Seeds

Today we have reached the end, at 4.00pm we will leave DBTC for the last time. When tomorrow arrives we will be in a different country and a different reality.

Emotions are very mixed, sadness and happiness running very close together.

The last nine months have been quite an adventure, we have learned a lot, experienced a lot, celebrated a lot and eaten a lot. Most importantly of all we have been touched by a lot of different people.

I would like very much to thank the Salesians of DBTC who have made us feel incredibly welcome and valued during our time here.

The last nine months has been a time of planting seeds. We have had the privilege of serving and helping a group of young people who, by all of the comparisons which most of our world value, are extremely poor and live with a constant lack. We have had the chance to plant seeds of learning in each of them, it is now time to walk away, what these seeds will become we do not know.

However, even more profoundly these young people have planted seeds in us. They have shown us that the standard economic measures of well being are not the full measure of a person. They have shown us what it is to be joyful even when life is hard; they have shown us what it means to really live in community and they have shown how valuable simply smiling can be. These young people have given me a new world of possibilities, many of which I am undoubtedly unaware of; I do not yet know what these seeds will grow into within me.

I leave with sadness but also a lot of hope.

If you are still reading this blog I thank you very much for sharing in my journey. I will end with a quote from a South African Christian[1] which, I think, sums up how I feel right now. It is a sentiment I hope I will be able to carry with me as life moves on:

"The deep joy, which only comes from God, can only be present in us if we live with others, because happiness is only true happiness when it is shared."

---

[1] Taken from Lettre de Taizé Sept-Dec 2011, my translation from the French

Finished Programme

After eight months of hard work our programmes for English and Maths are now finished. On Tuesday Steph and I had the chance to meet the training directors of the nine training centres which will be using our programmes; we have also had the chance to introduce the programmes to the teachers here who will be taking over from us in the new semester just starting.

I feel an enormous amount of satisfaction in having completed this work; I am pleased to be leaving behind something which I hope will be useful. 

Our work is now done it is up to others to carry on. Whether our efforts will bear fruit we will probably never know and in any case it is no longer in our hands. There is a sadness in that, letting go and ceasing to be in control of your own creation can be hard. Yet at the same time there is something inspiring about allowing others take up the baton and continue to create with what we started. I think overall it is a cause for celebration, we have played our part. It is time to let go.

An Update

A few weeks ago I put up a post which talked about 18 students who had failed Maths. These students had to continue with Maths for a few more weeks. So for the last few weeks Steph and I have been giving maths lessons to very small groups trying to give them an extra boost of learning. I am pleased to write that of the 18 who had failed, fourteen have now achieved a high enough level to proceed, and three have dropped out. 

Which leave one remaining student who still doesn’t have a good enough level of maths to cope with the course demands. He is a junior going into senior, he will continue into the next semester but with a programme of extra maths. For us it will very soon be time to move on, our last one-to-one lesson with him was yesterday, it will be others who have to help him going forward.

Waving the Flag

One of the quite surprising aspects of living here is how often we see our flag.

After the Filipino flag the second most common flag seen on the streets of Cebu is without doubt the British Flag. It is found on t-shirts, on cars, on sandals, on jeepneys and in shop windows. 

I don't think this is because there are hordes of britophiles in Cebu who adore the UK,  I think it is more likely because we have quite a good flag which people like the look of.

It is not only our flag which is commonly seen in Cebu, by far the most seen football shirt is that of the England national team, followed in second place by either the French national team or Barcelona. Among those who follow football, which is perhaps the fourth biggest sport behind boxing, basketball and cock-fighting, it is the english premier league which is followed. David Beckham and Wayne Rooney are probably the most well known Britains among Filipinos. 

below are a few examples among many......

Rain

Being a tropical country surrounded by a lot of water it tends to rain a lot here.......

Mary

Our rhythm of life while living with the Salesians has involved a lot of prayer. One of the features of this prayer which is sometimes a bit uncomfortable is the extent to which these prayers centre of Mary the mother of Jesus rather than on a person of the Trinity.

Personally I have no problem with acknowledging Mary as a person worthy of special praise, there is much that is inspirational in her story. I also believe that we can ask others members of the Church to pray for us, be these fellow Christians living or dead. Thus I have no problem with us asking Mary, as a fellow Christian, to remember me in her prayers.

