Intramurals (Sports Day) - Dance and Sports Competitions

Here are some highlights of the Dance Competition which was part of their Intramurals (Sports Days). Participation was compulsory for all students, some were more keen than others. Steph and I had to judge the Dances! If your interested, the woodwork students won.



and after the dance competition came the sports.....



Intramurals (Sports Day) - Opening Ceremony

This is the Opening Ceremony for the Vocational Training Centre's Sports Day (two days actually). No pressure London 2012 but if this is how they open school sports days here.......

Celebrating the Dead

In British culture the idea of celebrating death is very alien, our cemeteries tend to be places of quiet, places where exuberant joy is considered inappropriate, a subdued manner is the expectation. Here is the Philippines the culture is very different.

1^st and 2^nd November are days which belong to the dead. Virtually everyone goes to the cemeteries to visit their deceased relatives. During the days either side transport networks are at their busiest with people travelling back and forth, to and from their family homes and family places of burial.

The atmosphere in the cemeteries is not of mournful lament and quiet weeping. 1^st and 2^nd November are days of celebration. Families are reunited over the graves of their common dead. The whole day is spent in the cemetery, prayers are shared, picnic food is eaten, barbecues are lit, board games are played.

In the cemeteries of the better off tents are set up over the graves sheltering the living from the sun. Fast-food franchises set up temporary branches, vendors wander around selling flowers, candles, balloons, ice-creams and even rubber skeletons. Children play ball games in the roadways.

The atmosphere in the poorer cemeteries is much the same sense of festivity only there is less space. Above ground concrete ossaries, sometimes two stories high, stack mortal remains four or five people high. Families are squashed together trying to find the space to decorate their family graves with paint, candles and flowers.

These two days are very special days of festival but they are only the pinnacle of an ongoing devotion to the dead that exists here. Daily prayers are prayed for, and asked of, those who have died. A very immanent sense of relationship is maintained with those who have died. Death is talked about freely, it is certainly not a subject that is feared or hidden away from.

The experience of visiting the cemeteries has been fascinating but also strangely disconcerting. My European mindset shies away from focussing too much on the subject of death at times when it doesn’t have to. Perhaps I maintain some less than fully conscious superstitions about death which my mind prefers to leave hidden? Death is usually a subject I prefer to keep away from normal life in a walled off space different from the rest of life.

The practises here are both an inspiring eye-opener and a deep challenge. 

Hobbies Evening

I ought to acknowledge that many of these young people are far more gifted with performance talent than I am. This is particularly true of the artists, below are the finally results of their work.

 

Father Mac's Feeding Programme

Last week Steph and I went out with Fr. Mac to help with his feeding programme. He and a team of young volunteers visit the very poorest parts of Cebu to give out food on the streets.

There is nothing as pure as..........

They Pray a lot here

Steph and I have been living here at DBTC for  two weeks. In some ways it feels like much longer yet at the same time it feels like we've only begun to scratch the surface of what goes on here.

Four institutions inhabit the same campus here, they each have a different timetable and different routines. One thing which is common to all four is the emphasis on prayer.

Every morning the vocational students begin the day with a 6.30am mass, later on they have prayer during a morning assembly, the working day ends with more prayers at another assembly and every evening the students who board pray the rosary while walking up and down the playground.

The High school and Primary school students also begin each day with prayer. During October they are praying the rosary together everyday at 7.15am . Every week each year group shares a mass and every week the pupils have the opportunity to go to confession.

None of this religious practise seems forced. Of course there are pupils told off for being stupid during prayers but I've also seen groups of pupils holding their own times of prayer or praying individually beside a statue of Mary. Before a football match starts the players of both sides will pray together on the pitch, before every lesson the class will pray a short prayer together.

We have no way of knowing yet whether this is typical of the Philippines or happens just in Salesian schools. However I think it is fair to say that religion is a lot more practised and a lot more visible in the Philippines that it is in Europe. The local parish 'Our Lady of Lourdes' is said to have a Sunday mass attendance of about 20'000 worshippers. Religious inscriptions appear everywhere on houses, shops, cars and buses. The people here will speak of God much more readily than we do in Europe, God is thanked regularly and invoked easily.

What does all this say about the Philippines, it is far too early for us to make any judgements. Is all this prayer a sign of deep spirituality or a fake veneer of cultural religion? We cannot say. This is culture very distance from our western separation of private and public life with religion very much kept in the private sphere.



Induction of the New Vocational Trainees: Friday 15th Oct

.......and here is what the trainees were preparing for.

(See my previous Blog entry if you don't understand)

Induction of the New Vocational Trainees: Thursday 13th Oct

The day after Super-Hero day and the hoop game the vocational trainees were hard at work preparing for another challenge on Friday.

Address

we've been here at DBTC for just over a week now and we've finally gotten round to finding out the Postal Address.

Matthew and Stephanie Neville,

Salesian Residence,

Don Bosco Technology Centre,

PO Box 271,

6000 Cebu City,

The Philippines.

All post is most welcome!

