Crossing Allenby Bridge

by Michael Looft

  I was home a month and had just signed the paperwork on the loan to Zorigoo’s MFI. I was still a bit skeptical of how people were going to be able to pay back their loans, and it was half a million dollars, more than I planned to give. I still had a good chunk of equity at the bank, which I would receive in a lump sum once Don sold off the bank in the fall, so I wasn’t too worried. The next day I received an email from Sarah. With the end of the long winter and the air quality in UB improving by the day, it seems folks in the ger district were not setting their sights on buying products they wouldn’t use much for the next six months. Sarah had been in touch with an organization down in Manila willing to hire both her and Mark. They planned to head out there at the end of June.

  I took pleasure in her invitation to come visit once they got settled. The first thoughts I had were around the scuba diving given all the islands down there. Then I considered Mark. Her postscript mentioned how much he appreciated the books I brought and had devoured them all. “Maybe you can bring more, and a few fun ones for me?” she wrote, adding a little smiley face at the end with a short list of requests. He snagged a winner in Sarah and I hoped he wouldn’t blow it. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would, though. That was more my territory, where I was kept wondering if Elena would be bored with my loafing around. I was eager to get back out of the country and to see both Sarah and Mark again.

  CHAPTER 2 | manila

  I flew to Manila in late July with another bag full of books and the appropriate clothes this time. After UB, I assumed I could handle any third-world city. That was a mistake. The taxi ride from the airport to my hotel took over three hours. I had spent a week in New Orleans once, dealing with oppressive humidity. Manila was worse, far worse. My driver shrugged when I asked about air conditioning, and I collapsed in the back seat overcome with sweat, exhaustion, and nauseating fumes. A warped-humor uncle once told me that the one phrase a traveler needs to know in the language of a foreign land is, “how do I get back to the airport?” I laughed, shaking my head at the memory and wishing I knew enough Tagalog to get him to turn around. Where was Charon taking me? Amidst the slow-moving honking and violent poverty, I felt I’d entered the fringes of hell. I booked the Shangri-La hotel in Makati because I wasn’t taking any chances this time, and the online reviews promised that it lived up to its namesake. As we pulled into the circle with its ostentatious portico and smartly-dressed porters running about, I knew I would find comfort within its walls to help me adjust to a land that already drew unease in me.

  Two days later, I emerged from a sleep cocoon to take on Manila. This time Mark knew when I was arriving, and Sarah had arranged a dinner with her boss for the evening. She asked me to come a few hours ahead of time to the Center, as she called it. So, I made sure the hotel fixed me up with an air-conditioned taxi so that I could at least arrive without sweat rings under my arms. On the ride over, the sluggish movements of people trudging through the afternoon heat made me realize why the global South had fallen far behind northern industrial societies. How can anyone consider work while buried underneath such energy-sapping wet heat? I spent a summer swinging a hammer on a construction site in my teens. The Maryland humidity all but killed me, and it didn’t even come close to Manila.

  Within a few blocks, the taxi moved from the cleanest part of town to trash-littered streets displaying visible signs of residential decay. Children tapped my window at stop lights, holding out their hands for some form of compassion, just a few pesos. While I felt my heart twinge a bit, I dared not roll down the window and let the heat disrupt the cool air in the cab. Besides, I wasn’t about to create a mob scene by tossing money out the window. We turned down a narrow street filled with dirt and broken asphalt. The rainy season in full tilt, the taxi rumbled through a sudden downpour that seemed to get worse the further we rolled along. Groups of people peered out at me beneath plastic corrugated roofing abound with leaks. I noticed a family of five huddled on a small mound of dirt under a narrow overhang, skinny little faces buried in their mother’s arms while the squatting father smoked a cigarette and gazed off into the distance. As we approached the end of the lane, we passed through a chain-link fence opening to a large gravel area surrounded by freshly painted buildings that seemed out of place for the rest of the scene. My driver tapped the horn, and I saw Mark’s head pop up from behind a bush. He caught my eye and a broad smile spread over him. As soon as the taxi stopped, he rushed out with an umbrella to escort me to the safety of the building. The raindrops were so thick I saw a bird plunge to the ground and fumble helplessly in a thick gravel pool. Mark’s umbrella also had a hole in it and one arm bent, leaving both of us drenched after the eight steps back to the building. The storm had exposed every weak spot in both man and nature.