Where the spirituality of Mary gets very uncomfortable is when it is elevated to such as level that she is presented as if she is a god. While nowhere in ‘official’ Catholic theology is this claim made, within the culture of devotion and worship she is often presented as if she is God.

Here at DBTC the feast of ‘The Immaculate Conception of Mary’ was celebrated in a far bigger way than was ‘Epiphany’, ‘The Annunciation’ (the conception of Jesus), ‘The Ascension’, or ‘Pentecost’. The Feast of ‘Mary Mother of God’ was celebrated in preference to ‘The Holy Family’ which fell on the same day. The campus has many statues of Mary holding the child Jesus, yet when these statues are mentioned it is Mary rather than the child Jesus who is evoked and reverenced.

In preaching Mary is spoken of far more than is Jesus, she is the one who can grant us special blessings, she is the one who can assist us in need, she is the one who can answer our prayers. It is praying to Mary which is most often encouraged and celebrated.

So why this emphasis on Mary?

Centuries of hierarchical Church leadership have emphasised the masculine. When preaching to a mostly illiterate laity, unable to read the gospels for themselves, the medieval priesthood preached a God who was male, a God who was powerful, a God who was a judge. Thus the attributes traditionally seen as feminine were driven out of God. Perhaps it was a subconscious reaction to this lack of wholeness that devotion to Mary evolved. She is the merciful one, she is the caring one, she is the one who understands our weakness. When God became inaccessible in the eyes of many, it was Mary whom people looked to for consolation.

It is easy to see why Marian devotions have grown, and easy to see why it persists in a Church which is still male dominated, still hierarchical and still denies many of the feminine aspects of God.

But there are dangers in this spirituality. When speaking about Jesus we are obliged to hold true to the New Testament, we cannot credibly present Jesus in a way which contradicts these texts, and so when it come to Jesus every Christian must remain rooted in the earliest origins of Christianity. The same in-built safety mechanism does not exist when we consider Mary; she is mentioned only six times in the New Testament outside of the nativity stories and even then only briefly. Thus it is all too easy for devotion to Mary to collapse into superstition and tribalism. Sadly I think it often does and in doing so does her a disservice. 

Summers Over, it is back to school!

Here in the Philippines May is considered to be the height of summer so their school year runs from June through to March, each year being separated by a three month holiday (TVED where we work only stops for one week!). This week has been the return to lessons for the high school and elementary student.

Here at DBTC a large number of the students board. Some board inside the school campus in the boarding house run by the Salesians and many more board outside in private dormitories. Children as young as nine or ten will often board in large dormitories with very little supervision.

The pupils who board are financially well off by Filipino standards but by no means super-rich. In most cases they are boarding for one of two reasons, that their family home is somewhere remote on another Island far away from a good school, or that their parents are working abroad.

For many among the Filipino middle class the economic reality is that they have to work abroad if they want to live a comfortable lifestyle and send their children to private schools. Millions of Filipinos live and work all over the world many returning home only once a year or sometimes less often. Many of these workers have no option to take their families with them and so spend years away from their husband, wife, children and parents. A large proportion of the school boarders have either one or both parents working abroad. Weekdays are spent in school and weekends are spent with aunts, uncles or grandparents.

The Salesian High school here is a private fee-paying school. The fees are approximately £1’000 per year, nationwide only about 5% of children attend a private school with the majority attending the free government funded schools. To board in the Salesian boarding house costs about £60 a month. Thus to send a child here as a boarder the yearly cost to the parents is around £1’540 for the nine-month school year, for many these fees can only be paid because they are working abroad.

What is best for your child, to stay here and be poor, or to live away and be financially better off? Such is the dilemma facing many parents.

Exciting Plants

These plants still remain exciting even after eight months..........

The Spirituality of the Scapular

Many of our students wear scapulars. Scapulars are two pieces of brown fabric (or sometimes plastic) joined together by two strings. They are worn over the shoulders with one piece of fabric resting on the chest and the other on the back.

These Scapulars are worn as a form of religious devotion. Their historical origin is not completely clear but they seem to have developed in Medieval Europe as a way for ordinary people to symbolically participate in monasticism, the little pieces of fabric being a type of mini-habit. Over time the spiritual beliefs about scapulars evolved, and for many people they came to be seen as having magical powers such as the ‘Scapular Promise’ (see the picture). Such beliefs are not accepted by ‘official’ Catholic teaching but they are still commonly believed.

