Sch Adrian Danker, SJ spent 5 days living with the urban poor in Navotas, Philippines in October. Navotas, the former dump site, of Metro Manila is today home to about 2,000 poor Filipino families. He is presently studying Philosophy in the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University. Here, he reflects on his exposure with the poor as a time “to be in real-life contexts where the poor live and work, and to better understand our Jesuit commitment to promote faith and justice, especially, amongst and for the poor.”

Humbling, grace-filled and affirming are words that come to my mind as I reflect on my time in Navotas.

I stayed with a very, very poor family. The father is an itinerant fish vendor, who often has no fish to sell because of the high cost of buying fish from the wholesalers. There is then little income; they buy what they can afford as and when they need it. Three of their nine children are working; the rest are employed. A daughter works in Dubai in the entertainment industry. The 11 grandchildren fill the house; their laughter and good cheer fill the otherwise depressing atmosphere. All around their makeshift home, patched together with wood from discarded crate boxes are the slums, squalor, rubbish, polluted water and unhygienic conditions, lots of flies and an awful stench.

Theirs is a one-room house; the one space is as much their kitchen and dining area as it is their bedroom and the children’s playground. Everyone shares the same food, the same floor for sleeping and watching television. The bathroom is rather primitive: a hole that opens to the sea below. You peer through it and decaying refuse and the putrefying stench of decay and body waste greets you. What a way to wake up! There is no running water. Often, there’s never enough water to bathe with. Meals were simple and repetitive — fried fish and veggies. Surprisingly, I felt at home, even when I joined them for a beer and some karaoke singing, which I’d never do (me sing?!).

I found it painful and disturbing seeing and experiencing their poverty, their hardship and pain, and worse of all, their frustration at the limited, if non-existent, opportunities to live a better life. There seems to be so little hope for them to climb out of the slums and poverty they are in. So much is stacked against them doing better, let alone climbing out of their predicament: an inefficient and ineffective government, a local Church that does not seem to have the muscle and manpower to help, the rich who turn their back on their fellow Filipinos. It broke my heart hearing their stories and seeing their faces.

Yet, I received their love, generosity and happiness; these they shared so selflessly. Finding God in all things. I found him here among these people, not only poor and suffering but marginalized and abandoned. I found God too in simple things mostly, like holding a child, laughing with them, sharing their simple food, sitting with them to watch Filipino TV and watching the breathtaking sunsets over Manila Bay — for a while all the grime and gloom of the place vanishes and this is but paradise for a little while. How beautiful, peaceful and strangely, rich!

My time in Navotas taught me that I’m indeed poorer than the poor: I received more than I could give; I could only share my self. But this seems sufficient for them; to me, they wanted someone to be with them, to be their friend. In times like these, all we need give is the gift of ourselves.

I learn too that it is good to be poor, to have nothing but myself to share, to have no plan or targets to accomplish and to let God lead. Being poor means I have to really open my hands (in Filipino, we call this bukas palad) to our good God and to let him teach me poverty. With poverty comes trust, faith, hope, life’s simple joys and love. Yes, bukas palad means to beg, to ask, to hope that whatever little we get will always be the limitless bounty that is God’s loving providence, not only for me but for the others I’m called to share faith and live life with.

If I could, I would like to be bread broken for these poor, and for the many more in the world who long for God but are marginalised, suffering or afraid to let go and let God lead. This is my prayer these days, to be bread broken. I believe this is a meaningful way for me to live my life, and perhaps, to die. My vocation is affirmed. I know what a beautiful thing it is to be called to serve, to lay my life down and just be with and perhaps, God willing to be like the poor. Bukas palad, indeed. I see the real need for us Jesuits to make ourselves truly available, especially to the poor, the least, the forgotten, to go to those places that are difficult, and where no one else wants to venture to: there, God is crying for us to be with Him and his people.