In 2011 I lived in the Philippines for four months. I stayed in a children’s home in Payatas, which is a slum community on the outskirts of Quezon City. The children’s home was run by a charity called Asian Students Christian Trust (ASCT). I was out there to learn, to work in the home, and to see my friend who had co-founded another charity in the area called Fairplay For All Foundation.

Payatas’ local economy is dominated by the dumpsite that is situated there. Most of the people there survive by scavenging scrap metal from the dumpsite to sell to the merchants that are sporadically dotted around the place. Many of these people scavenge every day throughout their lives, for twelve or more hours a day. They stop doing this when they die, or when they become physically unable, at which point they could die shortly after as there is often nothing else to support them.

Children are often seen scavenging also. Some do so because they need to help support their families, while some don’t have families and simply need to support themselves. Many of these children don’t go to school because they need to work in order to survive. In this environment, it’s not difficult to see why so many adults and children turn to drugs, especially if they find a pot of glue on the dumpsite itself.

Before going out there I had read a few books and internet articles, and had obviously seen those adverts on television showing children crying while a narrator asks to donate some money. These all give some inkling of things but could never really get the point across properly. I had no real, human understanding of any of it, which I soon realised once I was out there.

I had no understanding because – to take the television adverts as an example – I watched them while sitting in a warm house and on a comfortable chair, and I could switch channels or simply glaze over if I wanted to. The adverts themselves meanwhile were sandwiched in between adverts for a new burger that was being sold, or a video game where I could blow up aliens or fight dragons. The message itself could be bang on, but was fatally undermined by that juxtaposition.

Intellectualising about ‘global poverty’ and ‘child labour’ in an abstract way is very different from the understanding you get from, for example, playing with and getting to know even just a handful of the young children who live in those circumstances. What changed for my view of poverty was that, instead of thinking about economic theories and absolute poverty intellectually, I came to consider the ideas by first considering the experience of these individual children that I had gotten to know and then extrapolating from that to consider the hundreds of millions of other people around the world who are in similar circumstances. This was a much more powerful insight.

I couldn’t glaze over or switch channels when I was living there and the situation was everywhere around me. I soon got to know some of the children very well and realised how vibrant and naturally intelligent many of them were, and it created some extremely deep-seated cracks in my perspective of the world. They weren’t stupid; some of them were extremely switched on and, in different circumstances, could have had a lot of opportunities available to them. In practice though, many of them weren’t in school and would never have an opportunity to do anything other than scavenge.

I quickly learned the children’s names and talked to them about all kinds of things, including what they wanted to be when they grew up. One kid wanted to be a police officer; another a social worker; another a teacher. The little girls taught me how to play their little patty-cake games, and we’d forget about everything else around us and enjoy playing them together. With the boys I played basketball (during which they all laughed at my shambolic hoop skills) and football. One child insisted on us playing marbles whenever we had a spare moment; another I taught how to play chess and they wanted to play that all the time.

Some of the kids told me of things that had happened to them in their short lives. One young child had been brought to the home after being rescued from the sex industry. Another had been abandoned by his family and did not know his birthday, his definite age or even his original name – his earliest memories were of him living on the streets and scavenging for food, and he was given a name by the charity when he moved into the home. Another, as a toddler, had been pimped out by his mother so she could feed her drug addiction. On and on it went. As I got to know the kids better and more of these stories came out, I realised that none of their stories were particularly out of the ordinary.

The kids in the home who I got to know best were the lucky ones, as they had been housed by the charity and were being given a chance to go to school, which means it may be at least possible for them to one day break the poverty cycle. There are many street children in Payatas though and thousands more in Quezon City and Manila as a whole, all having little to no chance of improving their circumstances because they need to either work or steal to survive instead of going to school. Estimates suggest that there are tens of millions of street children across the world, with UNICEF once suggesting a possible figure of up to one hundred million.

I found their stories extremely upsetting, and also very shaming. The underlying emotion that dominated much of my time out there was shame. Shame at how I had been born with the privilege of having the option of pissing my life away in a comfortable little bubble, and that I had hitherto wholeheartedly stayed in that bubble as much as possible.