I mention all this about scapulars because they are a good example of the wider religious culture here.

Religion here is not principally about ‘believing’ it is much more about ‘doing’. Religion is very practical and very immediate. Whereas in Europe we emphasis the intellect and the mind here it is the experiential and the physical. Religion is much less about books and much more about ritual practises. Trinkets, statues and medals are really important; people like to wear pictures of Saints. The rosary is a very popular prayer said while walking, touching the beads as each prayer passes. In churches it is not uncommon to see people stood before (often very ugly) statues seemingly deep in prayer. Frequent processions and vigils form an important part of the regular liturgical routine.

It is not surprising that this is the reality here; our experience of the education system makes it very clear that a religious faith based on books would be unsustainable just as was the case for medieval Europe.

The advantage of such a religious culture is its accessibility; there is no need to study, to struggle with deep ideas or sign up to lots of abstract dogmas. Perhaps there is a lot that we Europeans can relearn about the need for religion to be accessible and close to reality. Maybe we need to reconsider the ways in which the physical and the spiritual can be closer connected?

The disadvantage, of course, is that these popular forms of devotion can very easily become forms of superstition which are performed so as to earn blessings and favours. In such a climate there is a great risk that belief in the unconditional love of God gets forgotten.

The Scapular promise is a good example of these kinds of distortions. Another example is the rosary, when people speak about why they say the rosary often they will mention ideas such as that Mary will send us special spiritual blessings or that we can earn special graces from Mary. The same sentiments are voiced about all sorts of spiritual practises, to our European ears the spirituality of ‘Salvation by spiritual works’ is never far away.

And yet perhaps such a quick judgement is unfair, the human psyche is rarely so simply summed up. The well educated European Church knows that we pray, not to convince God to love us, but as a response to the fact that God already loves us.  But the reality is that we don’t actually pray that much, suggesting that we aren’t all that convinced by what we think we believe. What we claim to believe intellectually is not borne out by our practise.

Here maybe the opposite is true. The words which are spoken suggest a spirituality of constantly attempting to earn God’s love, but the fervour of their spiritual life suggest that on a deeper level they are already convinced of the reality of that love.

Every morning our students attend mass and every evening they pray the rosary together, I don’t believe they are doing so because they think they will be punished if they don’t, they don't exhibit the angst to which such a spirituality would give birth. To some extent they pray out of habit but only partly. Most deeply I think they pray because they know how much they are already blessed; they know how much they are already fully alive. They might not be able to articulate it but they are living it.

Longing for Community

The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth has not, as you might expect, been particularly big news here! She did, however, get a mention on the front page of one of the national newspapers.

We have, as always, been in touch with events via the omnipresent BBC. These types of national events are always a fascinating experience. Seeing the river procession on Sunday and the various street parties have reminded me very much of the Sinulog Festival which we were part of in January.

(For our experiences of Sinulog click: Sinulog Fluvial Parade; Sinulog Pasil Parade; Sinulog City Parade)

What is it that draws people out onto the streets? What is it which inspires people to join in these celebrations?

I don’t believe that the inspiration is really what it is claimed to be. Despite what they might say most British people do not love the queen, not really. She is a very private figure, she never gives interviews, she has never written a book and she is never seen informally. Her speeches are highly stage managed affairs not personal exposés. None of us know what her opinions are on any significant issue. The Queen is a very distant figure, amazingly so considering her profile. Thus for most of us she is not really a person rather part of a national myth. The media (chiefly the BBC) gives us a picture of an idealised Queen, one which we are encouraged to celebrate. No voices of dissent from this line are ever allowed to be heard. Yet we don’t really know (or possibly care) if this myth matches reality or not.

So what is the real reason that people pour out onto the streets. I think it is because we all long for community, the spiritual and emotional facets of our being yearn for universality; we all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. When we see a crowd begin to gather we are emotionally drawn towards it wanting to be part of the event. Thus for a few hours we are willing to put reality on hold and to pretend that as a nation we are one people united around our Queen. It is the action of coming together that is paramount not the object which forms the focus for this coming together. We are all swept along by the group dynamic; we enter into the event and the emotion. Reality is put on hold so as to let ourselves enjoy the mythic reality. We feel better about ourselves because we are part of something worthy.

