Jumbo sneakers

No mistaking “those oversized rubber shoes,” Heinz Kuluke recalled. This    Society of Divine Word (SVD) priest has  served indigents in Cebu City’s garbage dumps, streets and slums for almost 26 years now. He gave those large sneakers to Fred weeks earlier.

Fred was scrounging through garbage bins when Fr. Heinz, in fluent Cebuano,  offered some food. “(He) had not eaten for two days and was caught by surprise … It was the smile on a face without a nose that kept me moving forward.” Fred had stumps for arms and feet.

Released from a leprosarium years back,  Fred had been abandoned by relatives and friends, Fr. Heinz writes. “I visited on a regular basis and Fred made me  of part of his life”—then disappeared without a trace.

Weeks later, Fr. Heinz stumbled across Fred. He lay, eyes open, among other  “sidewalk residents” in front of Carbon  market. “Seeing the oversized rubber shoes, I recognized him immediately.”

“He must have died  a few minutes earlier. I closed Fred’s eyes and traced the sign of the cross on his forehead. I requested  his sidewalk ‘neighbors’  to say a prayer. Then, I informed the police who took his body away.”

Fr. Heinz’s job description is SVD superior for southern Philippines. Mornings, he teaches post-graduate students at University of San Carlos. Nights, he “journeys  with (those) at the margins of society”: thousands who  huddle in cemetery shacks, red-light districts to garbage dumps.

“No one can do this alone,” he stresses. Today, 70 coworkers implement 25 to 35 projects annually through the Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation (JPIC). Some  Cebu families and foreign donors support programs that range from nutrition, medical care, alternative livelihoods to education.

Fr. Heinz backpedals from the spotlight. He capped guests to 15 when Germany awarded him its “Federal Cross of Merit” January. In contrast, City Hall never acknowledged JPIC and its work. “No prophet is honored in his own country.” Yet the work is vital in a world where more and more people are dehumanized.

Fred and others appear in “Where God Has Found His Home,” a 58-page booklet Fr. Heinz wrote. Published on the centennial of SVD presence in the Philippines, this tract compresses 26 real-life tales of people who huddle unseen, like Lazarus, into a  mosaic of pain. The pattern is replicated  in  Davao, Iloilo, Calbayog, Cagayan and other cities.

“I was provided with a crude kahig (rake),” the priest recalls when he lived with the families of 160 scavengers in Inayawan garbage dump. This is Cebu’s version of Metro Manila’s “Smokey Mountain.” More than 75 trucks unload trash daily.

“We’d  sort  out  material that could be recycled: glass, metal, etc., amidst  foul smell, flies, rats—and shattered lives. Many  were children, some as young as six … Periodically, an  aborted fetus turned  up among  dead cats and dogs.” “There is no future anyway,” a 15-year-old says. Many youngsters are on drugs.

An illiterate scavenger asks the priest to write a letter to a daughter he has not seen in a year. Being illiterates, bride and groom affixed thumb marks on the contract at a marriage presided by Fr. Heinz. “Not wanting to embarrass anybody, I added my thumb mark on the contractc … People smiled. Here was a priest who did not know how to write.”

Inayawan scavengers set aside  partially rotten fruit and vegetables. “They eat them for snacks.” Manila’s Smokey Mountain scavengers dub the  thin gruel they make from food scraps papag, the late painter Joey Velasco discovered. Velasco then was  tracking down 12 slum kids who modeled for his Last Supper oil painting, “Hapag Ng Pagasa.”

“While waiting for the next truck, I’d  listen to people’s life stories,” Fr.  Heinz recalls. Three women lost two children each because they could not afford hospitalization. Weng, 23, and husband James have five kids. They  resorted to 5-6 usurers to get medicine for a dying child. That 30 percent interest per month means all their income is in hock till kingdom come.

Two women knelt in front of the 5-6  “banker usurers” to beg consideration. No mercy was forthcoming. “Amazingly, some are even grateful to the loan shark,” Fr. Heinz noted. “He saved lives of loved ones. This is an expression of  utang na loob.”

In the dump, Basic Ecclesial Communities guide people to see their condition in the context of the Gospel. They probe alternative lifestyles and craft projects. Conversion of heart and liberation from oppression go together.

“My name is Lyra,” says the girl  with the big smile and badly made up face. She is  trolling for customers in  a red light district. “Others  rush up to tell Lyra  I’m there to help. We talk.” And this leads  us to a 68-year-old woman at a small stall displaying candies and cigarettes.

“This is my mother Luccrecia,” Lyra says. The mother painfully displays a fractured right arm. The money she earned paid for X-rays but wasn’t enough for surgery. She could not hide the pain from her daughter.

“Lyra could not bear to see her mother suffer. She quit school. Going to Cebu’s red-light, the young desperate girl in her naivety thought, was the fast way to earn money for her mother’s surgery … A young promising life … forced into prostitution for her mother’s medicine.”

Did all this “journeying” change the lives of the marginalized for the better or not? Some ask. Fr. Heinz has not had time for navel-gazing. “There is no doubt,” he says, “it has changed (me) into a different person.”