Poverty Thoughts

I haven't written in a while. Life in Cebu has hit some sort of a rhythm now so many days just feel slightly routine and therefore don't seemingly give me much to share. Well unlike how that statement might make it sound, life here certainly is not boring. And if I really think about it, just being here should give me lots to write about. Like things that are different about Cebu as opposed to living in North America. Or how I am affected by seeing such poverty around me. This is the first time I actually lived in a place where poverty was more the norm than anything else. Sure I have traveled to places like Brazil and Mexico and have seen poverty. While living in Thailand I traveled to the Thai/Burma border regularly and saw it upclose for short periods of time. In Chiang Mai I taught English in a poor neighborhood twice a week for two years. But in general, where I came from in the US, was a really nice place to live and in addition, Chiang Mai was a very nice place to live. Sure there were dirty parts to it and pockets of impoverished people but Cebu City is so different from all that.
In my opinion, this city is not a very nice place to live. It's dirty and not that nice to look at. It is not a place with pockets of poverty. On the contrary; there are pockets of wealth - with some level of poverty being the majority; ranging from low-income wage earners living in squatters or very basic apartments to unemployed, destitute and homeless people.
Last Sunday I went out with a group from our church to the streets to visit and hang out with the poor. There were about 50 of us that split into ~10 different groups, each going to a regularly-visited area. I ended up in a group with 3 Filipino women from church. We visited a family of 7 - all living in a small 1-room squatter. The family consisted of a mother, father, 4 children and the mother's adult cousin. Their source of income is dependent on the father's ability to find people who need their cell phones fixed. The oldest daughter was attending high school (which here is 7th-10th grade and in most places in the Philippines is night school (4-9:30pm) since there's not enough space or resources for everyone to go during the day) but recently stopped going because of a gang of boys that kept following and threatening her. The 4 year old boy in the family has a twisted colon and can not poop. He needs surgery (and has since birth) but the family is unable to get the 10,000 pesos ($220US) to pay for it. Each month it is a struggle to pay the 150 pesos ($3.50US) for the tube needed to manually extract this boy's bowels. Some month's they can't afford it. Each month he faces infection and distention of his abdomen which I imagine is accompanied by some level of discomfort and pain.
Each adult in the family shared with us their struggles. We ate ice cream together. We asked about their lives. And then we prayed together. The mother of the family told us she knows God works because the last time they were prayed for whatever the problem was, got better. While we prayed with our hands on her shoulder she cried. God was enouraging and blessing this family. We prayed especially for Samuel, the 4-year-old. We layed hands on his body and prayed for healing. We prayed for each spoken need. It was a really nice time and the family seemed encouraged by our time together. All of us were really excited for the opportunity to pray for Samuel and are eager to return in two weeks to see what happened.
On our way back out of the neighborhood we came across a single mother and her 4 children, two of which are babies, all lying on a pile of cardboard boxes which was their home. A man standing near walked over and asked me if I had anything like this is my country. I said, Yes we have homeless people but not as many as you have here. As we drove back, I realized that I have never seen a whole family with young children like this living on the street. I wondered why. From what I understand, young children like this would not be allowed to stay on the street but would likely be taken into protective custody and then perhaps put into foster care or something so at least their very basic needs for food and shelter were met. I felt bad that I initially had equated America and the Philippines by saying, Oh yeah we have homelessness too. And yeah, sure we have our problems and it is really sad that there is homelessness in such a rich country as ours but the poverty in America is no where near what is so ubiquitous and tolerable here.