Sitio
a Picture of Poverty
aIoh:
Sweat dripped down my face as I forced my legs to continue hiking up the mountain. My arms and back ached from hauling my sleeping bag and my oversized backpack, stuffed with everything I needed for the next three months. Twenty-four hours by plane, three days on a huge ship, two hours by jeep, two hours on a motorcycle, three hours hike uphill and over the mountain, and finally I was here. Surrounded by slopes of green vegetation lay a small village along an open clearing. Sitio Alon,
Mindanao place took
was the primitive and remote had always envisioned, but the reality of such a by surprise. Everything around me was a picture
Island, Philippines— this
mission field
I
me
of poverty.
As
approached the cluster of tiny huts, natives stared and torn rags, remotely resembling the color and style they had once been, hanging loosely on their dark brown skin. Some of the tears were so large it seemed pointless to have anything on. A number of naked children ran barefoot along the dusty ground. Young, teenage girls carried babies tied around them with dirty, worn cloth. The chief datu and his four wives, dressed in a patchwork of faded colors, emerged form on of the larger huts, about the size of the dorm rooms at Southern. They were decked with bracelets and necklaces made of colorful, plastic beads. Their teeth were dark and stained. The chief datu directed me toward on of the larger huts. Wood and bamboo awkwardly assembled together on stilts a couple feet off the ground was my new home. Most of the other huts were considerably smaller-about the size of our bathroom at home. Families of five, six, even ten people lived in these tiny huts. I sometimes wondered how they all slept. The numerous cracks in the bamboo walls provided little protection a t night from the frigid mountain wind. I snuggled tightly in my sleeping bag, but the natives only had thin sheets and blankets. Early one I
curiously, but shyly, at the sight of a foreigner. Dirty
was a little boy squatting on his porch, shivering in the cold. The thatched roofs, resembling the neepa huts pictured in romantic beach resorts, did their job except when rain began to pour. Drip, drip, drip~I had to hold an umbrella inside our hut to keep from getting wet. The floor, or rather the slabs of rough. morning,
I
