In the first day of our visit, we went to the dumping site in Manila. It was like any landfill sites in Hong Kong. The main difference is that, there are people living beside the site, and they walk in the site to find 'treasure'

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Trip to Philippines

Sara Sze F.6D

“The difficulty in life is the choice”, written by T. Moore. Do you agree with that? How about the people who don’t even have any options since they were born?

Sara Sze from F.6D went to Philippines with 30 Oxfam Club members and 10 facilitators including Kristin Chan from F.7C to explore more about Philippines Rice Industry. It was really an unforgettable experience to me!

In the first day of our visit, we went to the dumping site in Manila. It was like any landfill sites in Hong Kong. The main difference is that, there are people living beside the site, and they walk in the site to find ‘treasure’ for sale. It is their life; everyday is like that, spending 7 or more hours in the site to earn their living. It seems to be terrible, how come you can live with the garbage? We visited also their houses, and had some chat with them. The family we visited came from the rural areas, they were farmers formerly. They couldn’t earn their living, so they came to Manila—the city to survive. The situation in the site is bad enough, but they chose not to go back, you could imagine the condition there would be even worse. Can this be regarded as a choice that they have?

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On the second day, we traveled to Iloilo city by inland flight. We were separated into three villages and lived with our host families. We stayed there for 5 days. The village is beautiful, farms and hills are nearby, fresh air you breathe in; everything is simple. It was quite an experience; I have never thought that I could live without electricity for 5 days long. We used rain water for bathing, we used kerosene lamp to illumine at night, we used hoe for farming, we lived with animals like chickens, cows. It seems to be so IMPOSSIBLE to me ...

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