Friends for five minutes

Today I had the questionable pleasure to witness how „doing good“ exactly shouldn’t look like. In 5 ½ years of working for non-profits and 38 years of (I would at least like to claim) more or less sanity and reason, I have not been witness to such a bizarre moment.

Together with a colleague and our photographer, I was in Anibong, a neighborhood directly at the shore, which has been literally annihilated by the flood wave triggered by the typhoon. In the middle of all the rubble and makeshift shelters that are slowly emerging, UNICEF has set up a so-called “Baby Tent”, in which mothers can breastfeed in some privacy and receive psychosocial counseling. Because of the terrible experience and the related trauma they suffered, many mothers have, and I only learned that today, somewhat lost the emotional bond to their babies, which the workers there now carefully try to help them restore. I experience an incredibly calm and emotional mood inside the tent when I am allowed to take a peek inside. We don’t want to disturb too much.

And then suddenly, out of nowhere a group appears which obviously considers the completely destroyed city kind of a Disneyland. Free of any sense, they hand completely useless plastic propeller toys to the children, who are waiting for their mothers and little siblings outside the tent. Naturally, the children happily rip the plastic bags open and throw them to the ground. The group heats up the kids, films for all it's worth, organizes a polonaise and asks the children to cheer and shout. All of them have big name tags around their necks with their names and obviously find this very funny, kind of an adventure playground.

After a few minutes, the woman working in the baby tent asks them for a little more silence, to provide a calm atmosphere for the mothers and their babies to do their exercises together. They do a bit more filming, and once I ask whether they would also like to consider taking their plastic garbage back with them, they ask the kids to pick up the plastic bags. Less than ten minutes later the spook is over.

What remains? Every child now has a sense-free plastic propeller, worth probably around three cents, talking about “sharing & friendship” which is written on the t-shirts of the five guys. If they do it a couple of more times elsewhere, Tacloban has another thousand plastic bags flying around somewhere, but a handful of adventure tourists has a camera full of jeering children, which they will likely present like trophies once they are back home in a couple of days. Exactly what the children need here – a bit of plastic, and friends for five minutes who then disappear forever.

“True Manila” is written on their shirts, and according to the internet that is a tour company offering authentic trips for backpackers who want to witness the “real” life of Filipinos. If anyone of you knows anyone of them, may I kindly request you to ask them whether they still have all their marbles.