Another day in the country, this time visiting four families who are being interviewed to receive loans to pay for heart surgery for their children. In each case, the child has already been medically diagnosed as having a condition that can be treated with surgery. What we (or, rather, Ms. Tu from the OGCDC staff) were doing was interviewing them to assess need and eligibility for the loan. Of the four, the first and third are worth elaborating on.
The first family we visited was absolutely destitute. The patient was a 6 year old girl with a 3 year old little brother. The mother was there, but the father wasn't. If I understood correctly, he was at a relative's house trying to recover from some sort of food poisoning. While he's away, the family is subsisting on the mother's earnings as a field day laborer, which basically come to around 70 cents US per day. They were living in a building that was a 15x20 concrete slab with three walls and a roof patched together from pieces of corrugated tin and tarp over a frame of scrap wood. It was open in the front and had an open doorway in the back. Inside, there was an old armoire, one thin double-size mattress on the floor, and a 2x3' plastic table with a few kid-size plastic chairs...and that's it. They had nothing, N-O-T-H-I-N-G. The kitchen was a small fire grate in the back, and I have no idea what they did for toilet. Thankfully, there was a hand pumped well for water.
Even for very poor people, this seemed a strange structure for a house. When this came up in the interview, we found out that they had, last year, borrowed money from the government to pay for a house nearby. Soon after its completion, it was completely destroyed in a typhoon. They still have to pay back the loan. Their son's leg was broken during that storm, but he's recovered, though they owe money for that as well. The "house" they are in now is actually a little lunch shack for field workers that is owned by a relative who was generous enough to let them move into it after the storm. However, the relative needs the income, and the family must find another place to live soon, though they have no idea where.
On our way there, on Ms. Tu's suggestion, we bought some candy, juice boxes, and other treats to give to the kids at the different houses. When we gave some of these treats to those two kids, the mother had trouble suppressing some tears. It was hard to tell if these were tears of thanks or of shame, but my guess is a little of both. It reminded me of an old episode of M*A*S*H in which Major Winchester gives a huge box of candy at Christmas to a local monk who runs an orphanage. A few days later, he sees someone in a bar eating one of the candy bars he donated and finds out that the man eating it bought it on the black market. Winchester confronts the monk, who he's assumed has sold the donation and kept the money for himself. The monk tells him that he sold the candy in order to buy rice, enough rice to feed the children for almost half a year.
And that's the weird tension of giving candy to poor children. On the one hand, a pragmatic person would recognize that the money could go a lot further to purchase food or other things the children need more. But on the other, children in these conditions have pretty much NO luxuries in their lives. It was quite clear to me that these kids live every day eating virtually nothing but rice and drinking nothing but well water. To see how they react to a juice box and a lollipop is heartbreaking; it's a true treasure to them.
The third family was an adventure all itself. They lived in a farming village that was quite literally off the beaten path. That is, we had to walk three kilometers across a series of dikes to get to the village because that's the nearest that any roads go to it. We were wanting shots of farm life, and we got them. We stopped a few times along the way to drink, and Ms. Tu had some conversation with the locals, who all looked at us pretty wide-eyed. I'm guessing it's not every day that have an entourage of white people walking through there.
When we finally reached the house, there was a man outside screaming at the family and throwing a general fit. We got some shots of this, though I was a little nervous about how he might react. I asked Lan if she could tell what the fight was about, and she said the man was insisting they repay a loan. Eventually, he got on his motorcycle and left in a huff. We went in to film the assessment interview, and everything seemed to go fine. After these interviews, the OGCDC staff member takes a look around the house to get some idea of the family's material living conditions. After that walkaround, Ms. Tu and the father in the family had a conversation that seemed a little heated, but I wasn't really paying much attention because I was shooting some exteriors. Then we trekked back to the van...but the plot thickens.
There's a lot of subjectivity built into this process because the families often live outside any clear "documentation" zone. For example, in the states, a similar agency would simply ask to see a few years of tax returns, but there's no similar objective measure to go on here, so they have to make some pretty gut-level decisions about how much money someone has. In such a system, you can imagine the loan applicant's temptation not to be entirely forthcoming about how much money they have. After all, who WOULDN'T want a three year, zero interest loan to cover an operation.
So, after we get back in the van and are on the way back into the city, Ms. Tu gives us the lowdown. She suspects that the family was being quite deceptive about their financial state. It turns out that the conversations she was having with people on the way out were to get some information about the family's condition. Apparently, several people in and around the village told her that the family was not particularly bad off and owned their own tractor (which is a very small motor-driven plowish device that looks almost nothing like a western tractor). In the assessment interview, she asked the father about this, and he told her he didn't own any such item. But in her walkaround, she saw it primitively hidden behind the back of the house.
She also said that the man who was screaming at them when we arrived had passed us on the way there, and that there was something about the way he was talking that seemed very stagey to her, like he was a friend who they'd asked to play the part of an angry loaner to try to give the impression that the family is on hard luck. At any rate, she wasn't sure her suspicions were correct, and she's going to do some more investigating, but she suspects they probably aren't really as needy as some other candidates and are trying to fake it.
Nothing more to add for today. Bye for now,
Stu
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