A Sense of Place

I went to Google Earth and found the very bridge where the Alquino family of Manila lives.

Diving around the planet on Google Earth is always a bit of a strange experience. Seeing places where you used to live, seeing places where you'd like to live, all from a bird's-eye view, makes the world seem like a very, very small place.

Going back to the bridge via Google Earth was rather strange in that, when we actually drove over the bridge--right there in Manila--it was so easy to forget, or never realize--that we were driving over an entire community and a family with a name. It was so easy for this unknown, unseen fragment of the one billion to just be completely anonymous.

Now, looking at the same bridge from the anonymity of a computer screen from thousands of miles away simply accentuates that "unseen" quality of this family.

Who would guess that beneath that bridge, on the Bay of Manila, an entire community is struggling to survive?

The Power of Media

“Slumdog Millionarie” is sweeping up awards and nominations around the world as people fall in love with the scrappy kid who wins it big in India’s version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”
Danny Boyle and his crew did an excellent job of capturing life in the slums of Mumbai. The grittiness of life there, and the desperation of slum dwellers is evident in many of the scenes in the movie.
Today, the news talks of some of the child actors from the movie who actually live in the slums. Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who plays the young Salim, elder brother of the film's central character Jamal, recently had his slum neighborhood razed and is now hoping for an actual house.
His father, Mohammed Ismail Mohammed Usman, who sells cardboard to eke out a living, said that since the movie came out, "The only thing that happened was that I became well-known because of my son. That's it. Nothing else changed. My kid became a hero and I'm living like a zero. This is my shack," he said.
The power of a film like “Slumdog Millionarie” is the power to get public attention focused on a subject like abject poverty. These people were acting, yes, but when the lights went off for the final time and the camera crew left, not much changed and the world is taking notice … at least of the few who appeared in the movie.
I really don’t think our documentary is going to sweep the world in quite the same way this movie did (but I can always hope). But our movie, like this one, will do its bit to help focus public attention on a subject that really needs the public’s attention. Mohammed, mentioned above, gathers up cardboard in hopes of getting enough money to live on. The Alquino family in Manila does that too. So do several families I shot in various parts of Nicaragua. As do people all over the world and yet the vast majority of these people will never be featured in a theatrical release or a documentary film. That doesn’t make them any less important. It just makes them less known.
Meanwhile, this very popular movie will eventually come out on DVD, then move to the “old” section of the neighborhood movie store. Eventually our documentary will come out, perhaps make a splash then also fade from the scene.
But the poverty won’t fade away, and if projections are correct, the one billion slum dwellers will grow to two billion and maybe more.
The power of media is to focus that spotlight. But that’s where it ends. To actually do something about it takes people who are committed to seeing real change.

It’s All About Improv

They say filmmaking is all about improvising when needed. Situations come up and there’s no rule book to tell you what to do. You have to figure it out.
We wanted a shot that goes from the traffic on the top of the bridge, straight down to the ramshackle dwellings beneath the bridge.
We didn’t have a crane or a jib … or a helicopter, but we did have access to bamboo.
We asked a local under the bridge for a little help. He provided us with a rusty machete, a hammer of sorts, and two rusty nails that we straightened out. We used a long piece of bamboo laying near the canal and hacked off the end to make it flat. We pounded the two rusty nails in about three inches from the base of the pole. Then we put one of our cameras upside down on the end of the pole and used gaffer’s tape to secure it tightly to the pole, using the nails to wrap the tape around (hard to explain, but it worked. The camera was very secure.)
Then we had a dugout go in the canal beneath the bridge while we took our pole and camera up top. Making sure we watched for traffic, we lowered the camera—upside down—(we’ll fix it in post) near the water and slowly pulled the long pole and camera up topside. After about 10 tries, we felt we had a few good takes.
Watch for that shot in the final documentary. And do me a favor: Appreciate the sweat and improv that went into it!

"Poorism"

In case you’ve never heard of it, “poorism” is a term used to describe what some tour companies and individuals are now doing: offering tours to foreign visitors of the poorest slums in the city.