Induction of the New Vocational Trainees: Wednesday 12th Oct - Part 2

here is the second part of the video

Induction of the New Vocational Trainees: Wednesday 12th Oct - Part 1

While we are here in the Philippines our main role is going to be teaching English and Maths to the vocational trainees who are taking course on Mechanic, Carpentry, Electrics and handyman skills. However before the courses start all the students have the attend a three week induction process.

This video and another which will appear shortly are of what they were doing on Wednesday last week.

Moving to DBTC

On Tuesday of this week Steph and I left the Salesian Provincial House and moved to the Don Dosco Technology Centre (DBTC). This is where we will be living and working for the rest of our stay here in Cebu.

The Technology Centre is comprised of four part.

An Elementary (read Primary) School,

A High School,

A College – running higher level courses for over 16s

A Vocational Training Centre – running skills based course for over 16s

Most of the students live in the local area and come daily but there are about 65 boarders who come from the villages and town in more remote parts of Cebu Island.

Our principal work will be helping the Vocational Training Centre Students with their English and Maths Lessons.

For the moment we are just settling in so there isn't too much to say, here are some photos which show you what the place looks like.

A City of Contrasts

A city of contrasts. A city of differences

Shanty towns stand alongside homes of a far better standard than those in which most western Europeans live. Air-conditioned shopping malls filled with famous international shopping chains stand next to, and tower over, rustic local markets where food is sold off tarpaulins stretched on the ground. Plush, spotless branches of McDonalds, Starbucks and KFC can be found in the most unlikely places, nearby vendors can be found selling hot meat fresh cut from a whole pig roasting on the side of the road. 

To walk the streets in some area is to pass kareoke bars a plenty, sometimes more food stalls than there seem to be people and to occasionally come close to tripping over a live chicken tethered to the curb by it's foot, or a small child who is surely too young to be playing so close to a road. Then all of a sudden there appears a smart looking restaurant with a polite security guard on the door beckoning you inside. Dusty streets filled with potholes merge quickly into well maintained grass-verged roads and then are followed once again by glorified dirt tracks.

On the roads top range black windowed people carriers compete with cars glad that there is no one checking MOTs. Motorcycle taxis laden down with six or seven people struggle to get up speed while dodging the potholes. A cacophony of beeping is a constant soundtrack, not as a form of aggression but used as they are intended, as a way of saying "I am here".

Cebu is a not a city which gives itself to quick judgements, there is too much diversity and too many extremes to allow any quickly made judgement to stand for long.

A Change of Plan

Before we arrived in Cebu we were expecting to be working in a home for Boys, not actually in Cebu itself but in a small town outside the city called Liloan.

Yesterday morning Brother Carlo who is responsible for all the volunteers told us that we weren't going to be able to live and work in the Boys' Home. This is for a variety of reasons.

Instead we are going to a different Salesian centre called the 'Don Bosco Technology Centre'.  On the site are a Primary School, Secondary School and a Vocational Training Centre. A handful of  students live onsite but the vast majority live in the local area. Nearby there is a parish church which is run by the Salesians, in the parish buildings there is a youth centre, an education centre to supplement the local schools and give the children somewhere to do homework, and there is a feeding centre which serves food to children from 0-6 who otherwise might not be given adequate food.

So it looks like there will be plenty of possibilities for work we might do.

Given time to make the necessary mental adjustments I think the new project has a lot of potential. We will most likely move there on Monday.

History can be very Contradictory

Arrived Safely!

Steph and I have arrived safely in Cebu.

The total journey time from door to door took just over 24hours.

Our fatigue and our disorientation has been somewhat allayed by having met some good people and having been given a really warm welcome. For the next few days we will be staying in relative comfort at the Provincial house of the Salesian Community in Cebu. In a few days time, after we have recovered from the journey we will move to the Childrens' home where we will be working.

At the moment the excitement of a new beginning is very much mixed together with the nervousness and anxiety associated with all new starts. There is a lot of learn, a lots to reflect on and a lot to experience.

For the moment it is time to rest and recover.

What will I be doing in the Philippines?

In just over a week from now Steph and I will be on a plane flying towards The Philippines. Assuming all goes to plan we are going to be living in the Philippines for the next few months, we will be living and working in a home for boys just outside Cebu City (if you don’t know where Cebu City is then google it!). What we will be doing exactly we are still waiting to find out but there are around 125 boys in the home so I expect there will be plenty to do.

The Boys’ home where we will be working, which is imaginatively called ‘Boys’ Home’, is run by a community of Salesians. The Salesians are a community of religious brothers and sisters which has members living all over the world. The work of the Salesian community is caring for and educating children and young people normally the most disadvantaged of the areas where they work.

The Salesian way of working embraces a holistic and christian approach to education. Formal education takes place in an environment of Prayer, Play and Care. A Salesian teacher would typically give as much importance to being with the children on the playground and the chapel as he would to being with them in the classroom. The Salesians put a great emphasis on the importance of being present alongside young people, loving what the young love. Just being present and willing to spend time with the young is already to value and affirm them.

Steph and I will soon be trying to live out this theory in reality......

James and Steph Bake a Cake

The job of a two-year-old is to remind us of how exciting the simple things in life can be!