Blessed are the Poor
After a nearly 4-month hiatus, my co-workers and I finally returned to conducting fieldwork. This means walking through narrow eskinitas littered with opened candy and shampoo wrappers, side-stepping horse dung trailing along the ground, and avoiding puddles of water from the nearby canal. It means meeting those we help face to face—a reminder that development work is first and most of all about encountering people right where they are.
For those who may not be aware, I have the great and humbling privilege of working with informal settlers which, in the Philippines, is more colloquially termed as “squatters”. In the past few days, I acknowledge how stark my reality is. I wake up to a room still cold from the air conditioner. I would walk to my personal bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth with water straight from a faucet. I would be driven to the nearby barangay I am assigned in and as my workers and I would make our way to the slum areas, the thought “My family’s home could likely fit half of the households I work with.” would surface.
There are times I would try my best to refrain from tearing up from the overwhelming feeling of sheer helplessness. Yesterday, I met a young widower whose wife passed away from COVID and is left with 3 children to care for. After suffering a mild stroke over a year ago, he has also been left almost bed-ridden and thus unemployed, furthering his plight. As we spoke to him by his window sill and with a quick peek at the run-down state of his house that was no bigger than a room, I could only reflect “What do we say?”. When people pour out their hearts in fear of eviction or burst into fits of warranted anger to protest the demolition of their houses, what can we say? While dingy, dilapidated and built out of galvanized steel sheets that convert their houses into an elephantine oven, the people we encounter would still adamantly proclaim, “these are our homes,” they would beg, “we’ve lived here for years”.
The past few days have been a stark reminder of “what it is exactly that I’m trying to do”.
My heart cries out to those who cannot fight for themselves. When I prayed for this vocation, I asked God to give me the opportunity to work in the grassroots. Now, here I am and I ask myself “God, why have you brought me here? What do you want me to see?” The past 8 months of working as a development worker have reminded me that the work that I do does not define me. My identity is rooted in the truth that God loves me and this is how I desire to love Him back.
Yet, I know love and empathy are not enough when people ask for solutions. If I could impart “words of wisdom” to those aspiring to work in this sector, it would be to listen and to do it well. My time the past 8 months working from home and much more recently working in the field has been filled with numerous moments of listening. The power of listening trumps whatever cold solution any project may offer especially if the people we hope to help fail to be heard.
To offer your ears to listen is a gift that those in the margins do not receive. In their scarcity, they have offered a world of stories about their families, lives, hopes, and aspirations. Their generosity to share themselves, even with no guarantee of receiving anything in return is a gift that I do not take for granted. I know that it is them entrusting their lives into our hands so that we can amplify their voices in platforms that seek to drown them out.
My only hope is that the work of my hands, as minute as they may be in the eyes of the world, could help give a better life even for just one.
Please pray for us.
