Why I wrote a story about slums in Manila

This was what I wrote:

When I took my trip to the Philippines, the first thing that struck me was the rigid dichotomy between the rich and the poor—just outside my hotel window in Makati, the country’s Central Business District, the poor and homeless linger opposite Starbucks and beside a strip club.

“People who were there but not there. People who spoke but were not heard, people who existed but were not seen. Invisible men are what Filipinos are in the heart of this country,” wrote Filipino writer Conrado De Quiros about the poor in his book, Tongues On Fire.

It was then I knew that I wanted to write a story about poverty but it was too difficult to explore this dichotomy with the little time I had.

Incidentally, my helper, has a sister who worked in Singapore as a maid. I seized this opportunity to better understand the Filipino people to find out what are some of their aspirations, their fears, and their motivations. And why are they still trapped in the quandary of poverty? Where is home, when you have spent years working overseas? Where is home, when you live your life moving from street to bridge?

It was difficult to find these answers even as I stayed in slums for three days. Often, I found that these answers sometimes lurk in the subtlest things: a twitch of an eye when memories about family are recalled; that pharmacies sell syringes but not condoms; how drink and fun takes precedence over food; the way youth frequently describe their peers as chismos; the helplessness people feel as their homes are infested by the equally desperate, are demolished by the government, are razed to the ground by electrical fires and, in one instance, buried under an avalanche of sodden, burning garbage.
Poverty is not as simple as it seems. And I wanted people to know this.

Writing this story was nearly as difficult. With only three days to work, I had to quickly gain the trust of the Filipinos.

“Are you Canadian? Australian?” they would inevitably ask.

“No, American.” “Oh.”

It is a reply that is short but eloquent. Many Filipinos I met perceived Americans to be brash, proud, and arrogant.

I managed to speak to them only after much listening, patience, and sensitivity. It was fortunate that the few locals who trusted me acted as interpreters when they needed to and took care in introducing me to their friends and neighbors.

Still, there was a harrowing experience when loitering strangers repeatedly uncocked and cocked a rifle, which I cannot determine whether it is real, outside the house of a person I was interviewing. I was led out through a different route in the end.

About a year after I returned from the Philippines, Mr Robin Yee, the lecturer who read online about the International Committee of the Red Cross’ (ICRC) Young Reporter Competition and urged me to participate.

Despite being hesitant in the beginning, I took part in the competition because I wanted people to know about what I had seen and heard in the Philippines. Also more persuasive was the opportunity to continue telling stories about people, as ICRC will fly five winners to an area of armed conflict—Georgia, Lebanon, Liberia, Senegal, or the Philippines—on a reportage trip.

By winning this competition, I will travel to Georgia, where simmering tensions boiled over in the 2008 South Ossetia War, in February next year. I expect that the stories I'll encounter this time will be more challenging as the problems that the Georgians face are more hidden, and hence more difficult to illustrate, than problems like poverty; the problems of displacement and missing family members, for instance.

I intend to work or volunteer, even if it is for a stint, in the frontline of a humanitarian organisation. This way, I will be able to truly empathise and witness the tales I have heard of blood shed and lives torn asunder.

Otherwise my stories will only be, as George Orwell has so clearly expressed in his essay Inside The Whale, “written by a person to whom murder 
is at most a word.”