  “Welcome to the Philippines!” Mark shouted over the thundering sound of pounding raindrops on corrugated metal roofing. He looked thinner than I remembered, with a glowing tan.

  “When are you going to listen to me and go to Fiji?” I jested, giving him a quick hug and knocking him in the ribs. He merely laughed and as he initiated a subtle interrogation of my trip so far, our conversation was hijacked by a loud screech.

  “Harry!” Sarah came running from the back of the building and tackled me. For a diminutive thing she could hug like a grizzly bear. At once it seemed both overdone and just what I needed, and I enveloped her in my arms. She collapsed inside me and then sprung back to look at me, an arm sliding behind Mark’s back. Had Mark actually found himself a genuine angel that loved others without condition? Time would tell.

  We drank bottled waters during the tour of the Center, an extensive complex of separate units providing care for the poor. A Christian organization, the Center referred to these units as ministries and those who ran them as servants. As we skirted around the buildings to avoid the rain, which had started to abate, I noticed several large crosses on the sides of the buildings. A lapsed Catholic with a deep suspicion of religious influences, I nodded at each reference with concealed disdain. The Center ran a multitude of ministries out of the complex, including one distributing healthcare and supplies and another that picked starving people up off the street and gave them food and shelter in exchange for helping around the place. At one point, I noticed an enormous cylinder constructed out of gleaming metal, resting on a four-foot platform. Mark pointed at my bottle of water and talked about the ministry team devoted to providing purified water to the area residents. As he described it, the Center lay in the heart of one of the poorest sections of Manila. I glanced at my bottle, wondering where the water was being tapped and checking for any impurities floating around.

  “Don’t worry, Harry, it’s clean,” Mark cackled, and he gave me a light slap on the back.

  We were followed by another man, a local they introduced as Edwin. He stood a foot shorter than me and wore glasses that magnified brilliant eyes charged with life. He had on a pressed light blue uniform, along with the dozens of other people I saw wandering about the large complex. Everyone seemed to move about with purpose, drawing a sharp contrast to the aimless wandering I’d seen outside the gates. A few of the others wore yellow shirts, and I asked Edwin about that.

  “Sir, they are part of our pavement dweller ministry.” He spoke in a very slow and deliberate manner. With his slight sing-song accent I wondered if English were his mother tongue. “As Mark explained earlier, in our ministry we help families transition from living in the streets to becoming productive members of society. Many of them are living and working at the retreat center that we are currently constructing outside of Manila. Some still work here to help out. Mostly maintenance and keeping the grounds tidy. If you have the time, you should come visit the retreat center.”

  “I would like that. By the way, how do you fund all these ministries?”

  “Over there.” He smiled and pointed to a small two-story building. “That is our microfinance ministry. Perhaps you would like to meet with our team, sir?”

 
We spent the next hour seated in the office of the microfinance ministry, which turned out to be a local branch serving the surrounding neighborhood. In fact, the Center itself did not house the headquarters of the parent organization, which I was told was in a small building located in a more industrial neighborhood of Manila not far from my hotel. The Branch Servants, as they were called, worked just like loan officers and branch staff I’d encountered in Mongolia, but they had an additional person on staff identified as the Branch Pastor. He was a burly man in his fifties with a kind face. He was tasked with making sure everyone followed the path of Christ, whatever that entailed. He also met with borrowers having trouble paying back their loans, sitting with them and praying that the money would come from God. Upon hearing this I nearly fell over in my chair, wondering if I was lost in a dream or had stumbled into a cult. From where I sat I could see the front gate through the window. It was still wide open. I looked at Mark, who raised his eyebrows and smiled as though I just had to roll with it. Welcome to the Philippines.