All of this is part of being human, we are social beings and we are future-orientated beings, we all need to occasionally stop working, forget reality and subsume ourselves into a collective celebration. Just occasionally we need to allow ourselves to trust in something higher than ourselves. The celebrations of Sinulog play much the same role for the people of Cebu as do many celebrations across the world. Every nation needs it national myth.

Where, however, this created mythic reality can become dangerous is in the fact that as we let go of reality and begin to trust very easily we become vulnerable to manipulation. We are just a little bit tempted to forget that this is all a game and so to stay living in the dream. We infantilise ourselves and we stop thinking. Thus we can all too easily become part of the mob just because it is what everyone else is doing. Let’s not forget that it was falling for this exact same idealised national myth that lead our nation (and others) into the butchery of the Somme and the mud of Paschendaele; and that it was a desire to let go of reality and embrace an idealised national myth which lead Germans to accept the death camps. It is an idealised national myth which is currently costing many naive young British and Afghan men their live.

So let’s enjoy the party and enjoy the community but not forget that none of this is real; she’s no more important than any of the rest of us.

Balut

Here in the Philippines they have some interesting types of food!

Most bizarre of all is the national delicacy called Balut. This is a fertilised chicken egg inside of which the chicken foetus is allowed to develop for between one and two weeks, normally the egg would hatch at about three weeks. These eggs containing half developed chicken foetuses are hard-boiled then eaten.

During the New Year celebration we got the chance to try.......although I ought to confess that Steph ate far more of it than did I!

Happy Times

A little video footage of our recent trip to the beach

Soft Imperialism

Here at DBTC there are two indoor badminton courts. These courts cannot be used to play badminton because they are being used as a place of storage for a hundred or so large boxes of books.

Long before we arrived here the Salesians received a gift of books from a charity in the USA, on the face of it a very generous gift. However on closer inspection it quickly becomes evident that most of these books are totally useless. There are manuals for outdated computer programmes, books to assist learning French or Spanish (not languages normally studied here), books on fashion design and book on US history. Even among the books which could be useful, such as textbooks for English or Maths, most are at too high a level for the students here. Perhaps about 10% of what was sent is of some use. The rest just sits taking up space and stopping students from playing badminton. These gifts are a clear case of un-though-out charity. They were clearly sent without any prior dialogue and without any real thought as to what might be needed. Eventually most of these useless books, expensively shipped across the ocean, will end up being binned.

Along with all the books came several boxes of T-shirts, these are much more useful and have already been distributed among the students. These T-shirts were, however, all T-shirts promoting the American Military’s Wounded Veterans’ Charity, the USA’s equivalent of ‘The British Legion’ or ‘Help the Heroes’.

The students have no affinity one way or the other for or against the US military, for them it is just another much needed T-shirt, they don’t much care what is printed on the front. I, however, do feel uncomfortable about the spectacle.

Admittedly I have a particular problem with the US military; I disagree with much of what they do and what it stands for as an organisation. However I think there are questions at stake which run deeper than my personal views, I hope I would still feel uncomfortable even if it was an organisation towards which I felt more disposed. The students are unconsciously advertising, and by implication helping to support the US military, they have not made a positive choice to do so, thus it feels as if their poverty and lack of education is being taken advantage of.

This is one example of a very subtle problem which exists here. The influence of the rich world weighs very heavily on the people here. The allure and pressure of North America, Europe and Australia deeply affects people here. However the image of the rich world that they see is not a fair picture, it is the idealised world of film, television and sport. There is virtually no encouragement to critical debate or deconstruction of their assumptions about the rich. The value of Capitalism, Consumerism and Militarism are subtly preached as unquestionable truth to those who benefit least from these systems.

In a context such as this the importance of good education becomes very obvious. Young people here need to be encouraged to think critically. Our students are bombarded with so much western propaganda and as a result it is easy for them to believe that the characters on television are ‘normal’ and they ‘subnormal’ when in reality the opposite is closer to being true.

Such education to think is, of course, dangerous. A people which sees itself as an equal to any other might start demanding equivalent wages, or equivalent working conditions, or an equivalent say in world affairs. Much better to appease our consciences by sending a few crates of useless books!