The Boy

6-16
I’ve decided, as long as I can make kids laugh, then this trip is totally worth it. And I finally succeeded in winning over Nana Magda’s youngest, “The Boy”. This may not sound like much to you, winning over a 3 year old, but this kid is a wild child. Seriously. And from the beginning of my stay here, he viewed me with constant suspicion. And why shouldn’t he? I invaded his otherwise mostly peaceful existence, took over an entire room and a half of his house, and suddenly, everyone’s schedules revolve around me. I get served special food, which he doesn’t usually get and people pay a whole lot of attention to me. Sounds like a huge threat in the world of a 3 year old. Oh, and I look really, really funny. White, glasses, blue eyes, and waaay too much facial hair (most Philipinos can maybe grow a solid mustache by 30, and some chin scruff by 40 it seems). I thought he had changed his mind and decided to like me at one point on day two. He came up to me while I was sitting on a bench, draped himself over my leg, and chilled there. Aww… how cute, right? Wrong. Only a clever ploy to position himself to spit on my shorts. Which, to me, was really funny, and quite slyly pulled off. His parents however, seemed almost mortified. But honestly, I sweat out of every pore almost every moment of everyday, what’s a little boy spit on my shorts? So it was sweet when I got him to play a game of poke/tag/tickle… which he thinks is hilarious! Woohoo! We tend to disrupt every meal, tricycle ride, and decent conversation (so much for me being respectful) through poking each other and laughing, but when he’s got a 3 year old version of tagalog vocab, and I’ve got pretty much none, it’s about our only means of communication. Which is good enough for me. Anything to make this poor kid smile, and I do mean poor. Especially considering how wary he was of me at first. And he had every reason to be distrustful of me, as I found out later. The Boy isn’t Nana Magda’s. They pretty much found him on the street in Big Banana, the craziest collection of hodge-podge squatter-dom I’ve ever seen. Nana Magda and Tatay Delphin are saints. They just straight up took in a baby off the street, with no clue where he came from. They didn’t even think he was Philipino at first, probably because of how malnourished he was. And this family doesn’t have a lot of spare resources to be taking in more dependents. Absolutely amazing.