Popular means of transport only for short distances even with many people and lots of stuff!

Wow, first couple of days have passed and it’s hot! So hot you don’t need to use salt in your food cause sweat’s dripping on your plate 😉  Further we have met so many great people! And also some great, well, ehm gigantic cockroaches, big as pineapples! First muskito bites in the pocket and realizing that we never thought of ourselves as ‘white people’ or been addressed as ‘ma’am’. Where are all the tourists?! Strange how we seem to be the only visitors around. People are so amazingly welcoming and friendly. We even had a private concert last night of a popular band within the workers movement. They sing songs about the women, their struggles, comrades, empowerment and solidarity. Check the small clip attached below!

Even more important is our first meeting with the Defend Job Philippines people. What an inspiring and so empowering group of people! However it was a very long and little chaotic meeting. Many great idea’s and expectations came out of it and now we have to try to focus that down to more concrete plans. Quite a job 😉 Especially since we have very little time cause all of our time is planned in in a very busy schedule already. Tomorrow we will go to the ex-Triumph Factory and see where the workers had their picket line, then we’ll go to the Edvan Factory where workers did a video-project also recently, we will be able to interview workers and film stuff. If we manage we will also go to meet people at the cooperation where ex-triumph workers started their own little business in ‘solidarity bags’. Hope we can bring some to spread the solidarity.

Much more to come soon…. Keep posted and spread the word!

While packing stuff we hear the following news from one of us who is allready in the area:

A typhoon some 1,600 kilometers (994 miles) from the Philippine capital is supercharging summer monsoon rains, which have flooded parts of Manila and could trigger flash floods and landslides across other parts of the country, forecasters said Wednesday.

Let’s hope everyone is ok!

It’s allmost so far. We are going to bring a preparation visit to Manila in the Philippines. We will finally meet the women from ‘Defend Job Philippines’ who have been very inspiring, enthousiastic about our project and helpfull with everything that needs to be arranged. Together we decided to set up big plans for the coming year. But before all this will get a chance, we need to bring a pre-visit.

Since all three of us happen to be in different countries at the moment we’re using skype to prepare the big visit. Who brings what, how many kilo’s can we bring, tripods, camera’s, battery’s, muskitonets etc.. We also have to prepare our meetings, possible workshops, trainings and find out who to reach where. We’re all super excited!

Defend Job Philippines is a broad campaign of workers demanding decent jobs and better working and living conditions in the Philippines. Defend Job was established in  2009 by displaced workers of Triumph International when their factory was closed and hundreds of workers were dismissed uncompensated. The center tries to support the interests of the laid off workers and their initiatives, e.g. the Displaced Womens’ Cooperative. Defend Job reaches out to a variety of effected people and has evolved as coordinating center for workers’ struggles and campaigns in the Philippines and abroad. At the same time the center aims to create more awareness among workers about their rights and wants to find ways how to share this knowledge.