Taking in the sights and smells...

One of the most distinctive things about working in the communities is the smells. I remember the very first time walking into the community where I help with the pre-school and thinking ‘O my gosh, this is vile!’. The alley ways in the communities are only maybe 2 or 3 feet wide and the houses are very densely packed together so there is not very often a breeze. It can be exceedingly hot and the smells can be almost suffocating. By far and away the worst smell for me is not the raw sewage, or the decomposing rubbish piles that lay about, it’s the smell of the fish drying in the sun. There’s nothing quite like it, it makes me want to gag. And sometimes I do! The only thing worse than that, is the smell of the dried fish being cooked, it’s all pervading and smells like the dried fish, only worse! I still haven’t got used to it and Ate Anna, who I live with, always apologises profusely when she cooks it at home. It’s part of the staple diet here (as most people don’t own fridges so can’t store fresh foods), it tastes OK but I find it so hard to get past the smell…

So this week I faced a new assault on the senses. Next week we’re having an art project with the English class so we decided to go for a wander around the community to take some photos that we could draw from and to inspire our work. I discussed it with the class and they suggested walking along the beach down to Magsaysay Park so that we could see the houses on stilts. This sounded like a lovely idea, and ordinarily it would be, except the beaches here are used as toilets. And rubbish dumps. There is a sea wall of boulders along the whole stretch which saves the community from the bigger waves. The tide was out and so all that was left was filthy puddles and a thick layer of muddy slurry. I tried hard not to think of what it consisted of. No one else was making a fuss, the kids were all running barefoot and picking up shells and crabs… I wanted to tell them how vile it was, how unsanitary, how disease ridden it must be, but that’s not my place, this is their home… It breaks your heart…

Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come, we came to a channel where the water flows out from the community, the kids started wading across and Ka Sarah asked if I was OK to wade across too. The kids were so happy that I was there and were laughing and splashing so I rolled up my trousers and stepped into the water. It was full of rubbish, and probably contained a high percentage of raw sewage as it ran from the community into the sea. I tried hard not to be sick, it was so disgusting. On the other side was a clean beach that leads into one of the public parks so I took the

opportunity of walking into the open sea to try to rinse my legs, I kept shuddering as I dreaded to think what I had waded through. Ka Sarah told me that we would go back a different way, across the taytayan, instead of along the beach. The name of our team here is Taytayan, and it means small bridges. The houses on stilts are all linked by narrow bamboo walkways and the team’s ethos is that they aim to build small bridges in the communities to help improve the damaged relationships between Christians and Muslims. Walking across the bridges was scary for me as I really hate heights and especially hate stairs or walkways where you can see through. But it was really special for me. I smiled as I thought of the metaphorical taytayan that I’ve helped to build here. People who lived in the stilt houses invited me into their homes, mostly just one room made entirely of spilt bamboo and were so pleased to have me there, I felt honoured that they would invite me in. It’s rare to see white people in Davao, and the Muslim communities are closed so it’s incredibly rare for a white person to be in the community, but the people are so welcoming, it puts me to shame when they offer me a glass of water in their best and sometimes only cup. There’s a dignity to their poverty that is overwhelming.

Next week we’ll use the photos that we took to draw pictures, something tells me that I won’t forget the experience for a long, long while…