A slow realisation for me was that, despite the obvious differences in their circumstances, these kids weren’t fundamentally any different from the kids in my neighbourhood at home. They wanted to play and have fun, and they laughed and joked a lot. The very young ones in the home loved getting lifted up and flown around. The slightly older kids loved getting chased around the place and laughing at silly jokes. The teenage kids were often cheeky and had concerns that drifted from whether to not they one day would find the love of their life, to whether I had time to help them with their maths homework. These were the kids in the home, of course – the ones who had a reliable source of shelter and food, and could afford think about things other than their basic survival.

Those Poor Little Darlings

I don’t want to paint the people of Payatas and the children in the home as victims, because there is more to them than that. Of course they may have a lot to claim victimhood over, but to give them an all-encompassing ‘victim’ label is harmful because it is insidiously disempowering. There is more to a person than the fact that they have been a victim of something – in this and in all other situations.

In writing this blog I want, in some small way, to encourage understanding. It may not contribute much in the grand scheme of things, and people reading it may only gain an understanding of my own personal perspective. Nevertheless, understanding is what I’m aiming for, rather than pity. Interestingly enough, the only pity I experienced out there was my own self-pity (because the whole experience was like, really hard for me).

Pity, while being well-intentioned, carries the implication of looking down on someone. They are the victim, and you are the observer taking pity on them with a view to rescuing them because they are obviously unable to do anything themselves. It is a common and understandable reaction but is ultimately unhelpful and debilitating. It’s basically a manifestation of the Karpman drama triangle (Picture Summary: Wikipedia article), which is a well-known model used to understand the dynamics of destructive relationships.

A better inclination is towards empathy and genuinely wanting to listen and learn, with a view to possibly helping afterwards from a place of genuine understanding and respect. Something I find inspiring about Fairplay For All is that it is run from Payatas himself – where the staff live and work – and that they don’t begin an initiative before consulting the people in the community and asking them what they want. They don’t decide how to help people from afar on the assumption that because the director has a relevant degree from a top western university he must know better than the people themselves on how to improve their situation.

FFA have actually begun a lovely little blog series called ‘Humans of Payatas‘, which is based on the famous scheme that took place in New York and is aimed at humanising the people in the community by letting them share their stories. The director explains his motivation for it:

“You miss so much by ignoring the poor. We all see the stories of desperation. We all see the pictures of a decimated child wasting in the arms of their mother as a charity asks for $2 a month to feed them. But so rarely do we hear anything from the people in the photographs. And when you don’t reach out to people on a genuine level, i.e. listen to them, you miss so much of their strength, their humour, their resilience, their creativity, their inspiration.”

“Too often we don’t do the simplest of things when trying to understand someone else. Listen. This is true in academia too. I recently read a review of related literature on the Psychology of Poverty. It was well written and interesting, but only two or three of the 40 or so studies had actually interviewed and studied poor people. The rest were simulations in a lab.”

Back in the UK

My first few weeks in the Philippines were characterised by culture shock. It took about four days to fully adapt my sleeping pattern, a couple of weeks to properly get used to the heat and humidity, and around six weeks to feel comfortable with the different social norms involved when conversing with the Filipinos I came to know. I never got used to the mosquitoes in Payatas, and I doubt I ever will.

Culture shock is common and is relatable for the vast majority of people, especially those who have lived in a country with a significantly different culture to their own. Less well-known though is the culture shock which is experienced upon moving back to your own country, sometimes known as ‘reverse culture shock’.

Reverse culture shock is basically the same as its more famous sibling except there’s the added discomfort of knowing that it is your country that you’re having a difficult time adapting to. You’re at home, surrounded by people you know and love, and yet you feel uncomfortable and isolated. It can be very disconcerting, and in practice I was depressed for a good six months after moving back as I struggled to accommodate my experience in the Philippines with my life in the UK in a meaningful and productive way.

