DAY FIVE: Peanut Butter and WHO

Today was a long and exhausting day emotionally. We had to be up really early so we could go the Manila. We left at 6:30 but didn't get to WHO until 9:30 and because of that we missed out meeting with the department of health. WHO was very interesting they are helping the Department of Health implement a program that can be used in emergencies to identify disease outbreak like diarrhea, cholera, leptospirosis through a text messaging system at the local barangay level. 

When we met with the Save the children organization they planned for us to travel to a few of their sites where they had programs going on. So we saw other parts of Manila mainly the ones with lots of poverty. They had one program making peanut butter and selling it. I bought two small jars to bring back with me and it is some of the best peanut butter. Another community was doing urban gardening to supplement their nutrition and that was really interesting. The gentleman working on the program had developed all these interesting ways to use water bottles and other items that might be considered trash to create gardening containers. Some of the ideas he had implemented I had never seen and they made the actual care for the plants minimal. There were a lot of little kids in this area and they were loving looking at all of us. One little girl started laughing so hard when I smiled at her. The little kids were really cute to I taught them how to make their fingers into glasses and we took some pictures together. It was sad to see the area they were living in because they were an informal settlement but the people were definitely trying to improve their situation and there was hope. 

The saddest part was when we went to the cemetery which a lot of people are living at and they were just so impoverished. It was also the trash dump right there so it really reminded me of the situation in Egypt at the trash cities. It seems like its at the start of becoming that a similar situation where the people are living and working in the trash. We actually had some young girls hand their babies to a few of the group and they wanted us to take the babies with us. It was so sad to think that life their is so bad that they were willing to part with their babies. 


Oh.... I forgot to mention that it has rained pretty much all day. I am constantly wet and even my clothes feel damp even if they haven't gotten wet yet...its just so much humidity. Its back to raining here and will probably rain all tomorrow.