http://www.vimeo.com/5295378

She’s right. We really do need to take a step back sometimes and be thankful for what we have…

Georgia has also written a blog detailing her thoughts on our visit to Manila. Read it below…

Wow – Manila.  To say that our time spent here was “intense” just does not do our visit justice.

Poverty is poverty, wherever you are in the world.  But having flown in from Khayaltsia, Cape Town, I couldn’t help but compare the poverty of the township of South Africa, to the poverty of the more urban setting of Himlayang Palanyag (“Resting Place”), Manila.  Is one a “better” form of poverty than another?  Is it “better” to be poor in Khayaletsia than it is in Himlayang Palanyag?

Ultimately, I figure that if you haven’t been gifted your basic human rights that every person in the world should have been born with: clean water, food, milk for your babies, hell – even a toilet that, if you’re lucky, flushes… than one poor is pretty much the same as another.

So… we were in Manila to see the work that Alex, Ritchie, Eboy, Irene and the rest of the Baluti team are doing in Himlayang Palanyag and the Paranaque area.  Himlayang Palanyag is a settlement pretty much built on one of them main rubbish tips of Manila, and spreads across to the government graveyard.  Seriously.  This is where people live.

Alex showed us around.  On the rubbish tip, stood an abandoned funfair – a haunted house and a small ferris wheel that looks as if it had been standing there for 30 years or so.  Very surreal.  Opposite was the graveyard.

We went in.  There were so many graves, literally crammed into each other, on top of each other, so there was no available space left.  Which meant that as we walked through, there was no choice but to walk across and over people’s graves – there was nowhere else to go.

I apologised to every grave that I stepped on as I did so, and I apologise again, now.  I was disturbed.  But what disturbed me more was to realise that people’s homes were INSIDE the graveyard, tents camped upon graves, because they had nowhere else to go.

I was told by Alex that a lot of the young people who live in this area use the gravestones, literally, as their beds… to have sex on.  Within five minutes, I was gingerly stepping around a used condom, discarded on a gravestone.  I guess at least they’re using condoms.

Alex & Baluti had ‘mapped’ the area around Himalayang Palanyag in order to find out where young people are having sex (so that they know where to focus their education effort) – and the most heavily used area was the graveyard!  It would be fair to say that I was pretty much out of my comfort zone.

Alex told me that people can’t afford to buy their graves, so they rent them from the government for 5 years… after which, young kids are paid to smash through the tomb and remove the bones, so that the graves can be reused.  The bones are then either buried in mass graves, or placed in cement “apartment” blocks.  For many of the filled in blocks that we saw, the families couldn’t afford to engrave the name, birth & death date of their loved ones… and so they wrote it instead with their fingers, in the wet cement that seals their graves.

As we left the graveyard, we saw two families with tiny coffins, about to be buried.  Their babies hadn’t survived long enough to make the graveyard their playground above the ground.

Himalayang Palanyag made me cry.  Talking with the woman with ten kids, no husband, no home, no food for her or her children, let alone milk for her baby which I held for her… I cried.  Stepping over the top of people’s graves… I cried.
But then we watched Baluti in action.  They give basic sex education lessons to kids in this area, and also at the Paranaque National High School (the largest school in the world: 25,000 kids go this school, but have to go in 2 shifts/day!).  Baluti find kids, aged 11-19, and they sit and listen – attentively – to learn about condoms, HIV and STIs.

As we watched their lesson, they asked for a volunteer to do a condom demonstration for the group; the young boy who eventually went up to do so, crossed himself before he opened the condom pack.

I loved the Baluti team: Doc Maris, their wonderfully inspiring adult mentor; Ritchie, who only came out to his family & friends after attending, and being so influenced by a Baluti session.  Eboy, who teaches gay men how to put their make-up on; and Alex, who leads Baluti, and is an ex-gang member who wanted to make more of his life.  Alex’s smiling face, his optimism, and his determination, made me want to clone him so that we could replicate the amazing work that Baluti is doing here, to other – just as needy – places around the world that could so benefit from the Baluti team’s dedication and commitment to changing their community for the better.

Georgia is Executive Director of the Staying Alive Foundation and SVP of Social Responsibility at MTV International.

Follow Georgia on Twitter here..

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