The ‘meaningful and productive’ part of it was the tricky bit. By meaningful and productive, I mean in a way which does not involve simply getting angry and resentful at how privileged and ignorant people are, how little they appreciate what they have and how so many choose to let themselves get bothered by such trivial things that it only serves to highlight how much of a privileged little bubble they live in. All of that is probably a natural reaction and it’s one that I struggled with the most, but it’s not particularly helpful in the long run. At least, there needs also to be a constructive way of life involved – not just those feelings. Writing about it certainly helps, and my motivation to write this article is partly to understand my feelings on it all a bit better.

I know a handful of people who have done similar things, and who have experienced similar difficulties when coming back. One friend has told me that she was severely depressed for close to a year, and that her dad came close to a mental breakdown when he returned from visiting her in Kenya. Many people though do eventually figure out a way of getting back on with things. Some, however, don’t and aren’t particularly interested in doing so either. For example Roy, the director of Fairplay For All, dealt with this issue by moving back to the Philippines permanently and co-founding his charity in Payatas.

Nowadays I’m quite happy in the UK, and I think I’ve made it work. I’m working as a debt advisor while training and volunteering as a adult counsellor and a play therapist with children. Aside from my relationships, a large part of my happiness is in that I’m going about my life in such a way that I can look in the mirror and genuinely feel, in my own way and within my limitations, that I am doing my best to contribute as best I can.

There are times when the things I do have an impact on me. After all, there are people in the UK who have been through similar things to those examples I mentioned further up – childhood sexual abuse, neglect, rape, and every other shade of horrible imaginable. The relative privilege in the UK doesn’t mean that there aren’t horrible things that happen; it just makes it easier for people to put their heads in the sand and ignore what they find uncomfortable. The underlying feeling I have in these roles – and this feeling is more powerful than any of the stuff that has been thrown at me so far – is that I’m not running away from the shit that people go through. I’m doing what I can to help.

Privilege

I’d like to explore my perspective on privilege and the importance of checking it. I don’t mean this as a contradiction of other forms of privilege that is often talked about, but rather a broadening of it.

I’ve tried to be careful when writing this section. There’s an important balance between being honest and being considerate of people’s feelings. That said, I don’t think I can write this in a convivial way without watering down my actual perspective, so I’ll just be honest about it. I’ll also do the courtesy of acknowledging explicitly I am talking in broad trends, which involves generalising somewhat. I know that people have their own stuff and I can’t always know people’s reasons for doing what they do.

With that in mind, here is how I see it:

If you have the option of turning away from the horrible shit that exists in this world, then you are privileged. To have such a life, as many people do, that you think it is appropriate to expend genuine emotional and intellectual effort on expressing precisely why your favourite TV series not being as good as it used to be, then you are in an incredibly privileged position. It is a privilege because many millions of people simply don’t have the option of thinking about things like that.

I don’t think this idea gets much airtime, and yet I think it’s fundamentally important: If you have the option of living in a safe little bubble where you need not expose yourself to anything that will take you out of your comfort zone or pose a risk to your ability to maintain your composure, then you are privileged. If you have that option to stay in your escapist bubble, and you indeed do nothing in your life but sit in that bubble, then you need to check your privilege.

Escapism itself isn’t a bad thing as everyone needs to recharge their batteries – my favourite way of killing an hour or so is by playing FIFA or some old, fan-made Doom wads every now and then. Going into some fantasy world has its appropriate place, but I think it is perverse to elevate the various forms of running away into some fundamental aspect of your identity; into a quasi-philosophy of life. This tendency to run away can furthermore wreak havoc on a person’s resilience, as it diminishes any appropriate frame of reference for the problems that they do experience. Note that I perceived no self-pity among the kids in Payatas or in the home.

People actually get worked up over whether the X-Box One is better than the Playstation 4; over whether DC or Marvel, Star Wars or Star Trek, are the better franchises. It’s almost as though these things are important enough to get worked up about. These are often intelligent and compassionate people. Why do they give a shit? My guess is because it helps them fill the underlying vacuum of meaninglessness in their lives.

Alan Moore expresses this in relation to comic book characters, but I think he captures the general point really well:

“To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics.”

