The visit to the Tomoy dumpsite gave me some anxious moments. There was an ominous feeling of what laid ahead, but I resolved to face it as it came. After donning rubber boots, we walked across muddy fields to the outskirts of the Tomoy dumpsite. There the Grace Community Empowerment ministry had started a preschool for children to learn phonics and Jesus. These children lived with their families in shacks along the edges of the dumpsite. They presented a few worship songs for us in English.
There we met a heroic girl, Marisa, who had deformed legs. She had to cross a canal on a styrofoam float, and walk with her butt and hands across dirt and mud, to get to school. The ministry is building a hut next door for her and her family so that she would not have to make those hazardous trips to school.
We ourselves had to balance precariously on a makeshift styrofoam “boat” to get across to the dumpsite. The canal was dirty brown and we were shocked to see children taking a dip in the stream of bacteria.
The suish of soft mud, the stench, the shock of seeing children scavenging among heaps of grabage grated at our conscience. We wanted to escape to a mall, but this was a mission trip! The discomfort churned in the stomach. Angry when you think of the super-rich politicians. Pity for the powerless and impoverished reduced to such humiliation. Only Christ can fix this, I thought, and we are his hands and feet.
Pastor Manny brought us to the home of Marisa. Instinctively I avoided looking into the eyes of poverty, and stayed a safe distance, as though poverty was infectious. Looking around was easier than trying to make a personal connection with them. He told us that Marisa’s brother was malnourished and the center helped nurture him with a special formula food. He grew bulk after some months and he was sent back home. We took pictures of him with his brother and mother. How were we to know he would be declared dead in the hospital the next day? There was nothing to indicate that his life hung in the balance that day. Between death and decay is a bottomless pit called despair, and I was there, and I had felt its merciless grip.
When I returned home the first thing I wrote in my Facebook was: “Every Filipino politician should work and stay overnight with a poor family living in a dumpsite before taking the oath as President or governor or mayor or senator or congressman.”
And maybe so should pastors and missionaries.
Thank you, Pastor Kenny, for this blog! It gives me all the more reason to want to be involved. So how did you come across Grace Empowerment Ministry. Is your church supporting them?
Grace, we were introduced to it by Michael Soon and we work with them on some projects.
Thanks for the reply, SP. ;-]
Catch up ur rest-time. Glad to know u r getting better after that bout of “dry bones”.
Hows the assignment business getting along – maybe Ms Elaine can be under-study and do all ur homework.LOL
It would be wonderful if Blog visitors and contributors who belong to these mega churches who have the capacity to raise many millions would consider just adopt the Grace Empowerment Ministry to help make them self sustaining in 3 years.
Have seen and been to dumps but this is in a league of its own – thanks for shaking me from my own smug matrix world.
You are welcome, Journeyman. Sustainability is what they are also working on: mainly cash crops and bee keeping.
Ur pictures and video clip – I am totally speechless. I cannot imagine life being led like that on a daily basis.
To think that to these impoverished and helpless people, it is just the normal thing to do and to be.
Do u have some kind of “methods/steps” to help u recover from these kind of trips that u take? To help u re-enter “the world” that u know as normal?? It must take a toll on ur emotional life.
No, 73’s, it was just a day trip. I would imagine if I had worked a year with them, re-entry would be a big problem. I knew a friend who returned from two years in a poor country and found re-entry adjustment difficult. He couldn’t “enjoy” or “spend” as freely as he used to and had a critical eye on all unnecessary and even what we would regard as normal expenditure.
How to we balance out the prosperity gospel and the poverty that this people live? Ask them to give so that more will be given? Any comments?
Hi Thinker, this passage from 2 Corinthians 8 will give us some food for thought: “13 For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of fairness 14 your abundance at the present time should supply(A) their need, so that their abundance may supply your need, that there may be fairness. 15 As it is written,(B) “Whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack.” Paul was raising funds from the richer Corinthian church to help the poorer financially stricken Judean church.