The following week in Manila was hectic with so many visits to places both rich and poor, but all of it making an impact.
One of my favourite places we went to next was called Malabon. This town was incredible and most of this blog will be about it.
Malabon is one of the really poor places in Manila. So poor in fact that the location of the mini-city is below water level during high tide and the water comes up the streets like a flood. The people just walk right through it, like it's not even there.
Hannah and I actually went to Malabon with a group that was independent from King Solomon Learning Centre, called Gentle Hands Orphanage. This was the orphanage where Emilio and Leanne Dendeluce (a couple from church) adopted their two Filipino sons from, and they're super cute.
Anywho, we went with this group to Malabon where every Saturday they do a type of 'Sunday school' outreach to all the children in the area. It's so cool. They set up in the middle of the basketball court, do a bible story, sing songs and teach the kids about Jesus and at the end they do a small food hand-out... cold spaghetti inside plastic bags... yum?? Not to us maybe but the kids absolutely loved it!!
When we arrived at Gentle Hands with the outreach team, we all had to cram into this tiny van/ute thing with bench seats in the back, it was so cool! I counted 24 ppl in there with us and that wasn't including the driver! I even got a random kid on my lap for 30 mins. It was a surefire way of getting everyone to meet and get to know each other, there was nowhere to look except into someone else's face!
Hannah had more space than me!
Cozy!
Here are some photos of the outreach event in progress.
Telling a story about Abraham
I was lucky enough to get to share the "Father Abraham" song with them
Hannah watching from the back, kindly doing the actions with me... the other girls weren't so keen.
More "Father Abraham". I got the girls up by then.
This is a shot Hannah took of a little girl giving Hannah a hug and looking up at her... she had the saddest eyes I've ever seen in a child...
We split into groups and did a colouring-in sheet. I was responsible for roughly 20 kids.
After this was the time each kid in each group was supposed to receive their spaghetti bags. I was handed a big plastic bag with 20 small plastic bags inside each filled with spaghetti. The idea was that the kids who had done the worksheet got a bag each but you would not believe how sneaky these kids were!! I had to sign the sheets before they received their bag so I knew which ones I'd helped and which ones I were from another group. This worked for a while but then after kids got their bag they would hand their sheet to a kid from another group to try and get another bag from me! Then the kids would start trying to do my quick signature themselves as well! So sneaky! You can't blame them though, I'd try every trick I knew too if it meant I would get some more food off some white guy who had no idea how hungry I was.
Getting rescued from the swarm of kids coming at me for food. Weak target I guess
Aww...
After this things settled down a bit. I got to play some basketball with the locals... and got whipped!! These guys were amazing! They could get some amazing air off the court and just made the white guy look hopeless! haha. I'm guessing they play a lot though.
There was also this cool version of pool they had with flat discs and talcum powder on a table and it worked pretty well!
I got to meet some of the boys that lived in the slums there and they were heaps of fun! I taught them a game called 'quick-draw' where you add each other's fingers together and the first one to say the answer wins. It's amazing how quickly they were getting it, without any education, and just goes to show how much potential every child there has if only they had the opportunity to grow and be taught in a school like normal. But unfortunately, that's not normal over there.
It turns out that the van we arrived in was actually full of medical supplies too! I just couldn't see any of it because I was surrounded by arms and legs the whole time. These supplies were set up in the back of the van and a mini-day surgery-type thing ran with a doctor guy who came along and Charity, the lady who runs the whole organisation.
This was just a small part of the group lining up to get treatment. Can you see Hannah in there?
Some of the maladies were minor, while some included seriously major sicknesses, like this woman who initially had a herpes infection but because it went untreated for so long it had spread up and around her back and to make matters worse, she was pregnant!! Poor thing.
I love this shot. These were some of the guys that help out with the Gentle Hands orphanage. The amazing thing is that the boys either side of me were actually rescued from this exact slum as orphans! Now they have been raised in the orphanage and are helping to rescue more kids like themselves from the same fate that they would have faced had they not been taken in as orphans. Pretty cool I thought.
There's so much more to tell about this place but I've run out of steam. More to come at some point. That was Malabon.
P.S. Here's another shot from our on-going competition of sleeping photos... I reckon it's a winner.
