WeDpro, Inc. Empowering women, youth, and their communities

In June of 2010, Jasmine Trice, a visiting Filipino-American academic from the USA and a wonderful supporter of WeDpro, sent out the following letter to her contacts. She graciously allowed us to reprint her letter.

For: Youth of Filipino and American descent, living in urban poor
areas around Subic and Clark, former US military bases in the
Philippines

Dear U.S. friends and family,

I’ve never written a letter soliciting help before, but it’s not every day that I meet over two dozen smart, enthusiastic, and tragically impoverished young people with whom I share certain historical and ethnic bonds...

Last week, I had the honor of assisting with a project for a nonprofit organization run by a dear friend named Aida, whom I’ve known for four
years. Currently, the organization is facilitating a community arts program for Amerasian youth around Subic and Clark, the former US military bases. While my brother and I were spending a happy childhood in Clark in the 1980s, many of the young artists participating in this project were born just a few miles away, under drastically different circumstances. At Clark Air Base, I went to school with many children of American soldiers and Filipina women. Ours were the more commonly heard stories of military migration heard on Base, beginning in traditional courtships and ending in marriages and multicultural families.

Background
Maybe in part because I feel so lucky to be a part of one such family, I also feel a responsibility for sharing the darker side to this narrative. This story takes place in the thriving “girly bars” of Angeles City and Olongapo, and it ends not with multicultural, nuclear families, but with generations of young people of American descent, living in unimaginable poverty, their hardships exacerbated by daily discrimination brought about by their mixed-race origins. While the bases have been closed for almost two decades, their reverberations are felt in the faces of these youth, who bear encounter daily discrimination in finding work and in school (for those who can afford to attend). In many parts of the Philippines, being part-Caucasian means being admired for the fairness of your skin, a remnant of colonial culture. In these areas, however, mixed ethnicity marks origins deemed unsavory. If you’re part-African-American, your situation is even more difficult.

Most of this community lives in poverty that’s incomprehensible outside the developing world, in cramped, urban poor areas (“slums” or “squatter” communities), consisting of makeshift shelters without running water or consistent electricity. With few resources from government and with nonprofit organizations suffering from the impact of the global financial crisis, the situation for many in these areas is a daily struggle for mere survival, let alone the privileges that so many of us take for granted—an education and creative expression.

The art workshop
The resilient, young artists-in-training I worked with this past week are a part of this community. The workshop uses street theater, puppetry, music, dance, and painting to provide a creative outlet for participants, as well as to educate the public about issues such as domestic violence and human trafficking. Ranging in age from early teens to late twenties, the participants auditioned and applied to take part in the workshop, which will last for eighteen months.

Numbering 15-20 participants in each city, the workshop is developed to educate the students about these issues, give them a creative means of disseminating this information to their communities, and importantly, to help them develop leadership skills, so that when the project closes (at least in its sponsored capacity), the participants can continue the mission on their own.

The youth develop ideas their own stories for their performances, often drawing from their own experiences. For example, in one theatrical piece the Angeles group performed for me, the story was based on the experiences of one participant’s friend, who was recruited by a crooked agency to be a maid in Malaysia. Upon her arrival, her passport and papers were taken from her, and she was drugged and trafficked into prostitution. The youth who wrote and performed the piece were truly amazing, drawing from the traditions of the Filipino melodrama to create a story that their audience might find relatable. Their performances were incredibly moving. With no props or costumes, and only a provisional staging area, the lead actress sobbed real tears as her captors threw her into a locked room, and she realized her fate. These events are all too common, and they happen because of the severity of these communities’ poverty, which leads to desperation coupled with a lack of education about those willing to exploit it. Taking its productions to the streets, these young artists will be able to educate their peers while telling their own stories.

I don’t want to paint this community as victims of their circumstances. They’ve committed to the program for a solid year and a half, in a context where life is necessarily lived day to day. I was able to contribute in a very small way by conducting a basic popular culture literacy workshop. The participants were eager and attentive, offering insightful ideas about the paintings, ads, and promotional stills we analyzed. Some of them were shy, others were hilariously funny. As the day progressed, and we moved from my workshop to the open sharing, the level of their achievement in simply showing up and participating became clear, as they described their lives outside the program. As we listened to stories of rape by family members and foreign tourists, alcoholism, and domestic violence, it became clear that in addition to being a creative outlet and capacity building activity, the workshop needed to integrate therapy and counseling.

How you can help
This is where we need assistance. At present, there are no funds for taking on a psychologist, but with trauma at this level, professional counseling is urgently needed. There are a few ways you can help out. It won’t solve massive social problems, but it can help make the lives of a few of these smart, enthusiastic artists a bit easier, enabling them to play a role in bettering their communities. They already have so much going for them—willingness, a sense of humor, energy, and talent. Importantly, they also have a community, if not necessarily at home, then among their peers. They simply need the tools to help them achieve what they’re already capable of.

When I finished my brief workshop, in an overly generous act of thanks, the students presented me with a framed letter. This is what it says:

Ate [older sister], Our appreciation for the time you spent with us, no matter how short, thank you too for the gift of knowledge you selflessly shared...Although the greatest thing we are grateful for is all the joy you’ve brought us by remembering that you are a Filipina, one with us in spirit and thought.
– Angeles and Olongapo Theater Arts Scholars

As these students affirmed, of course, I’m part Filipina. For me, it’s also important to remember that they are part American. For those of us who are Americans as well, these youth are a forgotten part of our national community and our history. As far away as their lives might seem, they are only a generation away from familiar places like Chicago, Illinois, Macon, Georgia, and Sacramento, California. That doesn’t necessarily make them our individual responsibility. But maybe we can help make the deal they’ve been dealt a little less raw.

Here are a few options.

Option One
$20 USD would go a nice way towards sponsoring an artist. Diego, Aida’s son and one of my best friends, has created a PayPal account for the sponsoring organization, Wedpro. You can access it here. Or, if you feel more comfortable sending money through me, I can give it to them. I’ve worked with this organization several times, and I know the funds will be stretched far and used wisely.

Option Two
If you’re uncomfortable donating money, but you’d still like to help, another option is that you could donate art supplies. The org needs supplies like paint, canvases, drawing pencils, face-paint, paper, or yarn. A Philippine bookstore chain that sells art supplies has a website, where you can order supplies and gift certificates and send to Philippine addresses: http://www.nationalbookstore.com.ph/shop/categs.asp?categ=298

Option Three
If you know of anyone who’s eligible for funding, say from their university, and who is either a professional psychologist, or an artist who could facilitate a workshop, or an editor who would like to document, and they might like to go to the beautiful Philippines for a few months, please get in touch.

Best wishes,
Jasmine