I promised to sit down and write a reflection about Manila. About what I saw, as I had never seen poverty the way I have seen it here. I have seen poverty in America, on the cross country road trips I took with my father. Through ghost towns along the highway, deserted. Empty. I have not seen poverty in Pandan, I know it is here. I work with the poorest of the poor through the Department of Social Welfare, but they are generous, happy, thriving despite their meagre income. It is a poverty with hope and with community and with support. It is unlike the more gritty and rugged picture I saw in Manila. Children covered in many days of dirt, gripping the sides of buildings as their mothers knocked on the windows of vehicles at stop lights. It is different. It is hard to look at. I don’t even know where to begin to provide solutions, but. I just know what I saw, and it is an image I’ll never erase.
I am not a poet, but constructing my prose in this way seemed more appropriate for me. I cannot narrate fully what I saw or easily convey how it made me feel. This is not a conventional structure, and I am not trying to convey any deeper meaning or parallel meaning. Emotionally, it just felt like the right expression.
MANILA – THE TRUTH SHE TOLD ME
Nothing is more humbling,
than when you see it for the first time.
You will feel guilt for a full stomach, a shower, and a change of clothes.
Poverty sleeps on the sidewalk;
it knocks on the windows of locked cab doors
while passengers lower their gaze with shame.
Look, at the slouched child
in a desperate mothers arms.
Observe cook stoves preparing dinner
propped up on the cracked concrete
from the tremors of overdue earthquakes,
on filthy sidewalks,
spotted with mysterious stains,
reeking of sunburned garbage and excrement.
poverty
is resourceful and those in it,
resilient.
what does it mean to help?
buying a meal for a begging child?
putting spare coins into the palms of the dirty faced street children?
donating to a relief organization?
No, help is none of these things.
For these are merely a bandage,
healing only the givers’ grief for humanity forgotten.
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I have not seen poverty in Pandan, I know it is here.
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