We Are the Pearls (2016)

In the Philippines in Tondo, Manila, in a post-apocalyptic moonscape of a place affectionately known as 'Helping Land' Smiles are as contagious as poverty but what many don't realize is that in the communities Project Pearls serves like HELPING LAND in Tondo Manilla, the two: POVERTY and SMILES are almost ubiquitous, That is to say they go hand in hand in HELPING LAND... This is simply a FACT, a shockingly counter-intuitive truism that many foreigners and even a large number of Filipinos who's lives are fortunately more comfortable find almost incomprehensible. I was no exception, it was in fact one of the characteristics that leaped out at me when Sidney and his team first led my film crew and I into HELPING LAND on that stiflingly hot day in June of 2016. As much as we found ourselves swallowed by an otherworldly broken landscape of carcasses of half collapsed massive government buildings strewn for miles amidst mountains of debris we were met by a parade of smiling faces of seemingly happy children riding bikes, playing tag, braiding each others hair, eating, jumping rope, amidst an ocean of every imaginable type of refuse, In Helping Land, there are more smiles than teeth, and food, but there is no shortage of HOPE. One of the big reasons for this is PROJECT PEARLS. PROJECT PEARLS and the words that PEARLS is an abbreviation of: Peace, Education, Aspiration, Respect, Love, Smiles is a MOLECULAR MACROSCOPIC FORMULA FOR HOPE that is as human as DNA