My first GK build

It's so great to be an Atenean. We have more holidays than the average university. But I guess the best thing about it is how these holidays are spent. July 31 was the feast day of St. Ignatius of Loyola and we chose to spend it at GK Blue Eagle Village at Payatas Trese. It was my first ever GK build so I was filled with excitement because I would get to experience something that has inspired hundreds of thousands of people to do more for our nation by giving more of themselves to the poor.

However, to be brutally honest, I felt very disappointed in the first part of the day. All we did was to form a human chain that will bring cement from the drop off point (the place that trucks could reach) to the build site (where the road is too narrow to accommodate vehicles). I understand the significance of the activity since it would have taken loads of labor hours to transfer the needed cement to the other side. However, I did not feel the inspiration I was looking for. It seemed pointless. I felt that if we just taught Math or English to the kids in the area, it would have benefitted the community more since it seems not a lot of their kids go to school (too many kids were around and it was a weekday).

The second part of the day was even more depressing. We continued work on transferring the cement and haha now I know what factory workers in the Industrial Age felt when they did monotonous assembly line work. It was so unfulfilling. Seeing your work steadily coming to form is really pushes you to work – to see what the final outcome will be. But I was in the middle of the chain and you simply couldn’t gauge how much cement you’ve already brought to the site. Would it have been enough to build a house? These were questions popping up in my head while I was passing bucket after bucket of cement to my team mates. I was thinking about a lot of things that time. I was trying to find some significance to what I was doing. Earlier in the day, I had prayed that God be with me in this work, that I will offer everything I will do that day to Him. But what kind of work was I doing? It didn’t seem important and significant. I didn’t feel it was nation building at all.

The biggest disappointment that I got from the experience was that there were a lot of able-bodied men just sitting around there talking to friends, sitting around, doing practically nothing. GK was supposed to give people the chance to work for the type of community they deserve. Why weren’t they working with us? I would have understood if they were working – I’m sure they needed to work to feed their families. But they were just chilling out while some students were giving time and effort to build better homes for them. This wasn’t the GK I had thought it was.

But God is so great, He didn’t want me to leave the place without actually understanding what I had done that day and what GK really stood for.

One of the members of the homeowners’ association in the Blue Eagle Village offered her home for us to rest for lunch and in the afternoon. It was a two-storey house with a floor area equal to an average classroom. They had a TV, a sewing machine, a rice cooker, a washing machine, two electric fans, a bathroom inside the house (meaning they had running water and proper drainage) and a marble countertop. But to me, the best characteristic of their house is that it smelled clean and almost insect-free. I saw one rat but our house has rats as well. The slum areas I’ve been to always have the distinct smell of garbage and with it, an army of mosquitoes, flies and cockroaches. You could easily tell that they were far from abject poverty. You could tell they were doing well enough to eat three times a day, send the kids to public schools and watch the daily telenovelas at night.

We had a chance to talk to her a little about her family. Our nanay is already 50 years old, I’m guessing married for more than 30 years already because she has a 30 year old (not sure), 25+ year old and an 18 year old. They were originally from Pampanga but her husband worked as a taxi driver here in Quezon City. Of course, it was impractical to be travelling back and forth from Pampanga to the Metro so it was inevitable that they would search for a more permanent home here. They already had relatives in Payatas Trece so that was the place to go. But nanay decided to delay their migration to Metro Manila because she wanted her children to grow up in the province and hopefully be inculcated with provincial values. She felt that there was a higher tendency for children brought up in the city to be exposed to vices so she really made it a point for them to grow up the way she thought was best in Pampanga.
They eventually decided to set-up a home in Payatas Trece (a slum area for informal settlers) and she tells us that the first months they were here, they really had to go to the Payatas dumpsite to look for materials for their house. They started out with the traditional squatter home made of discarded cardboards for walls and rusty metal panels for a roof. But at the very least, they had a livelihood with the husband working as a taxi driver and nanay working part time as a laundry woman. They were able to send to of their children to college but unfortunately were not able to finish. They’re trying really hard to have their last child graduate with a nursing degree even if the husband is nearing retirement age.

You could tell they were really an industrious family – working really hard for long-term goals. They were able to save enough and borrow enough to build a house. She told us it cost a total of around Php 200,000 (explains the marble countertop and working drainage system). Her neighbors thought they were actually rich but she explained they had to borrow money to have it built and had to work doubly hard to pay for it.

She seems to really believe in Gawad Kalinga for her to support it despite the fact that the house that will be built for them would cost less than what they had invested for their current home plus the stress of having to live somewhere else first while it was being constructed. She explains there are still problems confronting full implementation of the proposed GK village because not everyone in the area thought it was just too good to be true. She told us that GK provides for free the construction materials and the family needed only to find at least two people who were knowledgeable in building houses. The volunteers coming from the Ateneo Alumni Association and Ateneo students would not necessitate hiring too many laborers for the house and she says that on the average, each house only requires a month for construction (our house took 11 months to finish!). And well, she corrected my earlier assumption that people here didn’t work to build their own community. They had regular laborers from the community itself who leads the construction of the houses. And perhaps the biggest help GK gave to the community was that they pushed for a collective buying of the entire Payatas Trece property so that their homes would be secure from demolitions of informal settling communities.

This was the part that showed me what GK really stood for. Here was a family who had strived so hard to work for their own betterment and succeeded to a certain degree. But they were very willing to give up what they had worked for just for the idea of a better community, a Payatas Trece that had clean and concrete housing that was secure from the threat of demolitions. GK is not really so much about building houses but rather building communities. It was not about how much cement we had brought to the build site or how much time we had spent working on the houses. Though having clean, spacious and sturdy housing is a part of it, a community-building is more about uniting the people within it with an idea that they could all work together for themselves. The volunteers were there to help them out, to lend a hand in their community building. And how was this nation building? If communities could be built with an idea of progress through communal effort, a nation could be built with that same idea. You have people from all social classes, hailing from different backgrounds and areas of expertise working on the same level to help build communities. This was what GK was about. And this was what I did that day. By being part of that human chain, by passing buckets of cement, we were one step at a time building a better community in the area of Payatas Trece and in a small way building a better nation for them and for ourselves. For me, it is in this solidarity that GK inspires this spirit of nation building.

The tagline of GK is Bawat Pilpino, Bayani. Heroism is about sacrificing yourself for a noble and just cause. Gawad Kalinga is exactly that type of cause. As students, we were sacrificing a little of our time and effort to help out in this great cause of nation building. The family we talked to would have to sacrifice a decade’s worth of hard work for this cause. I find true inspiration in this idea of great sacrifice for a great cause, more for the benefit of others. To be honest, it has inspired me more to give more of myself to this cause. The great thing about this cause of nation building is that it is not limited to building houses. We have been blessed with our own strengths and own unique skills. It is by using these can we give a more unique and significant contribution to building this nation.
So in the next build, I’m sure to come with a renewed sense of purpose. God showed me in this first GK build showed me first hand what this purpose was. God, in the next builds, will allow me to do more for that purpose, to give more of myself to build a community, to build a nation.