  As Edwin explained in the spotless minivan that drove the four of us to dinner, the microfinance ministry provided the locomotive engine that enabled the boxcars of the other services they offered. Indeed, they charged high interest rates on their loans, sometimes carrying an annual percentage rate of sixty percent. This not only compared to other organizations offering microfinance loans in Manila, but their clients also received access to training programs and other transformative services to help them rise out of poverty, including Bible study. The rates were a bit lower in Mongolia, although I had already gotten over my initial shock of the high prices for doing these small loans. Regular banks wouldn’t even serve these people and the prices were nowhere near what loan sharks were offering. This is because serving people at the base of the economic pyramid is expensive. It required a shift in mindset altogether, particularly once I looked at how high revenues on loan interest collected were wiped out by all the costs associated with those loans. I suppose paying a fleet of loan officers traveling around to disburse and collect small amounts of money adds up.

  The minivan dropped us in the old section of Manila where cobblestoned streets and colonial architecture adorned the area. The sole reminders of the four centuries of Spanish rule were this tiny neighborhood and other ubiquitous hints found in last names, food, and facial features on most of the people I saw. Edwin led us into a quaint restaurant near a massive cathedral displaying architecture one might find in Europe. I reveled in the possibility of eating some local food that hadn’t been deep fried first. We were seated around a large round wooden table, and within minutes a tiny well-dressed middle-aged woman strode in flanked by a small entourage. She had the same shining light in her eyes as Edwin, and at first, I wondered if they might be related. She beamed at me, thrusting out her hand and introducing herself as Ms. Luisa. She had a mixture of powerful energy and playfulness, wielding both by grabbing my arm and forcing me to sit next to her in a brilliant display of gender reversal. I just rolled with it, delighted at her charming bravado.

  “Your first time to the Philippines, Mr. Harry?”

  “Yep.”

  “And how do you like our little country with its seven thousand islands?”

  “I’ve only been to one of them, and thanks to jet lag I’ve not seen much of it yet. I was quite impressed with the Center. Edwin is a wonderful guide.”

  “Yes, he is–and we like your friends Mark and Sarah. They are a big help to us.” She settled in and hesitated a moment while the waiter took drink orders from everyone, and then hurled a question at me, “Tell me, who is your father?”

  “My father?” I was flabbergasted. No one had asked about my father in years, and at my age it was likely due to the strong possibility of blundering into a conversation about his death. I later learned that in this part of the world people often asked others about their ancestors, with an unconscious desire to learn where they fit into social hierarchies. “My father was a fisherman. He is very old now.”

  “Do you see him often?”

  “Oh, every now and again I do.”

  “I see.” She held me in her penetrating gaze for a moment, wondering what to make of me. Then she broke it with a firm smile and maternal pat on my arm. “Well, no doubt the other father is always with you.”

  I wish I could say we all navigated the rest of dinner without incident, but it wouldn’t be true. I ordered a beer. Everyone else drank water or soda. Someone asked me what church I went to. I said I didn’t. Living in a land of secularism, I hadn’t eaten with devout Christians in decades, or ever. I took a bite of my adobo just before Ms. Luisa called for grace, feeling a wave of foolishness wash over me. Despite trying so hard to be the quiet American, I instead kept revealing the ugly one. I caught Mark giving me a downward smile with a hint of remorse for not giving me a heads up on protocol first. Of course, how was he to prepare me for a day with hard-core Christians? It was as if I kept stepping in shit and washing it off again, but at each turn I felt a stab of terror followed by a gentle easing of my heart. The Center people were a forgiving sort, and I could sense that a few of them found my foibles endearing, especially Ms. Luisa. In fact, the more I messed up the more she warmed up to me.

