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PO Box A524
Sydney South NSW 1235, Level 11, 227 Elizabeth Street Sydney NSW 2000

Telephone: 1800 812 164

© 2024 Opportunity International AustraliaABN 83 003 805 043

A Visit To The Slum

By Benjamin Freeman

Last Friday I visited one of the largest slums in Manila with Mark Daniels, Opportunity’s Philippines Director. In my time in the Philippines so far I’ve met mainly with families in regional areas in their homes. Though they’re located in very poor areas, these homes have generally been quite beautiful in their simplicity – lots of bamboo huts on acres of green farmland.

The slum was a different experience entirely.

For me, slums have always been pretty hard to visualise, no matter how much I’ve read or written about them – so I feel that writing this post is also part of my processing the day.

Within about twenty seconds of arriving at the slum some police stopped us and asked what we were doing. Mark explained that we were going to meet friends and they seemed to be okay with this.

As we entered I was approached by two boys. Their faces were filthy and the decay was visible on their teeth. They grabbed at my hands, which to be truthful made me nervous. While I was filming they would stand right next to me trying to get their faces in front of mine to see what was happening on the camera.

I took a photo of the kids and they got really excited. They wanted photo after photo. After taking it, the three of us would huddle around and look at the shot. They would say something I couldn’t understand to each other and usually finish with, “Picture?”

This was pretty common of kids throughout the slum; they were all ready to take a photo at any opportunity with a range of seemingly well-practiced poses.

Around the streets of the slum, there were several grocery-type stores, but the main occupation there is garlic peeling. Lots of older women were crouched out the front of their homes, peeling garlic cloves with a knife.

One of these ladies was Norah. We stopped to talk to her and were hit with torrential rain. The rain was so intense that we couldn’t go much further so Norah kindly invited us into her home. While we were huddled there she told us that she is able to peel one big bag of garlic a day, which she sells for Php.70 (A$2.16).

It’s hard for me to accept that, crouched on the ground with her roof leaking, this is all Norah ends up with after a day. A day that I imagine involves about 10-12 hours of working. But still she was happy – you can see that in the photos.

I’d like to think that with as little as she had, I would also be as happy and as welcoming as she was if a couple of strangers turned up at my home and interrupted my work day. But I’m not sure that I would be.

The rain grew so strong that the slum was flooding – we were up to our knees in water when we left Norah’s. The kids were jumping around in the puddles, some grabbing soap and washing themselves in the rain.

The rubbish that made up the walls of many people’s homes got caught in the water and floated towards Manila Bay where it banks up in large mounds. We saw a lot of things on our way. A dead turtle lying on top of a small rubbish mound, a young boy whose foot was dripping with blood and, the saddest of all, a coffin which had a young baby inside it.

Amongst such despair there was joy.

We met a family Mark knew where the three daughters were on their way to school. It’s a pretty simple thing, but ultimately it’s something that is likely to change the future of their family for generations. Like Norah, the mother was a garlic peeler, and I got a sense of pride from her as she watched her daughters leave the slum and walk to school in their uniforms.

The slum felt like a labyrinth in which we waded deeper and deeper. And I think that’s a pretty good representation of how I felt emotionally, too. It was a deep and intense experience, which left me thinking a lot about what exactly can be done.

I guess that when things are so bad there is a lot that should change and the most important thing is to be a part of it, no matter how overwhelming or complex it seems. Even in Manila where there is a lot of wealth, it’s pretty easy to drive by a slum and ignore it. But I think it doesn’t matter where we are, it’s just important we choose to face things like this.

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