Exploring the Slums of Davao

I just don’t understand why there are so many horrible things in this world.  I wish pain and sadness and suffering and poverty and violence and hate and injustice and all the bad things in the world could just disappear.  Today four group members and I spent the day at Tambayan which is the NGO that my group visited a couple day s earlier.  Tambayan was so kind to take us to the communities where the girls that they help live.  We took a pedi-cab (which I have been dying to ride) to Barangay 31-D where we were greeted by the Barangay Officials.  The Barangay officials is the local government that handles and facilitates that region.  They were extremely happy to see us and had many questions for us…What are you studying? Why did you decide to tour the community? What information will you take back to your country?…Were some of the questions.  It was sad to learn that the Barangay (village) that we were visiting was the biggest drug village and it had a high number of gang violence and prostitution.  We began our tour around the village.  Children and adults poked their heads out of their shanties and shacks as we passed by, probably wondering “who are these foreign people and why are they talking pictures of our home?”  It was sad to once again see how many little children lived in this poor village.  There were at least 8 children to one household.  The kids were adorable and as always my heart ached to see them because they were so poor.  They ran around naked and with ripped clothes, smiling every time I pointed the camera at them.  I took so many pictures of them and then showed them the screen.  They thought it was the most hilarious thing to see themselves in the screen.  This village in particular was just recovering from a fire that had occurred a year earlier.  There was a feud between two different groups and one group set a fire that spread throughout the village.  It burnt many homes (or shacks) down.  One girl even told us the story on how her mother died because she couldn’t breathe because of all of the smoke.  Many people were in the process of rebuilding their shanties and shacks.  How sad it was to see all of this.  I am so lucky and some of the things that I have seen in these past three weeks serves as reminder of how privileged I am.  It frustrates me that I can’t take all of these families and give them a proper home.  I want to put all those little children in school.  I want to give their parents jobs….I wish, I wish, I wish…..