Day 3
Part 1: Slums

Date: 17th May 06

Well woke up today again. Nothing much. Breakfast, then we quickly loaded the stuff that we wanted to give to the slum children and off we went. Reached the area about 10 am.

We were shuttled into a room that looks like a schoolhouse-nursery before anything else. Well we had attracted alot of curious bystanders, and our phil hosts put our safety before anything else, lest we get mugged or anything.

As one of our team members put it when she had experienced first-hand in Bombay: "there's this slum in Bombay that literally kills you when you step in, they rob you until there's nothing left, then they kill you." rumoured to be the biggest slum in asia or the world, something like that.

Gulp. meishan told us not to bring anything along, so i left everything including my wallet, my wristwatch and hp in the TLDC. means no pictures.

basically we had about 7-9 boxes of clothing as donations to be given to the slum people. They were given coupons, of which they could exchange a set of clothing each with one coupon. They were shuttled via a narrow doorway, the only door that led into the schoolhouse. The stronger guys formed a human corridor (about 4 of them, 2 flanking each side) that tried to control the crowd and prevent a mass stampede, while the rest arranged themselves into 2 groups and gave out clothing.

well... in accordance with one of the team members' verdict during the debrief, it was a mess. the clothing wasn't really classified, it was just classified into Adult Male, Adult Female and Child, without any other further specifications. so you can have things like 12-yr old kids getting baby clothing. but of course we try as much to prevent that by matching the clothing we give out with the respective clientele that we see, as in babies we give them some baby clothing, grandmothers we give them grandmother's clothing, etc. but that took some time and hence dampened efficiency.

i was in charge of unpacking the stuff (as were with the rest) and helping to control the crowd by ushering those people who had taken something out asap. Rule of thumb: you can't have more than one group (i.e. one family) of people inside, i think the concern is to prevent them from charging in once they see too many people huddled inside there.

while we were unpacking the stuff, some of the slum people (the hooligan type from 10-15 years old, male) stared at us from window panes and made some noises that i could not decipher. rude people! basically they were making this repetitive noise, very loudly and rudely, and gesturing to stuff on our selves, like some of them had taken a liking to my "Ray-bans" (my tinted transition glasses), some of our caps, etc. initially i responded a bit but then Bong, one of the hosts, told me to ignore them. hmmm.

well.. if this was a different situation i would have shown them the finger... don't ask for too much kids. and anyway we were also sort of being surrounded so i thought twice about it.

(for the record, i didn't show any fingers, i think? during this trip. some record.)

after all the people with the coupons left, there were still some extra, so meishan asked them to form one queue and take one piece of clothing per person. after all, some people might just forget their coupons here and there.

gulp, well ms was definitely asking for more trouble.. but well heck it. we saw some people coming for more, a second time, maybe a third, but we could do nothing to control them. can't expect to remember and screen everyone's faces when there' like 50-60 people outside waiting.

then we gave out our clothing until the last few pieces.. before we gave the last one out we evacuated all our men standing outside, especially glynsen (official photographer with the SLR camera), our phil hosts, into the schoolhouse, and shut the door on them.

it was quite... well. to hear people knocking behind the door, in fact feel people knocking behind the door. heart-wrenching was not the word i had in mind, more like scared. we were after all being besieged.

after the knocking dissipated our phil hosts graciously offered to show us around the slum area, and we split into two groups (probably for safety's sake). basically, those talk that mum and dad have of their childhood years come alive now, those kampung houses stand tall and firm on not-so-firm soil (the area is flooded when it's high tide, and the paths we walked through are actually streams). there is a nice well, pentagonal in shape, that smacks so much of village life. poultry ran all over the place. basically, the paths are sometimes covered with shit (dung), some dried and assimilated into the path where i had the misfortune to step on some. human shit? chicken shit? whatever. the paths were also covered with this shiny-looking thing, like pieces of glitter, which on further asking our phil hosts, confirmed that it was probably minerals which had washed onto the soil from the river. interesting.

wasn't very interesting though. the slums were better off that i thought, i saw one house with a little girl watching television, apparently that's their favourite pastime, or national pastime in phil. despite the living conditions, they do hold themselves proud here.

yup, we then went back to the schoolhouse area. they have a basketball pole next to the schoolhouse, i think someone donated it. apparently that's their national sport.

we left the slums at around 12pm, after taking a group picture and getting surrounded by all the cheeky cute little children. hmm. one thing: i observed very very few people of our age. where did they go?

i guess this operation was quite successful, in terms of 1) safety and 2) the efficiency, although i think we can improve on that much better.

One thing was the necessity of this entire thing: did we actually need to give them these clothes? Did we help them at all, in fact. While on my pre-trip tasks to find a logistics company to bring all these stuff there, the “boss” of the company remarked that he would his countrymen (he’s a Filipino) receive books rather than clothes (in fact he was quite shocked when we gave them clothes). “what use are clothes? What they need now are books, to educate them… clothes they can just sell…” that got me thinking.

Well, what exactly do these slum people need? A way out of poverty, I guess. But I don’t think receiving clothes doesn’t make them any closer to that goal. or do they not need anything at all?