Life in Manila -part 3 -Apostolate to the poorest

The purpose of the Heart's Home missionaries is a unique one. They do not have a specific sort of ministry that they do amongst the poor. Instead, their purpose is simply to live among them and to love them -to be 'friends' to them, especially to the littlest ones they meet. I was really excited when I found out that they spend their Tuesday afternoons helping at one of Mother Teresa's sisters' children's homes. It is amazing how clean and well cared for the children are in the midst of such a difficult place. Yet no matter how much they try to give the children (most of whom are handicapped), there simply are not enough hands to hold and hug them the way a mother would. It broke my heart when I left several babies crying for me when I had to go at the end of our shift. They just wanted me to keep holding them.

Another day we visited families living near the fish port. They are all squatters living in make shift one room 'houses' made of spare boards and cardboard. When we arrived we found that a handicapped 17-year-old friend had died from sickness. After spending time with his family and helping to arrange a Mass, we continued to visit a young mother with her two boys. She brought her friend over to show us her 'very sick' 3-month-old. I've never seen a baby so malnourished -skin and bones. He was raging with a fever, was white (despite his parent's dark colored skin) and crying weaker than I've ever heard a baby cry. I told the two girls with me that he needed to get to a hospital quickly. The mother was a very good mother and told us that he had just been released from the hospital 4 days earlier, but she had no money for his medicine. (Looking at the child I have no idea why a doctor would have released him -it is impossible for a child to become as sick and malnourished as he was in only 4 days). They decided to tell her to wait for the night and the next day to send her to a friend nurse of theirs. My heart was broken when I learned the next day that the baby had died a few hours after we left. They did not believe me when I had said, "This baby will die tonight," -I could tell as we held him that his eyes were rolling back and he would periodically stop breathing. Anyway, it was such a tragedy. Then we went to check on an old women they knew -she was paralyzed in her cardboard box and had not eaten in weeks. She had gone to the bathroom all over herself. We changed and fed her and promised to contact Mother Teresa's 'Home for the Dying' asking them to come and get her. Everyday their missionary lives are filled with such intensive love.

Tomek told me that he is always finding a 'new bottom' of poverty in Manila. When we were visiting homeless families living in a box he said to me: "See that boy (their son)? You think he is really poor, yes? He's not... he at least has clothes. See that boy over there, he cannot even afford clothes (often you see naked children running around simply because they do not own any clothes). He is poorer. But do you think he is the poorest? No... look at that boy... he has no clothes and is covered with sores. At least that other boy is healthy..." You can continue the line of thinking... a naked paralyzed boy with sores is poorer than a naked boy with sores, and a naked paralyzed boy with sores who has a mom to care for him is not as poor as one who is alone... it is amazing to continually see the deeper, deeper poverty...

The most shocking place we visited was 'Smokey Mountain' -the nickname of Manila's trash dump. There is always trash and coal burning, which is why the pile of trash has that name. Hundreds of thousands of people live at the dump. Their 'work' is to look through trash to find recycable things. Their houses are built from trash. Their toys are from trash... etc... Most of the following pictures are from my visit to this dump, although a few are from the squatters at the fish port. Since I did not want to take many pictures while visiting people there, Tomek 'snuck' a few (I only knew he took the one with me in the boots, which we had to wear because the water, trash and mud was so deep) and the rest I borrowed from others. Unfortunately you won't get the whole picture, since pictures don't have smells. :)