Mumbai, for example, has tours through the slums. Visitors come from around the world to gawk at the malnourished children and see the cardboard and iron-sheet structures that they call home. Some think this is a good form of responsible tourism as it exposes the more affluent to the reality of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Others call it exploitation.

One person in India took this accusation of exploitation one step farther by saying,

"If you were living in Dharavi, in that slum, would you like a foreign tourist coming and walking all over you?" he sputtered. "This kind of slum tourism, it is a clear invasion of somebody's privacy....You are treating humans like animals."

A tourism official called the tour operators "parasites [who] need to be investigated and put behind bars," and a state lawmaker has threatened to shut them down.

Those are the thoughts I had in mind as all 10 of our students here in Manila accompanied our team of three into the garbage dump and slum in Cavite. We brought them in so they could experience first-hand what their teammates were filming, and to get a taste of what life is like in such a place.

Was this irresponsible “poorism”?

I sure hope not.

Did it feel weird to go in with 11 foreigners while dozens of Filipinos of all ages were scrambling … again… in the muck and garbage to accrue the approximately $1 or $2 that most of them get by on a day? You bet it did. Ask any one of those students and they’ll tell you of feeling out of place, perhaps a bit exploitive.

At the same time, ask any one of those students if they have different thoughts now of what a slum is, of the reality of its awfulness, of the horrid, filthy conditions these people live in, and you might wonder if they’ll ever stop talking. These folks have now experienced firsthand what this stuff is all about.

I think there was a cost for us as Westerners to gain this empathy and understanding. The cost was some of the dignity of the people living in that slum. They knew what was going on. They knew rich people were coming to look at poor people. That’s a definite cost.

Was it worth it?

Time will tell. These students are on their way to becoming leaders in many different arenas of life. This experience won’t leave them. Perhaps they won’t leave the experience. Perhaps one, or two, or all of them, will use their considerable gifts and talents in the years to come to make a difference.

In my mind, that’s different than “poorism.” That’s tourism with a purpose.

Under the Bridge

Towards the southern end of Manila, on the Bay, lies Las Piñas City. There is a series of short bridges you must drive over to get there. And there must be a thousand cars and trucks and jeepneys and buses every hour that rumble across one of those nondescript bridges over just one more canal in this archipelago nation.
But this bridge is more than just a bridge. Underneath it is an entire community. Just below the rumble of traffic is a group of people eking out a living in the nearby Las Piñas dump.
For me, the “one billion” slum dwellers of our world now have a face, thanks to that bridge community. In fact, faces. An entire family. Spending time this week with this family is helping me move past the statistic and into the realization that each and every digit in that “one billion” has hopes and aspirations, dreams and wishes. I heard them today in our interview with the Alquino family beneath the bridge.
We (Piper Kucera, Peter Hessels and I) first met Jose Alquino Jr. and his wife, Elvie, in the dump in Santa Cruz, a small town in the Pulon Lupa Barangay in Las Piñas City. They and three of their six children were huddled down in garbage. Literally. Trucks from the city come in, disgorge their fetid contents and the residents of the dump swarm over it with short, curved metal hooks to help them get at the recyclables as quickly as they can. The Alquino’s 12-year-old son, Arnel, is the best at this as he’s small and quick. Jose and Elvie, with Jovelyn, their 15-year-old daughter, then sort through the garbage looking for plastic, aluminum, tin and best of all, copper. They, and dozens of other people from this community, spend their days sifting through other people’s garbage, trying to make a living.
Jose says on a good day, the family can make about 200 pesos. At an exchange rate today of about 47 pesos for one dollar, that’s about $4.25 a day. Jovelyn is the only one of the six children in school because they can’t afford to send any more.
Elvie also sells fish in a market further north. She gets up at 3 a.m. to buy the fish near the sea where they live, then travels by bus and jeepney to a different market to sell.
These are hard working people. Uneducated, but desperate to see their children do better than themselves. We interviewed them and asked questions about their lives. They were open and honest and cheerful … mostly. Jovelyn cried—though she tried desperately not to—as she told us about going to school hungry. Elvie cried—before quickly bouncing back to her more exuberant self—as she talked about having one meal a day, usually. She said she wants her children to have a better life than she does, but it’s so hard.
Meanwhile, the traffic continues to pound the pavement just a few feet above our heads, and the KLM jets continue to roar overhead because this slum is directly under the flight path for the Manila International Airport.
We left at the end of the day to drive back into the center of Manila. As we left the slum and maneuvered our way back to the main roads, we finally got onto the highway and went North. As we did, we rumbled over a bridge. And I looked back and realized we had just rolled over—literally—Jose and Elvie’s bedroom.
And I almost didn’t notice.

