Teaching!

After our relaxing mini-break in the jungle, on Tuesday it was time to do some work. For me, this meant being a teaching assistant for my friends' classes in the vocational education centre where they work. The students are all on practical courses, for example to become electricians or carpenters, but they also have weekly classes in English and Maths. As the classes were large, I spent some of the time just being an extra pair of hands, but I also worked on an individual basis with some of the students, consolidating concepts they hadn't understood, and carrying out mock job interviews. I was there for too short a time to make any great impact on their learning, but it was extremely rewarding nonetheless, mainly because it was so enjoyable getting to know the students themselves. In some ways they were boisterous and confident, calling out jokes in class and cheering each other on, but on a one-to-one basis, they were often either very shy or very charming, or sometimes both. I had the opportunity to talk to lots of them and also to read some autobiographies that they had written, which gave me a real insight into life in the Philippines that I wouldn't otherwise have had.

There were a few things that I found striking when reading the autobiographies and talking to the students about their experiences. Many of their concerns were the same as those of young adults the world over: friends, relationships and their place in their families and in society, but others were a testament to the differences between growing up as a poor, or even very ordinary person in the Philippines compared to most people in Western Europe. Many of the students, for example, hoped to graduate from the college and to get a job to be able to support their parents or to allow brothers and sisters to go to school. Lots of them had jobs in addition to full-time school, not for extra pocket money but to fund their education or even just to be able to eat. Some had seen dramatic reversals in their family fortunes when a parent fell ill or lost their job, which really brought home to me how fortunate we are in Europe to have a welfare system which, flawed as it may be, provides a safety net to protect us from the worst when something unavoidable happens.

Another thing that struck me in their attitudes to life was the central role played by religion. The school is Catholic and the programme places a strong emphasis spiritual as well as academic education and growth, so it's hard to say how much of this is part of the national culture and how much was specific to that particular school, but many, when asked to describe how they had solved a problem, would talk about praying to God for help and explained their goals for living as good Christians.

Having this insight into their lives, their plans, their hopes and their dreams felt like a real privilege and I would have loved to have been able to do more, but time was too short (on this trip at least!).

Cebu City Part 1

In Cebu city, the green hills behind the city merge gently into the smoky horizon and the turquoise sea laps softly at the dirty shore. Tower blocks look down on the mazes of the shanty towns and wooden shacks sit precariously among solid concrete. Advertising shouts down from every wall and roof top and rubbish builds up in silent piles in every corner. The traffic roars, the engines splutter, the crowds swirl and in the midst of it all, the people sit by the market stalls and on the kerbs, staring out at it all in quiet contemplation.

In Cebu city lives are lived piled on top of each other, wealth, desperate poverty and everything in between. Trying to understand its endless contrasts and contradictions was the most culturally difficult part of my trip, but when the end came and it was time to go home, Cebu city was the place that I didn’t want to leave.

I didn’t want to leave because I hadn’t finished with it yet. I didn’t feel that I had completely understood. When I went to the Philippines I knew that I would see poverty on a scale that I had never seen before, and I did. Whole families sleep on cardboard boxes, mothers desperately try to bathe naked children in the gutters of the main road and frail elderly women pick through the rubbish looking for things to sell. I was anxious about seeing all of these things and not liking my reactions, of feeling guilty and finding it all to easy to flee.

What I wasn’t expecting were all the other layers of the tapestry, the interwoven threads that twist and merge and make it impossible to straight away point a finger and say, yes, this is what I see. For me, part of the difference was due to the climate. It’s not shocking to spend a large part of your day out on the streets when the weather is consistently hot but it is shocking to have nowhere to go at night. It doesn’t matter if the bus has no glass in the windows, but it does matter that people’s homes can be blown or washed away when a typhoon comes.



A second element in the picture is the fact that there are plenty of rich people in Cebu as well. Large 4x4s with blacked out windows wend their way between the tricycle taxis and the jeepneys. If you want to buy designer clothes, or even just shop at Promod, there are three air-conditioned shopping malls to shop at. The Philippines is poor compared to Europe, but per capita income is four times higher than in many of the poorer African countries, for example. But because on equal distribution of wealth, it scores relatively badly, there are extremes of poverty and extremes of wealth, as well as everything in between. There are plenty of sad and shocking things in the Philippines, but they don’t jump out and strike you straight away. You have to look carefully at the tapestry to begin to understand the picture.