The Last Slum of Makati

You will probably hear it before you see it.

If you are listening, amidst the towers, the parking lots, the banks and coffee shops of Makati you will find it.

If you are listening... the sounds of cars, people, & construction will give way to the crowing of a rooster, in the center of the financial & commercial sector of Manila.

And if you are truly listening enough to care you will look up from the ground in front of you and peer beyond the trees growing so perfectly along the roadside and you will the corrugated rooftops of the last slum of Makati.

It stubbornly sits there, wooden creations, a spot, a blemish on the face of the otherwise clean and spotless Makati exterior. Laundry hangs out the windows to dry and an older man lounges on the third floor just in view over the tops of the perfect row of trees, which worked so hard to mask the existence of such a place.

The blemish, meticulously hidden yet betrayed by the cocks crow is there to stay. A miracle in many ways, perhaps God preserving the homes of the few, a symbol of his care for his people in the midst of an unjust opulence. Maybe His judgment, an indictment against the superficiality of Makati's prosperity that is striving to hide the abject poverty that lurks below the surface that is the backbone of the construction of the grand and soaring skyscrapers that tower over the miracle blemish.

And perhaps it, in this moment, is God's word to me... pleading with me to have his eyes and his ears for his people. To listen for his voice, even if by such mundane things as a rooster's crow.