Students from five countries in Asia Pacific gathered in the Philippines in July for a reflective and experiential forum designed to give them an understanding of what it means to be Ignatian leaders.
In all, 35 students participated in the first Asia Pacific Ignatian Student Forum, which was held from July 21 to 29 and hosted by Xavier School in Manila. They came from St Ignatius Riverview in Sydney, Australia; Sophia University High in Fukuoka, Japan; Xavier School; Wah Yan College in Kowloon, Hong Kong; and Canisius College in Jakarta, Indonesia.
In the Ignatian spirit, the emphasis was on leadership exercised in service, and the week’s programme culminated in two days spent in service to the poor in Bagong Silang, a town in northern Metro Manila that in the 1970s became the dumping ground of all the homeless and displaced people from central Manila.
It was transformed into a hope-filled model of community transformation by Gawad Kalinga, a non-profit organization founded by Catholic lay volunteers who hope to transform the plight of the poor by building homes, educating children, and providing sustainable economic opportunities.
The boys and girls worked hand in hand with the local residents to build the homes they would live in. The three homes were paid for from the fees the students had paid for the programme.
Much of the work entailed moving stones and concrete blocks from one location to another, mixing cement, laying concrete blocks on the concrete, digging ditches, and other forms of manual labour.
At night, they slept on bed mats on the floors of the community centres in two Gawad Kalinga sites – Australian Village and St. Aloysius’ College Village, which contains many homes built by students from St Aloysius College in Sydney.
However, prior to this, the students were provided with context and discussions to encourage reflection on what leadership means for Christians and in their own contexts.
They listened to and saw some of the realities and injustices in the Philippine context. An account of the history of the Philippines from 1898 to the present time was followed by a trip to the ports of Manila’s north harbour, where hundreds of thousands of informal settlers crowd in urban slums, and to Smokey Mountain, the largest landfill in the Philippines and home to thousands of Filipinos who scavenge through the trash for a living.
The squalor of these places was brought into sharp relief by the visit to the American cemetery. While students were in awe of the quiet, tranquillity, and wealth of the surrounding suburbs, Fr Ross Jones SJ, Rector of St. Ignatius Riverview, challenged them with the following comments:
“Earlier today, we saw how hundreds of thousands of residents live off less than 1 US dollar a day. Now consider this cemetery. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on this memorial? And while it is fitting that we honour the dead, we must also consider how we can best honour the living. This is a difficult question. But as students of Jesuit schools, we must never be afraid of asking difficult questions.”
The students also spent a day with a local community. They were divided among “host families” in Barangay Batis, an flood-prone area, and helped out with chores around the house, and had a Xavier school provided lunch with their “families”. The afternoon was spent playing with the children in the community.
The week’s experience, especially the two days spent with the Gawad Kalinga experience, had a profound effect on the students. Many expressed sadness and surprise at the living conditions that many of the urban poor experience, yet they also were surprised to find joy and hopefulness in many of the people they meet and in many of their interactions.
“We’re really happy about this historic forum,” said Xavier School President Fr Johnny Go SJ. “I’m glad the idea of networking, which we first discussed at the 2010 JECAP Colloquium in Fukuoka, has been fulfilled here. Our student leaders got together for a most enriching experience. Makes you wonder why it took us so long to get this done!”
Fr Ross Jones SJ has written a reflection on the experience of the forum entitled “To go where no one else will go”. To read it in Province Express, click here.