Engineering A Better World Date Posted: March 22, 2008 By KATE McDONELL How do I explain what it is like to spend three weeks in the Philippines working with Engineers Without Borders? I certainly can't explain it in a couple of paragraphs but it is definitely an overwhelming and life changing experience. The first twenty two years of my life I have lived as an only child. I used to joke that I had adopted siblings (my close friends) because I didn't have any real siblings. But then I went to the Philippines and lived with a family, now my family. I now have three younger sisters (Lerma, Lan Lan, Carla) and a younger brother (Christian) in addition to a massive extended family. More often than not during the day my cousin dropped her baby, Jacinta, off with my mum (Leni) when she went to work. I met my Dad once, who worked for Manila Water as a driver, but he was at work all the time. So this was now my family and we lived in a house that volunteers had built the year before and was of the same design as the houses I was building. Eight of us lived in this house, 14m2, made of hollow concrete blocks with concrete, of unknown mix quantities, filling the holes, rebar for the columns and a tin roof. We lived simply and happily but without much privacy. In the first couple of days, used to being an only child, the lack of privacy and lack of acknowledgement of one's personal possessions frustrated me. I couldn't go to the toilet without being asked where I was going. I would check my bag to look for my sunglasses and find that not only were my sunglasses not in my bag, neither were my hat or my camera. My things weren't stolen. My siblings had them. From their perspective they weren't 'my' things; they were 'our' things and so could be taken and returned as they chose. The rule applied to all of their possessions also, of which there were not many. It was somewhere between learning all the words to 'I will survive' by osmosis, being comfortable with singing karaoke sober and learning to enjoy cold dipper showers that I knew my life had changed for ever. I learnt so many life lessons from being there, particularly from my family. I think the most important one was about my responsibility to do something about poverty. You can watch the television and see people in poverty but then you can turn it off and it somehow goes away. But I can't do that anymore because my family lives in poverty. My little sister, Lerma, can't go to college because our family can't afford to send her. This is not someone else's responsibility. It is my responsibility now. They are my family and I have to do something. Our families changed because we were there not for ourselves but for them. They needed to know that somewhere far off people they didn't know who didn't "owe" them anything were thinking of them. That they hadn't been forgotten by the world. That people didn't turn of the TV and pretend that their struggle went away. They needed to know that they were valued and loved. Even now it is hard for me to grasp how we, who where there for such a short time, helped fulfill this need. My family told me about how they felt about living in the slums. They said they felt hopeless and that the world had forgotten them. The fact that we, as westerners traveled all the way around the world to be with them, and continue to think about them was a powerful source of hope and human dignity. Merely by being there was a more important gift to the community than we could ever give through building houses. As one volunteer said "you cannot buy the happiness of the families that live in these houses. If you want to help others, you also need to sacrifice. Our sacrifice was monetary and timely, but our gain was much greater than anything we sacrificed." As engineers, I believe we should not always think of the fastest, cheapest, most economical way to do things, but to think of the interest of PEOPLE first, because ultimately, we should be servants of people and communities; not money and time. Still, to this day, it really makes me rethink all my priorities when I remember how my family, who has always lived in poverty, is happier now that they have ever been. *** Please visit our GK Youth Australia Photo Gallery for photos of Engineers Without Borders *** > > > BACK TO  WHAT'S NEWS?