News from Asa!

After arriving in Manila late at night and taking a family car to the hotel where we spent the night we had many immediate ideas about Manila. We noticed right away that it was much less developed than Korea.

The next day we took the same family car into Payatas. In the car we were given a long talk about how here in Payatas the children have a much poorer education and we would be a college equivalant to their schools. We heard how people here don't have clean water and how we shouldn't eat much of anything that they give us. If we had gone by what he had said Payatas would have been a huge mound of garbage with various people living around it.

As we started to drive around coming to the school I noticed that it was very different from how it was described to us. Instead of just garbage dumps Payatas was a colorful place with many street vendors and cars. We were riding in a car owned by the family that we were staying with, it was a little bit bigger than a jeep in size but it was set up a lot like a jeepney. Payatas however had very different methods of transportation. People travel in Jeepneys which are smaller than buses and instead of seats they have two benches on each side. Other people travel in tricycles, tricycles are motorcycles with carriages attached to the side and are a little more expensive than jeepneys. Than for Zeus who can't fit into either of those without hurting his head they use cabs. When we got out of the car and saw all the high school students that Zeus was teaching, we realized how tall we were compared to them. Most adults in the Philippines are only around 5 foot 3 inches making Zeus a giant and me and Elliot tall for adults. When we met Flor and went to her house for lunch of fish, rice, and filtered water we realized that sometimes things aren't as bad as you originally think.

-Asa