An Analogy ... of Sorts

A group of us were discussing the incredible movement of people from rural areas to urban areas in Mexico. Friends who live in Mexico City and in Tijuana told us recently that up to 1,000 people move to those two cities each day.
I live in a town of 6,000 people. Imagine if 1,000 people moved to my town each day. In one week, we would double our town. Add a few more weeks and our town would be quadrupled.
Here's what would happen:
Our supply of clean, safe drinking water could not keep up with that kind of influx.
Our sewage system could't beginto cope with that influx.
We don't have near enough homes for all those people so they would start doubling up, living in any abandoned buildings they could find, and when the growth continued, they would start squatting on farmer's land near the town so they wouldn't be too far from any potential jobs.
In short order, we would have the beginnings of a slum in the rural heartland of N'W Iowa.
It's a simple analogy, but extrapolate that to what's happening in Manila, Kinshasha, Bucharest, Mumbai and so many other places. When you look at it this way, it becomes understandable why so many places have informal housing, lack of sanitation and security, just lack of planning. How does one plan effectively for an influx of 1,000 people a day?
There's more to it than this little story illustrates, but it's a start on the road to understanding.

Getting to Manila

In just over a week, 10 amazing students from Dordt College will accompany me on a real adventure into what is a daily reality for hundreds of millions of people around the world: Grinding Poverty.
We will spend our New Year's Eve somewhere over the International Date Line and may find ourselves ringing in the new year a few times while flying high above the clouds. We will land in Manila late at night and after clearing customs with all our gear, wearily crawl into bed ... somewhere. The next day, our work begins.
A family in one of the slums--still nameless to us (slum and family) has agreed to let us be part of their lives for many days. A small crew will accompany them along their daily path as they work, eat, socialize and survive. We will film their home, what they eat, where they go, how they wash their clothes, who they hang out with, what they talk about ... and we will get to know them. When we take our leave after many days, this one family from millions in the greater Metro Manila slums, will be no longer be strangers, but friends. They will still be part of the "one billion" who live in slums, but perhaps, with exposure in a documentary of the type we are making, the world--or at least those who care to watch--will see that this nebulous "one billion" isn't so different after all. They're just people. A lot like us, with kids and grandkids, who want enough to eat, and meaningful work, and security for kids and grandchildren.
Well, we hope those are the things we'll be uncovering in just over a week. The thing with documentary films is you can't script them. A producer has ideas, lots of idea and visions about how the film will go. Then reality shows up and the story can go a whole different direction. And that's what makes producing a documentary film such a thrilling adventure. It's unpredictable, always unfolding, revealing itself each and every moment. And when those golden, serendipitious moments arrive, you hope your cameras are rolling and you're alert enough to recognize the gold for what it is.
If you miss the moment, you tell yourself it wasn't so good, there will be more, not a big deal. But if you capture the moment, and capture it well, you revel in it, you dream about what you'll do with it in post and you congratulate yourself for being so good at what you do.
That's the nature of documentary film making.

Not all the students are going into the slums. While we're in Manila, we are also doing some pro bono work. Some fine organizations are doing some fine work among the poor and we can help them with their PR and promo needs. Two teams of camera-crew-students-writers-photographers will spend their days telling those stories and using all that raw material next semester in an advanced editing class. There they will craft the footage into usable stories that we will send back to Manila for use there.

Meanwhile, the documentary footage will keep growing as we do more shoots and interviews in different parts of the world. With each shot taken, the story will reveal itself more and more until finally, it will all be there and then we will wrap up post production and we will be ready to show our work.

But first we need to get to Manila.