard to see what was even going on. Despite our own shock and awe at the scene before us, the people there were going about their daily lives as usual, never knowing another kind of life, or simply accepting there’s as it was. It made me consider a trend that I’ve seen in religions, that of all the important stories being told from a perspective of poverty or even oppression. You never really hear tales from a faith where their hero was a socially accepted, wealthy individual who never had to sacrifice anything for their beliefs. I think maybe that day walking with these people who lived on the dumpsite was the closest I’ve even been to God, far closer than in the suburbs of America.
Most of the prostitution I saw was from a night of walking around the red light district, seeing all the brothels where a dozen Filipinas clad in schoolgirl outfits or gaudy Arabian dresses met us with fake smiles, whose boss was asking for about 500 pesos. Although we obviously never went inside one of them, we did go to a bar where prostitution was well known, and I got to see old, lecherous men approach girls young enough to be their daughters and then some. It was enough to make my blood boil, but in this situation, there was nothing I could do that night. The best I can do now is to be prepared to keep a watchful eye at my own site, and also to impart upon you readers how wrong the selling of sex is, at least to me. Many prostitutes are underage, they are victims of human trafficking, victims of abuse both physical and mental, are threatened if they try to quit, and even those that are not any of the previous listed are still bought and sold as commodities, as if they are not human.
The street children was the light at the end of the tunnel during street immersion. For three hours we played with the children and assisted one of the local NGOs with their teaching program that including coloring, handwriting, and even dinner. At first the children did not approach us, until we finally sat down and were at their eye level. Then they were all around us, at one point I had three children sitting in my lap and a fourth running their hands through my hair. The game they wanted to play the most was a simple one, to have me grab them by the hands and spin them around through the air. They showed me how to do it, and then several times throughout the three hours I lifted fifty(ish) pound children around and around. There was one girl in particular I remember clearly, who teeth had several noticeable cavities, and like the other children she probably had never regularly bathed in her life. However, I don’t know if I’ve even seen a happier expression than that child’s when she was flying through the air, free for at least the ten second or so I was holding onto her.
Although some life skills were taught, such as having the kids was their hands before dinner, to brush their teeth afterwards, one of the most important things to them was playing, to have somebody care and pay attention. To be around people with enough energy to keep up. It is within this lesson that I come full circle back to the community and see that it is not my place to lead, to tell those kids to get a bath (where at?), or to go to the doctor (with what money?), or to go to school (where they are already way behind in a conventional education setting, and may not fit in). I can however listen to them, to play with them as they ask, and through playing try to impart a few life skills that can help them to develop in the long term.
Parting Notes
Things should start slowing down a bit once pre-service training ends September 16-17. Either that, or it will get even crazier, not sure, but I think it will slow down. Didn’t take any pictures at street immersion because we weren’t supposed to bring cameras to most of the places. Shame in some ways, but it was the respectful thing to do to just observe and not gawk and point at how their lives were different than mine.
Hope all of you are doing well. As I’ve said before, I really want to hear news from back home to stay in the loop, and have a reason to keep communicating directly with you all.
