#kadamayako

Age-Old Struggle. For all those who think being a member of Kadamay is easy, because being urban poor is easy: Nanay Leleng, 82 years old, #Kadamay Chairperson Emeritus. When you can grow old poor, it puts into question the insistence that all-you-need-to-do-is-work-hard-to/achieve-your-dreams, yes? Even believing that is borne of privilege. #KadamayAko #BakitIkawHinde?

The Price Of Privilege. More and more, given President #Duterte and his practice of double speak, one finds that what surfaces is thoughtless public opinion, the kind that reveals a blindness to privilege and class difference, a display of our own predisposition to stand against one injustice but not another: no to the poor being killed in the drug war, but yes to the poor being left without homes and certainly they don't deserve access to water and electricity!; use oppression and inequality as subjects of our creative work, but never take a stand against either when it is most critical to real people's lives; speak of helping and empowering the poor, but refuse to support them when they act collectively towards self-determination, without us, with just their experience of having been disenfranchised for far too long by government policy, with rules they have tried to play by, but this a system that will not let them win. We like to talk about independence and freedom, about rebelling against rules and fighting for our rights. This is no different from the urban poor taking over idle housing no one else wants. Yet it seems we do not allow the poor to demand for what we ourselves would fight for, and one wonders if we realize that we're insisting that they deserve less, even as they already have the least. #ClassCrisis #ClassViolence #ClassPolitics #Privilege #blindness #elitism #Philippines #Pilipinas #OccupyPabahay #OccupyPandi #KadamayAko #Kadamay #housingPH #shelterPH 📷taken at Pandi Bulacan, Mar 2017.

Woman. The dialogue between the government's housing office and the urban poor who had taken over idle and neglected public housing units ended with the agreement that (1) they would not be evicted (2) they would undergo a profiling and validation process as housing applicants (3) the police and military would be asked to leave the Pandi communities. There is little doubt in my mind that this first step towards successfully giving these women, their families, and children these houses is because none of the urban poor women I spoke to in Pandi were mincing words, none of them were uncertain about their right to shelter, none of them were even thinking of leaving as an option. To be taught this kind of courage as borne of a clear sense of one's rights, and to collectively act on this courage. A lesson, among many others. #kawomenan #WomensMonth2017 #WomensMonth #KadamayAko 📷 by KSS during the People's Caravan to Pandi, Mar 18.

Claim What Is Ours. The gov't housing project in Pandi Bulacan is not part of PNoy's AFP-PNP Housing Project, if past gov't documents and press releases hold. In fact it appears as part of the list of housing projects that PNoy funded precisely for relocating Manila's informal settlers, but given how far Pandi is, given the lack of jobs for the urban poor here, even those beneficiaries left Pandi and became informal settlers in Manila and other cities. Now, after years of neglect and no claimants, the urban poor of Bulacan itself have taken over these houses, cleaned it up, made it into homes, claimed it as theirs. Had they not, would anyone have cared about these houses? Had the poor not taken a stand and courageously taken over these publicly-funded structures, would anyone have used these houses, no water and electricity and all? I doubt it. And as the taxpayers who undoubtedly paid for the construction of these homes, we all should be able to decide to #LetThemStay. #KadamayAko #OccupyBulacan #Kadamay #ShelterIsARight

Happiness. These are Shela, Baby, Vangie and Myrna, women who joined in the organized take over by the urban poor of an idle and neglected government housing project in Pandi Bulacan, two hours away from Manila. These houses are unfinished, some five years old, without doors and windows and toilets, all without running water and electricity. Contrary to what it looks like from the outside, there are no second floors. The women cleaned these houses of grass and weeds when they first arrived, put curtains in place of doors. They now wait out their fate even as they are ready to fight to stay in these houses no one else was interested in until they took over. We ask them how they are, given the emptiness of houses without furniture and facilities. They smile: "Masaya. May bahay na kami." ("We are happy. We now have homes.") #LetThemStay #KadamayAko #kawomenan #WomensMonth2017 #ShelterIsARight #internationalwomensday #iwd2017