Day #12

Hi guys!

I'm just back to Manila from a place called Gabaldon, which amazingly, I think is right here on Googlemaps!

This past week has been a really rich experience. I'm finding it really hard to share because I realise that things that you feel in your heart are not really so easily expressed in words. The people there where so open towards me, but yet they were so poor. I ate, stayed, and had fun with them, and made a few good friends on the way. It's really hard to describe, but I wish to share the place and a bit about the situation.

The place is beautiful, and I really want to go back again. It is a farming region of rice fields, situated in a valley right in between beautiful mountains in the east and west. It was one beautiful sunrise, to one beautiful sunset, to one beautiful moonrise, to one beautiful starlit night after another. A stream and a river runs past the village. I climbed the hills, swam in the rivers, walked amongst the stones... it's beautiful.

The villagers were people relocated after a terrible flood in 2o04, where their houses were washed away. They belong to category E, which is the poorest of the poor, and the village I stayed in was set up by this movement called Gawad Kalinga, which means roughly 'give care'. That's another story altogether, but go to www.gawadkalinga.org to find out more.

Thanks for reading! Pls say hi! I miss my friends in Singapore!

Chris

p.s. I have yet to comment on my last pictures and I have many more pictures. Will not be able to write about them much but pls ask if you're interested and I'll make the effort.