  “Let me tell you a story, Mr. Harry,” she uttered after taking her last bite and tapping her mouth with the cloth napkin. “I studied for my master’s degree in your country. In Iowa. It was cold, but I so loved it there. In fact, I wanted to stay, but an ill family member drew me back to the Philippines. It was my first time back in three years, and between you and me I was a little angry to have to come back. I was also shocked by the poverty. I had seen so much of it growing up, but being in your country and coming back brought out the contrasts. I didn’t see any poverty in Iowa, yet I came home to beggars in the street. Entire families living in a box in an alleyway. I wanted to help them, all of them, but this was the problem: how? You know that beer you are drinking (having already crossed the Rubicon, I had ordered two more during dinner)? It is the same beer maker that laid off five thousand workers, many of whom had worked at the factory for countless years. They could not find jobs. It was painful. I saw this pain and I internalized it–and in that pain, I struck upon an idea.”

  “And what was that?” By this point, I had fallen under the spell of her mellifluous voice that thumped with passion.

  “I would help them see who they were in God’s eyes, not in the eyes of someone else. No, I would help them appreciate their worth as human beings created in His image, and realize that this–their intrinsic value–was not in any way contingent on their work in some factory. So, with an initial grant I created the Center to train people to start their own businesses and to live with dignity built upon self-reliance.”

  “Sounds like the American dream.”

  “Perhaps we did learn a thing or two from your country’s hundred years out here. Like everything else, we put our own Filipino stamp on what we do. Most of us have not lost God and our connection to Jesus Christ. After all, He is the one who creates through each of us.”

  Back home I would have shuddered at such religious talk, but in her I sensed a strong belief in a divine hand guiding the work she was doing, and not some spiritual sales pitch. So, what if all these people tricked themselves into believing that something higher was guiding their path rather than human will and determination? Maybe they did have some help from above, who knows for sure. I thought of Elena and how much she would have enjoyed this strong woman and her story. Although Elena’s blend of Hindu-Christianity, if one could even call it that, would not fly with this group. God, I missed her. Mark and Sarah seemed to be enjoying themselves, and they seemed just as spellbound by Ms. Luisa and her unabashed claim that the answer to poverty rests in Jesus. She picked up on my skepticism–maybe it was the way I scratched my cheek–and responded with an invitation to visit the retreat center they were building a few hours south of Manila to “see how the hand of God was shaping their ministry,”
as she put it. How could I turn that down?

  CHAPTER 3 | pavement dwellers

  Edwin, Sarah and Mark picked me up at my hotel two days later in a minivan marked with the Center’s logo–the word Center with the “T” fashioned into a crucifix. We left at the crack of dawn to avoid the morning commute traffic. I was eager to get out of Manila as I’d spent the previous day wandering around what seemed like all of it, exploring as much as I could. Something both fascinated and repulsed me by the culture. The people expressed a warmth that stretched far beyond what I’d experienced outside America–which as a country could not hold a candle to others in terms of hospitality. Of course, as a swaggering American I represented wealth and my walking path became strewn with people creating jobs on the spot. Whether it was opening doors for me everywhere or trying to help me find my direction, I felt like both a mark and the ultimate guest.

  One thing that got under my skin and I fought hard to let go of was the way everyone made direct attempts to engage my attention by referring to me as “sir” in an inquisitive tone that smacked of passive aggression. While beginning as an endearing annoyance that I shrugged off with a smile, it soon devolved into a constant verbal bombardment driving me to the edge of madness. Was I that hypersensitive, or worse–ungrateful? At the end of the day I collapsed onto my bed in a heap of mental and physical exhaustion.

  Once outside Manila, the urban setting slipped away as we blazed along two-lane highways cutting through lush jungle. For two hours Edwin explained more about the conference center and other projects under the Center’s poverty alleviation umbrella. As he put it, God was working miracles through each of them. When we reached the grounds of the conference center, Edwin pointed to several construction workers wearing yellow shirts, noting that they were former pavement dwellers. A row of small huts lined the steep valley behind an enormous partially constructed white amphitheater that resembled a small open stadium. The men in the yellow shirts lived in those huts with their families during the construction phase. I could count over a hundred people scattered over the property that covered at least thirty acres atop a hillside stripped bare of most of its vegetation. In fact, I’ll never forget the wave of thick red dust that swept over us when we stepped out of the minivan.