A field report from Lapu Lapu City dumpsite in Cebu, Philippines
Phillip Michael Garner
They are like wounded animals abandoned to man-eaters. They are human prey and unless we help them we are either animals quickly running by trying to preserve our own lives or we are predators that exploit their poverty. They are often without record; no birth certificate to confirm their existence. So poor that even a wedding is an impossible expense. Their little hovels display the cruelty of their existence while revealing their humanity at the same time. Some bamboo carefully laid out to decorate a shelf on which a few flowers can be placed in broken pots. They are called scavengers by the locals. The title itself is degrading and implies inferiority. They are not lazy for they work everyday. With a piece of re-bar bent into a hook and sharpened on one end they pull apart trash bags and search for some refuse that they can sell for a few cents to buy some rice. They are the people of the Lapu Lapu City dumpsite in Cebu Philippines.
My students and the interns have learned their names, went to their homes, bandaged their wounds, given them school supplies and worked alongside them digging in the trash. Our interns and immersion team members have endured the heat, the filth, the flies and the stench to be able to work alongside the people at the dumpsite. They have sang songs and taught from the Bible while working alongside the people at the dumpsite.
Our students and interns are learning that Christianity cannot be a regionalized expression limited to the cultural practices and realities of a single area. Christianity by its nature is a global cause. We are to be our brotherıs keeper. We as a ministry are sending some of the children from the dumpsite to school. It is not enough! The cycle of oppression and poverty must be broken. Justice must find a way to exist and overcome the fear and greed that drive us all to self protection while we store up goods and neglect the dying.
When people are treated like garbage they often feel as though they are garbage. Each day their only hope is that they might find some valuable trash as they scavenge through the heaping pile of decomposing human waste.
I am happy to have watched Alison, Kaly, Rachel and others break into tears uncontrollably after they dug through the garbage to help a scavenger. These poor souls are human beings created in the image of God. Each one of them is of inestimable worth. But we sell their help for a gold chain, or a chrome rim, or a plaque to honor ourselves for doing what was our duty in the first place! Damn the prosperity preachers that talk about your best life now! This world is a violent lost place where God is rejected and people behave without faith and only look out for themselves because they are afraid. Jesus said if we will find our lives we must lose them! All great human beings were people that cared about others more than themselves. Such persons like Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoefer, Ghandi, Father Shay Cullen, and hopefully a bunch of young people from G.O.D. international will join this list, a list on which Jesus name is also found.
In the darkness of poverty when human beings are reduced to being nothing more than surplus humanity cast aside like waste, evil proliferates like a greedy man in pursuit of money. Children are raped, women are sold, boys are sold and often the buyers are Caucasian males from the U.S. or Germany or Australia.
Everybody wants to be a hero but nobody wants to pay the price. Heroes are not over paid celebrity singers, actors, or athletes. Heroes, real heroes do not even care if you know their name, they do what they do because they are constrained by love and can do nothing else. You can save a life today, you can help us save a life todaywill you help us help my friends at the Lapu Lapu dumpsite? They cannot wait because they are dying.
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Phillip Michael Garner
Dean and Director
The Institute for G.O.D. International
www.godinternational.org
615-832-2470
