Walking around the nearby neighborhoods is both taxing and pretty as described in yesterday’s post.  Whilst busy not twisting your ankle or getting run over by an aggressive driver, its imperative to take time to gaze at the amazing mix of homes to your right and left.  Well, its mostly not the houses that you see…its their entrances.  The villages are private so entry is via security point.  Then further security is added by high walls and big gates, and from street level all you can really see is the gates.  Although tops of some of an eclectic mix of housing styles appears here and there:

Many homes are ambassador residences.  We regularly walk past Morocco, Mexico, Paraguay and Belgium on our 90 minute jaunts.

Mostly what you see though are gates.  And a real mix of them too: old, new, modest, pretentious, or sometimes just weird.  I love this one guarded by magnificent tall bamboo:

This one is just rusty corrugated iron:

While this one is much more posh…

This one is my favourite.  Its a South American Embassy residence (Paraguay I think?) – the name is on the gate, but not visible in the photo.  Sort of spooky don’t you think?  Or it looks like it could be the hacienda of some drug baron.  All that’s missing is an armed guard..

Most houses have a blessing tile from the Virgin Mary next to the entrance and there’s quite a variety of those.  This is my favorite and they have gone a little OTT.  Sorry about the smudgy quality of the shot:

As many of you know, I like to walk and Manila has its challenges when it comes to getting around on foot. The heat for one thing…and my resolve to keep going wanes really quickly when I get too hot. The traffic lights go out frequently, and the traffic early in the morning (when its cooler) is horrible.  Sidewalks aren’t in evidence too much and, when they are, they can be treacherous after rain as the moss turns them into ice rinks.  Despite all these challenges, my friend Melanie and I have been pounding the pavement every Friday for about six weeks now.

Exercising outside is still so much better than the gym, and the residential villages near us have lots of interesting plants to look at.

I never tire of seeing the huge banyan trees, the hanging vines, or plants thriving outside that usually sit next to the central heating in our other homes.

Part two – Gates – to follow shortly…

Here in Manila, not only are we going to heading toward bed after a busy day, just as so many of you are only thinking of getting started, we are also busy in the next day working while you guys are all still snoozing…  So it will come as no surprise that we are also onto the Christmas thing MONTHS ahead.  Yes, Christmas here begins in September.  Of course, for real impact I should have posted about this last month, but life got in the way as usual.  But believe me when I say that for several weeks we have Christmas trees and jingle bells at the local supermarket and all around town.  Lights and trees are up in many houses, and Metro Manila Supermarket have dusted off their red Santa hats and everyone is donning them again, just like last year when we arrived in late December.  So its Santa hats and “deck the halls” from now until mid-January.  I am going to be an anti-Santa, raging beast!

“Quiel” or typhoon number two in less than a week is just dying down here in Manila.  It was just a bit wet and windy.  However, the damage is pretty bad in other areas of the country, especially those already devastated by “Pedring” earlier this week.

Here in the Fort, the damage was limited to a few trees and fallen signs, which were quickly cleaned away and swept up:

But elsewhere the damage was a lot worse.  Often those with the worse living conditions get hit the hardest and Pedring took its toll on the residents of Ulingan, in Tondo, a dump site which doubles as a residence area for the city’s poorest of the poor.

Project Pearls is one of the charities that helps bring hope, food, and medical care to the people of Ulingan, and on Saturday morning — just before Quiel started — Latham and I headed with friends and food/blanket donations down to the site.

We watched (and helped a little) as food was handed out to the kids, and took a short tour of the makeshift charcoal factories that provide a small living for some of the families.

I was somewhat prepared to see the extreme poverty and living conditions.  I knew the kids pick through the garbage mountains, looking for items that can be repurposed or sold.  I knew that the homes are built with anything people could lay their hands on, and a lot of those homes blew away in the last storm.  (Many people had been temporarily located to shelter housing while they waited to be able to rebuild their homes.  With the wait for things to dry out and more tyhoon damage on the way this was obviously going to take a while.)  What I wasn’t prepared for the smells, smoke, crowds and mud that was everywhere.  Its a dump and smelt like one.  The smoke from the charcoal fires was noxious, and everywhere.  It was so bad a times my eyes and throat stung for hours afterwards.  (Two showers and two shampoos later, Latham could still smell it in his hair.)  The mud from the rains must have greatly improved in just a few days, but bikes and carts and people had a hard time still just getting down the streets.

The site is right on the sea, they must have been chest deep in flooding during the storm.  There was no shelter anywhere.  Wherever did they go to stay safe?

The kids were amazing though.  And there were a lot of them.  All ages from tiny up to teen.  All friendly, lively and eager to get to know you!  These two chased each other all morning and were the stars of the day:

Many thanks to Loraine and Sandra for taking me.  It was hard to go there and look around on so many different levels. What it must be to have rich foreigners walking through your poverty stricken life looking on your destitution and handing your kids food.  I really felt for them.  Its nothing for most of us to donate the occasional bag of rice and it goes a long way to helping feed everyone for a few more days.  The Project Pearls organization is a California-based registered charity. Financial donations are gratefully accepted, however small, and the money goes directly to the distributors here.  We saw the trucks of food and clothing arrive and go straight to the kids.  If you would like to donate, please visit their donation page.  Thank you.

I know I will go back to help in some way, if just to take them more rice.  With a little girl holding her hand, Sandra summed it up really well.  “I mostly just hold their hand.  It doesn’t seem like much, but I think for a lot of these kids, its the only attention that they get.  Sometimes I feel our visit is the highlight of their week.”