trashtown

this afternoon i climbed to the top of a mountain of garbage, overlooking an urban slum in Malabon, where children played on top of the trash.

this evening i ate dinner at a shiny, glitzy mall, in the fanciest pizza hut I've ever seen in my life, with a bill that - while rather modest - could have fed dinner to dozens of kids in Malabon.  I have been thinking about money a lot lately, in case you can't tell.


visiting a slum - or a squatter community - or, to use the proper term, an informal settlement - was a pretty unexpected experience.  Unexpected because... well, I should probably wait a little longer to process everything i saw and smelled today, but whatever, I'll just write off the cuff here.  It was way more enjoyable than I'd expected.

that might sound terrible, I don't know, but when I think of communities of the urban poor in the global south, I think of the pictures on the pamphlets that ask you for money - malnourished children and dreadfully diseased families.  and i think of crime and violence and general misery.

and the community we visited today - well, let me start by saying that I don't mean to say it was rosy.  it certainly didn't smell like roses.  it was literally built on top of trash - an old pond filled with garbage until it was solid enough to construct ramshackle houses on - and it smelled like it.  and looked like it.  and as an informal settlement it has huge, huge problems.  regular flooding.  regular fires.  contaminated water supply.  flimsy, tiny houses.  hygiene issues. unmanaged human waste.  high incidence of preventable childhood diseases like diarrhea and dengue.  unemployment, of course, and poverty, and hunger, and uneducated children.

and see, doesn't that sound terrible?  i mean, it is.  it is terrible.  but if you read that catalog of challenges, you might picture a perfectly miserable community full of the ill, dying, dreary, depressed, starving and generally agonized.  i mean, that's what i pictured.

and instead, i found... people.  what an inane observation, but there ya go.  People - playing games, sleeping, doing each others' hair, cooking food, washing their children or their laundry, working, building houses, repairing houses, watching TV, watching youtube videos, laughing at the crazy foreigner.  children playing hopscotch (i forget the tagalog word) and, as soon as they saw me and my camera, chasing me down to mug for a picture and practice their english.  "What's your name?" "what's your name?"  "What's your name?"  "Hello!"  "Thank you!" "What your house?"  "What your age?"  "What your favorite animal?"  K said, "it's because you're so white," and then he laughed, and said, "so, SO white!"  and B, as American as me but far more Filipino, asked what it was like to be so obviously a foreigner.  I shrugged, and said for the fiftieth time, "Camila.  What's yours?"  And the children laughed, and their parents smiled, and I smiled back, and another kid asked, "What's your name?"

I guess the stupid, obvious lesson i learned today is that desperately poor communities are, in fact, still communities.  And not necessarily miserable ones, for all their problems.  Thursday K is taking me and B to another community that once was much like the Malabon settlement and now enjoys greater stability and healthier living conditions - so i bet my next obvious lesson will be that the problems can get better.  Get excited for more incisive observations like "people are people."

Anyway, I really am not trying to discredit or diminish the suffering caused by inadequate and unhealthy living conditions.  But i am trying to express - well, let me put it this way.  I thought I was going to have an expression of pained sympathy engraved on my face after spending two hours touring a slum community built on a dump and full of impoverished families.  And instead my face hurt from smiling so much.  and that surprised me.