Smokey Mountain II

Last Wednesday I went on an excursion trip to Smokey Mountain II, the area where waste is disposed, at the Manila bay. Smokey Mountain I was a famous icon in the Philippines in the 80s and 90s, plenty of photographers went there to show the extreme poverty and inhumane living conditions to the world. Seeing its controversy (there are people here who are as rich “as the ocean is deep”, others are starving), the government decided to strip it down (that was in 2002). They built housing blocks for the people that lived on the mountain, but the living conditions are pretty bad there and they didn’t think of relatives and friends of those people coming down to Manila as well… turns out that those housing blocks could not house all the people (and it’s expensive for them: the rent is about 20 euro per month, but those people only make 35 to 55 euro per month- when they’re lucky). So people had to move to the new dumping site, known as Smokey Mountain II. Around 12.000 people live there now, and more keep coming in every day.

When we arrived, we saw plenty of trucks full of garbage standing on a muddy dirt road, waiting to unload the trash on field next to it. Yuichi, my housemate, works for a Japanese NGO (ACCE) and they have a partner organisation on Smokey Mountain, so we first head out to their centre: a shack in the middle of the living compound, with no electricity during daytime and with a tin roof, hot as hell. Getting there was a bit of an adventure: we had to walk over a shabby wooden plank to get over the creek (full of garbage) and then through small alleys (not really alleys, they could fit 1 person), swarming with flies. In the NGO’s centre ( serves as a main office, school, medical centre, entertainment area, …), they explained us the history of Smokey Mountain and the poor people of the Philippines. Most people living there, scavenge for a living i.e. going through the garbage that the trucks dump there and look for anything worth selling. They make around 50 to 70 pesos a day (around 80 cents to 1 euro). As they work in the informal sector, they have no social security, no health insurance, no job security. They mostly eat “pag pag”: tossed away food they find in the garbage, dust off (that’s the “pag pag”) and fry it again. According to a recent study, people should earn 500 pesos a day just to survive here, put their kids to public school and provide for food and housing… You can imagine what conditions those people live in. We went to see the field where the garbage was disposed, people were going through it, looking for something pricy.

What struck me most was not the despair, but the hope of these people. They still have dreams, can laugh and hope for the best. They were not poor… because poor is the one who has no heart. May their dreams one day be fulfilled!