I describe this as ‘perverse’ without apology. If people lived in their bubble and openly didn’t give a shit then it probably wouldn’t even bother me so much, but you also often get people hiding in their bubble yet trying to pay lip-service to social justice by posting the occasional indignant message on social media. They’ll post their message, tell everyone how it is, show everyone how much they care and then step back into their bubble of pop culture infantilism and give themselves a pat on the back because they feel like they’ve contributed something. It’s all very flippant, and if you ask me it’s a sign of their need to ‘check their privilege’ if they think it is appropriate.

So easy it is to throw words out while actual positive action tends to be in the real world and involve talking to and building bridges with real people in the actual community; people who are often different from themselves. Real action also is ambiguous, and even with something as personal as counselling you can’t know for certain what impact you are having, whereas it’s easy to get a different impression from quantifiable ‘likes’ and comments online. For all the words spouted, I feel that the idea of living their values is utterly unthinkable for some of those same people who talk so passionately about social progress in the abstract from their safe little bubbles.

Anyone can talk, but I think it is best to look at what people actually do in their lives and what their priorities are in day-to-day practice to see how much they really give a shit about contributing something. Look at their commitments – their personal commitments and their professional ones. Posting things on social media is a not a commitment.

I find the hypocrisy irritating, but if people want to create a chasm between what their values are ‘in theory’ and how they actually live their lives, then fine. It’s ultimately their problem – and I do think it really is their problem, because I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point they would be hit by the conscious realisation that they don’t find much meaning in life. Maybe something will shock them into it, or maybe it’ll be when they are approaching middle age and they’re confronted by the fact that they are going to die one day when they have hardly even started living.

And on that note…

Meaning in Life

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

I never used to think about any of this until I went out to Payatas and had my perspective of the world implode. It forced me to consider, as a matter of urgency, what the fuck I actually exist for. I ended my last post by quoting and discussing Viktor Frankl and by saying that I was going to try and explore my own personal meaning in life in a future post. I didn’t intend for this post to include anything like that, but if you don’t mind indulging me I want to try to give a quick summary as it ties into what I’ve been talking about:

I am in a very privileged position in this world, and that is something that I need to take responsibility for. I do what I can to take responsibility for the privileged position in which I have found myself by committing myself, within the limits of my skill and ability and in the ways that I can, to the effort of helping people. Debt advice, adult counselling and play therapy all tie into this – as does generally wanting to learn more about the world (and myself) by exposing myself to new and different situations, taking time out to enjoy myself in order to look after my own needs, spending time with friends and family, and so on.

I don’t want to come across as too self-righteous, and I want to state categorically that this is my attitude largely because it enables me to live comfortably in my own skin, rather than anything else. This isn’t just a personal thing either – there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that a sustained sense meaning and purpose in life – not to mention happiness – comes not from accumulating material goods, running away from responsibilities or from egotistical self-aggrandisement, but from doing your best, within your limitations, in your own small way, to contribute what you can towards the betterment of the conditions of the world around you. It comes from first taking responsibility for yourself and then pursuing a cause outside of yourself. Even if ‘what you can’ is modest; you can still do that much to contribute.

I’m going to end this post much like my last one because I think in this context Frankl’s words are yet more powerful:

“It does not really matter what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

Meaning and ‘success’, much like happiness, does not come about by aiming directly for it, but as a by-product of taking responsibility for yourself and doing ‘whatever your conscience commands of you and carrying it out to the best of your knowledge’. Consider your existence (and your privilege) and take responsibility for the fact that you are an active agent within the stream of life, not a passive observer of it. Then listen to your conscience and let it guide you.

Again, I’m basically plagiarising Frankl, so let’s just quote him:

“Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success [and happiness] will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”

Footnote:

The charities I worked with were the Asian Students Christian Trust and Fairplay For All Foundation. ASCT ran the children’s home that I stayed at in 2011, while I spent time with Fairplay For All in 2015, who run the first democratic school in the Philippines, among other things. Check out the links for more info:

Asian Students Christian Trust (own website, Youtube)

Fairplay For All Foundation (own website, Facebook page, Youtube page)