Day 1 - The Invisible

There was the utter joy that radiated from the Badjao children’s faces as we handed each of them something so precious that the whole village heard about it within minutes.  We purchased for each of them a chicken and rice meal from Jollibee’s (a local favorite fast food place). The meals cost us $1.60 each but it was as if we were handing them a trip to Disney.  These children survive off of food from Feed One and Convoy of Hope, a ministry that we have supported for years and that our students all support.  The food is a rice porridge that is inexpensive but healthy but lacks a lot of flavor.

There was the mud that we gingerly stepped through and the puddles that we avoided, not realizing that we were to encounter far worse when we entered the boarded “walkways” of the raised village.  There were boards missing, sections missing, and precarious moments when we were sure we would not survive without falling through to the black water, mud, sewage and trash soup below.  I had seen pictures but this time, I smelled smells and balanced above the cesspool knowing that falling in would not only be messy but dangerous.

It was when we were slowly tiptoeing back to the van that we came upon a commotion.  A man had fallen and had lodged his thigh in between two boards.  His face was twisted in agony as those around him attempted to pull the board up so that his leg could be free.  We could not go around.   We did not know if we could help, and we got a very uncomfortable view of what this life is like.  The man was eventually freed and fell over panting and still in agony and there was nothing that could be done for him.

As we left the village and turned on the street, I realized that these people live different than those around them.  The buildings on the main road were fenced, and while not glorious, definitely mansion-like compared to what we had just seen.  So they live a separate existence.  They are other.  They are mocked, and a bit despised for what they lack, and I guess this is far worse than poverty.  Invisibility is how they live in a village that is sliced off from the community because seeing them would dampen one’s mood for the day.