Saturday, February 28, 2009 – Tour of Mariapolis Pace / Bukas Palad

Attim has been our tour guide of the Mariapolis Pace (Focolare Center, pace means peace), and the social center Bukas Palad which means “Open Hands”.

The area has three main parts, the women’s side, men’s side, and the families. We are on the women’s side. Both men’s and women’s side have a Bukas Palad, the women’s side has a very small health clinic and pre-school, while the men’s side has a grade/high school.

The health clinic and schools serve over 400 children and 360 families. The children are provided with most of the essentials for school through a Focolare program called “Adoption at a distance”. This is where families in other parts of the world send funds for a particular child in order that they might receive an education. Occasionally the clinic will have a doctor or dentist come by and they will treat over hundreds of families over the course of two days. Otherwise the provide basic help, some physical therapy, and try to teach the children health lessons.

We toured the men’s side which is a little ways away and requires transportation. This got pretty interesting. First we took what is called a tricycle. A tricycle is actually a motorcycle with a small covered side car attached to its right side. It doesn’t go very fast, and doesn’t take you very far. The next was a vehicle called Jeepney. This is basically a tin low ride SUV crammed with up to 20 people, and provided a very interesting experience, hahaha. The cost is extremely cheep.

There is a carpentry shop and metal shop on the men’s side and they do beautiful work. They send there work to various countries to be sold. Unfortunately the demand is low so the work is of course much less. In order to keep all the workers, and continue to provide a livelihood to some of the surrounding families, they decided to let some of the workers work 3 days, and the rest the remaining 3 work days.